and Making, Magazine Circulation, Magazine Advertising, and Magazine Verse. Most of these courses are given by Mr. Lee and Albert Frederick Wilson. Mr. Lee has been connected with some of our largest publishing houses, as may be seen in a biographical sketch of him which appeared in THE WRITER about three years ago. Mr. Wilson has been on the editorial staff of the Literary Digest and the World To-Day, and has been managing editor of Leslie's Weekly. Arthur Guiterman, one of the best known versifiers, and now on the editorial staff of Life, gives the course in Magazine and Newspaper Verse.

The courses in Book Reviewing and Editorial Writing are under the direction of Royal J. Davis, an editorial writer on the staff of the New York Evening Post. It will be recalled that Mr. Davis won the first prize offered by the Bobbs-Merrill Company for the best review of The Prodigal Judge." The judges of the contest were William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette; John S. Phillips, editor of the American Magazine, and Professor

William Lyon Phelps of the English Department of Yale University.

One of the most popular courses is in News Reporting, given by George T. Hughes, city editor of the New York Globe, and for many years city editor of the Evening Mail. Mr. Hughes combines the qualities of the practical newspaper man and the good teacher. George Burton Hotchkiss, who gives the course in News Writing, was formerly a reporter of the Evening Sun. I have paid more attention to the men than to different courses to show that the instructors are men of experience, who know whereof they speak. While most of the work of the classroom is of the nature of "writing-finger exercises," some by the more advanced students has been "read with interest" and kept by editors. Supplementing the regular work of the classroom, many lectures have been given by New York editors and writers. We students never knew before that magazine and newspaper editors were human beings until we had a chance to meet them in the classroom. NEW YORK, N. Y.

H. G. Seed.

If I were asked what tool or article is most essential to a writer, either amateur or professional, I should unhesitatingly reply: "A note-book, by all means!" And by note-book I do not mean a book in which to jot down an occasional happy thought or inspiration, say once or twice a week, but a daily note-book, kept where it can be got at at a moment's notice, in which to record any and every thought or impression which may be of use to you in your work as a writer.

Odd or interesting characters, bits of conversation, descriptions of scenery or of buildings human life and its environment, in its many varied phases, can all be embalmed

and preserved for future use in this way. If you are on a railway train and a beautiful stretch of landscape flashes upon you through the car window, out with notebook and pencil and get your description of it on paper while the scene is before you, and still fresh in your mind.

If you are witness of an interesting scene, it will be fine training to try your hand at describing it, even if you never make use of the copy though you very likely some time will. There is a place somewhere, in sketch, story, or essay, for every good bit of description to be found in the pages of a writer's note-book. And the writer who keeps his eyes and ears open, and his note

book handy, is the one who will best succeed in his chosen profession.

If it be your privilege to listen to a famous orator, statesman, clergyman, or even a politician, make it an invariable rule to jot down a description of the speaker, together with memoranda of the subject of his discourse and the impression it made on you.

Notes of this sort will prove invaluable to a writer. They not only lend authenticity to his work if he has occasion to refer later in his writings to any of the personages he has seen and heard, but a practiced writer can utilize descriptions and impressions of this kind in sketches, anecdotes, and in various ways to help bring in checks from publishers.

But irrespective of the commercial side of the note-book question, the practice alone of daily jotting down one's observations and thoughts, even if only for his own eyes, will

be of the utmost benefit to a writer, giving him facility in composition and confidence in his own powers.

Of course there are note-books and notebooks, but any kind of a note-book is better than none. Probably a loose-leaf note-book is the best. It is a poor stick of a writer, with extremely limited powers of observation, that can not manage to set down daily something of value in his note-book something that will prove helpful in his future work.

I don't think much of the idea of keeping paper and pencil by your bedside and waking up in the night to jot down the happy thoughts that occur to you in dreams, but a note-book for daily use certainly should form a part of every writer's working equipment. The writer will find it his most valuable aid. Will S. Gidley. SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

64

The editor of the Wichita (Kansas) Beacon makes a clever answer to the question, “Which phrase is right, 'You and I' or You and me'?" He says: Now, between you and me, I think that you and I are going to settle this problem very easily. Is it necessary for you and me to protract the discussion? The subject of a finite verb must be in the nominative case. Now, as you and I are good subjects, let us be nominatives. The subject of a transitive

verb must be in the objective case, so when the grammar urges you and me to be good objects, let us obey and be objectives. So both phrases are right, but they must be used right. Either is decidedly wrong in the other's place."

To say that a wedding "occurred" is equivalent to saying that it happened, or came about without design. Weddings, as a rule, "take place," rather than "occur." The sentence, "There were fifteen people in the room," has been criticised, on the theory that "people" should be used in speaking of an assembly as a whole, and "persons" in speaking of the individuals in an assembly, but the use of "people" to signify persons is good and accepted English. Dean Alford suggests that it would make a strange transformation of the old hymn, "All people that on earth do dwell," to sing "All persons that on earth do dwell." Edward B. Hughes.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

THE WRITER is published the first day of every month. It will be sent, postpaid, ONE YEAR for ONE DOLLAR.

All drafts and money orders should be made payable to The Writer Publishing Co. Stamps, or local checks, should not be sent in payment for subscriptions.

THE WRITER will be sent only to those who have paid for it in advance. Accounts cannot be opened for subscriptions, and names will not be entered on the list unless the subscription order is accompanied by a remittance.

The American News Company, of New York, and the New England News Company, of Boston, and their branches, are wholesale agents for THE WRITER. It may be ordered from any newsdealer, or direct, by mail, from the publishers.

Not one line of paid advertisement will be printed in THE WRITER outside of the advertising pages.

*** Advertising in THE WRITER costs fifteen cents a line, or $2.10 an inch; seven dollars a quarter page; twelve dollars a half page; or twenty dollars a page, for one insertion, remittance with the order. Discounts are five, ten, and fifteen per cent. for three, six, and twelve months. For continued advertising payments must be made quarterly in

advance.

to subscribers who are more than a year in arrears, unless there has been a payment or a request for renewal and a definite promise of payment. Subscribers for THE WRITER, therefore, are asked to look at the address label on the wrapper of the magazine. If the date on the label is earlier than February, 1912, it is necessary for them to send a remittance, or a request to continue sending the magazine, with a definite promise of payment. Will subscribers kindly give this matter their immediate attention?

The unwisdom of contracting with a publisher for the publication at a fixed date of a book unwritten has been brought home to Jeffery Farnol. "When S. S. McClure was in England a year ago last spring," he says, "I arranged with him for serial publication of The Amateur Gentleman' in McClure's Magazine previous to book publication by my Boston publishers. Unfortunately it was announced that the serial would begin in April, and despite my appeal for a postponement the editors told me they must keep faith with their readers and begin the story in that month. Then commenced the struggle to keep the magazine supplied with 'copy,' for I was besieged with letters and cablegrams asking me to hurry more manuscript or the magazine would be delayed. The more I hurried the less satisfied I was with my work, and I tore up ten chapters. Now it is finished and I feel relieved."

Edwin Balmer, author of the story, “A Diplomat," in the Red Book for January, was graduated from the Northwestern University in 1902, and took a master's degree at Harvard in 1903. He then went on the staff of the Chicago Tribune, and after a few months there went into the work at the Chicago Commons, where he was associated with the sociological publications of the Commons for about two years. Before leaving Harvard Mr. Balmer had begun writing occasional short stories, which immediately sold. One of them was accepted in the first big Collier's Weekly prize competition, although it did not win a prize. Mr. Balmer traveled for about two years in Cuba, Mexico, Europe, and Japan; for the last three or four years he has been mostly in Chicago, writing. Most of his work has appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, the American Magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal, Hampton's Magazine, the Outlook, the Red Book, the Popular Magazine, and the Youth's Companion. His best-known stories were probably his first wireless stories, which ran in the Saturday Evening Post about five years ago, and from which the play, "Via Wireless," was written. Three years ago Mr. Balmer began working with William MacHarg, and with him wrote the "Luther Trant" stories, which were one of the features of Hampton's Magazine. He has also done with Mr. MacHarg work which is appearing in the Saturday Evening Post,

the most recent of which is a story, "The Surakarta," which appeared last fall. Mr. Balmer is the author of the following books: "Waylaid by Wireless," Small, Maynard Company, 1909; "The Achievements of Luther Trant," Small, Maynard Company, 1910, and The Science of Advertising," Duffield & Co., 1911.

66

Amy Crosby, who had a story, 'The Tuning of Huldah," in the January Lippincott's, began writing stories about three years ago, and says that while she finds New York a hot-bed full of story germs, her ideas grow better in the little town of Brewster, N. Y., where there is plenty of sun and air to bring out color. "The Tuning of Huldah" was founded on fact. An old lady of her acquaintance, who saw life at an oblique angle, needed a remedy, and Miss Crosby came across her prescription in a New York boarding-house, where a girl's simple charm and her dogged determination to succeed suggested the tuning fork. Miss Crosby's first story, entitled "The Stronger Claim," she sold to Munsey's Magazine for $150. Other stories she sold to the Ridgway Company and to the Smart Set.

"

Edward Lyell Fox, who had a story, entitled The Quitter," in the December Red Book, was born in New York city, and educated at Rutgers College, N. J. While at college he was fond of athletics, and played 'varsity football and baseball. Leaving college unexpectedly, and needing a fair salary quickly, he turned to newspaper work, and began writing for the New York Evening Sun as football expert. He gradually drifted into writing for the newspapers, and liked it so well that he began to have ambitions, and so studied style, reading especially Dumas, Balzac, Turgenief, Stevenson, Stephen French Whitman, author of Predestined," Frank Norris, and Vance Thompson. He read everything of these men that he could lay his hands on, and gradually the study and following the rule,

66

66

"Write, tear up. Write, tear up," brought results. Mr. Fox worked at home, writing four nights every week until midnight, writing and tearing up. He also wrote from 2,000 to 2,500 words a day for the Evening Sun. As his style improved he obtained better assignments, and in time was writing the "color" on all the out-of-town "stories" - New London on Regatta Day, Philadelphia, Cambridge, and New Haven football games, disasters, and so on. He grew to like "color writing," and worked and worked on it. He wrote a color article" called "The Speed Kings," which Hampton's Magazine published in July, 1910. That determined his life work. From that time on he developed his magazine work more and more, and was son selling practically everything he wrote first to Hampton's, then to the Columbian, and Outing, then to the American Magazine, and next to the Century. Last year he wrote for Outing, Everybody's, the Century, Pearson's, the Red Book, and for the illustrated syndicated Sunday magazines. Leaving the Sun, he joined the forces of the Wildman Magazine and News Service, Inc., of New York, of which he is now editor.

Alice Hartich, whose poem, "Painted on a Fan," in Lippincott's for January, has been very widely copied, was born in 1888, and attended the Froebel Academy and the Girls' High School in Brooklyn, and was graduated from the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers in 1904. Since then she has been teaching. She has written quite a number of verses, but has had only two published thus far, the Lippincott poem and "The Little Tea House," in Good Housekeeping for July, 1911.

Lucy Huffaker, whose story, "The Way of Life," was published in the Atlantic Monthly for January, has been writing fiction for less than a year, although it has been her ambition all her life to write stories. When she was seventeen years old she received her first assignment on a weekly paper in Marshalltown, Iowa, where

she had lived since coming from Memphis. when a little girl. She had not finished college at this time, so she held her first position with the Reflector during a summer vacation. She received $3.50 a week for the first two weeks, with the stipulation that if she "made good" she was to receive five dollars a week. She says her pride when she peeped into her pay envelope and found the five dollars has never been surpassed. The next year Miss Huffaker was graduated from Drake University at Des Moines, and returned to work on the littlepaper. Then she was offered a position on "the Daily," as the Times-Republican is called in Marshalltown. After a year she went to Des Moines to work on the Capital, and in another year was in Chicago trying to become a city reporter. During this year she wrote circular letters for a photograph gallery and worked on a number of trade journals usually for ten or twelve dollars a week. Then she went to work in a publishing house at a living wage, and was one of the compilers of a dictionary. She did not give up her ambition to be a reporter, however, and after two years she was taken on the staff of the Chicago Evening Post, and later was a reporter on the Inter Ocean. Then she went to New York, where she did space work for a number of papers. she spent a year in Paris, sending specials to the New York Sunday papers, and doing "potboilers" for the lesser magazines, to pay expenses. Now Miss Huffaker calls New York her home. She is one of that group of writers, artists, and musicians who have discovered the charm of Greenwich Village, as the old part of New York near Washington square and below Fourteenth street is called. She has an apartment on Bank street, but spends her summers at Provincetown, Mass., where she and Susan Keating Glaspell, author of "The Glory of the Conquered" and "The Visioning," have a cottage.

Next

William B. Ridsdale, whose poem, "The Moon Maiden," appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for November, is a young English