Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

rights in second serialization, moving picture rights, and foreign rights, and tell the author of them.

The league means to establish definite business principles in the dealings of author with publisher, and we know the best publishers will welcome this. We hope to have nearly all the reputable editors and publishers

as

associate members before long - each day we receive accessions - and we believe they will find in the league a solution of many of their annoyances, for the quarrels between author and publisher almost invariably arise through misunderstandings of contracts and rights. We shall be in close touch with the Society of Authors of England and "La Société des Gens de Lettres " in France (similar organizations), and we expect to form agreeable relations with the various publishers' and magazine associations already existing in the United States. A legal department will be maintained, an

official organ of the league will be supplied to members, an English agent has been appointed (he will handle members' manuscripts in England), a reliable reading bureau has been established, a bureau of information will be conducted, and the league will, in short, supply that central business office of advice and action that has been so long needed. The inexperienced author needs the league because of his inexperience, and the experienced author cannot well afford to do without it, because his literary product is of such great value that the loss of one short manuscript, which might be prevented by the league, would pay his dues for a lifetime.

The offices of the league are now at 30 Broad street, New York, and the secretary, Ellis Parker Butler, will be pleased to mail to any one interested a prospectus, in which the plans of the league are set forth more at length. Ellis Parker Butler.

NEW YORK, N. Y.

THE EFFECT OF TYPEWRITING.

I can not entirely agree with the statement made in the December WRITER that “a legible pen-written manuscript is acceptable to any editor," especially if it implies that it is as acceptable as typewriting. I recall the remark of an editor of long experience, "a poem never shows its best nor its worst qualities until it is in print." That was before the use of typewriters had become common, but typewriting comes much nearer to having the " print" quality than the best pen work, and though the editor's statement had reference to poetry, yet the same must to some extent be true of prose also.

Every writer should by all means own a typewriter, and when excellent machines may be bought new at from twenty-five to fifty dollars it should not be difficult to acquire one. Its use in making copy brings a great relief to the pen-fatigued and cramped muscles of the hand and arm, and it makes

errors so visible that it is of real assistance to the writer in improving his technique. Aside from its quality as a labor saver, the machine has a psychological interest in connection with its influence on composition and style. There is doubtless a measure of mystery about the thoughts and processes of the mind in their transformation into language, and finally into the particular form in which they find expression on paper, but it can not be denied that the ease or difficulty of the manual labor of putting the thoughts on paper has an influence on the form of expression, or "style," as we usually term it. I know a clergyman who says his typewriter expresses his thoughts in so different a style that it is often his custom to write part of each sermon with the machine, and part of it with the pen, thus adding to its literary quality.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

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 sub. scriptions.

ine 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.

Contributions not used will be returned, if a stamped and addressed envelope is enclosed. THE WRITER PUBLISHING CO., 88 Broad Street, Room 416, BOSTON, MASS.

P. O. Box 1905.

[blocks in formation]

therefore, are asked to look at the address label on the wrapper of the magazine. If the date on the label is earlier than March, 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 ?

What is poetry? The editor of the London Sphere has attempted to answer this long-disputed question. Mr. Shorter's definition is:

"The expression in rhythmic form of an intellectual man's deepest aspirations, perfect artistry only being attained when verse is divorced from all attempt to further this or that faith or conviction."

"This definition," says Mr. Shorter, "at once proclaims Dante and Shakspere as Our two greatest poets and rules out all poets who preach, all versifiers whose rhymes disclose an absence of abnormal mental power." According to Mr. Shorter, therefore, Kipling's "Recessional" is barred out of the realm of poetry, along with Milton's "Paradise Lost," Holmes's "Old Ironsides," and Hood's "Song of the Shirt," not to mention other classics.

[blocks in formation]

poem by Alfred Noyes - who, by the way, is coming to America this month. The poem reads:

"When that I loved a maiden,

My Heaven was in her eyes,
And when they went above me,
I knew no deeper skies,

But when her heart forsook me.
My spirit broke its bars,
For grief beyond the sunset,
And love beyond the stars.

"When that I loved a maiden, She seemed the world to me; Now is my soul the universe,

My dream the sky and sea. There is no Heaven above me, No glory binds or bars My grief beyond the sunset, My love behind the stars.

"When that I loved a maiden,

I worshiped where she trod,
But when she clove my heart, the cleft
Set free the imprisoned god,
Then I was king of all the world,
My soul had burst its bars,
For grief beyond the sunset,
And love beyond the stars."

Criticised as an example, par excellence, of obscurity in verse, the poem has been defended by four or five admirers of Mr. Noyes, each of whom tells precisely what it means and each in a different way. No prize is offered for the solution of the puzzle.

Does poetry pay? The statement is made that during the last fifteen years more than 1,500,000 copies of various books of poems by James Whitcomb Riley have been sold, or, on an average, more than 100,000 a year. If that is so, Mr. Riley's royalties at fifteen cents a copy, or ten per cent. of the retail price, would amount to more than $225,000, or more than $15,000 a year.

W. H. H.

WRITERS OF THE DAY.

Irvin S. Cobb, whose horror story, "Fishhead," after being rejected by about every editor in the country, was finally published in the Cavalier for January 16, was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in June, 1876. He was first drawn to newspaper work because he

yearned to be an illustrator. He became a reporter on the Paducah Daily News, wrote local humorous stories which he illustrated himself, and at the age of nineteen was hailed as the "youngest managing editor of a daily paper in the United States." Removing to Louisville, he became staff correspondent for the Evening Post of that city, reporting among other events the Goebel murder and the subsequent trials. He then married and returned to Paducah, where he became managing editor of the Democrat. Later his ambitions took him to New York, where he visited every newspaper office in the city without satisfactory result. Being resourceful he returned to his rooms and wrote a personal letter to every city editor in New York offering his services. The next morning's mail brought him offers from five editors, and he accepted the offer from the Evening Sun. This was at the time of the Portsmouth Peace Conference, and Mr. Cobb was sent to report it. On his arrival at Portsmouth he found the story well covered by a large force of reporters, and he went to work writing joyous columns on subjects having no bearing whatever on the conference. There was n't a fact in the entire series, and yet the Sun syndicated these stories throughout the United States, so attractive was their individuality. At the end of three weeks Mr. Cobb returned to New York and found that he could have a job on any newspaper in the city. He joined the staff of the Evening World, and for four years supplied the evening edition and the Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. He did serious work besides. For instance, he reported the Thaw trial in longhand, writing more than 500,000 words of testimony and observation. Mr. Cobb's first short story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and since then he has written plays, musical comedies, and books, besides contributing to magazines and syndicates. Mr. Cobb says that he never failed to sell any manuscript until he wrote "Fishhead," a horror story, told with extreme vividness, which all the editors to whom he sent it said they admired as a work of art, but

which none of them would consent to print. Finally the editor of the Cavalier, who had once rejected the manuscript and who was haunted by it, asked permission to print it with an introduction giving its history of rejections, and it appeared in the Cavalier for January 16. Mr. Cobb wrote this story thirteen years ago, when he was only twenty-four years old. Its publication left him with no more unsold manuscripts on hand.

Annette Thackwell Johnson, who contributed the story, "The Churail," to Lippincott's Magazine for February, was born thirty-six years ago in India, where her father had gone as a civil engineer under the British government. While there he became converted and entered the American Presbyterian Mission. Her mother was the daughter of the moderator of the General Presbyterian Assembly. When Mrs. Johnson was five years old she was brought "home," and visited Scotland and Oxford, Ohio, but her seventh birthday found her back in India, where she spent the next seven years. Then she was sent to the south of England, to Lancaster in Cornwall. After remaining here for a little more than a year she went to Lille, in the north of France, where she spent nine months. Her parents then sent her to Wooster, Ohio, and she attended college there for four years, when she married Frank Orr Johnson and, at the age of twenty, returned to India as a missionary's wife. With her husband she spent six years and a half in India, just at the end of the terrible famine, going through plague and cholera, and ending up at the Sabathen Leper Asylum. Then, as their little boy was almost dying of malaria, they came to America. Mr. Johnson was soon called to be pastor of the Shield's Presbyterian church in Sewickley Valley, Pennsylvania, and was there seven years. Last spring he entered the Episcopal church and is now rector of Christ Church, Pittsburgh. Mrs. Johnson says she always thought she could write. At boarding school she used to keep the girls up nights telling them stories, and while she was at college she wrote some short stories that were pub

lished in Womankind, of Springfield, Ohio. For years after that she was too busy to think of writing, but after the family moved to Pittsburgh she started in to get experience and to "learn how." She did space work on the Pittsburgh Dispatch and Pittsburgh Gazette-Times for about a year, and then tried the magazines, and her stories. came back and back and back though generally with letters, in place of rejection slips, begging for stories on cheerful, merry themes. But as Mrs. Johnson says, she has spent her life helping people to die, or trying to make them live, and writing stories about doll babies and pink clouds and tame cats does not come natural to her, for as she puts it, she has seen life too naked. "When you once get down," she says, to the bed-rock of primitive emotions-hunger, thirst, lust of life, hate, greed of possession it is hard to write pretty stories. My stories aren't cheerful. I know they aren't. How could they be? If I ever succeed, it will be because there are editors bold enough to publish a woman's real thoughts, instead of the polite ones she ought to think." Besides the story in Lippincott's, Mrs. Johnson has had a story in Young's Magazine, and one in Holland's Magazine, published at Dallas, Texas, and the March Lippincott's will contain another of her East Indian stories.

66

Ralph Roeder, whose story, "Sunset Island," was printed in Harper's Magazine for February, was born in St. Louis twentynine years ago, and is now a practising lawyer in that city. His earliest literary work was done at the age of thirteen, when he wrote and published several very thrilling novels, designed for a schoolmate who frequently devoured the regular printed supply he brought with him several hours before school was out, and then made hurry calls on Mr. Roeder to supply the deficiency. Later Mr. Roeder edited the paper at the Central High School in St. Louis, and when he attended Washington University he contributed to the monthly there. His work now is done in the intervals of his law practice, and he has had stories in the Youth's Companion, Collier's, Adven

ture, the Semi-Monthly Magazine Section, Young's Magazine, several magazines of the Munsey group, and in other publications, including a series of legal stories in the New Story Magazine. His first story was accepted at a good price at the first place to which he sent it.

Fleta Campbell Springer, who had a story, "Wild Oats," in Harper's Magazine for February, is the wife of Thomas Campbell Springer, also a writer of short stories. Mrs. Springer was born in Kansas, and spent her early years in a little frontier town in Oklahoma, forty miles from the nearest railway. The family then moved to Texas, and later to Canfornia, where her father, John H. Campbell, was a practising attorney until recently, when he engaged in the business of grape-growing in central California. Her mother has been all her life interested in educational work, and is the founder of an organization in California for the bringing together of teachers and parents of school children, which is the only one of its kind in existence and which has had a phenomenal success. While living in California Mrs. Springer contributed articles on various subjects to western magazines and newspapers. A year ago she began writing fiction, and her first short story, "The Solitude," was printed in Harper's Magazine for March, 1912. This was succeeded by stories in various magazines, and Mrs. Springer is now engaged on a novel.

Thomas Grant Springer, who wrote the story, "Moses and the Rock," which was printed in Lippincott's for February, is a Californian, hailing from San Francisco. He comes of a family of printers, his grandfather having published one of the earliest California inland papers, later being elected state printer, in which office Mr. Springer's father succeeded him. After some early experience in the newspaper business, Mr. Springer, with Adam Hull Shirk and Albert Schertzer, published a magazine called the Satyr, concerning which he says: 'The Satyr kicked its heels joyously for six months, being regularly roasted' on its appearance, and as gaily responding. After

that it gave a final kick, not however at its creditors, and retired from the prosaic world to its native Hesperian Groves." Mr. Springer then began contributing to the Sunday Section of the San Francisco papers, the News Letter, the Argonaut, the Pacific Monthly and Sunset Magazine, both in prose and in verse. He "did" a series of lyrics for John Metcalf, the composer of "Absent," and other songs, which were published by Schmidt and Company. He also wrote a number of lighter lyrics for various vaudeville singers, and a vaudeville sketch of his has been produced in New York. In 1911 Mr. Springer, with his wife, left San Francisco to loaf along the West Coast, through Mexico and Central America, and write up Panama for Sunset Magazine, and their article appeared in Sunset May, 1912, number. Since coming to New York, Mr. Springer has been a literary free lance, and since then has had articles in the Smart Set, Adventure, Young's Magazine, the Cavalier, the Black Cat, the Semi-Monthly Magazine Section, and Lippincott's.

PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS.

Fielding. The solemn banning by the Doncaster free library committee of "Tom Jones' reminds one that the publisher's Reader who first recommended "Tom Jones" for publication was a woman.

Andrew Millar, to whom the manuscript was submitted, handed it over to his wife, as his custom was with all the lighter kinds of literature. The good lady read it and advised her husband not to let it slip through his hands on any account. On the strength of her recommendation Millar offered Fielding $3,000 for the manuscript. It was a good sum in those days, and Fielding had not expected to get half as much. Millar, however, had no cause to regret his bargain. "Tom Jones" profited him to the extent of $90,000, out of which he made presents to Fielding to the value of $10,000. - London Special in New York Sun.

[blocks in formation]
« iepriekšējāTurpināt »