THE fourth printing of this Directory which is constantly being revised and enlarged began in THE WRITER for July, 1922. The information for it, showing the manuscript market and the manuscript requirements of the various publications listed, is gathered directly from the editors of the periodicals. Great pains are taken to make the information accurate and the Directory complete.

Before submitting manuscripts to any publication, it is advisable to secure a sample copy.

(Continued from March WRITER)

SURVEY (S-M), 112 East 19th st., New York. $5.00; 30c. Paul U. Kellogg, editor.

a

The Survey is venture in co-operative journalism, and covers the field of civics, industry, health, education, social work, etc. Prints poetry, but no fiction. Buys photographs, and sets length limit at from 1,000 to 5,000 words. In very large part, manuscripts are contributed without pay, the journal being a pooling place for experience and information, but a modest payment is occasionally made for news or other articles based on first-hand investigation. SURVEY-GRAPHIC (M), 112 East 19th st., New York. $3.00; 30c. Paul U. Kellogg, editor.

Devoted to social progress, covering the field of civics, industry, health, education, etc. Pays, at the rate of ten dollars a page, on publication. SWEETHEART STORIES (S-M), Dell Publishing Company, 461 Eighth ave., New York. $3.00; 15c. Wanda von Kettler, editor.

Desires clean, wholesome love stories, containing melodrama, adventure, and occasional mystery. Uses short stories, novelettes, serials, and poetry, but no humorous verse, and no jokes. Sets length limits for short stories at from 3,000 to 10,000 words, for novelettes at 20,000 words, and for serials at from 30,000 to 50,000 words, does not buy photographs, and pays, at a minimum rate of one cent a word, on acceptance. SYSTEM (M), 660 Cass st., Chicago, Ill. $4.00; 35c. A. W. Shaw, editor; Norman C. Firth, executive editor.

Uses articles which tell of developments, policies, or methods of interest and value to business men generally. In general, each article offers some information, plan, or idea which will be of value to the business man, directly or indirectly, in the carrying on of his business activities. Many of the articles come from business men themselves. Also uses short items about significant new methods which can be used in many lines of business, and business fiction, with little or no love interest, either short stories or serials. The length of material is limited only by the concise handling of the information; many articles contain from 2.000 to 3.000 words. Buys photographs illustrating short items, and others showing anything of unusual interest to

business men. Pays, at a minimum rate of two cents a word, on acceptance.

TALES OF TEMPTATION (M), 584 Drexel Building, Philadelphia, Penn. $2.50; 25c. C. M. Stuart, associate editor.

Publication suspended.

TALKING MACHINE JOURNAL (M), 5941 Grand Central Terminal, New York. $3.00; 35c. Glad. Henderson, editor.

Uses articles that would be of help to talking machine dealers, paying about one-half cent a word.

TALKING MACHINE WORLD (M), 383 Madison ave., New York. $2.00; 25c. Charles R. Tighe, managing editor.

Uses fact articles, giving name and address of dealers, descriptive of the methods of talking machine dealers in selling talking machines, records, radio, and small musical instruments, giving a new solution to merchandising and incidental problems, including selling, advertising, direct mail, collecting, canvassing, stock control, cost finding, and business management. Sets length limit at from 1,000 to 1,500 words, and pays at the rate of twenty-one cents an inch. TANAGER (B-M), Box 66, Grinnell, Iowa, $1.50; 30c. Wayne Gard, managing editor.

Published by the English department of Grinnell college. Not restricted as to contributors, but especially interested in the work of midwestern writers. Uses short stories, poems, essays, character sketches, and articles on contemporary authors, and on topics of current interest. Uses woodcuts and linoleum-cuts, but not photographs. Does not pay for manuscripts. TARGET (W), Methodist Book Concern, 420 Plum st., Cincinnati, Ohio. 70c. Henry H. Meyer, editor; E. Leigh Mudge, associate editor; Alfred D. Moore, managing editor.

A paper for boys of from nine to fifteen. Uses short stories, of from 2,000 to 3,000 words; serials, of from six to twelve chapters; and illustrated general articles, of from 1,000 to 1,500 words. Pays from one-half cent to one cent a word, on acceptance.

TEN STORY Book (M), 1532 W. Harrison st., Chicago, Ill. $3.00; 25c. Harry Stephen Keeler, editor.

Prints realistic stories, sensational, daring, and sex. Sets length limit at from 1.000 to 8,000 words, and pays on publication.

TEXASLAND (M), San Antonio, Texas. $1.50; 20c. James Bennett Wooding, editor.

Name changed to the Pioneer.

Volume 39

I

FORUM J

The Mechanical Story

HAVE read your MS. attentively, and return it herewith. It has interest, but it seems to me to have one great want which I cannot overcome. It is all working machinery, and the people are not alive. I see the wheels going and hear them going, and the people are as like life as machinery can make them—but they don't get beyond the point of the moving waxwork. It is very difficult to explain how this is, because it is a matter of intuitive perception and feeling; but perhaps I may give two slight examples. If the scene, where the woman who dies is lying in bed, were truly done, the conversation between the heroine and the boy would belong to it could do no violence to it and whatever it might be about, would inevitably associate itself in the reader's mind with the figure on the bed, and would lead up to the catastrophe that soon happens. If the boy on the outside of the coach were naturally done, his illness would be a natural thing and one would receive it accordingly. Now, the conversation by the bed is an interruption to the idea of the dying woman, and the dying woman is

Number 4

an interruption to the conversation, and they don't fit. And it is plain that you, the author, make the boy ill because you want him to be ill for, if the few closing lines of the chapter, referring to him, were taken away, the reader would have no reason whatever to suppose that anything was the matter with him. The Sir Leicester Dedlock of the story and his Mr. Tulkinghorn are open to similar objections, and the whole of the opening is much too long for what it contains.

The scene outside the coach has a good deal of merit in it, but the same direful want. Consider if you had been outside that coach, and had been suddenly carried into the midst of a torchlight meeting of that time, whether you would have brought away no other impression of it than you give the reader. Imagine it a remembrance of your own, and look at the passage. And exactly because that is not true the conduct of the men who clamber up is in the last degree improbable. Whereas if the scene were truly and powerfully rendered, the improbability more or

*From "Charles Dickens as Editor." Sturgis & Walton. (Out of print.)

less necessary to all tales and allowable in them, would become a part of a thing so true and vivid, that the reader must accept it whether he likes it or not.

There is merit, too, in the scene on the top of St. Paul's, and in the engraver's housebut I still feel that Frankenstein has made the people. You are always getting into the footsteps, too, of a writer I know; and when your own shoes might otherwise leave a plain bold mark, they get so entangled with prints of his, that the reader, following on the track of both, gets confused and bothered.

I know it to be the nature of the case that these objections to the story must inevitably become stronger as it advances, because there the difficulties grow greater. I mention them honestly; firstly, because you want me to do so; and secondly, because I usually accept so much and suppose so much, in reading Fiction, that I do not think I find more fault than another, but rather the reverse.

The Sad Story

I have been so very much affected by the long story without a title - which I have read this morning that I am scarcely fit for a business letter. It is more painfully pathetic than anything I have read for I know not how long. I am not at all of your opinion about the details. It seems to me to be so thoroughly considered, that they are all essential and in perfect keeping. I could not in my conscience recommend the writer to cut the story down in any material degree. I think it would be decidedly wrong to do so; and I see next to nothing in the MS., which is otherwise than an essential part of the sad picture.

Two difficulties then remain, which I fear are insurmountable as to Household Words. The first is, the length of the story. The next is, the nature of the idea on which it turns. So many unhappy people are, by no fault of their own, linked to a similar terrible possibility or even probability—that I am afraid it might cause prodigious unhappiness,

if we could address it to our large audience. I shrink from the responsibility of awakening so much slumbering fear and despair. Most unwilling therefore, I come to the apprehension that there is no course but to return it to the authoress. I wish however that you would in the strongest language convey to her my opinion of its great merits, while you explain the difficulties I now set forth. I honestly think it a work of extraordinary power, and will gladly address a letter to her, if she should desire it, describing the impression it has made upon me. It might, perhaps, help to soften a publisher.

Miss Lynn's story shows to considerable disadvantage, after such writing. But it is what she represented it in her draft, and it is very clever. Now, as it presents (to cursory readers) almost the reverse of the Medal whereof Miss Jolly presents the other side, I think it will be best to pay for it at once, and, for the present (say even for a few months) to hold it back; not telling her the exact reason, but merely saying that we are pledged first to the insertion of other stories in four parts, already accepted. Miss Jolly's is more wholesome and more powerful, because it hits the target, which Miss Lynn goes a little about, with a rifle-shot in the centre of the Bull's eye, and knocks it clean over. Therefore it should have precedence both on its own account and ours.

could not have been more agonized than by ; which for imbecility, carelessness, slovenly composition, relatives without antecedents, universal chaos, and one absorbing whirlpool of jolter-headedness, beats anything in print and paper I have ever "gone at" in my life.

I think the best way will be for you to make an appointment with Collins, and talk to him on the subject of the enclosed. I don't quite understand from his letter that you explained to him that I doubt the subject of hereditary insanity not with an eye to the feelings of the public in general, but with a consideration for those numerous families in which there is such a taint. The force of my objection lies in that range of the subject only.

On the whole I am disposed to think that it will be best to accept his offer of a new story instead. And it is desirable to explain to him that a story within a story as this is is complicated and difficult for our peculiar purpose.

The introduction to "Soldiers' Wives" must be entirely re-written, and should be a plain and earnest representation of an obvious impropriety. Pray take out of the correspondent's part the message about "quivering at the smell of gin" — which makes me shudder from head to foot, in its unspeakable badness.

Trollope's story is exceedingly good; highly picturesque and full of interest. But he mars the end of over-anticipating it, and I have changed it there, a good deal.

I wish Hannay would not imitate Carlyle. Pray take some of the innumerable dashes out of his article and for God's sake don't leave in anything about such a man believing in himself - which he has no right to do and which would by inference justify almost anything. Yankee does not mean American but New England, merely, I think.

I have gone through Mr. Sala's paper, and

I think Thomas' story very good indeed. Close, original, vigorous, and graphic. It strikes me that I see better things in it than he has done yet.

An alteration occurs to me easily made - which I think would greatly improve it, in respect of interest and quiet pathos, and a closing sentiment of pleasure to the reader. It should be delicately expressed that the man (admirably described) who comes a-courting Miss Furbey is the old lover who has always been faithful. I think Miss Furbey might have always had a miniature of him hanging up, or in a pet drawer and sometimes brought out, taken when he was a young man; and that when the narrator begins to observe him and his visits, she should still see in the grey hair and the worn face something of that portrait.

I wish you would make the suggestion in my words. Beg him not to delay the story, for I don't like to keep anything of so much merit out of print.

The Reader's Right to Consideration

The fault of Prince's poem, besides its intrinsic meanness as a composition, is, that it goes too glibly with the comfortable idea (of which we have had a great deal too much in England since the Continental commotions) that a man is to sit down and make himself domestic and meek, no matter what is done to him. It wants a stronger appeal to rulers in general to let men do this, fairly, by governing them thoroughly well. As it stands, it is about the Tract Mark (Dairyman's daughter, etc.) of political morality. And don't think that it is necessary to write down to