The Table of Contents

— “ But don’t you see,” a writer for the magazines was heard saying, “ that my contribution ” — referring to a short story in a leading monthly — “ is given a killing environment ; that the hanging committee have sandwiched it with an essay and a poem that do for it all that unfavorable companion pieces can do for a picture in an exhibition ? ”

It was a new suggestion ; and yet how many of us do scan the table of contents as we would a sheet of music. How much our appreciation of an article depends upon the impression made, the flavor left, by that which precedes it ! And then who has not had one’s estimate of an article entirely changed by what followed in its wake ? Surely, the making-up of the menu must be as serious an affair with the magazine editor as it is with all givers of feasts. The individuality of the magazine — and what a marked individuality each magazine has ! — depends so much upon the table of contents, upon its tout ensemble when first seen. I have a friend who declares that he can tell what magazine, if any, a grown-up family has been chiefly raised upon. He holds that each one of the leading monthlies leaves an unmistakable stamp upon its constant readers. “ In war times,” he asks, “could we not, in college, pick out the boys who had been brought up on the Tribune ? Was there any mistaking those who had been bred upon the Liberator ? ” Speaking of this in a literary circle, some one remarked that the surest way of preventing the rising generation from reading so much trash as does the present (the extent of this reading may be seen in the enormous sales of books which can be called nothing else) would be to encourage those libraries which are largely patronized by public-school children to circulate as widely as possible, in place of the books now mainly called for and given out, the best of the monthly magazines. Why is not that a suggestion worth considering ?