Beauty in Business

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

WHEN a plain man, who is more or less wearied with the inevitable drudgery of daily routine, finds in his mail a business-like yellow envelope, splashed with the familiar stamp of a well-known publishing house, he hardly looks for such a breezy letter as this: —

MY DEAR SIR, — “What so rare as a day in June,” the blue ribbon season of the year with its flowers and white dresses, its exhortations to “hitch your wagon to a star, ” its dreamy music, and its “and to you too dear teachers, do we say farewell, ” and its glad tidings of a reëlection at an increased salary. The kings will soon be in their counting-house, counting out their money, the queens will be in the kitchen eating bread and honey.

Commencement. Now is the time to commence. Begin now to prepare for the new year. This school year ends June 30, the new one begins the next day. You will need new and up to date books in English, Ancient and Modern Languages, History, Mathematics, and Science, as supplementary to the state books, or as regular texts to “fill the gaps.”

Have you received the copy of our new 1902 illustrated Catalogue, recently mailed you ? If not, I shall be glad to send you another.

Have you any doubt as to the superiority of the publications of the — Book Company ? An examination will remove all doubts. What would you like to see? I am waiting for your reply.

Very sincerely yours, etc.

This letter was sent out in June, and the recipient has not yet forgotten the thrill it gave. What a pleasant, chatty style the writer has withal — dignified, at the same time, with quotation and allusion. I am sure one need never be anything but proud to show his acquaintance with Lowell and Mother Goose. Even the charm of inexactness is not wanting. Great writers are seldom exact, I find, in their quotations. They are privileged to move about at ease among their peers, and exactness of quotation would argue only a distant acquaintance with the originals, — not a companionship. Besides, exactness is pedantry.

I approve decidedly of this very successful effort to make the ordinarily dreary business letter a really literary affair ; it is the very artistic ordering of life, the transformation of the ugly into the beautiful. I hope that this style may spread throughout the country, and who knows if it may not end in the sublimating of all our gross materialism and bring about a junk and white apotheosis of the hard and strenuous life. I know Ruskin would see the glorious consummation of his whole endeavor in a letter like this.

One feels inspired to write a fitting reply — something like this, perhaps: —

“The melancholy days have come, the fresh green of summer has passed into the golden glory of autumn, and now the falling leaf calls back to labor those who have been drinking deep of summer’s life-giving fount. Later, but not too late, I turn to that ever ready help, the — Book Company. Though my winter’s work must be with the dust and ashes of the dead tongue of fallen Rome, yet I hope that if the — Book Company will send me Latin texts suitable for the ninth and tenth grades, some of the exhilaration that has been lent to the summer’s play by the mountain winds, the whispering pines, and the voices of the many-sounding sea, may be breathed also into the winter’s work. I pause for a reply.

Hopefully yours.”