ow where to buy paper cheap and sell it for a profit. I have
thirty publications, but their names, their contents, writing, or art I
never think about, nor does the public either. We ink something on the
paper, and sell it at so much a pound profit."

But I had nothing whatever to do with the commercial side of the
arrangements connected with ventures associated with my name. Ah! how
little the public know what goes on behind the scenes in the newspaper
world! If you stop a publication with which your name is associated,
everyone at once, very properly, dubs you a failure. As what? An editor,
of course. That is the mistake, the injustice. How many periodicals have
the most talked of publishers started and stopped? Scores of them. Yet
are they therefore failures? No, no more than the manager of a theatre
is who produces a piece which runs a night or two and comes off. He
still has his theatre, and other plays. So is it in the publishing
world.

It is the isolated editor, without the machinery of a big office, or the
head of the man of commerce,--if he stops, from whatever cause, his one
effort is the failure! The "successful publisher" stops a dozen new
ventures in the same time, and he is still considered successful. A
publisher is very much like a conjuror: he must start two or three
tricks, so that if one is likely to go wrong he can draw the attention
of the public off it by another, and the first is quickly dropped or
reintroduced under another name. My one mistake in publishing was that
having started a success, _Lika Joko_, I let it drop to take up another.
But let my confessions on this subject be brief and in order.

Before I had any notion of leaving _Punch_ I had conceived an idea for a
monthly magazine to be called _Lika Joko; Harry Furniss's Monthly_, and
had already had a number of drawings engraved, specimen copies printed,
and had gone to great expense in the preliminary work. Of course, the
_Punch_ men were to be the chief contributors, and Mr. E.J. Milliken was
writing a great deal, and Mr. Bernard Partridge was illustrating for me.
Shortly afterwards I retired from the staff of _Punch_. I was then
approached by the proprietors of an influential daily and weekly paper
to edit a sixpenny high-class weekly, and they offered to put down
L50,000 at once. This I would have willingly accepted, but it so
happened that just at that time Mr. Astor reconstructed the _Pall Mall
Budget_, regardless of expense--an