he idea appealed very strongly to him;
and believing firmly that there were others possessed of the same
thirst, he set out the next day, in his luncheon hour, to find out who
made the picture.

At the office of the cigarette company he learned that the making of the
pictures was in the hands of the Knapp Lithographic Company. The
following luncheon hour, Edward sought the offices of the company, and
explained his idea to Mr. Joseph P. Knapp, now the president of the
American Lithograph Company.

"I'll give you ten dollars apiece if you will write me a
one-hundred-word biography of one hundred famous Americans," was Mr.
Knapp's instant reply. "Send me a list, and group them, as, for
instance: presidents and vice-presidents, famous soldiers, actors,
authors, etc."

"And thus," says Mr. Knapp, as he tells the tale to-day, "I gave Edward
Bok his first literary commission, and started him off on his literary
career."

And it is true.

But Edward soon found the Lithograph Company calling for "copy," and,
write as he might, he could not supply the biographies fast enough. He,
at last, completed the first hundred, and so instantaneous was their
success that Mr. Knapp called for a second hundred, and then for a
third. Finding that one hand was not equal to the task, Edward offered
his brother five dollars for each biography; he made the same offer to
one or two journalists whom he knew and whose accuracy he could trust;
and he was speedily convinced that merely to edit biographies written by
others, at one-half the price paid to him, was more profitable than to
write himself.

So with five journalists working at top speed to supply the hungry
lithograph presses, Mr. Knapp was likewise responsible for Edward Bok's
first adventure as an editor. It was commercial, if you will, but it was
a commercial editing that had a distinct educational value to a large
public.

The important point is that Edward Bok was being led more and more to
writing and to editorship.

IV. A Presidential Friend and a Boston Pilgrimage

Edward Bok had not been office boy long before he realized that if he
learned shorthand he would stand a better chance for advancement. So he
joined the Young Men's Christian Association in Brooklyn, and entered
the class in stenography. But as this class met only twice a week,
Edward, impatient to learn the art of "pothooks" as quickly as possible,
supplemented this instruction by a course given on two