st acts as editor was to offer a series of
prizes for the best answers to three questions he put to his readers:
what in the magazine did they like least and why; what did they like
best and why; and what omitted feature or department would they like to
see installed? Thousands of answers came, and these the editor
personally read carefully and classified. Then he gave his readers'
suggestions back to them in articles and departments, but never on the
level suggested by them. He gave them the subjects they asked for, but
invariably on a slightly higher plane; and each year he raised the
standard a notch. He always kept "a huckleberry or two" ahead of his
readers. His psychology was simple: come down to the level which the
public sets and it will leave you at the moment you do it. It always
expects of its leaders that they shall keep a notch above or a step
ahead. The American public always wants something a little better than
it asks for, and the successful man, in catering to it, is he who
follows this golden rule.

CHAPTER XIII

BUILDING UP A MAGAZINE

Edward Bok has often been referred to as the one "who made _The Ladies'
Home Journal_ out of nothing," who "built it from the ground up," or,
in similar terms, implying that when he became its editor in 1889 the
magazine was practically non-existent. This is far from the fact. The
magazine was begun in 1883, and had been edited by Mrs. Cyrus H. K.
Curtis, for six years, under her maiden name of Louisa Knapp, before
Bok undertook its editorship. Mrs. Curtis had laid a solid foundation
of principle and policy for the magazine: it had achieved a circulation
of 440,000 copies a month when she transferred the editorship, and it
had already acquired such a standing in the periodical world as to
attract the advertisements of Charles Scribner's Sons, which Mr.
Doubleday, and later Bok himself, gave to the Philadelphia
magazine--advertising which was never given lightly, or without the
most careful investigation of the worth of the circulation of a
periodical.

What every magazine publisher knows as the most troublous years in the
establishment of a periodical, the first half-dozen years of its
existence, had already been weathered by the editor and publisher. The
wife as editor and the husband as publisher had combined to lay a solid
basis upon which Bok had only to build: his task was simply to rear a
structure upon the foundation already laid. It is to