d.

He was thinking along this line in a restaurant when a man sitting next
to him opened a box of cigarettes, and taking a picture out of it threw
it on the floor. Edward picked it up, thinking it might be a
"prospect" for his collection of autograph letters. It was the picture
of a well-known actress. He then recalled an advertisement announcing
that this particular brand of cigarettes contained, in each package, a
lithographed portrait of some famous actor or actress, and that if the
purchaser would collect these he would, in the end, have a valuable
album of the greatest actors and actresses of the day. Edward turned
the picture over, only to find a blank reverse side. "All very well,"
he thought, "but what does a purchaser have, after all, in the end, but
a lot of pictures? Why don't they use the back of each picture, and
tell what each did: a little biography? Then it would be worth
keeping." With his passion for self-education, the 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 today, "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
biograph