ked, we
should ignore the advertisements, even if they were crowded into the
same page. They might reach our eye, but they would not touch our
mind. Yet there is hardly any fear that the average American reader
will indulge in such severity of taste. He is quite willing to yield
to the temptation of the advertising gossip with its minimum
requirement of intellectual energy for its consumption. He will
therefore just as readily turn from the articles to the advertisements
if they are separated into two distinct parts. Frequent observations
in the Pullman cars suggested to me rather early the belief that these
advertisement parts in the front and the rear of the magazine were the
preferred regions between the two covers.

Just as the great public habitually prefers the light comedy and
operetta to the theatre performances of high aesthetic intent, it moves
instinctively to those printed pages on which a slight appeal to the
imagination is made without any claim on serious thought. It is indeed
a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of
looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing
along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour.
But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement
after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles
are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if
we constantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and energetic
running. Thus the chances are that the old attractiveness of the
traditional advertising part has disappeared. While those broken ends
of the articles may lead the reader unwillingly to the advertisement
pages, he will no longer feel tempted by his own instincts to seek
those regions of restlessness; and if he is of more subtle
sensitiveness, the irritation may take the stronger form, and he may
throw away the whole magazine, advertisement and text together. The
final outcome, then, must be disadvantageous to publisher and
advertiser alike. The publisher and the editor have certainly never
yielded to this craving of the advertiser for a place on the reading
page without a feeling of revolt. Commercialism has forced them to
submit and to make their orderly issues places of disorder and chaos.
The advertisers have rushed into this scheme without a suspicion that
it is a trap. The experiments have proved that they are simply
injuring themselves. As soon as t