ke 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.

XVI. First Years as a Woman's Editor

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 the vision and to
the genius of the first editor of The Ladies' Home Journal that the
unprecedented success of the magazine is primarily due. It was the
purpos