id Mr. Mifflin. "Anything I can do for you?"

"My name is Aubrey Gilbert," said the young man. "I am representing
the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency. I want to discuss with you the
advisability of your letting us handle your advertising account,
prepare snappy copy for you, and place it in large circulation mediums.
Now the war's over, you ought to prepare some constructive campaign for
bigger business."

The bookseller's face beamed. He put down his cook-book, blew an
expanding gust of smoke, and looked up brightly.

"My dear chap," he said, "I don't do any advertising."

"Impossible!" cried the other, aghast as at some gratuitous indecency.

"Not in the sense you mean. Such advertising as benefits me most is
done for me by the snappiest copywriters in the business."

"I suppose you refer to Whitewash and Gilt?" said Mr. Gilbert wistfully.

"Not at all. The people who are doing my advertising are Stevenson,
Browning, Conrad and Company."

"Dear me," said the Grey-Matter solicitor. "I don't know that agency
at all. Still, I doubt if their copy has more pep than ours."

"I don't think you get me. I mean that my advertising is done by the
books I sell. If I sell a man a book by Stevenson or Conrad, a book
that delights or terrifies him, that man and that book become my living
advertisements."

"But that word-of-mouth advertising is exploded," said Gilbert. "You
can't get Distribution that way. You've got to keep your trademark
before the public."

"By the bones of Tauchnitz!" cried Mifflin. "Look here, you wouldn't
go to a doctor, a medical specialist, and tell him he ought to
advertise in papers and magazines? A doctor is advertised by the
bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate.
And let me tell you that the book business is different from other
trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking
at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully
unaware of it! People don't go to a bookseller until some serious
mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they
come here. For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling
people who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor. Do
you know why people are reading more books now than ever before?
Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that
their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental
fever