ABSTRACT
A rising young publisher at Saint Louis heard of the Journal campaign which Bryan and I jointly did. This figure was Mr. E. G. Lewis, one of the most spectacular promoters who ever flashed across the journalistic firmament. He sent for me: wanted to buy the Journal campaign for his newly-acquired Saint Louis Star. I offered to sell it to him and to act as consultant at one hundred a week. I was straightway engaged. Although probably not the inventor of the postcard “endless chain”, E. G. Lewis was certainly the first to commercialize it on a vast scale. About the time he began toying with the thing, the Federal postal department began cracking down on the multitudinous mail promotions to weed out schemes which used the mails to defraud the public. They called Lewis on the carpet and rudely informed him he would have to give his “clientele” something of decidedly more intrinsic value than the catch-penny whateveritwas that he was sending them for the dimes he had pouring in on him by mail. Defiantly he declared he would give them the greatest value imaginable—a full year’s subscription to a monthly magazine for a dime, ten cents. The resultant “Woman’s Magazine” speedily attained a paid circulation of a million copies monthly,—the first in America to reach that proud mark. And Lewis gave his subscribers a real periodical,—a bounty of good reading matter and illustration, presented in most attractive typographical form.
