Dear Effendi:
I take the liberty of dedicating these little stories to you, with
affection and respect. They have all grown, in one mood or another,
out of the various life of Grub Street, suggested by adventures with
publishers, booksellers, magazine editors, newspaper men, theatrical
producers, commuters, and poets major and minor. If they have any appeal
at all, it must be as an honest (though perhaps sometimes too jocular)
picture of the excitements that gratify the career of young men
who embark upon the ocean of ink, and (let us not forget) those
much-enduring Titanias who consent to share their vicissitudes. You have
been the best of friends and counsellors to many such young men, and I
assure you that they look back upon the time spent under your shrewd and
humorous magistracy with special loyalty and regard. You will understand
that in these irresponsible stories no personal identifications are to
be presumed.
I think you remember--I know you do, because you have often charitably
chuckled over the incident--that rather too eager young man who came to
call on you one day in September, 1913, saying that he simply must have
a job. And how you, in your inimitable way, said “Well, what kind of
a job would you like best to have around this place?” And he cried
“Yours!” And you justly punctured the creature by saying “All right, go
to work and get it.” (There was more youthful palpitation than intended
impertinence in the young man's outcry, so he has assured me.) And then,
still tremulous with ambition, this misguided freshman pulled out of his
pocket a bulky memorandum on which he had inscribed his pet scheme for
the regeneration and stimulus of the publishing business, and laid
it before you. How hospitably you considered his programme, and
how tenderly you must have smiled, inwardly, at his odd mixture of
earnestness and excitement! At any rate, you set him to work that
afternoon, with the assurance that he might have your job as soon as he
could qualify.
Well, he did not get it; nor will he ever, for he knows (by this time)
what a rare complex of instincts and sagacities is needed in the head of
a great publishing house; and his own ambition has proved to be a little
different. But he can never be enough grateful for the patience and
humorous tolerance with which you brooded upon his various antics,
condoned his many absurdities, welcomed and encouraged his enthusiasms.
In nearly four years in your “shop” he learned (so he insists) more than
any college could ever teach: and how much he had to unlearn, too! And
the surprising part of it was, it was all such extraordinarily good fun.
The greatest moments of all, I suppose, were when this young man
was invited by one of your partners (on occasions that seemed so
interminably far apart!) to “walk in the garden,” that being the
cheerful tradition of the Country Life Press. There, after some
embarrassing chat about the peonies and the sun dial, the victim
meanwhile groaning to know whether it was, this time, hail or farewell,
there would come tidings of one of those five-dollar raises that were
so hotly desiderated. That paternal function (so this young man and his
fellow small fry observed) was rightly a little beneath the dignity
of the Effendi: you, they noted, only walked in the garden with paper
merchants and people like Booth Tarkington and Ellen Glasgow and good
Mr. Grosset of Grosset and Dunlap!
Many young men (O Effendi), from Frank Norris down, have found your
house a wonderful training-school for writers and publishers and
booksellers. There are great names, of permanent honour in literature,
that owe much to your wisdom and patience. But among all those who know
you in your trebled capacity as employer, publisher, and friend, there
is none who has more reason to be grateful, or who has done less to
deserve it, than the young man I have described. And so you will forgive
him if he thus publicly and selfishly pleases himself by trying to
express his sense of gratitude, and signs himself