The eventful evening, however, was not yet over. Edward had boarded a
Broadway stage to take him to his Brooklyn home when, glancing at the
newspaper of a man sitting next to him, he saw the headline: "Jefferson
Davis arrives in New York." He read enough to see that the Confederate
President was stopping at the Metropolitan Hotel, in lower Broadway, and
as he looked out of the stage-window the sign "Metropolitan Hotel"
stared him in the face. In a moment he was out of the stage; he wrote a
little note, asked the clerk to send it to Mr. Davis, and within five
minutes was talking to the Confederate President and telling of his
remarkable evening.
Mr. Davis was keenly interested in the coincidence and in the boy before
him. He asked about the famous collection, and promised to secure for
Edward a letter written by each member of the Confederate Cabinet. This
he subsequently did. Edward remained with Mr. Davis until ten o'clock,
and that evening brought about an interchange of letters between the
Brooklyn boy and Mr. Davis at Beauvoir, Mississippi, that lasted until
the latter passed away.
Edward was fast absorbing a tremendous quantity of biographical
information about the most famous men and women of his time, and he was
compiling a collection of autograph letters that the newspapers had made
famous throughout the country. He was ruminating over his possessions
one day, and wondering to what practical use he could put his
collection; for while it was proving educative to a wonderful degree, it
was, after all, a hobby, and a hobby means expense. His autograph quest
cost him stationery, postage, car-fare--all outgo. But it had brought
him no income, save a rich mental revenue. And the boy and his family
needed money. He did not know, then, the value of a background.
He was thinking along this line in a restaurant when a man sitting next
to him opened a box of cigarettes, and taking a picture out of it threw
it on the floor. Edward picked it up, thinking it might be a "prospect"
for his collection of autograph letters. It was the picture of a
well-known actress. He then recalled an advertisement announcing that
this particular brand of cigarettes contained, in each package, a
lithographed portrait of some famous actor or actress, and that if the
purchaser would collect these he would, in the end, have a valuable
album of the greatest actors and actresses of the day. Edward turned the
picture over, only to find a blank reverse side. "All very well," he
thought, "but what does a purchaser have, after all, in the end, but a
lot of pictures? Why don't they use the back of each picture, and tell
what each did: a little biography? Then it would be worth keeping." With
his passion for self-education, the idea appealed very strongly to him;
and believing firmly that there were others possessed of the same
thirst, he set out the next day, in his luncheon hour, to find out who
made the picture.
At the office of the cigarette company he learned that the making of the
pictures was in the hands of the Knapp Lithographic Company. The
following luncheon hour, Edward sought the offices of the company, and
explained his idea to Mr. Joseph P. Knapp, now the president of the
American Lithograph Company.
"I'll give you ten dollars apiece if you will write me a
one-hundred-word biography of one hundred famous Americans," was Mr.
Knapp's instant reply. "Send me a list, and group them, as, for
instance: presidents and vice-presidents, famous soldiers, actors,
authors, etc."
"And thus," says Mr. Knapp, as he tells the tale today, "I gave Edward
Bok his first literary commission, and started him off on his literary
career."
And it is true.
But Edward soon found the Lithograph Company calling for "copy," and,
write as he might, he could not supply the biographies fast enough. He,
at last, completed the first hundred, and so instantaneous was their
success that Mr. Knapp called for a second hundred, and then for a
third. Finding that one hand was not equal to the task, Edward offered
his brother five dollars for each biography; he made the same offer to
one or two journalists whom he knew and whose accuracy he could trust;
and he was speedily convinced that merely to edit biographies written by
others, at one-half the price paid to him, was more profitable than to
write himself.
So with five journalists working at top speed to supply the hungry
lithograph presses, Mr. Knapp was likewise responsible for Edward Bok's
first adventure as an editor. It was commercial, if you will, but it was
a commercial editing that had a distinct educational value to a large
public.
The important point is that Edward Bok was being led more and more to
writing and to editorship.