The Bootmaker's Handbill

Dear friend,

The riddle first. By now it's tradition, and Tilley is a great respecter of traditions he invented himself.

Two bootmakers put up their bills,
With equal boots and equal skills.
One bill is torn down, hardly read,
One empties out the street instead.
Ten words apiece, both plain and true.
What did the winning first line do?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

It was a wet autumn in the town I've never named, the kind of autumn that finds every crack in a man's boots, and two bootmakers decided, in the same week, to print a hundred handbills each and paper the town with them.

Their boots were equally good. You know by now that Tilley's stories work this way; skill is never the difference, or the story wouldn't need telling.

The first man's bill was handsome. Thick paper, fine border, and across the top in proud capitals: "SAMUEL PRICE & SON. FINE BOOTS. FINEST LEATHER. ESTABLISHED THIRTY YEARS." Every word true. He nailed one to the market cross, pasted the rest on every wall that would take them, and went home satisfied, because the bill said everything he was proudest of.

The second man's bill was cheap paper, and the top line wasn't about him at all. It read: "DO YOUR BOOTS LET THE RAIN IN?"

Underneath, smaller: "Bring them to the shop with the green door before Saturday, and walk home dry."

Now watch what the town did, because the town is always the whole lesson. Folk walked past the first bill the way you walk past a stranger talking about himself, which is what it was. But the second bill stopped people mid-stride, because half the town was reading it with wet socks on. They didn't read an advertisement. They read their own trouble, written large, with a way out printed under it.

By close of market day, the first man's bills were kindling and wrapping paper. The second man's bill had been read aloud in three taverns, and one had been carried home to show a husband. The green door didn't stop swinging for a fortnight.

The first man saw the queue and said what such men always say: "But my boots are better." Where have you heard that before?

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nobody stops for your name. Nobody ever has. Your name, your history, your finest leather: these are the things you are proudest of, and they are precisely the things a stranger cares nothing about, because a stranger, walking past in the rain, is thinking about exactly one person, and it isn't you.

The first line's only job is to stop your buyer. Not to sell, not to explain, not to introduce. To stop. And the only thing that stops a stranger is the sight of their own trouble, or their own desire, written where they didn't expect to find it. Selling comes after stopping, the way the green door comes after the wet socks. Get the order wrong and the finest bill in England is kindling by teatime.

Three questions, and read your own homepage before you answer them:

1. Whose name leads your first line, yours or theirs? Count the words on your website, your ads, your signs. Every "we," "our," and "established" is Samuel Price talking to himself in fine capitals. Every "you" and "your" is a hand on a stranger's shoulder.
2. What is your buyer's wet sock? The exact discomfort they're walking around with on the day they need you. Not the general category, the felt thing: the invoice unpaid, the diary empty, the rain coming in. Name that in your first line and the street stops.
3. Does each line earn the next? A first line's job is to get the second line read, and the second's to get the third. Read your own copy line by line and ask, coldly, whether each one buys the next. Where the answer is no, that's where your reader left.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the winning first line do?

It spoke about the reader. Ten words about wet feet beat ten words about fine leather, because the reader was standing in the rain, and the maker was standing in his own reflection. The bill that wins is the one the buyer finds themselves in.

The verse:

No stranger stops to read your name,
They stop for rain, for ache, for shame.
So write their trouble large and true,
And let the small print mention you.

Until next time. Go and read your own first line in the rain, with wet socks, and see if it stops you.

---

P.S. If writing that first line feels like pulling teeth, the Catalogue holds a vault of one hundred first lines that pulled money instead, decoded into formulas you can fill in. Item No. 2. Tilley took them apart so you needn't guess.