The Sentence the Town Learnt

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town an advertisement was a standing thing, nailed to a post or set in the same corner of the same page. The difficulty was never getting it printed. The difficulty was leaving it alone.

Two wheelwrights in one town, the same seasoned ash and the same elm stocks.
Both spent four shillings with the printer in every month of the year.
One had something new to say each time, and said it rather well.
The other printed a sentence of eleven words, and then printed it again.
Same money, same press, same town, and only one was quoted at a strange forge.
Which of the two had been advertising?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two wheelwrights in the town I have never named. Both of them good: felloes of ash cut three winters before they were wanted, the tyre shrunk on hot by the smith next door, the wheel dished so true you could spin it with a finger. Twenty years apiece, and four shillings a month each at the printer, which bought three hundred handbills or a corner of page three.

The first man enjoyed the writing, and that is not said against him. In January his bill was about his timber, a fine piece on seasoning and why a green felloe shrinks from its tyre in the first hot August. In February, his prices, which were fair. In March, his twenty years. In April, a new line of barrows. Every month a fresh sheet, read by somebody, good for a few enquiries, and in May he began again on timber, the January bill having gone out of everybody's head.

The second man spent a winter settling on one sentence and then stopped. The sentence was: a wheel off at eight and under the cart at four. It was true. He had built the day around it, kept made-up wheels in three common sizes and the smith's fire in by seven. In March he put the sentence in the corner of page three. In April he put the same sentence in the same corner. It went on his handbills in the same words, at the foot of his bills of charge, and on the board over the yard gate, unaltered and unimproved. He was tired of it himself by the second month and thought it thin. When the printer said in the autumn that folk must be weary of it, he left it alone.

Three years on, a carter broke a wheel at Michaelmas fifteen miles up the valley and asked at a forge for a wheelwright who would not keep him standing a week. The smith, who had never bought a wheel in his life and knew neither man to speak to, said the sentence. Not the name. The sentence, near enough word for word, and the name after it as an afterthought.

That is the whole of the difference, and notice what it is not. Not that the second man advertised more, for it was the same four shillings in the same months, nor that he wrote better, for he wrote worse. One of them had put a sentence into the mouths of people who had never dealt with him. The other had a tin trunk of good bills and a town that knew him, when it thought of him, as a wheelwright.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The town does not begin to learn your message until long after you have grown sick of it. Your fatigue and their learning run on different clocks, and you have been steering by the wrong one.

Do the arithmetic once and you will not forget it. You wrote the advertisement, you proofed it, you pass the board on the gate twice a day and read your own bills of charge. Call it fifty encounters in a month. The householder with a cracked stock sees page three perhaps twice and attends to it once, and that only if he is in the market, which for eleven months of twelve he is not. By the time you are sick of your sentence he has half noticed it twice. That is not a worn-out message. It is the beginning of one.

Nor is a town an audience sitting still. It is a procession, and the people in front of your bill in March are largely not those in front of it in April, so only the man who says the same thing each month is heard by the whole parade. Change the words and you begin again before a new slice of it, and a thing said once has barely been said at all, however finely put.

Recall, besides, is built out of sameness, there being nothing else to build it out of. A man may follow your argument on first reading and produce not one word of it a fortnight later, which is the only test that counts, since the need comes when your bill is not in his hand. What survives is a form of words met several times in the same shape, and that is the only thing a third party can carry for you. The smith could not have repeated an essay on seasoned ash. Eleven words cost him nothing.

The objection to all this is wear-out, a real thing wrongly applied. What wears out is the execution: the picture, the example, the setting. The claim beneath does not wear out, it accrues. A window must be pulled apart and rebuilt, and the thing that never changes stops being seen by the people who see it most, which is true of the display and false of the promise. Dress it differently as often as you like, and say the same thing.

Two cautions. Repetition multiplies whatever you give it, so a dull or untrue claim repeated for three years buys three years of teaching the town something that does not sell. Earn the sentence first: true, checkable, about a thing the customer wants rather than a thing you are proud of. And sameness of claim is not sameness of everything: new places, new months, new evidence beneath it, the same words at the top. Never repeat a claim you cannot keep, since every carter you disappoint will quote you as accurately as the smith did.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What sentence would a stranger say back? Ask three customers what it is you do. Three answers in three shapes means you have given the town nothing to hold, and the fault is yours rather than their memory.
2. What have I changed that nobody asked me to change? Go through a year of your own advertising and count the claims. More than two, and you have been paying for attention and spending the balance each time.
3. Where does the sentence not yet appear? The same words, unaltered, at the foot of every quotation, on the vehicle, on the window, under your name in the directory. Each is free, and each another pass of the parade.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had been advertising?

The second. The first had been printing, a different trade and a pleasanter one. Both spent forty-eight shillings a year. One bought twelve introductions, each forgotten before the next arrived. The other bought one sentence twelve times over, and ended with what no money buys outright: words other men say for him while he is fifteen miles off and asleep.

The verse:

The new-made line delights the man
who wrote it, and no more.
The sentence kept for three long years
is spoken at your door.

Until next time. Go and write the one sentence you intend to repeat unaltered for a year, and put it at the foot of today's quotations.

P.S. The cost of changing your message appears nowhere you would look for it. Nobody writes to say he nearly remembered your name. It is paid out of recognition you had begun to accumulate and then wrote off, and stays invisible because it is a thing that did not happen. Which is why staleness is so dangerous a feeling to steer by. It is the one sensation in the business that arrives exactly when the work has begun to pay.

Also in the archive: The Nine Headlines, Four Syllables in the Clay and Never the Finest Black.