The Washing Out by Ten

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two mangle makers took their bills to the same printer in the same February week, and bought the same block of wood from the same engraver.

Two mangle makers, the same iron frame, the same beech rollers, the same four pounds.
The same printer, the same paper, the same six hundred bills round the same streets.
One had the engraver draw the mangle, handsomely, from its best side.
One had him draw a back yard on a Monday, the line full and the mistress gone indoors.
Neither bill told a lie, and neither claimed a thing the other did not claim.
Why did one of them sell eleven mangles that spring and the other fifty-three?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two mangle makers in the town I've never named, their workshops at either end of the same street. The work was the work: the frame cast at the foundry, two beech rollers turned and left to season, the box on top loaded with stones to press a sheet dry in one pass. Both made a mangle that would outlast the woman who bought it, and both asked four pounds. In February, with the yards cold, both bought one engraved block and six hundred bills for a lad to carry round in March.

The first man knew exactly what he wanted drawn. He stood his best mangle in the yard, turned it until the shadows fell kindly, and had the engraver take it from three quarters on, so the depth of the frame and the line of the bolt heads showed. His name went on the cross rail as in life, and the printer set the word SUPERIOR above it in two sizes. It was a handsome piece of work, and he kept one framed for years.

The second man did not know what he wanted drawn, so he went and looked. He walked out to a cottage where a mangle of his had stood two seasons, and asked the householder whether he might sit in her yard on a Monday and watch, which she thought peculiar and allowed. The sheets went through two at a time and came away nearly dry, and the line was full by ten. And at ten the woman went indoors and sat at her own table with a cup of tea and a child on her knee, on a Monday, which in that street was not a thing a woman did.

So he had the engraver draw that yard: the full line, the tub tipped empty against the wall, the clock in the kitchen window showing ten, and the mangle at the edge of the picture with one hand on the crank. Underneath, a line saying the washing was out by ten and the rest of the Monday was her own, then the price and the address.

Six hundred bills went through the same doors in the same week. The first was looked at by people who thought, that is a mangle, and put it on the fire. The second was looked at by people who had never once thought of buying a mangle, and who found themselves thinking about a Monday afternoon. Eleven, against fifty-three.

Be fair to the first man. His was the better drawing, and it did one job properly: the ironmongers who stocked mangles could see the gauge of the frame and the length of the roller, and ordered on it. A picture of the object answers a buyer who has already decided to buy the category and is only choosing between makers. There are never very many of those.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A picture's only job is to show the buyer the morning after he has bought. Not the thing you made, not the premises, not you standing beside your work with your arms folded. The morning afterwards, in a place he recognises, with his trouble gone out of it.

The first reason this works is that a picture is read before a word of yours is read, and read in about a second. What a person settles in that second decides whether the words are read at all, which makes the picture the most expensive square inch you own. It faces the same test as reading your own work aloud at home, and fails it faster than any sentence can.

The second is that a picture of the object hands the imagining to the buyer, and buyers do not imagine. You have looked at your own work for fifteen years and cannot see it as a stranger does: an object of unknown size doing nothing in particular. Ask a householder to picture her Monday out of a drawing of a cast frame and she will not. She is busy, the imagining is work, and the work was yours. Half of it is merely scale: an object alone floats at no size in no place, while the same object in a kitchen she knows is already half hers.

The third is that a picture carries proof where a sentence can only make a claim. Write that your mangle dries a sheet in one pass and you are a man asserting something about his own goods. Draw a full line at ten in the morning and the evidence sits in front of the reader, who concludes it herself and therefore believes it. That is the glazier and his hammer, moved off the street and onto paper.

Two cautions. First, a picture is a promise that cannot be qualified in small letters underneath, so show a Monday you can deliver, in the weather you have. The quickest way to make a good picture expensive is to show your best half hour and then do your ordinary afternoon. Second, do not let a picture do work belonging to the offer, and do not polish it into a world the reader has never stood in, all clean hands and good light, which she reads as somebody else's life.

Three questions, and an hour on your own doorstep answers them:

1. What is the first picture a stranger sees of your work, and what is in it? Go and look as though you had never heard of yourself. Nine times in ten it is the thing, or the van, or the premises: a picture of you rather than of your reader.
2. Cover every word, and ask what the picture alone says changes for the buyer. If the answer is nothing, or only that you make a tidy job of it, you have a record rather than an argument.
3. Does anything in it give the size of the thing and the sort of place it belongs in? A hand on the crank, a cup on the table, a door frame. What cannot be placed in a person's own house is not bought.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did one of them sell eleven mangles that spring and the other fifty-three?

Because the first drew what he had made and the second drew what it did to a Monday. The eleven were already looking for a mangle and compared two makers. The fifty-three were not looking for anything, and were sold a morning they had never thought was for sale.

The verse:

One drew the frame and the roller and the bolt heads in a row,
One drew a line of washing and a clock that said it was ten.
The same beech, the same iron, the same four pounds to pay,
But one sold a mangle, and one sold the rest of the day.

Until next time. Go and take six photographs of your finished work where it is being used, in daylight, with a hand or a doorway in the frame for size.

P.S. The one picture never worth using is the one handed to you by whoever supplied your materials. It is handsome, costs nothing, and sits at the top of every rival's page in the county, so all it says is that you buy what they buy. A plain photograph of your own work in a real yard beats a fine one of somebody else's.

Also in the archive: The Bootmaker's Handbill, The Smear on the Hall Paint and The Yellow Wheels.