Three Bills on the Counter

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two ironmongers printed the same handbills in the same week, and one read three other men's bills before writing a word of his own.

Two ironmongers in one town, the same nails and the same oil, the same printer in the same week.
Both put out six hundred spring handbills, and both paid four shillings for the printing.
Both wrote their own words, and both were satisfied with what they wrote.
One sat down on the Sunday with a pencil and wrote his bill out of his own head.
One opened a tin trunk under his counter and laid three other men's bills on the counter first.
Why did the second man's six hundred bring eighty-one callers, and the first man's bring nine?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two ironmongers, in the town I have never named. Linseed oil and new rope, bins of nails sorted by the hundredweight, a window of spades stood up like a fence. Both knew their trade, and either could tell you by weight in the hand which of two forks would outlast the other. Each spring both printed six hundred handbills for the garden season.

The first man wrote his on the Sunday evening at the kitchen table, with a pencil and a cup going cold beside him. It took two hours and he was not idle about it. The bill said: Ironmongery of every description. Spades, forks, rakes, barrows. Best quality, moderate prices. Repairs executed on the premises. Every word true, and the whole of it a description of a shop rather than an invitation to a person. Nine callers, four of whom were coming anyway. He concluded that handbills had stopped answering in a town that size, a large conclusion from one bill.

The second man had begun, two springs earlier, to do something very small. Whenever a printed thing came through his own door and made him do something, he put it in a tin trunk under the counter and pencilled on the back what it had made him do, and when. Not the bills he thought clever. The bills he had obeyed.

By that second spring the trunk held perhaps thirty. A cattle-feed circular from a firm sixty miles off that had got him to the station on a wet Thursday. An auctioneer's notice of a timber sale he had attended, and bought nothing at, and attended. A seed house's letter with a dated slip at the foot, posted the same evening, for seed he did not need. Not one was from an ironmonger, and not one from his own town.

He laid three on the counter and did not read the words. He read the works. Each asked one thing and not five. Each gave a reason why now rather than some time: the wagon was in the district on the fourteenth only, the timber would be sold whether anybody came or not. Each carried a figure exact enough to check, and each put something in his hand to bring back.

Then he wrote his own. One thing, a spade, and not the shop. One Saturday named, the eleventh, for a reason that happened to be true: the maker's traveller would be in that day to grind and set edges, free, on any spade bought or brought in. One figure, a Suffolk-pattern spade at four and ninepence. And a slip at the foot to bring in.

Eighty-one callers. Thirty-four spades, a good deal of grinding, and the rest of it nails, twine and hinges, because a man standing in an ironmonger's shop generally remembers something else he wants.

The first man was not lazy and not the worse tradesman. He consulted his memory of what a handbill looks like. The second consulted a record of what handbills had done to him.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You are somebody's customer a dozen times a day, and the printed things that have already moved you are the only honest evidence about buying that you will ever get for nothing. You were not being studied when they worked on you. That is precisely what makes the evidence good.

Everybody holds opinions about advertising, and nearly all of them are recollections of advertising they enjoyed. Enjoyment and obedience are different events, and the one you remember is the wrong one. The trunk is a correction, holding only what got a busy man off his chair, and one more reason to go and look rather than sit and think.

What transfers between trades is the machinery, never the words. A reader is the same creature at every door: half attending, with one question of his own and no time to have it answered twice. So the works of a good bill, one request, a reason the date is the date, a figure he can check, something to hold, work as well on a householder wanting a spade as on an ironmonger wanting cattle feed. Words belong to a trade's own language and do not travel, and a borrowed sentence arrives in your shop smelling faintly of somebody else's. Note also where the second man did not look. Nothing in his trunk came from his own trade or his own street. A rival's bill is of unknown worth, since you never see his till, and a bill resembling the one across the road gives a reader no reason to prefer either.

The common counsel runs the other way, that imitation confesses you have nothing to say. There is something in it, but it misplaces the originality. Be original in the offer, in what you will do that nobody else will. Be conventional in the form, because form is where the reader's habits live, and a bill in an unfamiliar shape spends its first four seconds explaining itself. Four seconds is the whole allowance.

Two cautions. First, copy the works and never the words. Lift a sentence and you have imported a stranger's trade into your own, and a customer who cannot say why will feel it. Second, file only what made you act. A trunk of bills you admired is a scrapbook, and a scrapbook trains your taste, which nobody pays for. The test is not whether it was good but whether it got your coat off the hook.

Three questions, and the first one costs you a walk to the hall table:

1. What is the last printed thing that made you act? Find it, and pencil on the back what it made you do and the day. That is the first page of a file worth more than any book on advertising.
2. What were its works? Read it again for structure and not style. How many things did it ask of you? What made the date the date, a reason or an adjective? And what did it put in your hand?
3. Would your own last bill have gone into the trunk? Read it as a stranger with a wet Thursday ahead of him. If it would not have got you off your chair, you have no grounds for expecting it to move anybody.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the second man's six hundred bring eighty-one callers and the first man's nine? Because the first wrote from memory, and what a tradesman remembers of advertising is its appearance. The second wrote from a two-year record of what had worked on him personally, in trades nothing like his own, taking the machinery and leaving the words where he found them. Same town, same printer, same four shillings. One had evidence, the other an impression.

The verse:

One man wrote on Sunday what a handbill ought to say,
One man read the older bills that got him up one day.
The first described his premises, his prices and his trade,
The second named a Saturday, and eighty callers made.

Until next time. Go and find the last letter or notice that made you act, pencil on the back what it made you do, and put it in a drawer you will now call a file.

P.S. Keep a second compartment for the opposite case: bills for things you genuinely wanted and still did not answer. Those are the instructive ones, since they failed on a willing buyer, and the fault is nearly always the same. Nothing to do, or no means of doing it.

Also in the archive: The Chandler's Two Jars, The Sign Nobody Read and The Nine Headlines.