What He Found at the Flue Side

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the printer's window held a hundred handbills, and ninety-eight of them said the same four things. A man could read the lot and come away unable to name one trader in it.

Two coppersmiths in the old town, the same borax and the same tinning pot.
Both spent that winter relining worn coppers and resetting the brickwork beneath them.
Both had four shillings to spend at the printer in the same wet February.
One printed six hundred bills saying coppers repaired, all work guaranteed, prices moderate.
One printed six hundred describing a single copper, what he found in it and what it cost.
Same trade, same work, the same four shillings. Why did one sheet bring nineteen enquiries and the other two?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is coppers. Every scullery in the town I have never named held one: a brick setting with a fire under it and a copper sunk in the top, boiling the washing on a Monday and the fruit in October. When it failed it did not fail politely. It failed with thirty gallons of grey water on the floor.

Two men mended them. The same flux, the same scraped soot, the same hour on their knees with a candle looking up a flue. Neither was the better craftsman and nobody could have told you which.

In the February both had four shillings for printing, the whole of what either could spare. The first man took trouble over his. He wrote down coppers, boilers, cisterns, kettles, gutters and leadwork, because he did not wish to lose a man who wanted a kettle. He wrote all work guaranteed, because it was. He wrote prices moderate, because they were. He wrote eighteen years in the trade, because he had them. Six hundred went out and two enquiries came back, one for a kettle.

The second man had no notion how to write an advertisement and did not try. He had just come off three days at an inn on the coach road, and wrote that down instead, in the order it happened.

He wrote that the copper had been in eleven years. That the bottom was worn to the thickness of a shilling on the flue side, where the flame had always licked the same spot, the owner never having known a copper wears unevenly. That the lower seam was weeping, which had been blamed on the floor. That the setting had fallen in at the back, so a good third of the fire had gone up the wall for two winters with the coal bill quietly paying for it. He wrote that he was three days about it, and what the three days were. He wrote the figure, three pounds twelve. He wrote that it now boiled twenty-eight gallons in forty minutes where it had taken an hour and a quarter, the innkeeper, who weighed his own coal, putting the saving at better than a third. And he wrote that in getting the old copper out he had cracked the slate shelf and replaced it at his own cost, two and six, which he would allow for next time.

Nineteen enquiries. Seven began by telling him which side of their own copper was the worn one.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A claim can only be believed or doubted, but a particular can be checked, and a reader who has checked one thing of yours will take the rest on his own authority. The rest of this letter is that sentence with its workings shown.

Begin with the first bill, since it was not laziness. Every line of it was true, and every line could have been written by the worst man in the trade, who would also have claimed eighteen years and a guarantee. A sentence any rival can write without doing the work tells a reader nothing about the man who wrote it, and he knows it perfectly well, which is why his eye goes over it like water over slate.

The particulars cannot be copied, because they were not invented. No man who has not knelt under a copper knows it wears on the flue side. It is the machinery by which an exact figure is believed where a boast is discounted, carried a step further: the figure proves the claim, the particular proves the man.

Then the better half of it, which is that you never make the general case at all. Your reader makes it for you. You tell him about one copper on the coach road and he concludes, on his own account, that you will know what is wrong with his. You never wrote that, and he will hold it harder than anything you asserted, because a reason a man arrives at himself needs no defending.

Mark what else the sheet did. It taught seven householders how to look at their own coppers, and a man who has diagnosed his own trouble is no longer deciding whether to spend money but who to send for. And the awkward two and six did more good than the three pounds twelve, a man who reports what a job cost him being plainly not one who arranges an account for your benefit.

And it is the cheapest material in trade to produce. You cannot think up an advertisement at nine at night after eleven hours on your knees, but you can remember Tuesday. A man who could not write a line of persuasion can always write a report, and the report is what is wanted.

Two cautions. Describe a typical job, not your grandest. The cathedral roof impresses the reader and excludes him, and what you put before strangers decides the work you are asked for, so describe the work you want more of. And do not tidy it. Round figures read as invention, faultless accounts read as advertising, and the item you are tempted to leave out is generally the one doing the work. Get the owner's leave before printing his address; if he refuses, say the inn on the coach road and keep every other particular as it stood.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Can I still remember my last job in detail? Write it out this week or you will be inventing it next month. Six lines: what was wrong, what you found, what you did, how long, what it cost, what it does now.
2. What did I find that the customer did not know was there? That is the sentence a stranger reads twice, and the one you think too ordinary to mention, having found it four hundred times.
3. Which figures can I put my name to? Hours, pounds, gallons, coal, the day you started and the day you finished. If you do not know, ask the customer and use his number, not your guess.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same work, the same four shillings. Why did one sheet bring nineteen enquiries and the other two?

Because one asked to be believed and the other asked to be checked. The first man told six hundred households what sort of tradesman he was, which every bill in the window claims and none can prove. The second told them about three days in a scullery and left them to work out what sort of man does that. The conclusion was theirs, and so they kept it.

The verse:

A promise is cheap and a promise is wide,
And wears the same coat as a lie,
But a worn flue side and a shilling of slate
Are things a man cannot deny.

Until next time. Go and write out your last job today in six lines, with the figures exactly as they fell.

P.S. The sheet has a second use, better than the first. When a man asks for an estimate, hand him the described job before you hand him your figure. He then reads your price beside a job he has understood rather than beside your rival's price, and the comparison has moved onto ground of your choosing, for a farthing of paper.

Also in the archive: The Mason's Witnesses, Nine Lengths of Old Lead and Everyone Does It, Nobody Says It.