Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/825

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 809

secure the stories from the various nations, Mr. Brower carried on a correspondence with magazine-publishers all over the world, made arrangements under the various copyright regulations, and secured the services of skilled translators residing at different places in America. He estimated that the market for the Inter- imtional's presentation of foreign literary products should be found among 50,000 cultured people of this country. But only 1,500 became interested enough to send annual subscriptions to the magazine. A lack of support from Chicago and the Missis- sippi valley was particularly discouraging to the publisher, since Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews, had told him that two-thirds of that magazine's constituency was in this section. The unique character of the International called out a sporadic circulation in nineteen nations. But that did not help much. After a year and a half the translations were discontin- ued. An "International Register" of Americans going abroad was next introduced as a leading feature of the magazine. This was a list of names of travelers and tourists classified by states. But the pains required for compiling it were too great to make this experiment anything but costly. Then after the Spanish- American War, when there were signs of interest in the Spanish tongue, a novel scheme for teaching modern languages was un- dertaken. Lesson in Spanish were outlined in the magazine. Graphophones and cylinders for use in a sort of mechanical con- versational method of self-education were offered for sale to subscribers. But few of them, however, took interest in grapho- phone Spanish, and contemplated magazine lessons in German and French were not given by the International. Travel-letters writ- ten by American visitors to out-of-the-way places, and general travel-notes by the editor, were published in all stages of the experiments with the magazine. Toward its end, when the price per copy had been reduced to ten cents, Mr. Brower, in the hope of alluring the masses, inserted trashy, popular stories of a kind in which he had no personal interest.

In seeking advertising this Chicago business man found that other Chicago business men had the same sentiment he had about a Chicago magazine, but that they did not have advertising to