Page:The New Yorker 0001 1925-02-21.pdf/4

2 weeks, you will probably need one by that time anyhow.

This two week′s delay looms as a tremendous obstacle and you hasten breathlessly to the the telephone company′s office where you become part of a throng surrounding a man at the counter who dodges to a desk telephone for conversational purposes every forty seconds, obviously to demonstrate what a really great help this invention is to a busy man. This gentleman ultimately helps you fill out an Application for Service which you recognize as the old income tax blanks the Government used in 1919.

He asks you if you want a regulation switchboard with plugs and things or a Jumbo Jr., which a child can operate and which accommodates three incoming trunk lines and fourteen extensions. You decide on Jumbo Jr., because of its marvelous simplicity and because it comes in two finishes, oak and mahogany. You order an oak Jumbo. Some days later you decide on mahogany finish furniture and some days after this you think of the incongruity of Jumbo. By this time, however, you realize that such things are just a detail anyhow and that you are not, after all, a detail person.

The day after the carpenters begin to put up the partitions Jumbo Jr. starts to ring. He varies this by buzzing. By now you are meeting a lot of new people, including representatives of the wholesale paper industry, the rubber stamp industry—“you will need some eventually; keep us in mind”—the printing industry, the lady who wants to buy a ticket on the New Yorker to St. Louis and the fellow you think is Ring Lardner, author of one of the swellest books ever written, who, you think, is going to write you a swell piece, but who turns out to be a gentleman with a collar named Warsden who wants to sell you life insurance. At this point your secretary departs to marry the Assistant Something of the uptown branch of the Farmer′s Loan and Trust Co. (As unexpected to him, you suspect, as it is to .) And there you are with Jumbo. Co-operation

After two days with Jumbo you decide that if you really amount to anything such a little matter as this can′t get the best of you and you go to the telephone company and ask for a set of printed instructions (which, of course, they must have) on how to operate him. The instructions seem unintelligible at the time and get more so later. Eventually, you realize that they pertain to Model 382J Jumbo, apparently a deceased cousin of the incumbent, and you throw them out of the window. Two days later you have discovered how to work everything but the middle row of keys and two days after this you realize they have no use anyhow and draw the obvious conclusion that they are the keys used by Presidents of the United States to press to open things, such as the Panama–Pacific International Exposition.

After Jumbo is tamed everything is simple and you go forward without misgiving, confident that such achievement cannot but bring success. Ultimately the carpenters quit walking over your desk, the glaziers get through, the puttiers finish, the lowing herds wind slowly o′er the lea and things are peaceful enough to get out a magazine.

This does not leave you unshaken, of course, and at this point your doctor advises a couple of weeks’ rest.

It is now the middle of February and by this time most magazines have got their Fourth of July issue behind them and are relaxing before the strenuous work on the Big Christmas Number. By nature cannot be so forehanded. Most of its contents must be speedily prepared by a dozen persons and the magazine must be speedily put together. Because of the necessity for this haste asks consideration for its first number. It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it is impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number. At the same time it feels a great deal of pride in many of its features and heart-felt gratitude for the support it already has received.

starts with a declaration of serious purpose but with a concomitant declaration that it will not be too serious in executing it. It hopes to reflect metropolitan life, to keep up with events and affairs of the day, to be gay, humorous, satirical but to be more than a jester.

It will publish facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. It will try conscientiously to keep its readers informed of what is going on in the fields in which they are most interested. It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. By this it means that it is not of the group of publications engaged in tapping the Great Buying Power of the North American steppe region by trading mirrors and colored beads in the form of our best brands of hokum.