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"Shave, sir, or haircut?" "Haircut, please." "Something to read, sir?" "What have you?" "We have Collier's, Hearst's International, The American Magazine, True Romance and All Fiction." Thus did the advertising agency handling a certain piece of copy for the Lambert Pharmacal Co. of St. Louis imagine the average U. S. barber shop conversation. The agency's client wanted to advertise its product "Listerine" as a cure for halitosis, had drawn copy aimed at barbers. The copy began: "ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE 5 CENT TIPS. The barber was a good-looking fellow— one of the best in the shop. . . ." Last week, the five magazines above mentioned put out their issues, each containing this advertisement. No other magazine contained it. An observing public knew well what constituted the U. S. barber shop press.
"Books"
To keep up with the encyclopedic tendency of modern journalism, the New York Herald-Tribune, last week, added a fat section to its Sunday edition, entitled BOOKS, A Weekly Re-view of Contemporary Literature, edited by Stuart P. Sherman. Other occupants of the journalistic-literary field in Manhattan are: The New York Times, whose Book Review of a Sunday is labelled "Section 3' and comprises 32 handsomely rotogravured pages of reviews and comment; and the Evening Post, whereof the Saturday literary supplement, once edited by Henry Seidel Canby, became somewhat more informal in tone and appearance after the Post was taken over by Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis.
The initial number of the Herald-Tribune's new appendage, 24 pages in length, much resembled the Post's supplement in physical appearance, bearing a sketch of Joseph Hergesheimer on its first page betwixt a statement of policy by Editor Sherman and a review of Hergesheimer's Balisand by Carl Van Doren. Its temper struck the reader as being pitched somewhere between the grand manner of the Times and the familiarity of the Post.
*Gaga is slang for "stupefied."