Christmas Is Coming
Sirs:
Christmas is coming. An original and appreciative subscriber, I submit the following :
"There is no time like the present" There is no present like TIME.
E. B. WHITTLESEY
Scofield, Ore.
To Original Subscriber Whittlesey, all thanks. Let other subscribers submit slogans. To that subscriber who, before Dec. 1, produces a better than Subscriber Whittlesey's: $10. Otherwise, the $10 goes to Original Subscriber Whittlesey.--ED.
Phono Reviews?
Sirs:
... It is quite impossible for even a passably busy man or woman to listen to records in phonograph stores, and I know of no place where these records are reviewed save in the booklets of the publishers themselves. There are many very beautiful recordings being made with entire symphonies under the new processes of electrical recording, and some of the work is so fine, that I believe it would be a distinct help to your readers to review the better class of new records.
JAMES N. WRIGHT
Orlando, Fla.
Is Subscriber Wright's suggestion seconded?--ED.
Guess
Sirs:
Five percent is a short "base" line. Why don't you include these questions* on one of your advertising pages so arranged that it can be torn out. My guess is that 50% of your readers would fill it out and return it at their own expense if you phrased your request in your usual pert style.
CADWALLADER EVANS JR.
Waverly, Pa.
Interpretation
Sirs:
Please concede me an inch of space in your interesting publication for a correction on a subject dear to me.
On page 25 of TIME, Oct. 11 you say, "Finally, Mr. Brewer has completed the interpretation of the famed Aztec Calendar Stone, partially interpreted by Professor Valentini in 1875."
Mr. Brewer may be unaware of the fact that my father, to whom reference is made, made a very complete interpretation of the entrancing work of art referred to. His (your) statement is probably based on a perusal of the small published brochure, result of a lecture given by my father in New York in 1878, and in no manner complete. I regret that the complete manuscript passed out of my hands when I was a mere boy, at the time of my father's death in 1899. My complete edition of my father's works remains in abeyance until it can be found. E. E. VALENTINI
Detroit, Mich.
New Clarion
Sirs:
I am forwarding to you several issues of the Clarion, the Rochester East High School weekly newsmagazine.
Last March, its directors, ardent TIME readers, recognizing the superiority of your style of news writing, published a new Clarion modeled after TIME the weekly newsmagazine. Students delighted in the manner in which even the most remote news was transformed to a crisp, subtle article.
JERRY G. MANGIONE
East High School Rochester, N. Y.
Quiz Sirs:
. . . How do you get your magazine out? How big is your office? How many men on your staff? Have you any correspondents or have you a wide-reading staff? How do you work your material together as you do ? Are your men ex-newspaper men ? I'll bet they are. I think TIME readers would enjoy hearing about these things.
Personally I think your style of writing is an indication of what is coming in the future. Pictures are becoming popular. Writers will devise a new style to offset this popularity in newspapers. Your paper is simply great--everyone on the Telegram staff reads it. It's the only magazine the paper subscribes for! It's as much a newspaper man's magazine as the New York Sun used to be the newspaper man's newspaper. Tell us how you do it all, please.
GORDON MAC QUARRIE
City Editor The Evening Telegram
Superior, Wis.
Football
Sirs:
New York University is on the so-called football firmament. As yet you have to remark on the recent victories of the coming Eastern football champions, the noteworthy 30-0 whitewash given to Rutgers, etc. The students of New York University do not threaten to revoke their subscriptions to your most interesting periodical, because they like it too much, but still they feel that the meritorious record of the football team representing N. Y. U. deserves mention in your columns. Thank
BEN M. COHEN
New York University, School of Commerce New York, N. Y.
"Not Worth Two Cents"
Sirs:
In rebuttal of your reader who would have you reduce the subscription price of TIME to $2.00, Your paper is worth $5.00. One big cause of the prostitution of journalism in America is the low subscription price demanded. If we paid lOc to 25-c- a day for information and opinion which we could trust, we would be glad to pay it. Two-cent-a-day information and opinion is as a rule not worth the two cents. Keep up your quality and add on the tariff.
GEORGE LOOMS
Denver Chamber of Commerce Denver, Colo.
Insulting
Sirs:
Please stop sending me TIME even if my subscription only began, but I just cannot stand such persistent insulting stupidity of your Editors calling New York Manhattan. I will read other, better enlightened papers, instead of such narrow minded ones as TIME is.
A. MULLER URY
Pasadena, Calif.
Ross's Goose
Sirs :
I don't know what was going on a short distance outside of space during the week which preceded the beginning of time. TIME almost knows that, however, and wonder at the comprehensive material presented in the soul of wit of its welcomed weekly pages. . . . Being an idealist with a desire to see everybody excepting myself good and correct at all times I observed an error of statement in a recent number of TIME. According to the editor breeding places of all but four of our North American birds were known. I naturally asked about Ross's goose which had been left out of this list. Here is a letter from my old friend Captain Bob Bartlett clinching my point that the breeding place of this beautiful and abundant species of goose is still being guessed at.
ROBERT T. MORRIS
New York, N. Y. Capt. Bartlett wrote:
"Dear Doctor Morris :
"Yours of the 16th instant to hand a day or two ago. You should have been with us this summer. The finest weather that I have ever seen in the Arctic. No ice, no wind, sun--plenty of it--all the time. We covered 8,500 miles. I never saw "Greenland right, nor the opposite shore until this time.
"Now about the Ross's goose, whether it goes north, beyond the mainland, that is, over the Polar Basin ? You remember at what pains people were led to find the knot's eggs, and spoonbill sandpiper. I remember Peary offering rewards to Eskimos for the knot's eggs, and at length they became interested. And they were found. So with spoonbill. John Thayer had the money, and the desire to secure the eggs, so he sent a man to Siberia for two years, and this man found his quarry. So with the Ross's goose eggs. Money would find the eggs--that is, in the nest. That goose lays its eggs somewhere between the Mackenzie Delta and the north shore of Hudson's Bay and Islands. The reason probably that the eggs have not been seen is because not enough interest has been shown to go after them. Next summer I am going along the north shore of Hudson's Bay and north amongst the Islands. R. A. BARTLETT"
Anchor Language
Sirs:
Hereby renewing my subscription, tendering unqualified praise for TIME as it stands, size, contents, etc. Also one small criticism. "Gunboats, to Nicaragua" (TIME, Sept. 6)--and cast anchor--. Never is an anchor "cast." It may be dropped or as the order comes from the bridge it is "let go" which is customary, but it is not "cast." That particular word used in that particular sense never fails to get a mariner's "wind up."
Please do not increase the size of TIME.
GEORGE B. SWORTFIGNER
Oakland, Calif.
"Old Black Wills"
Sirs:
In TIME, Oct. 25, under SPORT you have for a headline "Old Black Wills.*" This is very absurd. It is not as hurting to the Negro as it is to you. It immediately shows how ignorant and narrow minded the publishers of TIME are. Instead of listing it as SPORT, you should call it race pride against impartial justice, then possibly you would have it as it really is.
If the most honorable white Sharkey had been such a great fighter why then did he win on a foul? With a narrow minded referee and white newspapermen, such as publishers of TIME, what reasonable chance did "Old Black Wills" have?
Your paper is the most ridiculous in these United States.
WILLIE DAVIS BUTTS
East Orange, N. J.
Will Find
Sirs:
Gatti-Casazza will find his American Caruso [TIME, Nov. 1] in the person of one William B. Martin, tenor, who in the five years since being graduated from Harvard has sung in the Opera Comique, Fans (1923-4), Marseilles and Barcelona (1925) and at Ostend in the summer of 1926. Martin was the idol of Parisian operagoers for two seasons and last year took Spain by storm. He is now in Italy polishing up his Italian. Perhaps Mr. Gatti-Casazza has already signed him up for the 1927 Metropolitan season and is going to spring him on us then.
J. W. SAVAGE
Scituate, Mass.
Kit, Cat
Sirs:
I do not know who your authority is for deriving catgut from kit, as you do in TIME, Oct. 18. At any rate, let me quote the comment to be found in the Oxford Dictionary under the word catgut: "So far as the name can be traced back, it distinctly means guts or intestines of the cat, though it is not known that these were ever used for the purpose." You will probably recognize the authority of the Oxford as final.
STANLEY S. SWARTLEY
Meadville, Pa.
TIME relied upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica for the statement that catgut derives from "kit gut," that is gut used in playing a kit or fiddle.--ED.
*Subscriber Evans refers to a set of questions that were asked (recently, by mail) of a number of subscribers selected at random. For further details, see page 23.--ED. *Wills, prizefighter, defeated by Sharkey.