BILLBOARD LITERATURE

The airplane which traced smoke letters in the sky yesterday to advertise a familiar commodity was probably not operated by a college man. Such skywriting is a final flash of old advertising methods with which the educated man had little sympathy. A new advertising is developing, however, in which he finds an acceptable place, in which the cultured man will actually be more valuable than the paperhanger and the circus band.

The billboard, the old sledgehammer method of advertising, lacked finesse but was effective. Its value lay in its being the "biggest thing on earth". Now when every vantage place is plastered with bill posters, when bill boards are lighted, the lights colored and flashing, each advertisement is lost in the glare and dazzle of the whole array. Every novelty in noise and color has been exploited, until the buyer's eyes and ears have been exhausted by the massed attack.

The airplane was hailed as something new, but as an advertising medium it is doomed to be short-lived. The writing is soon whisked away by the wind, and few will raise a jaded eye at the expense of a rheumatic neck to watch the gyrations of an airplane which has become a commonplace. Something more than mere novelty is demanded of the new advertising.

In fact it threatens to become a real American art. Mr. Dooley will be forced to give up the magazines completely. "What I object to", he says, "is whin I pay tin or fifteen cents for a magazine, expectin' to spind me avenin' improvin' me mind with the latest thoughts in advertising, to find more thin a quatter of the book devoted to literachoor". He could already find some literature in the advertisements. There is poetry in the line "meaty marrowy oxtail joints" used to describe a well-known soup. A prose rhythm of unusual smoothness is discovered in an automobile advertisement. "The velvety clutch responds to the merest pressure. . . . The plant but positive gears engage silently". One nationally known electric firm prints well rounded essays to describe its product, and the Ann Sawyers and Well-Dressed Men gossip like Pepys and Evelyn.

The new advertising employs, artists of pen and brush alike. Its appeal is to the taste of the artistic which everyone has in some remote corner of his nature, and which the old methods did not reach. Instead of flaunting, barbarisms, the new art embodies "the fables of the people", and it displays "some of the most ingenuous literature of the age".