about and get some attention to do it withright.

-was shrewd and

Every intelligent and effective man in our modern life who is trying to do things is making a study of ways of breaking into banks or churches of attention and of breaking in in some way that all these people who are taking care of their precious souls in them will forgive him for and be glad for afterward.

Anybody can break in and be turned out. What we are studying on, many of us, is how to break in and be asked to stay.

Every enterprise stands or falls on its having or gathering around it to-day men who have a kind of genius of making people look and like to look—men who make looking catching.

Everything civilization wants to have happen to-day turns on getting the attention of people who will attend to it and make it happen.

The Ladies' Home Journal fences off one million women and says, "These are ours. You cannot get at them except you ask us. What do you want to say to them?" The Saturday Evening Post skims off two million men from the top of the country and says: "These are ours. You cannot get at them except you ask us. What do you want to say to them?" Mr. Robert Collier takes a few hundred thousand more. Mr. Hearst has huge cities listening. They also say, “These people are ours."

Authors come and look over at them wistfully. "If you say what we want in just the way we want it said," they are told, "you may be paid ten cents a word."

Very few authors slip away sadly. They elbow in and say anything.

Every author, like every business man, soon comes to see how it is. There is just so much territory of attention, or area of possible listening, in this country in a year, and the publishers and editors stake it off between themselves. Each has his own corner plot of the spiritual real estate of the United States. It is the most profoundly real real estate there is.

I have been trying to get a few feet of it for seventeen years— room for a fruit-stall in the street of the world, or a booth to sell thoughts or seeds in-room in the public thought or public attention for what shall I call it? my cucumber frame of ideas, my experiment station, or what you will-my brooder or incubator of ideas-to make a civilization out of.

The fact is that practically all the really agreeable ways of attracting people's attention to what is important to them are apt to get used up. One finds that they have made all their attention arrangements themselves and have planned just what they propose to have their attention attracted to-and why-and who-and how long every day of the week from 7 A. M. to 11:30 at night.

The specific thing they want of you and, in fact, of nearly everybody, is to leave their attention alone.

Everybody is talking at once. Everybody is engaged in a unanimous uplift of not listening to anybody else all together. The most complete and successful team-work that is being done and done by all classes together is this stupendous and matchless feat of the twentieth century—of not letting anybody be heard.

III

CONFESSIONS OF A MERELY LITERARY MAN

On a big iron gate, as I was just entering the Yale Campus yesterday, I saw this sign. I stopped and read it:

All Peddlers, Second-hand Clothing Dealers, Book Agents,
Solicitors for any kind of business, Newsboys, Bootblacks and
all persons other than welcome visitors are hereby prohibited
from entering these premises under the penalty of the law.

"That means me," I said to myself.

But I walked on. Nobody would know it meant me. People go by clothes mostly, and I slid through and wandered around under the elms and gazed at the statue of Nathan Hale, and read in the library, and sat on The Fence, and generally did as I liked. (To be accurate I did not strictly sit on The Fence. That would have been getting too much for nothing, considering who I was and knew I merely was, but I leaned against it respectfully.)

In the library, as I was slipping about feeling a little guilty, of course, but comfortable and safe and anonymous, with all that intellectual grandeur around me, one of the librarians called me by name and asked if he could do anything for me.

I got away in a minute. It made me vaguely unhappy. He wouldn't have wanted me there after all-not if he knew, I thought. In his heart of hearts he would side, if he knew, with that big sign on the gate.

All Peddlers, Second-hand Clothing Dealers, Newsboys, Book Agents.

I thought of it as I came back through the big gate. "That sign means you!" I said to myself. You know it. Yale College does not want a man like you, an unaccounted for, unclassified person, a kind of slicked-up outlaw or spiritual cowboy-a man with nobody back of him and without a license-just toting his own little ideas around on the premises.

I did not like to admit this about Yale College, or, rather, about me, whichever it is. But I'm afraid it is necessary.

Take any man to-day who is trying to interpret or get before people what is new in his time and put him in the middle of the Yale Campus and let him try with his new little idea under his arm to ring one door-bell after the other on those great proud front doors of All Knowledge on the Yale Campus, and he would be taken for a book agent. Jim Donnelly would shoo him off.

The question I would put to the reader to-day is this: How should a man who is by temperament an interrupter, and who has to be and expects to be shooed, feel and act while he is being shooed? In other words, what is a good, practical, wearing philosophy for a book agent? We are all of us book agents in a way, those of us who are interested in ideas and in the world and in getting our ideas slid in. People are always taking us for book agents and shooing us. What would be a good philosophy for us to have before, during and after being shooed?

Here is mine. I put down these rules for myself or for anybody for what they are worth.

But before I go on to the rules, I want to record the main philosophic principle I placed before myself for the rules to start from. My advice to myself is like this:

"Stop bothering about being a book agent and face the music," I say to myself plainly. "I am a book agent. It's all I ever was or ever will be. All I hope to be is a good one before I die. My business is peddling ideas that people know they do not want. I am spending and propose to spend my life in interrupting people, in breaking in with what good manners I have, or bad manners people may think I have, upon all institution

alized, comfortable people people who have locked up the great bronze front doors of their important thoughts, pulled down the curtains, and who are sitting by the fire in the slippers of their minds. I might as well face the fact and get on with it as well as I can. Toward the life around me, toward the big severe forbidding front door of my century I am a book agent at heart. And except that I do not propose (by anybody with an apron or a degree on) to be sent around to the back door, I have a book agent's soul. I pull the bell! I hear it ringing through the halls without fear and with deep joy! Let them come on!" I say. Then door after door.

Elijah was a book agent.

Getting people to want ideas they do not want is like any other kind of salesmanship. All successful business, even all really successful religion, consists in interrupting people. As it is a matter of interest to nearly everybody-every fellow human being from a bootblack to a prophet—I have thought I would name two or three practical aids in the art of interrupting.

(I would not want anybody to lay my book down just here at the end of this paragraph. It will be appreciated if the reader will not interrupt me until he has let me interrupt him for about twenty lines more to say what I think an interruption is.)

The kind of interrupting in which I believe, and that I am writing about in this book, must conform to the following three rules:

First. The thing that has to be got right first in an interruption is its soul or spirit. The soul of an interruption is the way one feels toward people while one is interrupting them. One must wait before interrupting until one gets this feeling right. It should run as a kind of humming accompaniment or obligato underneath one's words while one is doing it. These people I am interrupting want to be interrupted. They merely don't know it and haven't mentioned it.