“All right,” said the Idiot, dryly. “There’s a lot in your profession who like the cheap sort. But I warn you in advance that if you go in for cheap notoriety, you’ll find it a pretty hard job getting anybody to sell you any eighteen-karat distinction later.”
“Well,” said the Poet, “I don’t know that I can promise to be one of your customers until I know something of the quality of the fame you have to sell. Tell me of somebody you’ve made a name for, and I’ll take the matter into consideration if I like the style of laurel you have placed on his brow.”
“Lean over here and I’ll whisper,” said the Idiot. “I don’t mind telling you, but I don’t believe in giving away the secrets of the trade to the rest of these gentlemen.”
The Poet did as he was bade, and the Idiot whispered a certain great name in his ear.
“No!” cried the Poet, incredulously.
“Yes, sir. Fact!” said the Idiot. “He was made famous in a night. The first thing we did was to get him to elongate his signature. He was writing as—P. K. Dubbins we’ll call him, for the sake of the argument. Now a name like that couldn’t be made great under any circumstances whatsoever, so we made him write it out in full: Philander Kenilworth Dubbins—regular broadside, you see. P. K. Dubbins was a pop-shot, but Philander Kenilworth Dubbins spreads out like a dum-dum bullet or hits you like a blast from a Gatling gun. Printed, it takes up a whole line of a newspaper column; put at the top of an advertisement, it strikes the eye with the convincing force of a circus-poster. You can’t help seeing it, and it makes, when spoken, a mouthful that is nothing short of impressive and sonorous.”
“Still,” suggested Mr. Brief, with a wink at the Bibliomaniac, “you have only multiplied your difficulties by three. If it was hard for your friend Dubbins to make one name famous, I can’t see that he improves matters by trying to make three names famous.”
“On the modern business principle that to accomplish anything you must work on a large scale,” said the Idiot. “Philander Kenilworth Dubbins was a better proposition than P. K. Dubbins. The difference between them in the mere matter of potentialities is the difference between a corner grocery and a department store, or a kite with a tail and one without. Well, having created the name, the next thing to do was to exploit it, and we advertised Dubbins for all there was in him. We got Mr. William Jones Brickbat, the eminent novelist, to say that he had read Dubbins’s poems, and had not yet died; we got Edward Pinkham, the author of “The Man with the Watering-pot,” to send us a type-written letter, saying that Dubbins was a coming man, and that his latest book, Howls from Helicon, contained many inspired lines. But, best of all, we prevailed upon the manufacturers of celluloid soap to print a testimonial from Dubbins himself, saying that there was no other soap like it in the market. That brought his name prominently before every magazine-reader in the country, because the celluloid-soap people are among the biggest advertisers of the day, and everywhere that soap ad went, why, Dubbins’s testimonial went also, as faithfully as Mary’s Little Lamb. After that we paid a shirt-making concern down-town to put out a new collar called “The Helicon,” which they advertised widely with a picture of Dubbins’s head sticking up out of the middle of it; and, finally, as a crowning achievement, we leased Dubbins for a year to a five-cent cigar company, who have placarded the fences, barns, and chicken-coops from Maine to California with the name of Dubbins—‘Flora Dubbins: The Best Five-Cent Smoke in the Market.’”
“And thus you made the name of Dubbins famous in letters!” sneered the Doctor.
“That was only the preliminary canter,” replied the Idiot. “So far, Dubbins’s greatness was confined to fences, barns, chicken-coops, and the advertising columns of the magazines. The next thing was to get him written up in the newspapers. That sort of thing can’t be bought, but you can acquire it by subtlety. Plan one was to make an after-dinner speaker out of Dubbins. This was easy. There are a million public dinners every year, but a limited supply of good speakers; so, with a little effort, we got Dubbins on five toast-cards, hired a humorist out in Wisconsin to write five breezy speeches for him, Dubbins committed them to memory, and they went off like hot-cakes. Morning papers would come out with Dubbins’s picture printed in between that of Bishop Potter and a member of the cabinet, who also spoke. Copies of Dubbins’s speeches were handed to the reporters before the dinner began, so that it didn’t make any difference whether Dubbins spoke them or not—the papers had ’em next morning just the same, and inside of six months you couldn’t read an account of any public banquet without running up against the name of Philander Kenilworth Dubbins.”