THE SCRAP BOOK.
| Vol. I. | APRIL, 1906. | No. 2. |
A MARVELOUS RECEPTION.
Nothing is a success until it is a proved success. The ideas that seem best frequently turn out the worst. If it were not for this fact, a fact with which we are thoroughly familiar, we should feel that we have in The Scrap Book the hit of a century. Indeed, it is difficult not to let ourselves go a bit, even now, and talk about this new creation in magazine-making in a way that would sound like high-pressure fiction.
Six weeks ago The Scrap Book was nothing but an idea. It had had a good deal of thought in a general way, but nothing effectually focuses until actual work begins. Filmy, desultory thought, in cloudland, counts for little.
In the early conception of The Scrap Book it was as unlike this magazine as a mustard-seed is unlike the full-grown tree. Rebelling as I did, and still do, at the restraints of the conventional magazine, and realizing the added strength that should come from the rare old things and the best current things—the scrap bits that are full of juice and sweetness and tenderness and pathos and humor—realizing all this, I undertook to incorporate in Munsey's Magazine a department which I intended to call The Scrap Book.
I had special headings and borders drawn for this department, with a view to differentiating it from other parts of the magazine. I had sample pages put in type, and more or less work done on the department. But it did not fit Munsey's Magazine, and Munsey's Magazine gave no scope for such a section. It was atmospherically antagonistic to a magazine which consisted wholly of original matter. This was the beginning of The Scrap Book—the thought nebula.