My tenure at Collier’s gave me a new experience. There I always worked under conditions inviting and stimulating imagination, and there I probably unknowingly shattered many a precious editorial precedent.
Collier’s had one of the early color presses akin to those used on newspapers. We decided to use this to print illustrations for a monthly “Household Number” carrying extra stories. The editorial back-list showed no fiction suitable for color; the awarding of one thousand dollars a month for the best story, judgment based upon literary merit, had resulted in the purchase of nothing but literary fog. Mr. Collier told Charles Belmont Davis, fiction editor, to order what was necessary. Charley asked me who could write the type of story needed. I said, “Gouverneur Morris.” Mr. Morris, then in California, sent a list of titles accompanied by the request: “Ask Will Bradley to take his pick.” We chose The Wife’s Coffin, a pirate tale. During an editorial dinner at his home Robert Collier read a letter from his father, then out of the city, in which P. F. (his father) wrote: “If you continue printing issues like this last our subscription-book salesmen report the weekly will sell itself.” Robert said: “Mr. Bradley can make this kind of a number because he knows the people from whom the salesmen obtain subscriptions. I don’t, and any similar undertaking by me would be false and a failure.”
During this period of art editorship, and following the lay-out of a booklet, Seven Steps and a Landing, for Condé Nast, advertising manager of Collier’s, a color-spread for Cluett-Peabody, lay-outs for the subscription-book department, and pieces of printing for Mr. Collier’s social activities (also a request from Medill McCormick that I go to Chicago and supply a new typographic make-up for the Tribune; a suggestion from Mr. Chichester, president of the Century Company, that if I were ever free he would like to talk with me about taking the art editorship of Century; and from Mr. Schweindler, printer of Cosmopolitan and other magazines, an expression of the hope that I could be obtained for laying-out a new publication), Robert Collier proposed the building of a pent-house studio on the roof near his father’s office where, relieved of much detail, I could give additional thought to all branches of the business. This promised too little excitement, and instead I rented a studio-office on the forty-fifth floor of the then nearly-finished Metropolitan Tower. At this time Condé Nast had just purchased Vogue, then a small publication showing few changes from when I had contributed to it in the early Nineties.
In this new environment I handled the art editorship and make-up of Metropolitan, Century, Success, Pearson’s and the new National Weekly, which was given a format like that of present-day weeklies and a make-up that included rules. Caslon was used for all headings except for Pearson’s which, using a specially-drawn character, were lettered by hand.
Among some discarded Metropolitan covers I found one by Stanislaus—the head of a girl wearing a white-and-red-striped toboggan cap against a pea-green background. By substituting the toboggan-cap red for the pea-green background, with the artist’s approval, we obtained a poster effect that dominated the newsstands and achieved an immediate sellout.
ENTER MR. HEARST
