The Buckeye Book of Direct Advertising
A working manual on direct mail by Carl Richard Greer, "the Buckeye Cover man", published by the Beckett Paper Company of Hamilton, Ohio, printed on its own Buckeye Cover and Text papers and mostly given away.
What it is
A working manual on direct mail by Carl Richard Greer, "the Buckeye Cover man", published by the Beckett Paper Company of Hamilton, Ohio, printed on its own Buckeye Cover and Text papers and mostly given away. It replaces a 1915 Beckett book whose 25,000 copies ran out. It defines advertising as telling people you have something to sell in a way that creates the desire to buy, puts direct advertising at over $400,000,000 a year in the United States, and lists its advantages, led by the personal appeal and the lack of waste. Chapters follow on uses, the mailing list, catalogues, booklets, broadsides and folders, envelope stuffers, house organs, engravings, color, printing processes, typography and layout, paper, and letter writing. An appendix shows how line cuts, halftones and woodcuts are made, with type showings and tables for printers.
Why read it now
The book is its own best lesson: a supplier writes the reference manual its buyers need, prints it on the product it sells, and says openly that it hopes to win goodwill. That is content marketing in 1928, and it still works for any B2B firm whose buyers study before they buy. The mailing list chapter holds up almost word for word: lists decay by 20 to 25 per cent a year, a misspelled name kills the personal touch, and duplicates make a company look careless. B2B data firms today report similar decay, around a quarter of records a year, and give the same advice to clean the list after every bounce. The rule that benefits sell better than product description, and that proof beats assertion, agrees with later copy testing. What has dated: most production chapters (engraving, halftone screens, letterpress), the cost figures, and the belief that a duplicated letter can pass for a personal one. Use: a Saudi supplier can publish a bilingual handbook that buyers keep on the desk, such as a specification or procurement guide, and let it outlast a year of ads.
Passages worth keeping
advertising is the telling to others that we have something to sell, and it is the telling of it in such a way as to create the desire to buy.
الإعلان ليس مجرد إخبار بأن لديك شيئًا للبيع، بل إخبار مصاغ بطريقة تجعل السامع يرغب في الشراء.
It is always well to prove, rather than assert, that your goods will benefit the person who buys and uses them.
لا تكتفِ بالقول إن منتجك مفيد، بل قدّم الدليل على أنه ينفع من يشتريه ويستعمله.
The average mailing list will develop from twenty to twenty-five per cent of error in a single year.
قائمة المراسلة تتقادم بسرعة، فربعها تقريبًا يصبح خاطئًا خلال عام، ولذلك تحتاج إلى تصحيح دائم.
once the recipient discovers that he has received a form letter, his interest sinks toward the vanishing point.
قيمة الرسالة في أنها موجهة إلى شخص بعينه، فإذا اكتشف القارئ أنها رسالة جماعية فقد اهتمامه بها.
Any advertisement that will work for you ten or twenty years is worth some extra cost. This book is, we trust, a permanent advertisement.
الإعلان الذي يبقى نافعًا سنوات طويلة يستحق كلفة أعلى، والشركة ترى في هذا الكتاب إعلانًا دائمًا لها.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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