FACE VALUE

In spite of its caustic critics the advertising industry continues to poison its own wells. The latest example of the inept bogus is a telegram from the Realsilk Hosiery Company to Mr. Sinclair Lewis, published in facsimile in the New Republic. The advertiser offered Mr. Lewis four hundred and fifty dollars and the honor of being included in a series of "dignified advertisements" indorsing silk socks, to which Messers Floyd Gibbous, James Montgomery Flagg, and George Ade had lent their names and faces. The novelist's only duty was to give his photograph and approve the copy; one suspects that the Realsilk Hosiery Company has never seen Mr. Lewis.

All the criticism, sober and ribald, to which the venal trade of publicizing has been subjected seems to have been blunted on the dullness of its target. Or possibly the public has become so habituated to the nonsensical claims by manufacturers who keep safety-pins and piston rods fresh in cellophane, that claptrap and falsehood in advertising neither arouses suspicion as to the purity and worth of the product, nor awakens resentment in the minds of the duped. If this is so no hopes can be held for any immediate change. But if the flood of periodicals mocking the accepted lies of the cigarette vendors are truly interpreted, an interval of relative honesty in advertising may be in the offing. In either case, gentlemanly perjury of the sort to which this company invited Mr. Lewis to sell his name cannot fail to draw the contempt and distrust of the sagacious reader upon the advertiser.