Tenth Annual Meeting 47 



"On the other hand, its columns are open for your reports 

 on prospects and conditions. If your orchards or your fields 

 look promising, your receiver must enlarge his avenues of dis- 

 tribution lest local gluts destroy your market. The trade 

 paper should be an information bureau, where facts by wire, 

 mail messenger and personal contact concentrate, and after 

 being summed up and an average taken, are given to you 

 again for guidance in your business transactions. 



" 'How shall we ship our goods?' 'What shall be the 

 style of the package ?' ' How shall we grade our products ?' 

 ' By what route will they reach the market in the best con- 

 dition ?' ' When shall we begin to ship ?' ' How long can 

 we keep the season open ?' ' What new markets can we 

 count on for distribution ?" These and a thousand other 

 questions rise, and if you read your trade paper religiously, 

 however much it bores you, at times, you will find that some- 

 how, somewhere, by somebody, the questions get answered. 



"Then, too, you keep in closer touch with the sellers of 

 your products, for we all have something to sell, whether it 

 be brains, potatoes, muscle or ingenuity; they are all mer- 

 chantable commodities. Through your trade paper and its 

 comments and items and illustrations of men and things, you 

 are, as it were, within arm's length of those with whom you 

 are dealing. 



"You do not ship cauliflowers to the man who died last 

 week if you are getting your weekly budget of news by the 

 earliest mail, nor do you write to the man who eloped with 

 the mayor's daughter for quotations on Seek-no-furthers or 

 smooth -skinned pears. 



"But among the most important of the attributes of the 

 trade paper is the fact that the trade paper needs you. When 

 we say to the broker and jobber and commission man: ' Please 

 advertise with us,' he promptly says, 'Why?' and we must 

 answer: 'Because we go directly to the people you want to 

 reach,' and in order to go to those people we must seek out 

 this grower and get the matter that another grower wishes to 

 know. It is simply a case of scratch-my-back-and-I-will 

 scratch -yours, and the trade paper does the scratching. 



"We sometimes send the paper to a man for a few months 



