Special Articles 
83 
in the SjiriTig at the distances required for outdoor cultivation. When 
the sashes are removed after the danger of frost is past, the plants will 
l)c (pdte large and will produce the earliest outdoor Melons. This is 
profitable eonnnercially and jirovides a delicious early j)roduet for the 
lioine table. 
Seed and Nursery Catalogs 
Some Friendly Criticisms and Suggestions 
By Joseph H. Sperry 
I N the first ]>laee I am going to take off my hat and make my best how 
to those seedsmen and nurserymen of this country who annually puh- 
lish catalogs. I have been reading these catalogs for the last 2,5 
years or more, and 1 am increasingly impressed by their steady im- 
provement in scope, in descriptive matter, and in wealth of illustration. 
Nevertheless, perfection is ever a rare attainment, and it has not yet 
been reached, it seems to me, in the making of seedsmen’s and nur- 
serymen’s catalogs, and the writer in a most friendly spirit begs leave 
to make a few criticisms and to add to those a few suggestions as his 
contribution toward the making of complete and perfect catalogs. We 
use the words complete and perfect advisedly, for the incompleteness 
and the imperfection of some of the very best catalogs now issued will 
be the main topics of our friendly remarks. 
We will begin with the catalog covers. This is eminently an age 
of illustrators and illustrations. Many catalog covers lack illustration, 
and are painfully plain and severe in their appearance, other covers 
are illustrated with vegetables or flowers, or with garden and lawn 
scenes, or with business-buildings, but most of these lack human life. 
Every flower or vegetable garden implies that there is a gardener and 
a family who love the flowers, and relish the vegetables. Every garden, 
or lawn, or business-building illustration on a seed or nursery catalog 
should, therefore, have in it human life, as indeed some of them, we are 
pleased to say, now have. Have some human life in the illustration in 
some posture any way, even if it is nothing more than a gardener 
coming out of the garden carrying a dead hen by the legs, or a boy 
sneaking out of the back garden gate with a fish pole and a box of 
angle-worms. I think that we would all understand at once what the 
hen had been doing in the garden previous to her demise, and at what 
value relatively the boy held the joy of pulling weeds and of fishing. 
This leads us to say that a little touch of humor in the illustration 
of catalog covers woidd do no harm, but, if the seedsman or nursery- 
man fears that the shock of such an illustration would be too great for 
his customers, he could try its effect on the back cover first, and if he 
heard of no serious results from it, he could venture a little humor on 
the front cover in the next season’s catalog. For example, a picture of 
a man and a boy bringing out of the field a big Mangel Wurzel, with 
a look on their faces showing they had about all they could carry, and 
with a caption underneath: Uaised from ’s Seeds, would 
probably need no explanation, and would not hurt greatly the non- 
humofous people. Other cover illustrations, whose humor should be 
