A LITTLE TALK ON PICTURES 
N our constructive work—endeavoring to make catalogues that really 
sell things—we constantly strike • a curious economy. 
The customer with a large stock of California Privet or Yellow 
Transparent Apple wants to sell that stock, and if he does he is 
probably several hundred dollars to the net good. 
When we suggest that a good illustration, specially made for the purpose, 
will sell the stock, he is liable to rise several miles in the air, at the expense of 
$10 or $15 proposed, and content himself with an ordinary stock illustration 
not different from any other and used by a dozen other tradesmen. 
Now the man who sells plumbers’ stuff knows better, and when he has a 
new wash-basin to put on the market he prints the prettiest picture of that 
wash-basin he can get, no matter how expensive it may be, and he sells the 
basin a great many times over. 
These reflections are forced out of us by a letter from a new customer in 
California, who says: “I am in the midst of a very busy season, with all of 
the orders that my force can handle, and in excess of the supplies that I had 
arranged for. This should be a very good answer to your inquiry about how I 
like my catalogue. It is bringing business, and also a great many unexpected 
words of praise from unknown customers.” 
But this good man has discovered the truth for himself, when he says 
further: “One thing that is being driven into my mind very firmly is the fact 
that the picture sells the goods. Order after order picks out the articles which 
are most attractively illustrated, passing by others as good or better. The 
Keizerkroon tulip on the first page illustrates this forcibly, for I am far over¬ 
sold on it. Tulip Gesneriana is as good an instance.” 
Now when nurserymen, florists and seedsmen get to be as good business 
men as the chaps who sell stockings, or hats, or mattresses, or toilet powders, 
or soap, we shall not have so much trouble to convince them of the value of 
the picture in advertising. Not merely a picture , that may look as little like 
the thing illustrated as a tomato-can lithograph does like the fruit it is sup¬ 
posed to help sell. But the picture —reproducing with photographic fidelity 
and engravers’ skill the exact form and appearance of the article advertised. 
<$ 
Meanwhile, we will keep on pounding—mighty glad of the in¬ 
creasing number of customers who have come to see the point. 
the McFarland organizations 
THE J. HORACE McFARLAND COMPANY 
THE McFARLAND PUBLICITY SERVICE 
Constructors of Catalogues 
Builders of Business 
Mount Pleasant Press 
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 
