April 1935
The Editor’s Quill
We wish to make our editorial bow to the Bookselling and Stationery Trades in an entirely unobtrusive fashion. We are blowing no trumpets about ourselves, because we believe trumpet-blowing to be as futile as it is annoying. This magazine is published in an endeavor to accomplish certain specific purposes. If it succeeds in doing so no trumpets will be required; if it fails, the combined efforts of the massed bands of an army will make no difference.
We hope our readers will forgive us if we omit the pretty speeches usually attendant on the birth of a new publication, and get straight down to business. QUILL & QUIRE is intended to be a modern merchandising magazine, to assist the retail merchant in the front line trenches in the eternal business of Buying and Selling. Good merchandising, as we see it, can be summed up in a sentence. It consists merely of selling the maximum quantity of quality goods at a minimum of cost. The purpose of this magazine, too, can be summed up in a sentence. It is here to assist in every way possible in the cause of Good Merchandising. Its object is to help the retailer in selling well as in buying. We do not believe in telling the retailer by means of editorial matter and advertising pages what he will do well to buy unless we can also make some suggestions as to how he may sell what he has bought! That is we call QUILL & QUIRE a merchandising magazine, and not a Trade Journal.
The magazine will thus be found to be a highly sectionalized unit. The advertising pages and the In The Market section, the extensive list of Spring Books and the Review section, these are all Guides to Good Buying. Advertisers, by the way, do not spend good money to send out a certain message to the Trade unless they have faith in what that message is about. The Advertising Pages are not only a source of information, they are a confession of faith!
The Display Section, the Educational Articles, The Book Reviews and the Bookman’s Newsreel, these are all aids to Good Selling. We wish to say nothing about them here, preferring to let the editors of Books and Stationery Sections deal with their own business in their own way.
A final word. We hope that you will like QUILL & QUIRE. We know it contains a good deal of valuable material, but we hope that it will amuse you too. We have tried to impart to it qualities that are usually conspicuously absent in journals of this kind, good-fellowship and a sense of humour. The measure of our success will be the measure of your interest. We will welcome comment and correspondence very heartily.
The Editors.
Contact us via email