Life, 1912-12-05 · page 8 of 116
Life — December 5, 1912 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top half features an advertisement for "Club Cocktails Bottled Delight," showing a woman in 1920s attire holding a cocktail glass. This promotes pre-mixed cocktails available through dealers, listing varieties like Martini, Manhattan, and Tom Gin. The bottom half contains "Letters to the Literati"—a satirical reader section addressing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The unsigned letter (signed "Arthur Guiterman") playfully teases Doyle about his prolific output, questioning how he manages such successful literary production while seemingly dabbling in various enterprises. It references his Sherlock Holmes stories and jokes about Doyle's financial success, all in mock-reverent, humorous verse. This is typical Life magazine content: combining advertisements with satirical literary commentary on contemporary figures.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Letters to the Literati To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Gentle Sir Conan, I'll venture that few have been Half as prodigiously lucky as you have been. Fortune, the flirt! has been wondrously kind to you, Ever beneficent, sweet and refined to you. Doomed though you seemed—one might swear without perjury— Doomed to the practise of physic and surgery, Yet, growing weary of pills and physicianing, Off to the Arctic you packed, expeditioning. Roving and dreaming, Ambition, that heady sin, Gave you a spirit too restless for medicine; That, I presume, as Romance is the quest of us, Made you an Author—the same as the rest of us. Ah, but the rest of us clamor distressfully, “How do you manage the game so successfully? Tell us, disclose to us how under Heaven you Squeeze from the inkpot so splendid a revenue!" Then, when you'd published your volume that vindicates England's South African raid (or the Syndicate’s), Pleadin~ that Britain’s extreme bellicosity Wasn't (as most of us think) an atrocity— Straightway they gave you a cross with a chain to it— (Oh, what an konor! I could not attain to it, Not if I lived to the age of Methusalem!)— Made you a Knight of St. John of Jerusalem! Faith! as a teller of tales you've the trick with you! Still there's a bone I've been longing to pick with you: Holmes is your hero of drama and serial; All of us know where you dug the material Whence he was moulded—'tis almost a platitude; Yet your detective, in shameless ingratitude— Sherlock your sleuthhound with motives ulterior Sneers at Poe's “Dupin” as “very inferior!” Labels Gaboriau's clever “ Lecoq,” indeed, Merely “a bungler,” a creature to mock, indeed! This, when your plots and your methods in story More than a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau, Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing. Borrow, Sir Knight, but be decent in borrowing! Still let us own that your bent is a cheery one, Little you've written to bore or to weary one, Plenty that’s slovenly, nothing with harm in it, Much with abundance of vigor and charm in it. Give me detectives with brains analytical Rather than weaklings with morals mephitical— Stories of battles and man's intrepidity Rather than wails of neurotic morbidity! Give me adventures and fierce dinotheriums Rather than Hewlett’s ecstatic deliriums! Frankly, Sir Conan, some hours I've cased with you And, on the whole, I am pretty well pleased with you. —Arthur Guiterman, comicboohi a