Life — June 10, 1915 — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“LIFE: E BOOK-WORM If They Told the Truth BAD bargain. We call your attention to a set of volumes we have just issued at inconsiderable ex- pense, printed from a job lot of battered-down old plates which we bought for a song from a brother publisher who had no further use for them. Twenty volumes of inaccurate history for about twice what it is worth. Send a dollar and we will send you the entire set. You can look them over, but if you don't like them, don’t send them back, as the long correspondence and annoyance to which we will subsequently subject you will be more trouble than they are‘worth. You can then fill in a contract which, worded by us, gives you not a loophole of escape, and then by forwarding us one dollar a month for the next three years, you will eventually (if you live) be the proud possessor of a long shelf of worthless books which nobody will ever read. The Book Cataract Hew. the new novels continue to pour! Month after month how the big presses roar, Grumbling and rumbling and mumbling while tumbling, Books in a torrent like that at Lodore! My, but they’re numerous— Books that are humorous, Books that are glittering, Books that are frittering, Books that are blundering, Thundering or sundering, Gladdening or saddening or maddening, Or mushy or gushy, Or shocking or knocking, Or sparkling or darkling, Or girlish or churlish, Or bubbling or troubling, Or dashing or clashing, Or teary or cheery, Exciting or biting, Romantic or frantic, Reforming, or storming, or warming, Amusing, abusing, accusing, confusing ; And so, never ending, they keep on descending As if reading fiction our lives we're all spending. They stream evermore from the publisher's door, And that’s how the novels continue to pour! Walter G. Doty. Hail and Farewell CCORDING to a report recently published in the papers, the celebrated Metchnikoff, or buttermilk, theory, is now being discredited by the medical profession. Doctors are beginning to admit that there is nothing in it. Lactic acid bacilli have been robbed of their charms. Their badges have been taken away from them. Shorn of their temporary power, they are rapidly going back into the ranks of private citizenship, and now their duty consists in sitting around the country store, telling of the good old days when their business was to prolong life, when every hospital opened its doors to them, and the press contained columns a day about their most trivial acts. It must be said, however, to the imperishable glory of the buttermilk theory, that of all the fads which have come over the horizon it held the stage longest, and if the facts were known, probably could count more victims than any other. Since the panic of 1907—if not before— it has been on deck. + Roller skating did not equal this. The bicycle certainly did not exceed it, Ping pong vanished almost as soon as it came. The twilight sleep at the end of the first year is even now becoming groggy. But many years from now, so complete was the reign of the lactic acid bacilli, and in spite of the infidelity of the medical profession, there will still be thousands of people drinking buttermilk in the proud and happy con- sciousness that their feeble little lives are thereby being lengthened. comicbooks.com