Adventure Magazine Cover — page 196: what you’re looking at

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

190 fiction in relation to life, of fiction as a shap- er of morals and ideals, an American today should have the brains and courage to face some extremely serious problems in the selection of what should be read. He can not afford to be led blindly by jaded critics and their sheep followers. Sewers and brothels, photographic attempts at realism, glittering surface cleverness camouflaging nothingness, anemic or morbid psychology, exaggerated trivialities, all these are held up to him as the apparent mark and test of “class.” If he thinks for himself he will not find them so. On the contrary he will rec- ognize them as of no literary importance in themselves and as factors of decay or de- generation in our social fabric. He will know that his choice is between the clean and the unwholesome, the sincere and the artificial, the normal and the morbid, the vital and the anemic, the solid and the glit- tering shell. And his choice made on this basis will be a safer guide to real literary quality than he may have suspected. E’RE going to get rid of a bad habit. Like most other magazines ours dates each issue a month ahead. In any given month you find on the news stands issues bearing the name of the next month ahead. For example, this issue is labeled December 8, but it went on sale November 8. “his confusing custom began a good many years ago. If one magazine ap- peared on sale June 28, another June 25 and others June 23, 21 and 20, the first one wasn’t going on sale until all the others had put forth their new issues and the public had already pretty well stocked itself with magazines for the time being. The ob- vious remedy was to change its date of ap- pearance from the 28th tothe 1gth, thus getting first chance at the monthly market. Very good, but the others could try the same game and presently, instead of appearing on the 23rd, 21st and so on, they began ap- pearing on the 18th, 17th and so on. Grad- ually they worked back to the very first days of the month. And then, since there wasn’t any earlier June day for the June issue to appear than June 1, the next step was to have the June issue appear May 31 or 30. By this time the June issues have worked pretty well back toward the first part of May. Adventure It’s confusing and rather ridiculous and Adventure is going to break away from this bad custom. There have already been some pioneers in this sane movement and soon the date on our own magazine is going to be the date on which it actually appears. We know, without asking, that our readers will endorse the change back to normal. The old ownership could not be persuaded to take this step but the new ownership are going to join the pioneers in getting things back to a simple and sensible basis. E DO so much drifting along. Things are handed down to us by our ancestors—they are here before we are, we grow up with them as fixed parts of the world that surrounds us and are likely to go through life considering them as accepted things needing no par- ticular examination. So with our schools. It is an age-old habit to brag about them, erect improved buildings, make changes in curriculum, texts and teaching methods. It is also an age-old habit to consider the low pay of teachers merely one of the things that are. No good business man would dream of making such a tremendous investment in buildings and equipment and then offer such low wages for the operation of his plant that people with brains enough to handle the job would have too much brains to take it when on every side were better paying openings. Yet that’s what we do in our schools. If you have any doubts, ask the Bureau of Education in Washington for what data they have on the average salary of teachers clear up through college. Compare that average salary with the wages of skilled and unskilled labor including school janitors, and blush. Some are born to teach and will not be stopped even by low pay, but for the most part that low pay entices only those too incompetent to meet competition in better paid fields. Good or bad, either they escape from it through marriage or better oppor- tunity or else they remain and are shriveled into ever decreasing efficiency by a narrow- ing life that can afford little or none of the enrichment and broadening needed to equip them for their profession. Those are the brutal facts. Digest them. To make matters worse there is a COmiclboooks.c©