First Requisite

Walter J. Weir, 39, is a handsome six-footer who flopped as a vaudevillian, switched to advertising and built up a $1,500,000 business. At a Publishers' Ad-club dinner in Manhattan, he rose to register a protest about the ads "connected with the business of embalming authors' brains between stiff covers." To Weir, the ads for what another adman called "breast sellers" look no different from "bra advertising ... It is difficult, at times, to tell . . . whether a book is about land-development or bust-development, about seafaring or suckling ... In my opinion, book advertising trades too much upon the sensational--when it has too little of the sensational to offer. If books were food or drug products--and some of them are all too often in the latter category--book publishers would be the principal recipients of FTC cease and desist orders ... The first requisite ... is a good product . . . One of the first things the publishers ought to do is to pick better books."

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