I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to
conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched.
You must remember that his were the days before the Time took to
enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated
Encyclopedia. That alluring, button-holing, let-me
-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of
newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of
some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. "Many
people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well," was one of
his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR
MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was
warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertised
nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. The
thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was
usually a quarter column in the evening papers: "HILARITY--Tono-Bungay.
Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions: "Are
you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you
bored with your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both
these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south central,
and west; and then, too, we had our first poster--the HEALTH, BEAUTY,
AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me
the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here with one or
two others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality that
initiated these familiar ornaments of London.

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known "Fog" poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)