JOTS AND TITLES

William Johnston, whose new mystery novel. "The Waddington Cipher." (Doubleday, Page & Co.), is the first story that has ever been serialized over the radio, holds a unique newspaper position as suggestion editor or official idea man to the New York World. His work is to anticipate public interest--to guess what will interest newspaper readers, not only today, but tomorrow and next week. This position with no detail duties and freedom to scout all over the world for suggestions that will add interest to any department of the paper, has shaped itself out of the variety of new ideas that Mr. Johnston has contributed to the World since he became a member of its editorial staff. The most essential element in making a successful newspaper, he believes, in "human interest," or satisfying that natural curiosity that everyone has about the other fellow.

"We're all egoists," be says. "Whether we admit it or not, every one of us consciously or unconsciously pictures the universe as revolving about us. Our interest in anything is measured by its relation to ME. You go to a play. Unconsciously you visualize yourself as the hero. If he does something that you wouldn't do, he irritates you, and you dislike the play. So the news article that interests you most is the 'human interest' one, that records some happening that might have happened to you. People like to read about the things they know about. An article about a eucalyptus tree wouldn't interest most people as much as one about a cherry tree."

Mr. Addison Woolsey Bronson, the book collector, has been permitted to make a copy of a unique poem which Rudyard Kipling wrote some years ago for Mr. F. D. Underwood, the president of the Erie Railroad. When Mr. Underwood was general manager of the Soo line, he named two stations, Rudyard and Kipling, after Rudyard Kipling whose works he greatly admired, and wrote the author about his Michigan namesakes. Kipling replied by sending him a cabinet photograph with these lines inscribed upon the back:

Wise is the child who know his sire".

The ancient proverb ran

But wiser far the man who knows

How, where and when his offspring grows

For who the mischief would suppose

I've sons in Michigan?

Yet am I saved from midnight ills

That warp the soul of man

They do not make me walk the floor

Nor hammer at the doctor's door

They deal in wheat and iron-ore

My sons in Michigan.

Oh! Tourist in the Pullman car

(By Cook's or Raymond's plan)

Forgive a parent's partial view

But may be you have children, too

So let me introduce to you

My sons in Michigan.

In Dr. Arthur I. Kendall's "Civilization and the Microbe," the much abused microbe will find a worthy sponsor and genuine admirer. Some of the facts which the Dean of Northwestern University of Medicine points out in the fascinating realm of bacteriology are "that without microbes life could not exist on this earth, that one microbe can theoretically increase within twenty-four hours to 78,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, that it takes fifteen millions of millions average microbes to weigh an ounce.