THE NEW YORKER One of the first things you do in starting a magazine, after you have got the notion to do it and, as our advertising friends say, sold your associates on the idea, is to rent an office and the next thing you do is get a telephone. You don’t actually get a telephone next, but you put in an application for one. You do this on the sagacious suggestion of the agent of the building who explains that it is the busy season with the telephone company and that you should hurry because it usually takes thirty days to get a telephone and, while he will use his drag with the telephone company and cut this down to two weeks, you will probably need one by that time anyhow. This two week’s delay looms as a tremendous obstacle and you hasten breathlessly to the telephone company’s office where you become part of a throng surrounding a counter for about an hour. At the end of that time you tell your story to a man at the counter who dodges to a desk telephone for conversational purposes every forty seconds, obviously to demonstrate what a really great help this invention is to a busy man. This gentleman ultimately helps you fill out an Application for Service which you recognize as the old income tax blanks the Government used in 1919. He asks you if you want a regulation switchboard with plugs and things or a Jumbo Jr., which a child can operate and which accommodates three incoming trunk lines and fourteen extensions. You decide on Jumbo Jr., because of its marvelous simplicity and because it comes in two finishes, oak and mahogany. You order an oak Jumbo. Some days later you decide on mahogany finish furniture and some days after this you think of the incongruity of Jumbo. By this time, however, you realize that such things are just a detail anyhow and that you are not, after all, a detail person. The day after the carpenters begin to put up the partitions Jumbo Jr. starts to ring. He varies this by buzzing. By now you are meeting a lot of new people, including representatives of the wholesale paper industry, the rubber stamp industry—“you will need some eventually; keep us in mind”—the printing industry, the lady who wants to buy a ticket on the New Yorker to St. Louis and the fellow you think is Ring Lardner, author of one of the swellest books ever written, who, you think, is going to write you a swell piece, but who turns out to be a gentleman with a collar named Marsden who wants to sell you life insurance. At this point your secretary departs to marry the Assistant Something of the uptown branch of the Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co. (As unexpected to him, you suspect, as it is to THE NEW YORKER.) And there you are with Jumbo. After two days with Jumbo you decide that if you really amount to anything such a little matter as this can’t get the best of you and you go to the telephone company and ask for a set of printed instructions (which, of course, they must have) on how to operate him. These instructions seem unintelligible at the time and get more so later. Eventually, you realize that they pertain to Model 382J Jumbo, apparently a deceased cousin of the incumbent, and you throw them out of the window. Two days later you have discovered how to work everything but the middle row of keys and two days after this you realize they have no use anyhow and draw the obvious conclusion that they are the keys used by Presidents of the United States to press to open things, such as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. After Jumbo is tamed everything is simple and you go forward without misgiving, confident that such achievement cannot but bring success. Ultimately the carpenters quit walking over your desk, the glaziers get through, the puttiers finish, the lowing herds wind slowly o’er the lea and things are peaceful enough to get out a magazine. This does not leave you unshaken, of course, and at this point your doctor advises a couple of weeks’ rest.