Let it not be assumed that the prose stylings that grace this space are the work of one man, writing alone and unassisted. Whilst our proprietor and editor-in-chief has many talents, manifold views, and multifarious morals, he has but a slim grasp of the vernacular, which impels him to rely on his sub-editors for the production of simple copy. I hope that the readership of the Glob will forgive me for taking advantage of his recent spell of incarceration (for incarnadine carnality, no less) to address you directly, thus:
Friends! Noble and loyal readers of the stelliferous Evening * Glob! I bear greetings to your worthy selves from the legion of sub-editors now immured within that commercial Moloch, the Consolidated Glob Corporation, Inc. Hear our plea; for we are the pencil-necked and ink-stained wretches who laboriously wrest the literary gems that bedeck these pages from the unyielding rock of our insensate Chief’s opinions.
We are the drab wielders of the pen, cowed beneath the whips and stings of our employer’s peculiar manual of style. Our weapon, mightier than the sword it may be, is rust-spotted and out of temper. We are too weak to hold our ranks against our Chief’s venality. We write what we are told to write, how we are allowed to write it. A mention in The Glob commands a huge sum from operatives of every party and concern, and our Chief is extremely judicious in his choice of patrons. He lives in palatial apartments above the City Room, while we labor below in fear of forfeiting our day’s wages by a misplaced comma.
Beaten down by duns and deadlines, we scratch and scribble and burn out our eyes to afford a one-room apartment for our families. (Just the one.) Half of the time our real wages are discounted with a handful of scrip for the ConGlob company store, so that our children will not lack for remaindered copies of The Glob’s Guide to Glibness: How to Talk Your Way to the Top and Glob Gone Wild: 211 21-Year-Old 21st Century Starlets, in Color!
I could horrify you with the privations visited upon our families. When our weekly ration of wheat runs low, my wife concocts a filling stew from excelsior, fortified wine, and coal. The most popular schoolyard game among our children is rickets. But these sufferings are nothing compared to the obscene conditions within The Glob itself. I speak, of course, of murder. Infanticide! Oh, my baby stories, my sweet paragraphs that died in draft!
How many times has a darling idea of mine been strangled in the press bed? How many times has that tyrant driven a spike through a gentle essay, an unassuming poem, a whimsical anecdote? Our best work is thrown to the flames of The Glob’s infernal presses. Just last week, the Chief used a sheaf of my manuscript annotations to Pound’s Cantos to light his grill for Fajita Night. These pages, the labor of months, were to have formed the basis for a new fortnightly feature, “Pound by the Ounce”. Our editor proclaimed the fajitas the best he’s made in years.
Dearest readers, do not allow this brute to consume more of our children. Help us, and yourselves, by adopting the manuscripts that would otherwise surely perish. You can redeem these innocent captives at the very reasonable rate of ten dollars per page, sending cash to the Glob Progeny Rescue Fund, in care of this column. Be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope of the largest size for the remission of the lucky articles. All pages are guaranteed to contain writings that would never be deemed fit to print in The * Glob, so that you will be sure of the supreme charity of your gift.