The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 7

THE GUARDIAN Wednesday November 6 1968 7 ffeb Qurlcy Brown KJW ff'! I Dennis Johnson I Tit iron butterfly Helen Gurley Bvown talks to Catherine Stett KNOWLEDGE by instalment is once again a highly profitable business. Multi-purpose, all encompassing knowledge, as in "Mind "Mongol children, nourished by fermented mares' milk called koumiss, quickly learned to ride and like their parents became more at home on horseback than on foot." Recondite, maybe, but undoubtedly a contribution to the whole man. One of the most interesting points about the present flood of multi-part, general knowledge encyclopedias is that it has occurred at a time of increasing specialisation. Man and his environment is the general theme, and the postwar advances in science have so enlarged the spectrum that the publishers can claim a certain novelty for their brainchildren. The basic idea is at least as old as living memory.

The late Sir Philip Gibbs expressed, ingenuously it now seems, the philosophy of his age when, as a young provincial journalist before the First World War, he wrote a series of articles for the Weekly Scotsman called Knowledge is Power." He drew, as he put it, on the wisdom of the ages," and the articles were eventually published as a book. Years later he used to recall how even the most venerable, white-haired dons said they found his work useful and rewarding. Much the same sort of thing, though on a grander scale, happened to the late Sir John Hammerton, who was described by the World Review at the beginning of the Second World War as "King of the Fortnightly Part and Emperor of All The Encyclopedias." Profiting by the memories of his Amalgamated Press bosses who had brought out a sixpence-weekly record-of the Boer War called' "With the Flag to Pretoria," he launched in 1914 a twopenny weekly called "The War Illustrated," "a picture record of events by land, sea, and air." In four years it sold a total of 75,124,500 copies, and was eventually followed by Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia, the most successful ever published in its class." Research Organisation, and Mr Alan Bullock, historian and Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Pictorial Knowledge" has signed- up such dignitaries as Professor Asa Briggs and Sir John Rothenstein. Since they emanate from the same publisher, "History of the 20th Century" and "History of the Second World War" pool their reservoir of talent Sir Basil Liddell Hart is military consultant to the first and editor-in-chief of the second.

To serve the twin ends of mass appeal and disinterested education, front covers have to be a bit ambivalent. The cover of Part 37 of Mind Alive displays a magnificent ape, aggressive and The explanatory note on page two says feyly Anthropoid apes are often looked on as Man's immediate evolutionary Whether or not this is true, there certainly some striking similarities between us and our hairy but intelligent monkey cousins." The biological article which the covers advertise is, however, unequivocal education. Content gulf Pictorial Knowledge describes itself as "a family adventure in discovery and learning and aims at a juvenile audience with; for example, articles on fire fighting, how mountains are made, the legend of the Midwest aircraft and air hostesses What's it like, being an air hostess Between this and the histories of the Second World War and the twentieth century there is a wide difference in style and presentation, the one reflecting wonderment and implicit pride in the past, the other two embodying the ethos of the Sunday supplements and depth journalism. If there is a gulf of content between one instant package and another, there is also an increasingly comprehensive plumhing of "all knowledge, an attack equally on the pocket of browser and specialist, intellectual and artisan, recapitulating don -and -self-improving housewife, child mind- and oracle. Volume 1, Course 1 of the "Cordon Bleu Cookery Course" "Are you baffled by Jacob's Ladder or bored with gravy, uninspired by cabbage.

Haute cuisine comes' through the door with the." Mrror." The Encyclopedia of Gardening attractive green and gold binders convert your. 84 weekly parts into a permanent work of pursues the bewitching patter Apparently placid on the outside, a plant is a bustle of activity inside." Television programmes like University Challenge," with millions of followers, sharpen the new guilt that goes with ignorance. Knowledge is power not only in the abstract but' in the competitive' sitting-room, where the multi-part educator is grandad's secret weapon. No one can accuse publishers of neglecting the market everything, more loved perhaps. 1 wasn't ambitious when young, only frightened.

I just got very' scared during the Depression. Fear led me to do the best I could at everything. At school I was competitive in a very quiet, deadly way. I had to work the minute 1 got out of high school and all I could do was shorthand-typing. I didn't think I should have been doing something better, only if I get fired we'll all go down the I was a secretary for 15 years but always getting better until at 33 1 was a whizz-bang executive secretary who got a whack at writing advertising copy." (She wrote sexy, girlish copy for seven years and was the highest-paid woman in advertising in California.

But the last agency she was with stopped giving her assignments, having stolen her from another for a vast sum, so she asked her husband, David Brown, who is vice-president of Twentieth Century-Fox, what she could write a book about.) He said I should write for the single girl. He said When I first met you, you were a kind of a swinger but you were also a solid citizen. You were very respectable with lots of friends and dates and So I wrote it and it sold millions." TIHERE are girls who read Cosmo-politan and enjoy it as voyeurs. They don't want to be that driven, to have that many affairs they don't want more than one man or one dress at a time. They don't care about jewellery and they don't want a sable coat or Paris for the weekend.

They don't want to work as hard as I do. But my girl wants it She is on the make. Her nose is pressed to the glass and she does get my message. These girls are like my children all over the country. Oh, I have so much advice for them and it's fun." Helen Gurley Brown was talking about the readers of the magazine she edits with a stamp as personal as and not dissimilar from Hugh Hefner's on Playboy." It was Helen Gurley Brown who wrote the Ehenomenally successful Sex and the ingle Girl," sold the title for $200,000 to a film "company, and then began broadcasting its message for all it was worth through the columns of a moribund 79-year-old magazine which Hearst Publications asked her to edit three years ago.

A success When she began it waB selling 650,000 copies. Now they are hitting the million mark and advertising has quadrupled an unparalleled success with Madison Avenue. And all because this small, frail-looking woman they call the "iron butterfly" has an uncanny eye for what women want, knows how to give It to them, edits every word herself, and spends ten hours' a day and several hours a night working on it. In a deceptively gentle voice she will explain to the listener that her success was motivated by fear not ambition. That she had a sad little childhood and a terrible growing-up.

Although her simple little dress probably cost $100 a stitch and her jewellery may well come from Tiffany's, she looks as if afraid that it may all be taken away that she will be planted back in the Ozarks, a fatherless 11-year-old girl with acute acne giving dancing lessons to the other kids at 25 cents an hour to help make ends meet. Her philosophy is one of self-betterment, extremely subjective, virtually autobiographical. She thinks of herself very much as a girl who had very little going for her. As far back as I can remember I thought I was physically barely adequate in the 1940s bosoms were the big things legs didn't matter. If you were small-breasted it was bad luck.

Then I didn't have money going for me nor an outrageously wonderful personality and I didn't go to college. I was a terribly average girl who inherited enough of a brain to do a few things. Being stupid is the worst thing that can happen to a girl, much worse than being ugly." Talking to Helen Gurley Brown in her Manhattan office is very much like reading her magazine she" explains her life in terms of what other people could achieve in the same way. I always say that anyone can do what I've done not that it's all that much but you can have a great career, make money, and have some fabulous men in your life and you don't have to be sensational to start with because I certainly wasn't." She was the classic American dream girl who capitalised on what she had and finds it fun to watch others doing so. It always charms her to see a girl who doesn't look like very much "coming on very sexy and maybe a little bitchy but very attractive to men.

My way would be to come on dynamic on the inside. To have something that gleams and burns inside you." What makes Helen burn I think you get it because you feel deprived. You want to be more pretty, more of worry and feel guilty if you are having an affair because so is everyone else. A sisterly book by a girl who was doing it herself who seemed to understand how it was for others. Like a nice letter from More than this, 'Sex and the Single Girl' actually conferred a new respectability on spinsterhood, making it appear glamorous." She believes every girl has one thing she can do really well and must find it if she wants to succeed," and I have made this one exquisite little talent for writing sincerely in short sharp sentences into quite a thing." She doesn't necessarily approve of women waiting as long as she did to marry (she was 37).

"I would think anyone who doesn't marry until 37 is quite neurotic. My neurotic drive towards work and success is perhaps a healthy one. The other neurosis was a bad one in that the men who wanted to marry me I didn't want to marry "and- vice versa. I talk a great deal about success and you'll notice the word love has hardly entered this conversation. One is always criticised for that.

Well, I adore my husband and I was in love with him when we married and there's not much point in going on about I don't say I wanted to marry a successful man just I never would have married anyone who wasn't successful, end that's not the nicest thing you ever heard either, is it But if I'm going to work like a bunny rabbit I don't want a passive man, but my kind. "Suddenly, when I was 40, I fell Into a glamorous life. And I had earned it. And I've had some 'influence on other women. I work much too hard.

But tomorrow we're going to Paris for a movie premiere and, weh, I like our life. I sound like a little girl from the Ozarks but I'm glad at 46 that tnings seem like fun and games to me. My forties have been my best years and I keep pounding the message home to my readers." The modern purveyors of instant knowledge can draw not only on' the riveting material of the intervening decades but also on the advances in publishing techniques accurate colour printing, better photography, graphic design. Prices, of course, are higher, and a collector would spend about 30s picking up all the current issues. "Mind Alive," which will run to 120 weekly parts, advertises the common aim Every week your knowledge increases and learning becomes a pleasure." As if to counterbalance the list towards pop culture, the "editorial advisory boards" are apt to be distinguished.

"Mind Alive includes Hermann Bondi, director-general of the European Space She says it wasn't that good a book a sweet nice book on an idea whose time had come, about single girls having a good life. Single girls had been sleeping with men for a long time, quietly and without' being run out of town. But secretively. Well, along I came with my little book and said that single girls did have a great, sex life and were often much happier in bed than they ever would be as married women because they had more choice and variety and didn't I have to stay with a man they didn't like. Mostly the message was don't wfe giveyouthelower London ibr66 'bob, llfil as 33ibr the kids (Day Rettarn) Aiaraa all TJEADERS whose waking, like mine, has been ruined by the GPO's pumtively expensive new alarm call charge, can take heart The suggestion from the Telephonists' Guild to ask operators to book you direct to TIM weather (cost 8d, instead of the new 2s) really does work in my district and others who have tested it in the North and South for me report success.

But my favourite, anarchist night operator warns me that Mr Stonehouse won't let this loophole remain for long What then IThose who are such heavy sleepers that they don't respond to a clock may like to consider a Philips radio alarm. An About the House tester, an inveterate hiber-nator," says by using one she has found herself able to disDense with the GPO call she had relied on for 20 years. She reports 1 have used the radio alarm for a year and I am well satisfied. Usually I can't be roused by anything except a telephone call." The radio alarm automatically switches on news or-music to wake you. In case this doesn't register with deep sleepers, there is an optional device that, nine minutes later, buzzes until you are really awake.

It won't stop until you switch it off." The radio is portable, all-transistor-mains, and she considers "the' tone is quite good provided you don't want to listen to symphony concerts." Colour blue and white. Size 9in. 4in. Price which, as our tester says, is a good deal cheaper than an alarm call five days. a week, yearly.

Manufacturers: Philips Electrical Century House, Shaftesbury Avenue. London WC2. Pestle and mttvta? THE cheap, Portuguese wood pestle and mortars that have flooded into our kitchen shops here are decorative but I find they do "hold" strong odours, especially garlic. A washable alternative, under SI, is the substantial pottery one commissioned from potter Allan Wallis by Edward Bull. It comes in plain white or farmhouse style honeybrown glaze, with beech pestle and is about five inches tall The inside is rough glazed on purpose to give good friction.

Price 19s 6d, postage and packing 4s 6d. From Edward Bull Ltd, 16 London Road. Guildford. Surrey tH 431 wi mi 'rim "If Bvuna prints METHUEN'S ask us to point out that their Bruna Prints, illustrated on this page on October 31, selling at 35s a set of five, are 7s each. Plate holder FOR anyone with a single, lovely old antique plate to show off, an unobtrusive display stand originally designed for antique shops is now available.

It is made of plastic coated, lightweight steel. I have found that it holds a plate securely, can be bent to fit an irregular shape, is easy to wipe clean and does not corrode. There are two sizes four inch height, 2s 6d, and seven inches at 3s 6d. Allow Is 6d postage and packing. Manufacturers are Auriol (Guildford) Trading Estate, Farnham, Surrey.

-weekdays 17.30, 19.0CU9.30 and onSundays 18.00,. 19.00 and 20.00.-There is "also a late train every, night at 01.00. Details of Inter-City services, fares and' availability of tickets at principal stations or rail travel agents. "Whether you are going to London for a shopping spree, for West End shows, for trips to the Zoo or to the Tower, Inter-City rail travel is comfortable and fast-much nippier than Beefeaters! Fare deals. Go electric and excite the family.

exciting your budget. And make the mostof your outing to London. Off-peakDayReturnssaveyouupto8bob in the 1. During the "week catch the 10,00 train from ches1Rccadilly.GoearlieronSaturdaysbythe07.20 or 08.30 or take the Sunday morning train at 10.00. 'And to crown the day there are plenty of Inter-City eresesfrcmEustonforacomfortablejourneyhome a choice of candlelit dinner in the restaurant, buffet supper or late coffee for those whose lists are just incredibly long.

Even husbands, judging by last year's pilot run, enjoy the opportunity to roam the store's six floors having a good peer. A colleague who went along reports It is all very relaxed and enjoyable." The closed shops are on November 12 and November 19. "Guardian" readers who would like to go should telephone Museum 1666 or write to 196 Tottenham Court Road, London 1. rjHHIS week's award for imaginative invitations goes to Heals. They sent out a green and white Danish candle to all their listed customers inviting them to the store's Christmas shopping parties.

For those who dread the annual trudge as much as I do, undoubtedly the most civilised way is to do the lot in one swoop at these after hours, closed shop evenings. There are no crowds, parking is easy and wives can forget about the evening meal because there is IttddentaHy the TouserofLondon opens from 10 a.m.io-4 fr.u. on weekdays and2p.m. to4p.jn.on Sundays. fnter-Cify.