This isn’t a review of this book.
In fact, I am just beginning my journey with it.
While looking at one of the many stacks of books in my house, a copy of Cialdini’s Influence caught my eye. And above it, two much older books.
One of them was George Burton Hotchkiss’ book “Advertising Copy.”
I don’t recall how I came by it. I do haunt used book stores, both online and off.
(Including the “mother of all library book sales” — the one run, monthly, by the Palo Alto library. I dare a booklover to go there and walk away empty-handed. A bag of books — they sell them by the bag at the later points in the weekend — is far more likely.)
This tome has much to recommend it.
Not that it needs my say-so. A biography I found reports that “Advertising Copy” was listed in the top 18 books on advertising in 1933 by a reputable trade journal of that time, “Printer’s Ink”. If you’d like to read more about Hotchkiss, you can find the biography here.
One of the refreshing aspects — sometimes missing from the background of many would-be copywriters — is the background and respect for literature. In fact, Hotchkiss claims that advertising copy is actually a subset of English Composition.
While many copywriting courses pooh-pooh English literature, and that you don’t need to be an English major — and that it, in fact, could hurt you — it’s a bit of mis-direction, I think.
i’ve heard no less than John Carlton sing the praises of E.B. White’s “Elements of Style.”
And if Gary Bencivenga doesn’t have a few ounces of literary blood running through his veins, I would, indeed, be surprised.
Because at least a sub-goal of both literature and copy is to involve the reader. And to leave the reader with something memorable. And the means to do that — by rhetorical devices — is therefore common to them both.