Publishers v. Crammers

Every sizeable U. S. university has a collection of barnacle-like "tutoring schools" which gain fat fees by cramming predigested knowledge into dullards and lazybones. The tutor is usually a shrewd, undersized person who was at one time the "whiz" or "shark" of his college class. There is usually a legend that he has been offered enormous sums to take a college professorship. He works in a grimy, smoke-laden office, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, is busiest when examination time approaches. His stock-in-trade is a file of old examination papers, a collection of mimeographed texts, outlines, shortcuts. That these are extracted copiously without by-your-leave from authorized textbooks, should long have been obvious to everybody. But not until last week did U. S. publishers move into open combat. Vaguely speaking of a "nationwide war," Macmillan Co-., Ginn & Co. and Houghton Mifflin Co. all brought suit against an obscure Harvard "College Tutoring Bureau." They alleged infringements on copyrights of such books as Frank William Taussig's Principles of Economics, a Life of Andrew Jackson, Garver & Hansen's Principles of Economics. They demanded an accounting of profits, charging that the College Tutoring Bureau used 200 books owned by a score or so of publishers.

Harvardmen were unimpressed. New college tutorial plans and reading periods (before examinations) have cut into the crammer's trade. And Harvard's most famed crammery died with William Whiting ("Widow") Nolen in 1923. Graduated from Harvard in 1884 (summa cum laude), "Widow" Nolen left to Harvard his fine collection of Lincolniana, as well as $36,000 to a Miss Beseley of Brattle Street. Harvard's Nolen, like Yale's Samuel B. ("Rosie") Rosenbaum and Princeton's John Hun, represented the highest type of crammer, but of them all it might have been written as it was of him: Dead or dreaming, drunk or sleeping,

Nolen puts you through; But gratitude takes early wing when

Nolen's bill is due.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.