Don't Send Money
Last week the Catholic Herald published the following advertisement: MISCELLANEOUS.
LITEBARY : Several Library-users are wanted as assistants to Publishers' Reader. Interesting, Remunerative, Spare or wholetime engagement Performable in own home and tinie.—Write, The Durham University Press, 9, Mills Buildings, London, S.W.1.
Readers who answered the advertisement received a letter from a Mr. E. Hamilton Hargreaves, under the heading "The Faculty of Criticism " stating that " the Durham University Press has instructed this Faculty to deal with responses to their advertisement." The Press was stated to re
quire " unprofessional readers" who would have to pass by post the Preliminary Examination of the Royal College of Literature.
Successful candidates could be assured of a minimum earning of £4 5s. a week, rising in the Spring and Autumn to between £9 and £12. These lucky people were to be paid at the unheard of rate of 10s. 6d. per hundred pages of book read.
Meanwhile would intending applicants send an examining fee of £2 2s.?
The advertiser in a burst of humanitarian.
ism "proposes to invite successful candidates to contribute a moiety of their first earnings to reimburse the unsuccessful can didates."
It need hardly be added, that Durham University knows nothing of the Durham University Press and that there is no Royal College of Literature in Great Britain.
The "Catholic Herald," which prides itself upon investigating the bona fides of its advertisements, apologises for having failed to spot this one. It trusts that none of its readers have remitted the money
asked for, and can only hope that the full publicity it has now accorded to this ex
ample will serve as a warning to all readers to be on their guard against offers of the kind which sometimes find their way. through human frailty, into respectable journals.