The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1906-08-26
price List Given.


The circulars wind up with price list
about as follows: I'VE will furnish manu-
script and publish the song and furnish
you with $50 copies for $50. These sold
at % cents each among your friends and
townsmen will bring you $3.50, a good
profit on your investment. We Will sell
you all the additional copies you want for
10 cents a sheet. II you furnish the words
and music we will correct 1t and publish
the same and furnish you $50 copies for
$685. This will give you a profit OF nearly
one hundred per cent"
The profit to the lemon squeezer Is large
under any circumstances. The actual ex-
pense of getting out the $50 copies Is never
more than $12, and seldom more than $40.
Very few of the songs will sing. Some of
them lack metrcal construction, rhyme,
rhythm, continuity of story and sense.
That this business Is within the letter
of the law seems probable. Nevertheless
1t causes not a little hardship to the VIC
tins of the lemon squeezers.
Not long ago the writer saw a letter
from a man in Ohio stating that he was
blind and helpless, and had fallen a VIC
tim to one of three lemon-squeezing es-
Establishments and had spent S35 to get
song published. Out of the $50 copies sent
him he had sold just twenty-five, and
these, no doubt, had been bought from
him because the buyers sympathized with
his nfirmity.
He said he had no complaint to make
because he had walked blindly into tho
swinde which was true in double sense.
but that he had to suffer all kinds of de-
prlvations because of the money he had
spent He had put the music on sale in
his town and not a single copy was sold
in three weeks. He was in debt and in
despair.
He had been persuaded to have the
song published by the glowing accounts
of the money made by a dozen or more
celebrated song writer's "who had their
works published by the firm soliciting his
order" He had also been promised a
royalty of cents sheet for all the songs
sold by the firm, and bad been led to
expect from their correspondence with
him that he would get each year quite a
sum in royalties. 1t did not dawn upon
him how badly he had been swindled
until he found out that his song would not
sing and that he could not sell It among
his own personal acquaintance.
Sample of Lyrics.
One firm of lemon squeezers in Tin Pan
alley has put out no less than 100 songs
for amateur composers since the first of
January. Here is a sample of the lyrics:
My little sweetheart lives in a cottage
covered with roses,
And when the sun goes down at night
she stands in the door and poses.
She's as pretty as violet down in the
hazel dell.
Her rosy lips are ripe and sweet like the
lips of a sea shell.
Another poet tells of his longing to go
home to the farm. He says
My dear old mothers waiting for me
down at the old home farm,
Where the honey bees are buzzing in and
out the barn,
Where the cider press is dripping with
the juice of apples sweet
And where my boyhood friends are wait
ing me to greet.
CHORUS.
Take me back just once more again,
Down to the old home farm,
And then I'll never roam any more
Away from the good old farm.
This is the stuff with which the country
beyond the Mississippi is being flooded
Almost every. little town Is developing
bards who have received the call to fame
through these lemon sqeezing factories.
When the people who patronze these
lemon squeezing establishments learn that
they have been. squeezed they conceal
their chagrin as a rule and say nothing
Those who complain and write to their
lemon squeezer rarely get an answer to
their complaint, or in case of an answer
are told that Mr.. So and So has retired
from business and gone to Europe to es-
tablish a business in London. or some
other story.
One little town in Iowa has furnished
no less than dozen victims and each