Tiny book: "Instantaneous Personal Magnetism Debunked"

Happy New Year! Big Boi welcomes 2025 with this tiny book. It's so small he could probably open it with his paws and read it himself while lounging on the couch. But, like me, he'd probably fall asleep after a page and a half.

The staplebound Instantaneous Personal Magnetism Debunked is 3½ inches by 5 inches and 32 pages. It is one of the hundreds of millions of pocket-sized Little Blue Books published between 1919 and 1978 by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company. This one, No. 1395, indicates that it was edited by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951) himself. (Side note: I've been planning a Haldeman-Julius post since Papergreat's launch, and one of his books can be seen in the lower right of the photo in this blog's very first post. I still plan to get to it someday.)

Instantaneous Personal Magnetism Debunked, by Ben Moore, was copyrighted in 1929. It's an essay that dissects and debunks a popular book of the time: Instantaneous Personal Magnetism, which was written by Albert Webster Edgerly (1852-1926) under the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury and published by Ralston University Press. Outside of his "self-help" books, Edgerly advocated some truly horrifying ideas that I will not repeat here.

It's nice to see that Edgerly/Shaftesbury was debunked and ridiculed by some of his contemporaries. Here are some passages from Moore's little book:

• "To an unmagnetic personality such as my own the inducement was irresistible. I signed the coupon in the corner of the page, and in due time received the volume."
• "The new light which is shed by the author on many of the hitherto perplexing problems of psychology, biology, physics and other sciences, is little less than amazing. For example, it has long been erroneously thought that to be devoured by a wild animal is a process causing more or less discomfort to the devouree. This idea is disspelled by Shaftesbury in a few well-chosen words: 'Life dies most happily and most easily in the clutches of other life. The bird that must end its days in the slow process of old age suffers many a month of torture waiting for the end; but in the jaws of the cat or the fangs of the snake it finds a pleasurable release from the agonies of living; an enjoyment that is participated in by the victim as much as by the devourer.'"
• "The extraordinary faculty of Shaftesbury for assembling accurate statistics is indicated by the following note on divorce: 'Where two persons are drawn to each other by the power of magnetism, they never separate, and there has never been a divorce in any such case.'"

Moore's debunking essay is one of several wedged into this small booklet. The others, on the same general topic of charlatans and shady sales techniques, are by Cloyd Hampton Valentine, Marc T. Greene and Ballard Brown. This passage by Valentine remains painfully relevant a century later: "Yes, there is no doubt at all that Americans, on the whole, are a trustful folk, not readily regarding with suspicion any person or thing, surprisingly prone to believe what they are told, if the telling carries the least degree of conviction, and to believe what they read, too, if only the subject is set forth in large type an in sufficiently forceful language."

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With this post, Papergreat has now published posts in 16 consecutive calendar years.