National Bad Poetry Day

August 18th is National Bad Poetry day, and I have to celebrate by showing a series of interesting ads.  Created in 1971, these ads ran in Editor & Publisher and other trade magazines.  While the purpose of the ads was to reinforce the rules about printing our trademark, the first ad challenged the trade press to write a better limerick about the rules of use of our trademark than this one purportedly created by our legal team.

The rules that we write are three:

We abhor the diminutive "c"

and "s" preceeded by "e" or "a"

is no better than apostrophe.

The winner of the limerick would win a trip to Atlanta to have dinner with our legal staff. 

As one would imagine, the replies were swift and furious.  Many pointed out that the initial rhyme was not even a limerick and that the ad had misspelled the word "preceeded."  After a few mea culpas, a follow up ad declared that Carol Wait of The Seymour Daily Tribune won the contest.

We don't have any prizes now, but you are welcome to submit your own limericks about the trademark.  We will even post the good ones.