The story of Lillian Boxfish is inspired, in part, by the life and work of the poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, herself the real highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world during the 1930s, thanks to her brilliant work for R.H. Macy’s.
Back in 2007, my best friend from high school, Angela McClendon Ossar, was earning her master’s degree in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and doing an internship in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University. As part of this job, she got to be the receiving and processing archivist for a recent acquisition: the papers of Margaret Fishback.
Angela, as the first person ever to work professionally with the papers (after Fishback’s son, Anthony Antolini, donated the material), quickly realized that Fishback was a figure—a poet, a protofeminist, a successful career woman, and a mother—who would appeal to me as a poet, a feminist, and a professional myself. She called me up and told me all about Fishback, and I was so fascinated that I applied for a travel-to-collections grant from Duke, which enabled me, in May of 2007, to be the first nonarchivist or librarian to work with Fishback’s archive.
I instantly felt a deep connection to Fishback—an affinity for her writing both of ads and of poems, and her overall sensibility—though she’d been dead since the mid-1980s. I knew that I wanted to do something to bring her story and those of others like her (this whole forgotten generation of pre–Mad Men advertising women) into the light. I gave a lecture at Duke about my findings, focusing particularly on Fishback’s innovative use of humor in her ad copy for Macy’s, but it took me a few years to realize what shape my project should take. At last, stuck inside during a blizzard in Chicago in 2013, I got the idea to combine my love of Fishback with my love of cities and flânerie; I resolved to write a novel that would bring these two affinities together. Now, almost exactly a decade to the day that I first set eyes upon the Fishback archive, the book has arrived.
To be clear, this is a work of fiction and not a biography of Margaret Fishback. The circumstances of the novel are my invention, and the attitudes and opinions expressed by Lillian Boxfish are entirely imagined. That said, I encourage everyone to read Margaret Fishback’s collections of light verse, which are utterly charming and are as follows:
I Feel Better Now, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932 (poems originally appearing in the New York World, The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York American, Judge, and Vanity Fair)
I Take It Back, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935 (poems originally appearing in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York American, The New York Sun, The World, Judge, Vanity Fair, Redbook, Buffalo Town Tidings, The Stage, and The Forum Magazine)
One to a Customer, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937 (an omnibus comprising I Feel Better Now and Poems Made Up to Take Out, supra, together with two other volumes: Out of My Head and I Take It Back)
Poems Made Up to Take Out, New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1963 (poems originally appearing in Better Living, Collier’s, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, Pictorial Review, Reader’s Digest, American Girl, American Home, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, The Wall Street Journal, This Week, Woman’s Day, and Women’s Wear Daily)
I also recommend taking a look at her how-to books, including the one on etiquette, Safe Conduct: When to Behave—And Why (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1938), as well as a humorous guide to parenthood called Look Who’s a Mother! A Book About Babies for Parents, Expectant and Otherwise (Simon & Schuster, 1945).
All of the poems and advertisements that appear in the book attributed to Lillian Boxfish—as well as the letter here—were written by Margaret Fishback and appear here with the permission of her estate. Many thanks to Fishback’s son, Anthony Antolini, for granting this permission.
Additionally, the “Women in Cosmetic Advertising” quiz is drawn from Advertising Careers for Women, edited by Dorothy Dignam and Blanche Clair and published in 1939; Fishback’s copy of this book was a part of her archive.