Focus on Flinges
EKIDPEPIn
By STRIX
ALMOST all schools, one imagines, have a school One can see, of course, the general idea behind them. If—like for instance Messrs Kniblock and Hee Ltd.—you are the biggest manufacturers of commercial flinges in the country, you employ a large number of persons, some in one place, some in another. Anything that can give them—or, perhaps more important, you—the illusion that the whole firm is one great happy family is to the good; ancl„a house journal theoretically contri- butes to this end. It serves, too, an educational purpose. Some of the men—those, for instance, who produce the retractor-gusps in the South Wales factory and the semi-skilled gerbe-wrivers at Uxbridge—have never seen a completed ffinge. More still have scant conception of how far afield the firm's products find their way, or how near the firm is to winning one of Mr Wilson's plastic medals. Their imaginations will be stirred, and pride in their craftsmanship stimulated by photo- graphs showing a huge Kniblock and Hee hinge towering over the palm-trees at Santa Serafina or dominating the bauxite-wharves at Nij.
Then there is the more extramural question of prestige. Like the enormous Christmas cards which Kniblock and Hee send to their customers and associates, the house journal is credited with a certain propaganda value. It is left about in waiting rooms, unloaded on foreign trade dele- gations, dispatched to commercial attachds, com- pared—seldom to its detriment—with the corres- ponding produsts of rival firms. It is felt to fill a niche, and so m a way it does. But who actually reads it, and how much of it they manage to wade through, remains a mystery: which is possibly just as well.
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