Do brochures — long accused of lacking intimacy — have a place in direct-mail fundraising?

By Jerry Huntsinger

The legend grows …
Okay, back to my original brochure legend. After the famous designer suffered his humiliating defeat, the shoe company hired a new writer with a mandate to “enhance” the control letter.

This young man, fresh from writing subscription-letter copy for Harper’s magazine, studied the situation for five minutes. Then he took the two-page control letter and, in the middle, stuffed in the four pages of copy that the famous illustrator had put in the brochure — and ended up with a six-pager. (This tale could also be told as the historical moment when longer letters were discovered to work well, too.)