Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.

This is your host, John Haggardorn.

Today, a great short story from Robert Barr,

this one called Not According to the Code. Even a stranger to the big town walking for the

first time through London sees on the sides of the houses many names with which he has long been

familiar. That stranger's precognition has cost the firms those names represent much money in advertising.

The stranger has had the names before him for years in newspapers and magazines,

on the hoardings and boards by the railway side.

Paying little heed to them at the time, yet they have been indelibly impressed on his brain,

and when he wishes soap or pills, his lips almost automatically frame the words most familiar to them.

Thus are the lavish sum spent in advertising justified, and thus are many excellent publications

made possible.

When you come to ponder over the matter, it seems strange that there should ever be any real man behind the names so lavously advertised, that there should be a genuine Smith or Jones

whose justly celebrated medicines work such wonders, or whose soap will clean even a guilty conscience.

Granting the actual existence of these persons, and probing still further into the mystery,

can anyone imagine that the excellent Smith to whom thousands of former sufferers send entirely

unsolicited testimonials? Or the admirable Jones, whom prima donnas love because

his soap preserves their dainty complexions. Can anyone credit the fact that Smith and Jones have

passions like other men, have hatreds, likes, and dislikes? Such a condition of things,

incredible as it may appear, exists in London.

There are men in the metropolis, utterly unknown personally, whose names are more widely

spread over the earth than the names of the greatest novelist, living or dead, and these men

...