DIRECT gets many announcements about list firms reaching their second or third decades. But Guild Co. tops them all – it has entered its second century.
It wasn’t the first brokerage ever – that honor apparently belongs to H.H. Hull, which was in business in 1880. But it’s the oldest surviving one, spanning the years from horse-drawn cars and hand addressing to supersonic jets and e-mail lists. And for its first 100 years, it had an Edward Proctor in the company.
The firm was founded in 1899 by Charles Howard Guild (it rhymes with mild), who previously had run an ad agency in Boston. Operating out of a Nassau Street office in lower Manhattan, Guild sold space in mail order publications like “Success,” “Home Companion” and “Westerner.” His clients included respectable firms like Sears, Roebuck and Siegel Cooper, and also a host of nostrum sellers like Swamp Root (whose founder, Dr. Kilmer, was said to be better known than the president of the United States). But Guild soon found an even better business.
The publishers asked him for names and addresses with which to boost their circulation in those pre-ABC days, and so Guild became a “letter broker” – the forerunner of a modern-day list broker. As there were no tapes, letter brokers simply rented used letters and order forms to clients for a specified period of time.
Shortly after opening in 1899, Guild hired a young assistant named Edward Proctor to help him run that end of the business. Soon the tail was wagging the dog, and by 1903 Guild was out of the ad space business and entirely devoted to lists.
A 1903 trade ad tells the story: “We carry millions of all kinds of letters received in reply to newspaper and magazine advertising, which we are offering for copy at low rates. Our specialty is Nervous Debility and Medical letters.”
The medical specialties covered included “catarrh, rheumatism, kidney, dyspepsia, asthma, morphine, drunkenness, constipation, cancer, rupture…”
Meanwhile, young Edward became a master broker, able to turn things around in a hurry. On Armistice Day in 1918, he was summoned to Philadelphia by the John C. Winston Publishing Co. Winston ordered millions of names to promote a book about World War I whose final chapters were not yet written. The book, “History of the World War,” by Francis A. March, was a best seller in 1919.
In 1920, Guild died and Proctor took over the business And in 1931, Proctor’s son Ed Jr. came on board, and remained active until his retirement only this year. He assumed the reins of the business after his father died in 1945, and moved it to New Jersey in 1951.
The firm, now a division of Mail Marketing in Haworth, NJ, serves clients in such fields as B-to-B and catalogs.
How has the business changed since the ’30s, when Ed Jr. entered the company? There was a broker’s association that carefully restricted entry to the field, according to Ed Jr.
“It had a lot of ridiculous rules,” he says. “If you rented from one broker, you couldn’t rent from anyone else. The rule couldn’t hold up.”
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