Chapter III: Part 3

... And so there, in _Foes_, we have the book in a hundred which called for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the book reporter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as economically as possible--and as dispassionately--to the root of the trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers would be enraged or misled; young writers playing the sedulous ape would inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be spoiled; publishers would lose money;--and, much the worst of all, the world would be deprived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in _Foes_ was the fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not always base; there are emotions in the human so high and so lofty that it is wiser not to try to transcend them....

The appearance of part of the foregoing in _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a State college. He wrote:

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“I hope that the mails lost for your college professors of English subscribers their copies of _Books and the Book World_ [containing the foregoing observations on _Book Reporting_].... College professors do not like to be disturbed--and most of us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should have been.

“When I read _Book Reporting_ I dictated three pages of protest, but did not send it on--thanks to my better judgment.... Then I decided, since you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask you to help me.

“We need it out here--literary help only, of course. This is the only State college on what was once known as the ‘Great Plains.’ W. F. Cody won his sobriquet on Government land which is now our campus. Our students are the sons and daughters of pioneers who won over grasshoppers, droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They are so near to real life that the teaching of literature must be as real as the literature--rather, it ought to be. That’s where I want you to help me.

“I am not teaching literature here now as I was taught geology back in Missouri. That’s as near as I shall tell you how I teach--it is bad enough and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, in fairness to you, I should say that for several years never less than one-third of those to whom we gave degrees have majored in English, and always as many as the next two departments combined.)

“Here’s what I am tired of and want to get away from:

“1. Testing students on reading a book by asking fact questions about what is in the book--memory work, you see.

“2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the study of literature that is so academic that it is Prussian.

“3. Demanding that students serve time in literature classes as a means of measuring their advance in the study of literature.

“Here’s what I want you to help me with in some definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college professor making an assignment--beg pardon.)

“1. Could you suggest a scheme of ‘book reporting’ for college students in literature classes? (An old book to a new person is news, isn’t it?)

“2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.

“3. What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English? Part of our work, especially in the summer, is to give such training to men and women who will teach composition and literature in Kansas high schools.

“Your help will not only be appreciated, but it will be used.”

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To answer adequately these requests would take about six months’ work and the answers would make a slender book. And then they would exhibit the defects inseparable from a one man response. None of which excuses a failure to attempt to answer, though it must extenuate failures in the attempt.

We shall try to answer, in this place, though necessarily without completeness. If nothing better than a few suggestions is the result, why--suggestions may be all that is really needed.

And first respecting the things our friend is tired of and wants to get away from:

1. Fact questions about what is in the book--memory work--are not much use if they stop with the outline of the story. What is _not_ in the book may be more important than what is. Why did the author select this scene for narration and omit that other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically interesting of the two? See _The Flirt_, by Booth Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a few lines and a small boy’s doings occupy whole chapters.

2. Scholarship is less important than wide reading, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A wide acquaintance doesn’t preclude a few profoundly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be spoiled in the same way.

3. Time serving over literature is a waste of time. There are only three ways to teach literature. The first is by directing students to books for _voluntary_ reading--hundreds of books, thousands. The second is by class lectures--entertaining, idea’d, anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in character. The third is by conversation--argumentative at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by way of exchanging information and opinions.

Study books as you study people. Mix among them. You don’t take notes on people unless, perchance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you read, if you like, but don’t “take notes.” Look for those qualities in books that you look for in people and make your acquaintances by the same (perhaps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows.

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We go on to the first of our friend’s requests for help. It is a scheme for “book reporting” for college students in literature classes and he premises that an old book to a new reader is news. Of course it is.

Let the student take up a book that’s new to him and read it by himself, afterward writing a report of it to be read to the class. When he comes to write his report he must keep in the forefront of his mind this one thing:

To tell the others accurately enough about that book so that each one of them will know whether or not _he_ wants to read it.

That is all the book reporter ever tries for. No book is intended for everybody, but almost every book is intended for somebody. The problem of the book reporter is to find the reader.

Comparison may help. For instance, those who enjoy Milton’s pastoral poetry will probably enjoy the long poem in Robert Nichols’s _Ardours and Endurances_. Those who like Thackeray will like Mary S. Watts. Those who like Anna Katharine Green will thank you for sending them to _The Moonstone_, by one Wilkie Collins.

Most stories depend upon suspense in the action for their main effect. You must not “give away” the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In a mystery story you may state the mystery and appraise the solution or even characterize it--but you mustn’t reveal it.

Tell ’em that Mr. Hergesheimer’s _Java Head_ is an atmospheric marvel, but will disappoint many readers who put action first. Tell ’em that William Allen White writes (often) banally, but so saturates his novel with his own bigheartedness that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell ’em the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as well as you can make it out--and for heaven’s sake ask yourself with every assertion: “Is this a fact or is it my personal opinion?” _And a fact, for your purpose, will be an opinion in which a large majority of readers will concur._

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“Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.”

The following list is an offhand attempt to comply with this request. It is offered merely for the suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restriction is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may be a little older than that. Strike them out.

For Kansans: Willa Sibert Cather’s novels, _O Pioneers!_ and _My Antonia_, chronicling people and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen White’s _A Certain Rich Man_ and _In the Heart of a Fool_, less for their Kansas-ness than for their Americanism and humanity.

For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson’s _The Valley of Democracy_. Zona Gale’s _Birth_. Carl Sandburg’s _Chicago Poems_. Edgar Lee Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_. Vachel Lindsay’s longer poems. Mary S. Watts’s _Nathan Burke_ and _Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_. Lord Charnwood’s life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells’s _The Leatherwood God_. Booth Tarkington’s _The Conquest of Canaan_ (first published about fourteen years ago) and _The Magnificent Ambersons_. Gene Stratton-Porter’s _A Daughter of the Land_, her _Freckles_ and her _A Girl of the Limberlost_. One or two books by Harold Bell Wright. _The Passing of the Frontier_, by Emerson Hough, and other books in the Chronicles of America series published by the Yale University Press.

For Americans: Mary S. Watts’s _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_. Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_ (if not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tarkington’s _The Flirt_. Novels with American settings by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White. Mary Johnston’s _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_. Willa Sibert Cather’s _The Song of the Lark_. Edith Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. Alice Brown’s _The Prisoner_. Ellen Glasgow’s _The Deliverance_. Corra Harris’s _A Circuit-Rider’s Wife_. All of O. Henry. Margaret Deland’s _The Iron Woman_. Earlier novels by Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole’s _The Harbor_. Joseph Hergesheimer’s _The Three Black Pennys_, his _Gold and Iron_ and his _Java Head_. Historical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American biographies too numerous to mention. _From Isolation to Leadership: A Review of American Foreign Policy_ by Latané (published by the educational department of Doubleday, Page & Company). Essays, such as those of Agnes Repplier.

Each of these enumerations presupposes the books already named, or most of them. Don’t treat them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of them aren’t. Those that have fine literary workmanship have something else, too--and it’s the other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, not a Magna Charta. “Manners makyth man”--yah!

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We are also asked:

“What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English?”

We reply:

A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but as it moulds lives. A profound respect for an author who can find 100,000 readers, a respect at least equal to that entertained for an author who can write superlatively well. For instance: Get it out of your head that you can afford to condescend toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship.

An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary man or woman as keen as your perception of what will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don’t insist that people must live on what you, or any one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for nothing that they “don’t know anything about literature, _but know what they like_.”

A confidence in the greater wisdom of the greatest number. Tarkington got it right. The public wants the best it is capable of understanding; its understanding may not be the highest understanding, but “the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” Neither does the writer who never concedes anything. The public’s standard can’t always be wrong; the private standards can’t always be right.

Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the classics are made and kept alive by “the passionate few.” But the business of high school teachers of English is not with the passionate few--who will look after themselves--but with the unimpassioned many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope’s Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense, it’s all off. If you can’t tell what it is a girl likes in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show her what she’ll like in Dickens? Unless you know what it is that “they” get out of these books they _do_ read you won’t be able to bait the hook with the things you want them to read. Don’t you think you’ve got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn’t you do worse than sit down yourself and read attentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the best sellers?

It all goes back to the size of the teacher’s share of our common humanity. A person who can’t read a detective story for the sake of the thrills has no business teaching high school English. A person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high school English. A person who can’t sense (better yet, share) the common feeling about a popular writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympathize a little with it and express it more or less articulately in everyday speech is not qualified to teach high school English.

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A word about writing “compositions” in high school English classes. Make ’em write stories instead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches or abstracter writing--little essays--why, let ’em. Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean--it’s fatally easy to get beyond your depth, and every one else’s. Read what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his _Studies in Literature_. Once in a while a theologian urges us to “get back to the Bible.” Well, there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner points out in his _The Bible as English Literature_, it was the fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no such word as “virtue”; you said “sweet smellingness” or “pleasant tastingness” or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant. Whereas “virtue” means anything from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their abuse.

What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English? Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people--and undying enthusiasm. Only these--and the love of books.

LITERARY EDITORS

BY ONE OF THEM

V

LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM

The very term “literary editor” is a survival. It is meaningless, but we continue to use it because no better designation has been found, just as people in monarchical countries continue to speak of “King George” or “Queen Victoria of Spain.” Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one wants to be the first to allude publicly and truthfully to “Figurehead George” or “Social Leader Victoria.”

Literary editors who are literary are not editors, and literary editors who are editors are no longer literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words about what they had read. These were printed. Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read them looked up to ask each other pathetically: “But what does it _mean_?” Book readers who read them resolved that the publication of a new book should be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was good for the secondhand trade.

We’ve changed all that, or, if we haven’t, we’re going to. Take a chap who runs what is called a “book section.” This is a separate section or supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday newspaper. Its pages are magazine size--half the size of newspaper pages. They number from eight to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the advertising. The essential thing to realize about such a section is that it requires an editor to run it.

It does not require a literary man, or woman, at all. The editor of such a section need have no special education in the arts or letters. He must have judgment, of course, and if he has not some taste for literary matters he may not enjoy his work as he will if he has that taste. But high-browism is fatal.

Can our editor “review” a book? Perhaps not. It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review when he sees it, which will matter a good deal. Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the books for him. Which will matter more than anything else on earth in the handling of his book section.

A section will most certainly require, to run it, a man who can tell a good review (another word-survival) and who can get good reviewers. It will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear and very broad viewpoint. Such exist. What do we mean--viewpoint?

The right conception, it seems to us, starts with the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes an old one is news too) and should be dealt with as such. Perhaps, we are dealing only with a state of mind, in all this, but states of mind are important. They are the only states where self-determination is a sure thing. To get on:

Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an individual whose desk is usually not so far away but that you can study him in his habitat. The city editor tries to distinguish the big news from the little news. The literary editor will wisely do the same. What is big news in the world of books? Well, a book that appears destined to be read as widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publication is big news. And a book that will be read immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news. People who talk about news often overlook the ephemeral side of it. Much of the newsiness and importance of news resides in its transiency. What is news to-day isn’t news to-morrow. But to-day 100,000 people, more or less, will want to know about it.

Illustration: Two events happen on the same day. One of them will be noted carefully in histories written fifty years hence, but it affects, and interests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that hour, be much bigger. For another event occurring on that same day, though of a character which will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand.

Parallel: Two books are published on the same day. One of them will be dissected fifty years later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts of that time. But the number of persons who will read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small--in the hundreds. The other book will be out of print and unremembered in five years. But within six months of its publication hundreds of thousands will read it. Among those hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thousands, whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seriously modified and in some cases lastingly modified--whose very lives may change trend as a result of reading that book.

No need to ask which event and which book is the bigger news. News is not the judgment of posterity on a book or event. News is not even the sum total of the effects of an event or a book on human society. News is the immediate importance, or interest, of an event or a book to the greatest number of people.

Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in every thousand persons in the United States, or perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once. Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O’Brien would say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one person in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the subject matter were made comprehensible to him. The oldtime “reviewer” would write three solid columns about Isidor MacDougal’s work. The present-day literary editor puts it in competent hands for a simplified description to be printed later; and meanwhile he slaps Mrs. Porter’s novel on his front page.

The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are good book reporters, but like the people on the city editor’s staff they have usually their limitations, whether temperamental or knowledgeable. Every once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully but who has no sympathy with fires, who can’t get through the fire lines, who writes that the fire “broke out” and burns up more words misdescribing the facts than the copyreader can extinguish with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will happen in the best regulated literary editor’s sanctum that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong book to the right man. Then he learns how unreasonable an author can be, if he doesn’t know already from the confidences of publishers.

The literary editor’s point of view, we believe, must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes Holliday in the essay on _That Reviewer “Cuss”_ in the book _Walking-Stick Papers_. Few books that get published by established publishing houses are so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a body of readers somewhere, however small or scattered. The function of the book reporter is transcendently to find a book’s waiting audience. If he can incidentally warn off those who don’t belong to that audience, so much the better. That’s a harder thing to do, of course.

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The first requisite in a good book section is that it shall be interesting. As regards the news of new books, this is not difficult where book reporters, with the reporter’s attitude, are on the job. Reporter’s stories are sometimes badly written, but they are seldom dull. New books described by persons who have it firmly lodged in their noodles that they are “reviewing” the books, fare badly. The reviewer-obsession manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes the new book is made to march past the reviewer in column of squads, deploying at page 247 into skirmish formation and coming at page 431 into company front. Very fine, but the reader wants to see them in the trenches, or, headed by the author uttering inspiriting yells, going over the top. On other occasions the reviewer assumes the so-called judicial attitude, the true inwardness of which William Schwenk Gilbert was perhaps the first to appreciate, with the possible exception of Lewis Carroll. Then doth our reviewer tell us what will be famous a century hence. Much we care what will be famous a century hence. What bothers us is what we shall read to-morrow. Of course it may happen to be one and the same book. Very well then, why not say so?

The main interest of the book section is served by getting crackajack book reporters. They will suffice for the people who read the section because they are interested in books. If the literary editor stops there, however, he might as well never have started. These people would read the book section anyway, unless it were filled throughout with absolutely unreadable matter, as has been known to happen. Even then they would doubtless scan the advertisements. At least, that is the theory on which publishers hopefully proceed. There are book sections where the contributors always specify that their articles shall have a position next to advertising matter.

No, the literary editor must interest people who do not especially care about books as such. He can do it only by convincing them that books are just as full of life and just as much a part of a normal scheme of life as movies, or magazine cut-outs, or buying things on the instalment plan. Many a plain person has been led to read books by the fact that books are sometimes sold for instalment payments. Anything so sold, the ordinary person at once realizes, must be something which will fit into his scheme of existence. Acting on an instinct so old that its origin is shrouded in the mists of antiquity, the ordinary person pays the instalments. As a result, books are delivered at his residence. At first he is frightened. But he who looks and runs away may live to read another day. And from living to read it is but a step to reading to live.

Now one way to interest people who don’t care about books for books’ sake is to get up attractive pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pictures, with jokes in the corners of ’em, with some new and original and not-hitherto-published matter in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type, with signed articles so that the reader can know who wrote it and like or hate him with the necessary personal tag. But these things aren’t literary, at all. They are just plain human and fall in the field of action of every editor alive--though of course editors who are dead are exempt from dealing with them. That is why a literary editor has no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not be if it is going to prevent his being human.

We have been talking about the literary editor of a book section. There are not many book sections in this country. There are hundreds of book pages--half-pages and whole pages and double pages. The word “technique” is a loathsome thing and really without any significance in this connection, inasmuch as there is no particular way of doing the news of books well, and certainly no one way of doing it that is invariably better than any other. But for convenience we may permit ourselves to use the word “technique” for a moment; and, permission granted, we will merely say that the technique of a book page or pages is entirely different from the technique of a book section--if you know what we mean.

Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that things which a fellow would attempt in a book section he would not essay in a book page or double page. Conversely, things that will make a page successful may be out of place in a section. It is by no means wholly a matter of newspaper makeup, though there is that to it, too. But a man with a book section, though not necessarily more ambitious, is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects to turn his reporters loose on more books than his colleague who has only a page or so to turn around in. For another, he will probably want to print a careful list of all books he receives, of whatever sort, with a description of each as adequate as he can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus title, author, place of publication, publisher and price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, booksellers, librarians, readers in search of books on special subjects--by pretty nearly everybody who reads the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality of such a list has its value. A woman down in Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he prints, “but the lists of books are delightful”! There you are. In editing a book section you must be all things to all women.

The fellow with a page or two has quite other preoccupations. Where’s a photo, or a cartoon? Must have a headline to break the solidity of this close-packed column of print. How about a funny column? That gifted person, Heywood Broun, taking charge of the book pages of the New York _Tribune_, announces that he is in favor of anything that will make book reviewing exciting. Nothing can make book reviewing exciting except book reporting and the books themselves; but if Broun is looking for excitement he will find it while filling the rôle of a literary editor. Before long he will learn that everybody in the world who is not the author of a book wants to review books--and some who are authors are willing to double in both parts. Also, a considerable number of books are published annually in these still United States and a considerable percentage of those published find their way to the literary editor. It is no joke to receive, list with descriptions and sort out for assignment or non-assignment an average of 1,500 volumes a year, nor to assign to your book reporters, with as much infallibility in choosing the reporter as possible, perhaps half of the 1,500. Likewise there are assignments which several reporters want, a single book bespoken by four persons, maybe; and there are book assignments that are received with horror or sometimes with unflinching bravery by the good soldier. To hand a man, for instance, the extremely thick two-volume _History of Labour in the United States_ by Professor Commons and his associates is like pinning a decoration on him for limitless valor under fire--only the decoration bears a strong resemblance to the Iron Cross.

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Advertising?

Newspapers depend upon advertising for their existence, let alone their profits, in most instances. Of course, if there were no such things as advertisements we should still have newspapers. The news must be had. Presumably people would simply pay more for it, or pay as much in a more direct way.

What is true of newspapers is true of parts of newspapers. The fact that a new book is news, and, as such, a thing that must more or less widely but indispensably be reported, is attested by the maintenance of book columns and pages in many newspapers where book advertising there is none. The people who read the Boston _Evening Transcript_, for example, would hardly endure the abolition of its book pages whether publishers used them to advertise in or not.

At the same time the publisher finds, and can find, no better medium than a good live book page or book section; nor can he find any other medium, nor can any other medium be created, in which his advertising will reach his full audience. “The trade” reads the excellent _Publishers’ Weekly_, librarians have the journal of the American Library Association, readers have the newspapers and magazines of general circulation on which they rely for the news of new books. But the good book page or book section reaches all these groups. Publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, book buyers--all read it. And if it is really good it spreads the book-reading habit. Even a bookshop seldom does that--we have one exception in mind, pretty well known. People do not, ordinarily, read in a bookshop.

Of course a literary editor who has any regard for the vitality of his page or section is interested in book advertising. There’s something wrong with him if he isn’t. If he isn’t he doesn’t measure up to his job, which is to get people to read books and find their way about among them. A book page or a book section without advertising is no more satisfactory than a man or a woman without a sense of the value of money. It looks lopsided and it is lopsided. Readers resent it, and rightly. It’s a beautiful façade, but the side view is disappointing.

The interest the literary editor takes in book advertising need no more be limited than the interest he takes in the growth or improvement of any other feature of his page or section. It has and can have no relation to his editorial or news policy. The moment such a thing is true his usefulness is ended. An alliance between the pen and the pocketbook is known the moment it is made and is transparent the moment it takes effect in print. A literary editor may resent, and keenly, as an editor, the fact that Bing, Bang & Company do not advertise their books in his domain. He is quite right to feel strongly about it. It has nothing to do with his handling of the Bing Bang books. That is determined by their news value alone. He may give the Bing Bang best seller a front page review and at the same time decline to meet Mr. Bing or lunch with Mr. Bang. And he will be entirely honest and justified in his course, both ways. Puff & Boom advertise like thunder. The literary editor likes them both immensely, or, at least, he appreciates their good judgment (necessarily it seems good to him in his rôle as editor of the pages they use). But Puff & Boom’s books are one-stick stories. Well, it’s up to Puff & Boom, isn’t it?

Oh, well, first and last there’s a lot to being a literary editor, new style. But first and last there’s a lot to being a human. Any one who can be human successfully can do the far lesser thing much better than any literary editor has yet done it.

WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS

VI

WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS

A big subject? Not necessarily. Discussed by an authority? No, indeed. On the contrary, about to be written upon by an amateur recording impressions extending a little over a year but formed in several relationships--as a “literary editor,” as an author and, involuntarily, as an author’s agent--but all friendly. Also, perhaps, as a pretty regular reader of publishers’ products. What will first appear as vastness in the subject will shrink on a moment’s examination. For our title is concerned only with what _every_ publisher knows. A common piece of knowledge; or if not, after all, very “common,” at least commonly held--by book publishers.

To state the main conclusion first: The one thing that every publisher knows, so far as a humble experience can deduce, is that what is called “general” publishing--meaning fiction and other books of general appeal--is a highly speculative enterprise and hardly a business at all. The clearest analogy seems to be with the theatrical business. Producing books and producing plays is terrifyingly alike. Full of risks. Requiring, unless genius is manifested, considerable money capital. Likely to make, and far more likely to lose, small fortunes overnight.... Fatally fascinating. More an art than an organization but usually requiring an organization for the exhibition of the most brilliant art--like opera. A habit comparable with hasheesh. Heart-lifting--and headachy. ’Twas the night before publication and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a stenographer. The day dawned bright and clear and a re-order for fifty more copies came in the afternoon mail.... Absentmindedly, the publisher-bridegroom pulled a contract instead of the wedding ring from his pocket. “With this royalty I thee wed,” he murmured. And so she was published and they lived happily ever after until she left him because he did not clothe the children suitably, using green cloth with purple stamping.

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A fine old publishing house once went back over the record of about 1,200 published books. This was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler as possible; its books had placed it, in every respect, in the first rank of publishing houses.

Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080 had either lost money, broken even, or made sums smaller than the interest on the money tied up in them. Most of the 120 profitable books had been highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn this when you reflect that these lucrative books had each to foot the bill, more or less, for nine others. So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay behind the figures? In some cases it was possible to tell why a particular book had sold. More often it wasn’t.... Is this a business?

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Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book published. It’s not a bad book, either; very good novel, as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jenkinson’s publisher takes his next book with a natural reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this is a better story and has in it elements that promise popularity. The publisher’s salesman goes on the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters a bookseller’s and begins to talk the new Jenkinson novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and backs away in horror.

“Stock that?” asks the bookseller rhetorically. “Not on your life! Why,” with a gesture toward one shelf, “there’s his first book. Twenty copies and only two sold!”

The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, may yet call for it when they read a review--not necessarily a favorable account--or when they see it advertised. If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or biographies the bookseller’s wholly human attitude would not much matter. But a novel is different. The customer wanting Jenkinson’s _History of France_ would order it or go elsewhere, most likely. The customer wanting Jenkinson’s new novel is quite often content with Tarkington’s instead.

When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at a Broadway show and find they have none left for _Whoop ’Er Up_ you grumble, and then buy seats at _Let’s All Go_. Not that you really care. Not that any one really cares. The man who produced _Whoop ’Er Up_ is also the producer of _Let’s All Go_, both theatres are owned by a single group, the librettists are one and the same and the music of both is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source. Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write Tarkington’s novel, the two books are published by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indifference over your choice.

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The publisher’s salesman comes to the bookseller’s lair equipped with dummies. These show the book’s exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding and (very important) its jacket. Within the dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty pages of the book printed over and over to give the volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may read these twenty pages. If the author has got plenty of action into them the bookseller is favorably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of the book upon what the salesman and the publisher’s catalogue tells him. He has to. He can’t read ’em all.

Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his remarks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story called _Whispering Wires_ in which the explanation of a mysterious murder depended upon the telephone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the booksellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone receiver about the country with him, unscrewing and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put against your ear and showing how the deed was done.

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The bookseller, like every one else, goes by experience. It is, or has been, his experience that collections of short stories do not sell well. And this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at short story volumes. Where there is a name that will command attention--Alice Brown, Theodore Dreiser--or where a special appeal is possible, as in Edward J. O’Brien’s _The Best Short Stories of 191-_, books made up of short tales may sell. But there are depressing precedents.

In his interesting article on _The Publishing Business_, appearing in 1916 in the _Publishers’ Weekly_ and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites Henri Bergson’s _Creative Evolution_ as a modern instance of a special sort of book finding its own very special, but surprisingly large, public. “Nine booksellers out of ten ‘passed’ it when the traveller brought it round,” observes Mr. Scott. “Fortunately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of the expert, and public attention was secured.” Was the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not. _Creative Evolution_ is nothing to tie up your money in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel.

Mr. Scott’s article, which is inconclusive, in our opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are like each other no two books are really the same article. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp; many books, and here we are by no means limited to fiction, have whatever unity comes from the authorship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elusively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may be confined almost wholly to the presence of the same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that _The Virginian_ and _The Pentecost of Calamity_ are both the work of Owen Wister.

No! Two books are most often and emphatically _not_ the same article. Mr. Scott is wholly right when he points out every book should have advertising, or other attention, peculiar to itself. A method of reporting one book will not do for another, any more than a publisher’s circular describing one book will do to describe a second. The art of reporting books or other news, like the art of advertising books or other commodities, is one of endless differentiation. In the absence of real originality, freshness and ideas, both objects go unachieved or else are achieved by speciousness, not to say guile. You, for example, do not really believe that by reading Hannibal Halcombe’s _How to Heap Up Happiness_ you will be able to acquire the equivalent of a college education in 52 weeks. But somewhere in _How to Heap Up Happiness_ Mr. Halcombe tells how he made money or how he learned to enjoy pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution of his unoriginal domestic troubles--any one of which you may crave to know and honest information of which will probably send you after the book.

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At this point in the discussion of our subject we have had the incredible folly to look back at our outline. Yes, there is an outline--or a thing of shreds and patches which once went by that description. What, you will say, wrecked so soon, after a mere introduction of 1,500 words or so? Certainly. Outlines are to writers what architects’ plans are to builders, or what red rags are supposed to be to bulls. Or, as the proverbial (our favorite adjective) chaff before the wind. Our outline says that the subject of selling books should be subdivision (c) under division 1 of the three partitions of our subject. All Gaul and Poland are not the only objects divided in three parts. Every serious subject is, likewise.

Never mind. We shall have to struggle along as best we can. We have been talking about selling books, or what every publisher knows in regard to it. Well, then, every publisher knows that selling books as it has mainly to be conducted under present conditions, is just as much a matter of merchandising as selling bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. But this is one of the things that people outside the publishing and bookselling businesses seldom grasp. A cultural air, for them, invests the book business. The curse of the genteel hangs about it. It is almost professional, like medicine and baseball. It has an odor, like sanctity.... All wrong.

Bonnets, bathrobes, birdseed, books. All are saleable if you go about it right. And how is that? you ask.

The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great foundational demand for headgear. The best way to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home. It might be supposed that the best way to sell books would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies of any particular book.

Of course every publisher knows this and of course all the publishers, associating themselves for the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably allied to the general welfare, spend time and money in the effort to make readers--not of Mrs. Halcyon Hunter’s _Love Has Wings_ or Mr. Caspar Cartouche’s _Martin the Magnificent_, but of books, just good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course....

This would be--beg pardon, is--the thing that actually and immediately as well as ultimately counts: Let us get people to read, to like to read, to _enjoy_ reading, and they will, sooner or later, read books. Sooner or later they’ll become book readers and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as well as automobiles....

On the merely technical side of bookselling, on the immediate problem of selling particular new novels, collections of short stories, histories, books of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, collectively at least, not much to learn from their fellow merchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so highly developed in America that many of the methods resemble the interchangeable parts of standardized manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a look at these methods.

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The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered by at least two American publishing houses. With their very large lists of new books they contrive to avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six months ahead, these publishers are moving largely but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and less largely but with swift certainty three months, two months, even one month from the passing moment. And they are absolutely right and profit by their rightness. For this reason: Everything that is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that ephemerality if you like but also that widening ripple of human interest which is the unique essence of what we call “news.” This quality is present, in a perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. Oh! exclaims the reader, there surely is a book with no ephemerality about it! No? But there was an immense quantity of just that in its publication. It came at the right hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone unnoticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of biological knowledge that Darwin knew not.

Fifty years, one way or the other, would have made a vast difference in the reception, the import, the influence of even so epochal a book as _The Origin of Species_. Now a little reflection will show that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time is far more sharply important. Darwin’s book was so massive that ten or twenty years either way might not have mattered. But in such a case as John Spargo’s _Bolshevism_ a few months may matter. In the case of _Mr. Britling_ the month as well as the year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a magazine article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Arthur Guy Empey was on the very hour with _Over the Top_; but the appearance of his _Tales from a Dugout_ a few days after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was one of the minor tragedies of the war.

Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as human and mechanical conditions permit, preserve flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron-clad arrangements at half year ahead can be avoided the methods of two of the most important American houses demonstrate. Either can get out a book on a month’s notice. More than once in a season this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000 and one of 15,000 copies--that is, between not much more than “breaking even” and making a handsome profit.

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Every book that is published requires advertising though perhaps no two books call for advertising in just the same way. One of the best American publishing houses figures certain sums for advertising--whatever form it may take--in its costs of manufacture and then the individual volumes have to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper share of the money. Other houses have similar unsatisfactory devices for providing an advertising fund. The result is too often not unlike the revolving fund with which American railways were furnished by Congress--it revolved so fast that there wasn’t enough to go round long.

A very big publishing house does differently. To the cost of manufacture of each book is added a specific, flat and appropriate sum of money to advertise that particular book. The price of the book is fixed accordingly. When the book is published there is a definite sum ready to advertise it. No book goes unadvertised. If the book “catches on” there is no trouble, naturally, about more advertising money; if it does not sell the advertising of it stops when the money set aside has been exhausted and the publishers take their loss with a clear conscience; they have done their duty by the book. It may be added that this policy has always paid. Combined with other distinctive methods it has put the house which adopted it in the front rank.

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Whether to publish a small, carefully selected list of books in a season or a large and comprehensive list is not wholly decided by the capital at the publisher’s command. Despite the doubling of all costs of book manufacture, publishing is not yet an enterprise which requires a great amount of capital, as compared with other industries of corresponding volume. The older a publishing house the more likely it is to restrict its list of new books. It has more to lose and less to gain by taking a great number of risks in new publications. At the same time it is subjected to severe competition because the capital required to become a book publisher is not large. Hence much caution, too much, no doubt, in many cases and every season. Still, promising manuscripts are lamentably few. “Look at the stuff that gets published,” is the classic demonstration of the case.

The older the house, the stronger its already accumulated list, the more conservative, naturally, it becomes, the less inclined to play with loaded dice in the shape of manuscripts. Yet a policy of extreme caution and conservatism is more dangerous and deadly than a dash of the gambler’s makeup. Two poor seasons together are noticed by the trade; four poor seasons together may put a house badly behind. A season with ten books only, all good, all selling moderately well, is perhaps more meritorious and more valuable in the long run than a season with thirty books, nearly all poor except for one or two sensational successes. But the fellow who brings out the thirty books and has one or two decided best sellers is the fellow who will make large profits, attract attention and acquire prestige. It is far better to try everything you can that seems to have “a chance” than to miss something awfully good. And, provided you drop the bad potatoes quickly, it will pay you better in the end.

There _must_ be a big success somewhere on your list. A row of respectable and undistinguished books is the most serious of defeats.

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