I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the
sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to
get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this
iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity,
stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and
obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so
many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until
I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to
take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a
good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry
IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the
position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No
country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external
intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.
The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest
booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign
books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.
If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned
goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business
firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped
against the tradesman.
As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even
publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort
which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing
... but that is no matter.
It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he
wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a
purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be
repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous
difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both
foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on
with it.
Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers
shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one
would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to
struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks
and parasites and against our appalling _decentralization_, i. e., lack
of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and
communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly
repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.
When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity,
since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on
which the whole world happens to agree.—_Bernard Shaw_, 1916.