[_22 Aug. '08_]
In the month of August, when the book trade is supposed to be dead, but
which, nevertheless, sees the publication of novels by Joseph Conrad and
Marie Corelli (if Joseph Conrad is one Pole, Marie Corelli is surely the
other), I have had leisure to think upon the most curious of all the
problems that affect the author: Who buys books? Who really does buy
books? We grumble at the lack of enterprise shown by booksellers. We
inveigh against that vague and long-suffering body of tradesmen because in
the immortal Strand, where there are forty tobacconists, thirty-nine
restaurants, half a dozen theatres, seventeen necktie shops, one Short's,
and one thousand three hundred and fourteen tea cafés, there should be
only two establishments for the sale of new books. We are shocked that in
the whole of Regent Street it is impossible to buy a new book. We shudder
when, in crossing the virgin country of the suburbs, we travel for days
and never see a single bookshop. But whose fault is it that bookshops are
so few? Are booksellers people who have a conscientious objection to
selling books? Or is it that nobody wants to buy books?
Personally, I extract some sort of a living--a dog's existence--from the
sale of books with my name on the title-page. And I am acquainted with a
few other individuals who perform the same feat. I am also acquainted with
a large number of individuals who have no connexion with the manufacture
or distribution of literature. And when I reflect upon the habits of this
latter crowd, I am astonished that I or anybody else can succeed in paying
rent out of what comes to the author from the sale of books. I know
scarcely a soul, I have scarcely ever met a soul, who can be said to make
a habit of buying new books. I know a few souls who borrow books from
Mudie's and elsewhere, and I recognize that their subscriptions yield me a
trifle. But what a trifle! Do you know anybody who really buys new books?
Have you ever heard tell of such a being? Of course, there are Franklinish
and self-improving young men (and conceivably women) who buy cheap
editions of works which the world will not willingly let die: the Temple
Classics, Everyman's Library, the World's Classics, the Universal Library.
Such volumes are to be found in many refined and strenuous homes--oftener
unopened than opened--but still there! But does this estimable practice
aid the living author to send his children to school in decent clothes? He
whom I am anxious to meet is the man who will not willingly let die the
author who is not yet dead. No society for the prevention of the death of
corpses will help me to pay my butcher's bill.
* * * * *
I know that people buy motor-cars, for the newspapers are full of the dust
of them. I know that they buy seats in railway carriages and theatres, and
meals at restaurants, and cravats of the new colour, and shares in
companies, for they talk about their purchases, and rise into ecstasies of
praise or blame concerning them. I want to learn about the people who buy
new books--modest band who never praise nor blame, nor get excited over
their acquisitions, preferring to keep silence, preferring to do good in
secret! Let an enterprising inventor put a new tyre on the market, and
every single purchaser will write to the Press and state that he has
bought it and exactly what he thinks about it. Yet, though the purchasers
of a fairly popular new book must be as numerous as the purchasers of a
new tyre, not one of them ever "lets on" that he has purchased. I want
some book-buyers to come forward and at any rate state that they have
bought a book, with some account of the adventure. I should then feel
partly reassured. I should know by demonstration that a book-buyer did
exist; whereas at present all I can do is to assume the existence of a
book-buyer whom I have never seen, and whom nobody has ever seen. It seems
to me that if a few book-buyers would kindly come forward and
confess--with proper statistics--the result would be a few columns quite
pleasant to read in the quietude of September.