THE PRESENT LIMITS OF THE BOOK MARKET
_In Spite of the Many Books Issued and the Many “Large Sellers,”
the People Are Very Poorly Equipped with Good Books--Circulating
Libraries and the Sale of Books--Many Neglected Subjects on Which
Successful Books Could be Written--The Lack of Good Writers the
Main Source of Poor Sale of Books._
How large the book market is, nobody knows. Still less does anybody
know how large it may become, say, in another decade of our present
prosperity and spread of intelligence. Beyond any doubt more books are
bought in the United States than in any other country. Yet it is a
constant surprise to discover how ill supplied the mass of the people
are with good books. But the enormous increase of the market in recent
years gives hope of a still greater increase to come. The number of
books published every year in the United States and in the United
Kingdom is about the same, but more American than English books run to
large editions.
Leaving out fiction, which is the spectacular and sensational part of
publishing, books of reference, of standard literature, of history, of
applied science and even of poetry are sold in constantly increasing
quantities. The public hears little of these because the literary
journals pay little attention to them. There is, for instance, one
publisher of subscription books who now adds few books to his list of
which he does not expect to sell 100,000 copies. He has agents in every
part of the United States, and they probably sell more books in a year
than all the publishing houses in the United States put together sold
thirty years ago--excluding textbooks, of course. Last year a literary
man went to a remote railway station, 1,000 miles from Boston or New
York, to shoot quail. One day he saw men unloading boxes of books from
a freight car on the side track. The wonder was that there should be
even a freight car in that corner of the woods; and that the freight
car should be filled with books was simply incredible. But there were
wagon loads of Thackerays, of Dickenses, of Eliots, and even of sets
of the poets, fairly well-printed, fairly well-bound volumes which had
been sold to the country folk for miles around. Perhaps there has been
more money spent for encyclopædias and dictionaries than Noah Webster
could compute, these last ten years. The book market, therefore, is
very much bigger than persons who live outside the book selling world
are likely to think.
Still, relatively it is small. The largest retail book store in the
country is a department store in New York or Philadelphia; but the
book department is not considered one of the important parts of the
store. The much-abused department store, by the way, has done much
to bring a new class of persons to acquire the book-buying habit.
It has made books common merchandise for the first time. Since the
“Century Dictionary,” to take a definite example, was thus made common
merchandise, the sets of it that have been sold are incomparably more
than were ever sold in any other way. Yet how small the book market yet
is, is shown by this fact--that a novel of which one hundred thousand
copies are sold reaches only one person in every eight thousand of the
population.
Do circulating libraries lessen book sales? Yes, I dare say they do.
But you will find that the publishers do not complain of them. They
are disposed to accept the comforting doctrine that everything which
encourages the reading of books in the end helps the sale of them. In
the end--yes. But for the moment probably no.
One man will tell you that he used regularly to buy a novel a
week--sometimes two novels. He was a pretty good customer of the
publishers; for fifty-two novels a year is about as many as the most
avaricious publisher could reasonably expect one man to buy. But now
he says he does not buy three a year. A circulating library will for
$5 bring him all he wants. The publishers have, therefore, lost him as
a good customer. On the other hand it is a working theory that every
subscriber to a circulating library who reads a novel and talks about
it at the woman’s club may induce somebody to buy a copy who otherwise
would never have heard of it. At any rate, the total number of novels,
or of books of other sorts, now sold is not less than the number that
was sold before the libraries found subscribers. The discussion is,
after all, a vain one. The publisher and the author must do the best
they can by the help of the libraries or in spite of them.
Yet I am sure that the great widening of the market for which we
are all looking will be found, when it is found, not by any special
machinery or mechanical device; but the person who will really find
it--or make it--will be a great writer. Whenever books are written that
are interesting enough to compel the attention of the whole people, the
poorest publishing house can sell them. The secret of success, after
all, is the secret of writing books that touch masses of men deeply
and directly. We have much to learn from the careers of such books as
“Progress and Poverty” and “Looking Backward.” They reached their great
sale not by the ingenuity of their publishers, nor by their literary
merit, but only because they carried messages to many minds. However
delusive these messages may be, they were sincere. The truth is that
the publisher (exalt him as I am trying my best to do) is, after all,
only a piece of machinery. The real force that makes itself felt in the
world that has to do with books is the initial force of the men and
women who write. Whenever a great mind, or a great sympathy, be found
which puts forth an appeal or a hope in the form of a book that has
the power to touch those emotions or aspirations that all men have in
common--then the trick’s done. The mechanical plans that we make have
power to carry only as far as the book has strength to go. If I had
five great living writers on my list, my publishing task would be easy.
For the broadening of the book market, then, what we need is
writers--writers of the proper quality. Of novels, we have enough and
to spare, such as they are. But not of good books of other sorts.
Let us take a hint from the novel writers. Twenty years ago or less
the American public was amusing itself with novels written by English
writers. But about that time came those story tellers, a whole army
of them, who began to write about life in different parts of our own
country. Of New England, Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins and Mrs. Austin
and many more; in the Middle West, Mr. Garland, Mr. Churchill, Mr.
Tarkington and half a hundred more; in New York, the author of “David
Harum,” Mr. Frederick, Mr. Bacheller and others; of the South, Mr.
Page, Miss Johnston, Miss Glasgow and more; and there are California
stories in profusion. In other words, an army of men and women began
about the same time to write stories of local history and manners.
Now there are other subjects that need to be written of just as much.
One such subject is science. The world is flooded with popular books
about science, but nearly all of them fail either in being accurate or
in being popular. There is a better opportunity now than there ever
was before for a man who really knows the most recent and scientific
achievements, and who can write in the language of the people. To many
people, “authoritative books” are dry books, but this is not what I
mean. Such books as I have in mind can be written only by men of the
best scientific equipment, but they can be written only by men who have
also a great deal of literary skill.
Another great subject about which good books are needed is--you may not
believe this--American history. Our political history has got itself
pretty voluminously written, and there is no lack of slapdash books in
distant imitation of Green’s “Short History of the English People.”
But most of these have been prepared out of newspaper files by men
who would not take their task seriously or who were not well prepared
either in matured knowledge or in literary skill to produce them. Then,
too, geographically considered, the history of less than one-fourth of
our territory has not yet been written. Southern history, for example,
is utterly unknown.
It would be easy to name a half-dozen other great subjects which
writers who now bring their manuscripts to the publishing houses are
neglecting. If, therefore, men and women who have the literary gift,
even to a reasonable degree, and who have literary ambition, would
frankly seek those two or three publishers who are real publishers and
would prove their ability to do serious work of this sort they would
be almost sure to find satisfactory careers before them. Of course,
one disadvantage of such work is that during its early stages no very
large financial returns can be expected. But if the work were done
well enough it would pay in the end--pay more money by far than a
professorship in science or in history or in literature pays.
All this leads me to this general remark--that the writing public does
not take the trouble to find out who the real publishers are. There is
a lack of coöperation between publishers and writers in what may be
called the formative period of the writer’s lives. A man who writes
a book sends it to some publishing house that is chosen by accident
or by personal acquaintance or by whim. The public seems to think
that one publishing house is as good as another. If a writer’s first
volume in this way falls into the hands of a publisher who does not
make the acquaintance of the writer, or who cannot make an appraisal
of his ability and promise, and who does not understand him, then the
writer, after an initial failure, of course, becomes discouraged. On
the other hand, all the publishers are so eager to get books that they
accept work which is not properly done, and on their part fail to put
themselves into such a relation to young authors as would help them to
their normal development.
If a man or woman, therefore, proposes to enter upon a literary career
his first duty is to make the acquaintance of a real publisher, to be
as frank with him as one must be with one’s physician or one’s lawyer.
If two such men work together seriously and without too great haste the
best results will be achieved for both, and the best results are not
likely to come in any other way.
If you start, then, to gossip intelligently about the book market or
about anything else with which a publisher has to do, and if you gossip
long enough, you will come back to the starting point of the whole
matter. What do we do or can we do to encourage the writing of good
books? And now we’ve run on a subject as deep as a well and as wide as
a door. In the multitude of counsellors about it there is confusion. In
the only other “confession” that is to follow this I shall try to show
how ignorant and mistaken all those are who differ with me about this
fundamental subject.