Our literary deluge and some of its deeper waters

Front matter

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Contents

IV. Fashions in Collecting .

V. Profits in Rare Books

VI. Parkman and Some of his "Sources'

II

The causes of our deluge, once we reflect on the intellectual history of the past twenty or thirty years, are plainly to be seen. They lie in the greater efficiency of the common schools, the increase in attendance at colleges, the enormous growth of libraries, free and otherwise, the spread of such systems of instruction as are provided at Chautauqua, the growth of periodical literature, from reading which the public passes by a natural process of intuition to reading books, the free travelling libraries, and along with these causes the very important one of the general decline in the cost of printing books and magazines. To get an education has become the mere matter of taking the time to get it. One lies within the reach of all who seek it. How keen and widespread has become the appetite for reading is seen in the familiar fact that popular magazines find their largest support in small and distant communities. Many purely literary periodicals have their subscribers scattered through small towns from Maine to Texas, from Florida to the state of Washington. Readers in such localities have become a mainstay of book publishers also.

The natural outcome of this is a tremendous growth 9 in the number of those who know how to write; who have acquired ideas, power to express themselves, and self-confidence in saying what they think in print. Names often appear on title-pages that were unknown before, even to periodical literature. Many of these writers for years had been acquiring rich stores of knowledge, with literary taste and literary feeling. They have written out of full minds, — as amateurs, it is true, but showing real love and knowledge of books, clearness of understanding, joyousness in work, culture, purpose, power.

Then again, books have become more attractive to the eye. It is beyond dispute that they are better manufactured everywhere, both as to print, binding, and cover design. Even the ordinary novel is more certain to have a cloth than a paper cover. Paper covers as an infliction have definitely passed away. Perhaps the most disastrous failure the book trade has ever seen was made by a house which in the last years of its existence poured them forth with unrestrained profusion. Its failure in considerable degree was due to the unprofitableness of paper-bound books. Cheap as they were, the public would not buy them. Nor has the adoption of cloth covers in any way tended to lessen the quantity of books published, but quite the contrary. Improved methods of distribution meanwhile have sprung up, mainly in the department stores and in methods of advertising, through which have been made possible enormous sales never known before.

CAUSES I I

England has presented conditions that have operated favourably in other ways. Less expensive books have come from that country; not paper-covered ones, but a single volume where formerly there were three. After a brave and long-extended fight worthy of a better cause, the three-volume novel has received its death-blow. It is not many years since book-buying in England was a pursuit possible only to men with money to spare; but the buying of a popular book is as feasible to a lean English purse now as it is to an American.

Moreover, it has become very easy to get a book printed, being a mere question of paying a printer, and ordinarily $300 will be quite sufficient. Paper, type-setting, and binding have all been growing cheaper. We have actually no safeguards except the cost. The mind is bewildered when it contemplates the stores of books the Library of Congress must eventually contain, — those it now contains and those it will have added to its store when present conditions have prevailed some generations longer, — a few kernels of wheat lost in heaps of chaff.

Another contributing cause has been foreign wars and what we call territorial expansion. Men's interests and their visions have been widened. New activity has gone into the literary habit as into most other occupations, and here we encounter a familiar fact in history. In the life of nations it is times of war and times just subsequent to them that have seen produced some of the most famous books of the world. Prolonged periods of peace have often been marked by few books, and notably by commonplace and unimportant ones. From the Napoleonic wars date the poems and some of the early prose writings of Scott, many of Coleridge's poems, Wordsworth's and Byron's — some of the greatest names English literature gathered to her roll of honour in the last century. Nor do these names exhaust the possible list : Landor, Lamb, and Southey belong also to that period. England's earlier conflict, when she warred with her colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, would tell a similar story. Burns was then writing his songs, Boswell collecting material for his biography, and Gibbon telling his story of a great nation's decline and fall. France herself, from the outbreak of the Revolution until the battle of Waterloo, a period of twenty-six years of almost constant warfare, saw produced some of the best-remembered works in modern French literature.

Details from the totals of books published, when carefully studied, afford gleams of hope. Books of theology, poetry, and education have remained about the same in numbers from year to year; but there has been shown in this country an increase of as many as 200 among historical books and ioo among new novels, with still greater increase among reprinted novels, which of course points to interest in standard fiction, and of these the increase has recently been 200.

These figures will not surprise those accustomed to observe tendencies. Novel-writing has been a growing pursuit, and no signs of decay appear. But it is the novel of adventure and of history that gains the warmest welcome. No writers find such rewards as do successful writers of these books ; nowhere, indeed, is more notable literary art now in evidence. Men and women, after all, are interested in nothing so deeply as in human nature — its fortunes, history, manifestations, and possibilities. To the end of time fiction will be universally read. The tales found in old Egypt, the folk-lore that pervades the literature of every land and epoch, proclaim how wide this interest has been in the past, and sales of novels proclaim how permanent it still remains.

The greatest source of gratification respecting fiction, however, may be derived from the increase in the number of reprints. Samuel Rogers once remarked, " When a new book comes out I read an old one." The public obviously begins to follow his example to some purpose. How rich a storehouse exists to be opened up each year for the delight and admiration of readers ! We may not hope in our time to see produced again such work as the masters did, though an occasional example may be produced worthy of mention ; but with Fielding, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and all that noble company of the dead who still live, the time need never come when readers will actually lack for good novels to read, or publishers for good ones to reprint.

In the increase among books of history doubtless lies the most suggestive fact. This reflects known conditions. Never before have historical studies been so popular with so many classes of persons. Not only are the graver and grander topics receiving unwonted attention, but the minor ones, the local annals, the annals of industries and organizations, and those of individual lives ; and this increase promises to become even greater before it declines. The fields yet to be explored are many and the material worth the finding is of vast amount.

A distinctive feature of books in this country has been those relating to our own history, whether they were fiction or more sober history. Here we see disclosed the interest in our own storied past which the patriotic societies have done so much to foster. The tendency will scarcely stop here. The next step seems almost inevitably to be the writing of better local histories. Out of this are already coming incentives to the several states, our own included, to print their historical records, which have so long been permitted to rest in archives hidden from the public gaze.

Fiction now embraces over twenty-five per cent of the whole number of books published. History and biography combined are next on the list. Theology stands third and music last. The classification shows conclusively how men and women are interested in nothing so deeply as in the vital aspects of their own race — its past, present, and future — books relating to human life as pictured in fiction, as lived in the past, and as it may be hereafter. The growth of this interest has clearly been commensurate with the spread of universal education.

Nearly one-half of all the books published come under these three headings. The relative numbers represent in what seems due proportion the various orders of mind found among men and women. Fiction appeals to the largest number, because it appeals most powerfully to the lower grades of intelligence. History properly comes next, and theology, in which only the least common minds take interest, comes last.

Very notable in all this growth has been the rise of New York to its supreme place as a publishing centre. Early in the last century Philadelphia held the chief place in rank. Supremacy then passed to Boston. During the last quarter of a century the publishing business has become more and more one of the distinctions of New York. Statistics on this subject, compiled a few years ago, are interesting. They came from what may be accepted as authentic sources, and gave the number of books published by a few leading houses in the United States.

The list was imperfect in some important respects. It omitted a large English house now on an American business foundation, and all the houses in Chicago, where the importance of publishing interests is growing. One large Boston house was also omitted, and smaller firms there and elsewhere. But the statement as far as it went was extremely interesting, disclosing as it did the ascendency of New York as the book centre of the whole country. Here we had 654 books from New York, with only 150 from Boston and 113 from Philadelphia. 1

It is impossible that the inclusion of all the houses in the country in these lists would have modified New York's overwhelming lead. The one English house omitted would alone have offset for New York nearly all the houses from Boston. It would be entirely safe to affirm that more than two-thirds of all the books published in the country now come from New York. Had we at hand corresponding figures for magazines, the showing would be equally favourable to New York. Boston has only one magazine of distinct rank to set down, and Philadelphia only one.

It is also in New York that the most important sales of books at auction take place. Boston, for example, in all its book history down to 1899, had witnessed the sale of only thirty-six books that fetched as much as $200, whereas in New York had been sold 275 books for that sum or a larger one. From the point of view of totals realized for collections sold, the results are equally striking in their showing of the supreme place New York holds.

1 It appeared that D. Appleton & Co. were first among the houses named, having produced 123 books in the year. Then came Charles Scribner's Sons with 121, the J. B. Lippincott Company with 113, Houghton, Mifflin and Company with 104, Longmans, Green & Company with 104, Dodd, Mead and Company with 101, Harper & Brothers with 89, G. P. Putnam's Sons, with 46, and the Century Company with 31.

This concentration of literary interests in one place has operated as concentration always does, in facilitating methods of distribution. Combined with the magazines and literary periodicals, now so numerous in New York, it has been a very active force in the popularization of books as reading-matter.

Amid these new and potent factors in contemporary literature have come changes in methods of selling books. No more remarkable influence has entered the trade than the influence of the dry-goods stores, where departments devoted to the sale of the day's popular books have grown to large proportions. Probably the regular book-stores in their totals of trade have not really suffered. What they have lost in one direction, they may have made up in others, — for one thing in what are known as collector's books, for another in fine editions, wellbound books, and in limited editions. Moreover, it should always be remembered that the number of persons who buy books has enormously increased. The number of books published and the sales of successful books present striking contrasts to the corresponding totals for ten and twenty years ago. Such sales as Du Maurier and Maclaren, Hall Caine and Kipling, Stevenson, Churchill, Paul Leicester Ford, and Mrs. Ward have had, were then absolutely unknown.

The larger view of this change will scarcely awaken regrets. Even houses which have suffered from it have probably seen a way to other profits and to other methods bringing compensations. The public has bought more books and has read more; the general level of knowledge and culture has correspondingly been raised. And this increase will continue. More and more men are acquiring the laudable habit of buying a book as cheerfully as they buy a handful of cigars, and women as willingly as they buy a pair of gloves.

Meanwhile the need remains for some step by which the small bookseller, dealing in current literature, may have his trade restored to him. Wide interest has accordingly been taken in the action of leading publishers in making an agreement which shall cause its members to deal in copyrighted books, exclusive of fiction, at net prices. Members of the association they have formed desire to restore bookselling to its old-time dignity and usefulness (a dignity which it now possesses in Germany through legislative enactment) by maintaining uniform prices.

As everybody knows, the small bookseller has not been able to maintain his own when a department store in his neighbourhood or out of it has found it convenient to cut prices, sometimes merely for advertising purposes, looking for profits from other articles sold to customers who came to buy books and lingered to purchase other things. The book departments in general stores have become so important that it is believed their proprietors are willing to maintain them on their own merits and profits. In fact, members of the association believe that the department stores will in the end find it more profitable to maintain prices at the point where they are held byregular booksellers. Success for this action will promise success for the cause which its publishers have made it to represent — the cause of the bookseller, the man who is only now and then a publisher, and of whom there are thousands of representatives in this country that have been threatened for some years with eventual annihilation.

Ill

PECUNIARY REWARDS

The sale from the Arnold collection, in May, 1901, of a copy of the first edition, containing the first title-page, of Milton's " Paradise Lost," for $830, may or may not be the highest price that will ever be paid for a copy of that scarce book; but it starts reminiscences of the strangely unequal rewards which authorship has given from the earliest to the latest times. The money paid to Milton for the copyright of that poem was exactly $50, in instalments of $25 each, his estate afterward receiving an additional $25.

Along with this item may be placed the statement that Nansen, from one of his books describing his Polar explorations, was understood to have received not less than $100,000. Writing books sometimes pays, but the rewards often stand in curious relation to the fact whether the book is pure literature or mere descriptive writing on a topic in which there happened to be some world-wide interest. Nansen did not get his money simply for writing his book ; he got it for going farther north than any other man had gone, for living in Arctic parts during a prolonged season, and for reaching home sound and

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well to tell his tale. From Stanley's books the same moral could be drawn.

Milton was an explorer into an unknown world. He went farther among the possibilities of the English tongue than any other man save one had gone before him. The world, however, did not know what he had done until long afterward. He, in the meantime, had sold his book for what he could get, and the world, when it saw what he had accomplished, no longer had a chance to reward him. Nansen and Stanley created their public before they wrote their books ; Milton, after he had written his and sold the copyright.

Nansen's success and Stanley's came not merely from the renown of their names, but from the deeds they had performed. An author may have a great name and yet fail to write a successful book. Stanley afterward published a volume called "Through South Africa." His fame had in no wise grown dim, and the land in which he won it was again his theme ; but his book awakened no interest whatever. Three weeks after its publication his own American publishers had not heard of it, and no American edition has ever been brought out.

The secret of this indifference lay in the fact that Stanley recorded no great achievement. His book comprised merely a series of newspaper letters from a region fast passing into the list of wellordered and prosperous states. It was cast aside, while James Bryce's weighty book on the same subject, issued at the same time, aroused wide interest, bearing as it did to South Africa the relation which his " American Commonwealth " bears to the United States. Stanley's book was a commonplace traveller's chronicle, for which its author had created no public waiting to receive it.

Wherever first editions have sold for great prices, the Kilmarnock Burns for $2800, Hawthorne's " Fanshawe" for $412, Shelley's "Alastor" for $350, Goldsmith's " Vicar of Wakefield " for $630, Browning's " Pauline " for $700, and Poe's " Tamerlane " for $2050, they were books for which, when first issued, there had not been created great demand. There was small sale for them, and hence they became scarce. An active demand afterward advanced the price. There will come to Nansen's book and to Stanley's, out of which fortunes were made, never any competition for first editions. A few years have already retired them from active places in book sales. Milton and Goldsmith, Burns and Shelley, Tennyson and Hawthorne, Longfellow and Poe meanwhile survive to charm new generations. Prices for first editions of their works will go higher still. Nansen and Stanley will survive perhaps as names on maps. Their deeds will get a few lines in the cyclopaedias, and that will be all.

Strange, indeed, in other ways, have been the rewards which literature has bestowed. When we think of the princely sums writers have earned in our day, Hall Caine, Kipling, Du Maurier, and Sien-

PECUNIARY REWARDS 23

kiewicz, not to name Mr. Churchill and Mr. Ford, it is startling to remember Burns and his immortal poverty, or Milton selling "Paradise Lost" for that picayune. A negro poet in our day, Paul L. Dunbar, does better than Burns or Milton did. Scarcely a year had passed after his " Lyrics of Lowly Life " came out, when more than 5000 copies had been sold. He was the most widely read poet of a year. In England one of the magazines, following a French custom, had " crowned " a volume of verse by Stephen Phillips, and the newspapers chronicled as a great success the sale of 500 copies, with another edition of 700 as on the press. But here was the coloured man, whom nobody had crowned, boasting 5000 copies.

It is not poetry, nor is it other literature of a creative kind, that wins the largest pecuniary rewards. It is usually the man who performs some great feat, perhaps in exploration, and then writes a book. It was this fact that made General Grant a most successful writer, made Stanley another, and Nansen a third. The returns these authors gained raised them to independence.

Of all writings save those just named, it is fiction that yields the largest returns, because the sales are so enormous. The contrast between the returns which Gibbon received and those which poured into the lap of Scott would probably be as great, and perhaps even greater, were they writing in our times. With the increase Gibbon might now secure, there would be corresponding increase for Scott. Froude in his later life had an ampler reward than Gibbon ; and ampler than Scott's have been the sales of Dickens and Thackeray, Mrs. Ward, Du Maurier, and Crawford. When " Saracinesca" a few years ago was announced as already in its one hundred and tenth thousand, " Mr. Isaacs " in its fifty-fifth, and " Sant' Ilario " (a sequel though it be) in its forty-fourth, one was tempted to count up what even the ordinary royalty would return to Mr. Crawford ; but here we might forget that the modern novelist often secures greater sums than a simple fixed royalty would have yielded, because he sells for a large lump sum on the "progressive royalty" plan.

But even Mr. Crawford's sales have since been far outdone. In the late summer of 1901, the following reports were made for other books, as here named ; and these figures have, of course, been increased since then.

David Harum 520,000 copies

Richard Carvel 420,000 "

The Crisis 320,000 "

Janice Meredith 275,000 "

Eben Holden 265,000 "

Ouincy Adams Sawyer 200,000 "

To Have and to Hold 285,000 "

The Christian 200,000 "

The Eternal City 100,000 "

An English Woman's Love Letters .... 250,000 "

Black Rock >

The Sky Pilot } together nearly 500,000

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Even if we reckon the royalty on these books as only ten per cent, handsome sums of money were secured for writing them, sums which in authorship may be called princely.

When we turn to Jane Austen, another series of facts confronts us. Before George Eliot's time and Charlotte Bronte's, she was unquestionably the greatest of female writers of fiction. But she died in that humble habitation in rural England quite ignorant of the fame her pen had won. Only four of her works had seen the light when she died, and for them all she had been paid less than $3500, and for one received only $750. One of her books had been returned unread, while another had been sold for $50 to a publisher who was glad to return it unprinted and receive his money back. If recognition in her own lifetime was slight, when it came it was emphatic, Scott speaking the loudest word — entirely sincere praise. In his diary Scott describes her talent as " the most wonderful I have met with."

Not more than five years ago some letters were printed which had passed between Burns and one of his publishers, George Thomson. Thomson on one occasion sent Burns $5 for six songs — compensation which, in its absurd smallness, surpasses what Hawthorne got for some of the " Twice Told Tales " — $3 each. At the time this Burns correspondence was published, there was sold in Edinburgh a copy of the Kilmarnock edition of " Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect." It brought rather more than

$2800 — a sum in excess of all that Burns ever received for all his writings — a sum, moreover, which in his lifetime might have purchased a splendid farm and made him an independent young Scotch laird.

Late years have seen some changes in the spirit that prevails in the relations of authors and publishers — an unquestionable change in the proportion of profits the author receives. A better understanding each of the other's point of view has arisen, and greater willingness to make concessions. Advantages have resulted for both — advantages which we know to be considerable for authors (at least for the very popular ones) and which probably have not been unimportant for the publishers. In the early times differences that often were bitter led to accusations and assumptions that were far too sweeping. Because many publishers were rich and authors were commonly poor, it was hastily inferred that injustice had been done. This conclusion lost sight of the fact that a publishing firm might consist of two or three or five individuals only, while the authors for whom they had published books numbered some hundreds. Two men, or three or five, who were publishers, had thus been made rich, while some hundreds of authors, while getting certain returns for their books, had not received enough to make them also rich. Had the result been otherwise and the authors become rich, much greater profits would obviously have been necessary.

The question arises whether these hundreds of

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authors got the proper proportion of the profits : did they as a body share as well as the body of two, or three, or five, in the firm of publishers ? We have no statistics to help us to arrive at any definite conclusion regarding this ; but it would certainly be interesting could we know, for a period of, say, ten years, what proportion existed between the net profits of a successful publishing house and the total sum paid by that house to its authors for the same period. Here we should have facts of considerable service in forming conclusions. But there would still remain a source of grievance for the successful author, for he, in any such reckoning, would be the man who virtually paid for the mistakes of the publishers in bringing out books in which there was not profit, but an actual loss.

It is unlikely that these grievances ever will be entirely adjusted so long as publishers remain a necessity. Obviously the author cannot do without them. Authors have often attempted to become publishers and have usually failed and sometimes have failed memorably. Authors of great popularity have made the experiment, and they too have failed. The difficulty arises from the conditions in which an author's work must reach a market — in a sense, his work is raw material requiring manufacture, advertisement, and sale. It is unmarketable until it has been subjected to such treatment, and success in reaching literary markets comes of long experience.

The publisher may be regarded as the agent of an author, employed to manufacture and sell for him, or as a servant in the sense that a lawyer or a doctor is the servant of those who employ him, or he may be viewed as a mechanic or tradesman, whose services the author seeks. But there exists one great difference in the relation in most cases. The publisher as an agent is greater than the author as the principal ; he has the larger means, the more independence and power. All the same, it has been demonstrated by long experience that the author cannot dispense with him, and his wisest course will be to make the best terms with him that he can.

IV

How little the world knows of its greatest men is probably better illustrated in literature than in anyother calling. One thing almost absolutely proven is that the greatest writers fail of immediate recognition. Recognition starts from the top, or from what Matthew Arnold called "the saving remnant," and thence spreads slowly downward. The regard of the masses never creates real fame. What the masses create is notoriety, while fame comes from the recognition which the best minds bestow. It starts at the top, and the top maintains it, — a small group, silent but firm-set as granite, and it alone secures to any author a title to enduring remembrance. How few are the men and women who ever read Milton or Homer, Dante or Shakespeare, in one generation, compared with those who read the popular novels by which authors may be made rich in a single year. Emerson many years ago put this truth in striking and concrete form when he said of Plato, that at no one time had Plato ever had more than a handful of readers, hardly enough to pay for printing his books, and yet his writings had come down through the centuries, to us, the strangers of another age, " as though God brought them in His hands."

Some of the foremost names in nineteenth-century literature illustrate what magnificent justice has come to writers who, in the morning of their work, were among the great unknown. We mayrecall Emerson's early appreciation of Carlyle, which moved Carlyle to say he could hear only " one voice, the voice from Concord." Emerson caused to be issued here an edition of Carlyle's essays, and Carlyle returned the act of appreciation by bringing out, in 1841, a London edition of the essays of lynerson. Nowhere in literature have we had a finer story than this — a tale of recognition, each of the other, which has since been beautifully confirmed by the whole world of culture.

Emerson, said Carlyle in a preface, was perhaps not so remarkable for what he had said or done as for what he had not. With uncommon interest, Carlyle had learned that here was " one of those rare men who have, withal, the invaluable talent of sitting still." That an educated man like Emerson " should retire for long years into rustic obscurity, and, amid the all-pervading jingle of dollars, and loud chaffering of ambitions and promotions, should quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, sit down to spend his life, not in mammon worship or the hunt for reputation, influence, place, or any other advantage whatsoever, this," said that wise man from Craigenputtoch, " when we get a notice of it, is a thing really worth noting."