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LONDON, May 1, 1925.

HE spring publishing season in London has been held up to some small extent by a binders' strike, but this has fortunately been settled before trade dislocation became too marked. In any case, according to my advices, the sales of books for the first quarter of the year have been none too brisk. At first it seemed as if the season would be fair to middling. But March showed a falling off. Whatever the causes, and of course there have been innumerable explanations, as there always are of any slump, it seems to be true that books all round have sold less well than the booksellers had a right to expect. I hear of several quite noteworthy publications which were bought freely by the trade upon the assumption that they would sell, and which are still to be seen in the shops of the purchasers. They have not been bought by the larger public, which happened not to want them. One's sympathy goes out to the booksellers, who were justified in expecting large sales, and who now find themselves burdened with heavy stocks which they will perhaps never unload. It is quite true that a shrewd man could have foretold that some of these books had no chance, but that man would have read the books, and this is a task for which no bookseller has any time. When so many books are published each week, no bookseller can spare the necessary attention to read one half of them. He has to depend upon his

"nose", and sometimes his "nose" is badly at fault. The bookseller is rarely a trained literary man, and the trained literary man is rarely a judge of the public taste. Hence the unsatisfactory state of affairs in the book trade. This state is bound to continue until there is a diminution in the number of books published. I have been waiting all my life for the requisite diminution, and it never comes. Publishers, it appears, are optimists, or if that is too strong a term for them, "opportunists" will do as well. They will always take chances upon books which even I would reject scornfully. Few unprofessional readers are aware of the many reasons for the publication of quite half the books which appear year after year. Publishers and booksellers are a sporting lot. They often know very well that they can never get home upon a book, yet they persist in publishing it and in purchasing copies of it. The publishers think that by publishing a certain book they will encourage the author of that book to write another one that will sell. They see promise in it, they hope that something will turn up later, they wish to please somebody, they wish to be associated with something good even though it be unsalable, and so on. The booksellers have equally generous impulses. They feel that although they can never hope to sell their stock they ought to have copies of this doubtful book upon their shelves, or they have a fancy for a particular author or a par

ticular kind of book, etc. The whole trade is imperfect, and it is often wrongheaded, as one sees whenever one tries to get a particular book which has happened not to have struck anybody's fancy; but the difficulties of it are enormous, and I should be the last person to take the easy way of condemning a trade which is on the whole well intentioned.

The strike of the binders all arose from an attempt which is being made to return to sixpenny books. As most people know, the sixpenny book, bound, is an impossibility nowadays. It simply cannot be produced. And yet some bold men thought they would reintroduce it. They have done so. Naturally this has involved terrible cuts in price, and when it came to the binding of these books, with pseudogilt lettering and adornment, by means of a marvelous American machine which I believe does everything except write the books, the question of wages arose. As far as I can tell, the trouble began in a house of binders in which the son of Sir Hall Caine is concerned; and it arose as the result of a misunderstanding.

Fortunately, although the strike (which resembled rather a lockout, as strikes very often do) spread to other houses, everything has now been smoothed down, and until another cause of conflict arises we are to have peace once again in the book trade. I am glad of this. Personally I have no use for sixpenny books, but there are many people who want to read books, to whom the price of sixpence is a severe temptation; therefore it is impossible to find fault with those who are endeavoring to put these books upon the market. Naturally the books involved are not as a rule books upon which royalties are payable to their authors.

Speaking of this matter reminds me that a common fallacy has lately found an exponent in the London press. The fallacy to which I refer is the one which assumes that there is enmity between current literature and that which dates from past times. I will quote the letter which appeared the other day in the "Daily News". Here it is:

AUTHORS LIVE AND DEAD

Sir, Your reviewer complains that a new Jane Austen fragment has not received half the enthusiasm of welcome it deserves. As a present-day author whose work is liable to be crowded out of the public consideration by such enterprise, I protest most stoutly against this eternal raking up of fragments by long-dead authors. In point of fact, only an elect few in England to-day can read Jane Austen's completed masterpieces, leave alone her literary odds-andends. GILBERT COLLINS.

Bournemouth.

Mr. Collins is wrong in all his facts. In the first place, the "elect few" who buy and read the novels and fragments of Jane Austen is probably larger by some thousands than the number of those who buy the works of any of our leading "literary" novelists. Mr. Collins would probably be surprised if the sales of Miss Austen's works in various editions were revealed to him. He would probably be surprised to learn the number of non-highbrow people (I include myself in this number) who read the whole of Miss Austen's works through at least once a year, with never

failing zest. failing zest. But this is a minor point, which I mention only for the purpose of illustrating the mere news value of a review of a new volume, however fragmentary, by Miss Austen. Where

Gilbert Collins is most seriously wrong is in his belief that he is crowded out of the public consideration by such an enterprise as the publication of a new Austen fragment. He is evidently a

"protectionist", and the fallacy of "protectionism" is one of the most pathetic there is. I believe it to be a fact that in the market for children's books one volume which has a very large sale does interfere with the success of other children's books published in the same season. In 1923, Mr. Kipling published a book of tales for Boy Scouts, and although these tales were not considered very good the sales of the collection were enormous. Everybody bought copies of Kipling to give away, and nobody bought copies of the other children's books to give away. Result, a slump in the sales of all other children's books. Last year, A. A. Milne brought out a book of verses for children called "When We Were Very Young", and this book was of such superlative quality that all parents and uncles and aunts bought copies of it to give to their young relations and acquaintances (together with some few copies for themselves). The book, I am credibly informed, sold something in the neighborhood of forty thousand copies in England alone. Result, a slump in the sales of all other children's books published in the same season. But the market for children's books is a very restricted one, and is not comparable with any other market in the book trade.

With books for grown ups, the sales of which depend almost wholly upon personal recommendation, it is true to say that every bullet finds its billet, and that every book has the circulation it deserves. There are some books which nothing can sell, and some which nothing can stop from selling. Such fortunes are not affected one way or another by the publication of other books (at least in England, where the library system is in full swing). They depend solely upon the nature of the

sales are regulated, not by the number of rival books published in the same season, but by the number of persons who wish to read the works of each author.

Taste is a temperamental thing. Mr. Collins has not lost the sale of one single copy by the publication of "Sanditon". Nor, to take the superficial point of his letter, has he lost a single word of commendation in the press. The reason I have never read one of Mr. Collins's books is not that I bought a copy of "Sanditon" upon the day of publication, but that I have not yet felt an irresistible urge to read Mr. Collins. However many copies of "Sanditon" I might buy, I should still read a book by Mr. Collins if I wanted to. I have read a number of books during the last twelve months by writers no better known than Mr. Collins. It has never entered my head to choose between him and Miss Austen. Nor, I think, has Mr. Collins suffered in any other way through the publication of "Sanditon". If he is young, as I suppose him to be, Mr. Collins must cultivate patience. When he is old, and full of riches, and of enormous news value to the press, he will welcome any fragment of Miss Austen's that may appear. He will be all for Free Trade. He will know that every book published, so far from checking him, is in reality creating a potential market for him, since it is spreading a conviction that literature is a thing that matters extraordinarily, and fostering a taste for the best work that Mr. Collins can do.

One book which was recently forced upon my attention by an admirer was called "The Long Way Round", and was written by one Michael Maurice. I do not know Mr. Maurice's name, and I gather that he is the author of only one other book. "The Long Way Round" is a sort of detective book, and it begins, I am sorry to say, with the following words:

On a certain Tuesday in April, when Grace had counted nineteen centuries and approximately a score of years, Henry Stafford caught, as usual, the Ten-Five express from Cambridge to Liverpool Street en route for his Town office-and his face was never seen again in this world of men and affairs.

Now I am prepared to swear that a book which begins in this way could never be a good book. In the first place, what on earth is the good of going such a "long way round" to say nineteen-twenty-something? This opening is a fair sample of the author's literary style. It gives a hint of the confused verbosity of the whole book. And it adds an illumination to the story itself. Nevertheless, for a person not easily jarred by improbability and an intolerably facetious style, the story has its interest. I must admit that I had guessed the riddle by the two hundredth page, but only because, being a professional novelist, I knew that no writer could expect to keep a reader's sympathy with a young wife who had lost her husband and who immediately allowed the detective in search of him to make love to her. There must be, I argued, some disclosure at the end of the book which shall gloss over these horrid scenes. Other readers, including the man who commended the story to me, were less perceptive. For this reason I venture to suggest that here is a mystery story in which the mystery is not immediately to be guessed by the reader; it is also a relief from the highly

cross word detective tale which is being manufactured so steadily at the present time, in which suspicion is thrown from one person to another until it is no longer a matter of interest to detect the real criminal.

A very important decision has just been given in the English law courts on a question of copyright. It may not be known in America that the new English Copyright Act (it is fourteen or fifteen years old now) gives copyright to any work for fifty years after the author's death (in the case of posthumously published work for fifty years after publication). At the end of thirty years, however, any book may be published by any firm of publishers on payment to the author's heirs of a royalty of ten per cent upon the publishing price of all copies sold. The first author of any note to whom this new scheme applies is Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894, and whose work is copyrighted until 1944. At the end of last year, it became possible for any publisher to publish Stevenson's works on payment to Stevenson's heir of the legal royalty. Messrs. Dent, among others, wished to avail themselves of the opportunity to reprint Stevenson in their Everyman's Library. But as we know, Stevenson's works are short, and so Messrs. Dent conceived the notion of putting several of them into one volume. They proposed to pay Stevenson's heir ten per cent upon that volume, and not upon each book contained in the volume. Naturally, Lloyd Osbourne objected, because the Act seemed to him to indicate that a royalty was to be paid upon each work by his stepfather. Mr. Justice Romer has decided in favor of Messrs. Dent, who are to print "Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”,