IV

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THE BOOKSHOP?

SOME time ago my friend Mr. William Harris Arnold told me that he had written a paper on the welfare of the bookstore. When it appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," I read it attentively, and I disagree with his conclusions. As it seems to me that the subject is one in which all who read should be interested, I should like to present my views for what they may be worth.

Mr. Arnold's remedy for the situation, admittedly difficult, in which the retail booksellers find themselves is to have publishers grant to booksellers "the option of taking books by outright purchase or on memorandum that is to say, on sale, and subject to return. I remember once, years ago, hearing the late Andrew Carnegie say to a body of business men that, if he were in a business in which it was impossible for him to tell, at least approximately, how much money he had made or lost in a given month, he would get out of that business. He said that the next best thing to making money was to know that you were not making it—and apply the remedy. Now, if a publisher should establish in any large way the custom of disposing of his publications "on sale," as the phrase is, I should like to know when, if ever, he could go before his creditors, represented

upon a success or a failure until it is too late to withdraw. And it has always been so. Sir Walter Scott, whose career as a publisher is not always remembered, said that the booksellers, as publishers were called in his day, were "the only tradesmen in the world who professedly and by choice dealt in what is called 'a pig in a poke,' publishing twenty books in hopes of hitting upon one good speculation, as a person buys shares in a lottery in hopes of gaining a prize"; and Sir Walter had reason to know, as had also Mark Twain.

I remember that, some years ago, a little book, "A Publisher's Confessions," was issued anonymously by Doubleday, Page & Co. It recited the difficulties, financial and other, of a firm of publishers, and is now generally understood to have been written by Walter Hines Page, our late Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The writer's conclusion was that men of such distinction as those who control the organizations known as Scribners, Macmillans, and others of like standing, could earn very much more by devoting their abilities to banking, railroads, or other lines of business; for, he said, "publishing as publishing is the least profitable of all professions, except preaching and teaching, to each of which it is a sort of cousin." And it is to this harassed person, perplexed, by reason of the nature of his calling, beyond most business men, that Mr. Arnold would add the financing of the countless bookstores, in many cases in incompetent hands, all over the country, from Maine to California. His suggestion is interesting,