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The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news value in the book he is dealing with at the moment he is dealing with it. This needs illustration.
On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books relating to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until the foreseen end came, when the interest in them would have been as great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a historical or biographical sort.
But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world was transformed. The reaction in the normal person was intense. In an instant war books of several pronounced types became intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the War, by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentarily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland.
The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all. On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as interesting public records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, were not diminished either in interest or in importance.
Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two apiece.