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The bookseller, like every one else, goes by experience. It is, or has been, his experience that collections of short stories do not sell well. And this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at short story volumes. Where there is a name that will command attention—Alice Brown, Theodore Dreiser—or where a special appeal is possible, as in Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 191-, books made up of short tales may sell. But there are depressing precedents.
In his interesting article on The Publishing Business, appearing in 1916 in the Publishers’ Weekly and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution as a modern instance of a special sort of book finding its own very special, but surprisingly large, public. “Nine booksellers out of ten ‘passed’ it when the traveller brought it round,” observes Mr. Scott. “Fortunately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of the expert, and public attention was secured.” Was the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not. Creative Evolution is nothing to tie up your money in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel.
Mr. Scott’s article, which is inconclusive, in our opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are like each other no two books are really the same article. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp; many books, and here we are by no means limited to fiction, have whatever unity comes from the authorship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elusively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may be confined almost wholly to the presence of the same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that The Virginian and The Pentecost of Calamity are both the work of Owen Wister.
No! Two books are most often and emphatically not the same article. Mr. Scott is wholly right when he points out every book should have advertising, or other attention, peculiar to itself. A method of reporting one book will not do for another, any more than a publisher’s circular describing one book will do to describe a second. The art of reporting books or other news, like the art of advertising books or other commodities, is one of endless differentiation. In the absence of real originality, freshness and ideas, both objects go unachieved or else are achieved by speciousness, not to say guile. You, for example, do not really believe that by reading Hannibal Halcombe’s How to Heap Up Happiness you will be able to acquire the equivalent of a college education in 52 weeks. But somewhere in How to Heap Up Happiness Mr. Halcombe tells how he made money or how he learned to enjoy pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution of his unoriginal domestic troubles—any one of which you may crave to know and honest information of which will probably send you after the book.