OUR GOVERNMENT SUBVENTION TO LITERATURE

M. Paul Otlet, the Secretary of the Brussels International Bibliographic Institute, places the total annual book production of the entire globe at approximately 150,000 volumes per annum.

Senor Eduardo Ravarro Salvador, a distinguished Spanish author, has compiled with greatest care statistics of a similar nature which are printed in the Madrid Heraldo, and his estimate quite closely confirms the other, aggregating approximately a little over 160,000 for the year 1911.

A dozen years ago, when book production was smaller than today, Mr. Percy L. Parker, in the New York Independent, gave the total number of books issued by thirteen countries in an average year as 77,250, which would be not as large as the estimates of either Senor Salvador or M. Otlet, but is nevertheless of use in confirming them, and increasing the probability that a mean of the three estimates may be quite substantially near to the truth.

Mr. Joseph B. Gilder, in an article in the New York Times, for January 25, 1914, states that our Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mr. Page of the publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co., said not long before departing for his post, that American men spend less for books than for neckties, and American women less than for the buttons on their frocks. The same article quotes the Boston bookseller, Mr. W. B. Clarke, who is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Booksellers Association, as saying that the per capita consumption of books is less than of any other commodity.

Following Mr. Gilder's article, and using the statistics of the Statesman's Year Book, as to population, and of the World Almanac, as to book production in 1910, we find that in Switzerland there was one book printed for every 872 population; in Japan one to 1,224; in Germany one to 2,075; in France one to 3,809; in Great Britain one to 3,808; and in the United States one to 7,295. In 1911 our showing was not quite so good.

According to statistics prepared for the World Almanac, and to sources indicated above, and others, the number of books issued annually in the United States varies in late years but little either way from 10,000. It would appear that the United States issued roughly only about six per cent of the total, and if we deduct new editions and translations, only about four per cent of the total.

Further, by an examination of these various and varying statistics from the best experts, it is evident that little Switzerland, which is scarcely one-eighteenth the size of our State of Texas, and whose population is less than one-twenty-fifth that of the United States, publishes more than three-quarters as many books per annum as we do; in other words, ten times as many books per million inhabitants per annum are published by Switzerland as by the United States. In fact she leads the world in this particular.

By similar analysis, we find that the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, which in book production are next in rank to Switzerland, have an output of about six times ours. Germany, France, the British Empire, Holland, Italy, Austria greatly surpass us, all running, per million of population, from three and one-half to five times our output. Roumania, with one-thirteenth our population, publishes one-fourth as many books; Japan with slightly more than half our population, publishes four times as many; in other words, eight times as many per million of population; but a large number of these are pamphlets: so instead of publishing in percentages eight times as many, she really issues an average of between three and four times as many, which makes our showing even then bad enough.

In the density of our ignorance, we sometimes think and speak of Russia as a benighted country, forgetting that in her middle and upper circles, she is vibrant with intellectual and artistic energy. In book production, even though the showing on her side is distorted by the countless millions of her ignorant peasant class, who number about 79 per cent of her population, we find that she produces two and three-quarters times as many books as we do, and has a population only one and two-thirds times larger. In other words, she materially exceeds us in book production.

This leaves us to seek in Spain the only one of the civilized nations of the entire globe that publishes so few books per million of population per annum as we do; and it is questionable whether we are able to hold the lead over even her: for an analysis of the statistics of both Otlet and Salvador places us slightly behind united Spain and Portugal, the figures for the two being given in conjunction. Beneath these there is no lower depth.

Germany produces more books than any other nation in the seven highly creditable classes of educational, arts and sciences, belles lettres, theology, medicine, voyages, and law.

Italy holds first rank in political economy; France in history, poetry and drama; and the United States ties France for first place in one item only, books on sport. That is our best bid for a premier place.

The Publishers' Weekly, the semi-official organ of the book trade, in its issue of Jan. 30, 1904, contains the following statement:

The great decrease in all the more serious departments of literature, as well as in some of the lighter ones, is a curious and unexplainable condition of our book production. Scientific and philosophical writings are as conspicuous through their absence as are the simply amusing books.

Moreover, this backward condition of America's book production is a new situation that has existed for a generation only. That this is so, is shown in various ways, but particularly in the parlous condition of the retail bookselling trade. A generation ago, when our population was a little less than one-half what it is today, there were in the United States, it is estimated, between three and four thousand booksellers carrying fairly good stocks of books representative of history, light science, economics, art, biography, travel, poetry, essays, fiction and belles lettres generally.

There are less than fifteen hundred booksellers left, and this number is steadily being diminished through withdrawals from business. Yet on January 9, 1914, the Secretary of the American News Company told the House Committee on Post Office that the country contains nearly a hundred thousand news stands.

Since there were three or four thousand bookstores, not only has the population of the country more than doubled, but the general average of wealth has increased markedly, being quite four times what it was then: so that by good rights the three or more thousand booksellers of that day should have increased three-fold or over, to at least ten thousand, instead of diminishing by more than one-half.

If it be true, as has been repeatedly asserted, that a good bookstore, well stocked and intelligently managed, performs an educational work in any community only slightly, if indeed at all, less important than that done by its schools, colleges, libraries or churches, this deplorable condition of affairs merits serious attention.

The reason for the situation is not far to seek: though not even its existence, let alone its cause, is as generally known as it should be. Yet the cause seems plainly and definitely determinable. To arrive at it, we must turn from book production to another printing-trade industry that has waxed in the United States as book production has waned. Forty years ago less than ten million copies of periodicals, exclusive of newspapers, were published annually. Today it is estimated that there are published over seven-and-a-half billion, and of this quantity more than one-half gets distribution through the mails. These extra hundreds of millions of periodicals would seem to mean as many tens of millions fewer good books; and that seems to be virtually the sole cause of the disappearance of the books.

On June 23, 1874, there was approved an act of Congress establishing a pound rate of postage on mail matter of the second-class—newspapers and periodicals. At first this rate was three cents a pound for magazines, and two for newspapers. Soon it was lowered to two cents for each, and still later, becoming operative on July 1, 1885, the rate was reduced to only one cent per pound for each. The cost of service rendered then and every year since, is many times that amount: at present it is estimated by various experts and commissions as running from 6-1/2 cents to 12 cents per pound.

The effect of that law is emphatically shown in the following table giving amounts of second-class mail (periodical literature) carried by the Post Office Department at various dates.

For1875(first year law was operative) 40,000,000pounds
"188061,000,000"
"1890204,000,000"
"1900450,000,000"
"19131,096,000,000"

At this rate, within less than ten years, if the law is not changed, this output will have increased to more than two billion pounds per annum.

Evidently giving to periodical literature this service at one cent per pound, $20. per ton, the cost being eight or ten times as much, has been simply a subvention, and a very effective one. Although we publish few books as compared with other civilized nations, we issue more periodicals than all other nations put together, and half as much again: for we publish sixty per cent of the periodical literature of the entire globe.

The United States, according to the report of the Third Assistant Postmaster General for January, 1914, handled in the second-class mail, during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, over five thousand million copies of periodicals—more than fifty for each man, woman and child in the United States—enough to make more than 2,600 train loads of ten fully loaded cars per train. And this does not take into consideration the enormous number of copies of daily newspapers and other periodicals which are circulated outside of the mails, by carriers, newsdealers and others.

Underlying this megalosaurus-like development, is the factor that carriage by the government at the nearly free rate of one cent per pound, covers not only the literary product but the advertising material which has been the determining factor in this marvellous increase. At the time the pound-rate law first became operative, magazines were few in number, and contained little advertising and much good literature; but the pound-rate law gave birth to a new kind of magazine issued at less than cost for the revenue to be derived, because of the immense circulation possible under the subvention, from its advertising pages; and their advertising pages generally weigh more and cost the government more to transport, than do their literary pages.

To increase this revenue, circulations were forced by methods that directly violated the law, and these methods are still being used. Premiums were given to an extent that led to an investigation by the Post Office Department, and it was found (Third Assistant Postmaster General's report, Dec. 1, 1911, p. 39) that in one case four-fifths of the subscribers went for the premium, the publication being worth nothing except as an advertising medium because of its large circulation—a circulation with which, despite the government subvention, literature had nothing to do. Another periodical, weekly and agricultural, forced by premium 122,000 subscriptions out of 143,000; another 41,000 out of 53,000.

There are hundreds of needless growths of this sort. As an instance, there are published in the United States some eighty-six banking periodicals. The Secretary of the American Bankers' Association, when asked how many of these were needed, replied: "From three to six, and the other eighty are 'leg pullers.' They live in great part by sandbagging advertising out of financial interests."

Dr. Talcott Williams, at the session of the American Historical Association at Washington a few years ago, said that one hundred years earlier, the aggregate weight of one copy of each issue of an ordinary city daily for a year was about ten pounds; fifty years later it was twenty-five pounds; twenty-five years later it had become fifty pounds; and when he spoke it was a hundred and twenty-five pounds; while in some instances the Sunday editions alone weigh more than that. How much of it is published to the real advantage of the community?

Upon careful consideration, it seems evident that at first the law diverted the patronage of the reading public from books to the higher-priced and more respectable magazines, those so priced that their sale at the published rate would be possible even if the advertising were a minor consideration; that next, the twenty-five cent issues cut the ground from under these older and higher-priced ones; that then rapidly appeared the fifteen-cent ones, and next the ten-cent ones—all so expensive to make that only the great volume of advertising rendered the low price possible; and that now the five-cent issues are, in their turn, no less rapidly displacing the ten-cent ones. Swift's doggerel tells the tale:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

While this article has primarily to do with the decadence of our literature, the economic side should not be lost sight of.

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, the expense account of the Post Office Department amounted to over $260,000,000. The second-class mail supplied nearly two-thirds of the tonnage, and cost more than one-third of the total aggregate of expense, but the revenue paid by its publishers amounted to just under $10,000,000, as against the cost of over $86,000,000.

To make up for the loss thus incurred, the first-class mail—the letter mail, which weighed only about one-fifth as many pounds, had to supply $175,000,000 of revenue from a service costing the government less than $100,000,000. That is to say, the letter mail paid eighteen times as much revenue as the second-class mail, and weighed but one-fifth as much.

There were carried the past year very nearly two billions of postal cards which produced a revenue of nearly $20,000,000. The weight of these was only about 12,000,000 pounds. Twelve million pounds of postal cards therefore produced almost exactly twice as much revenue as one thousand million pounds of publishers' second-class mail.

Averaging all in all, first-class mail costs at most not quite four times as much per pound as second-class mail, and pays eighty-four times as much.

In other words, each time that one of the forty or fifty million users of the first-class mail puts a two-cent stamp on a letter, one cent pays for the service rendered, and nearly all of the other cent is taken by the Department to give the "special privilege" of service at one-eighth of cost, to less than thirty thousand periodical publishers.

Is it any wonder that new periodicals have begun their career in the United States at the rate of more than ten a day for every day, Sundays and holidays included, of the past fifteen years? Fortunately, however, the death rate is nearly as great as the birth rate; but since those that persist are the selected growths, there is, as we have seen, a tremendous annual increase.

One expert estimates that the total number of books published in the world since the invention of printing is some fifteen millions, and another, more modest, places the figures at between ten and twelve millions. Assuming for each book a first edition of one thousand copies, a somewhat common issue, we should have from ten billion to fifteen billion copies of all. In other words, there are issued in the United States each year from one-half to three-quarters as many copies of periodicals as have ever been published in the first editions of all books ever printed by all the nations of the world.

There can be no deduction made from the general features of the situation other than that the distribution of this one class of merchandise at a practically free rate is nearly the sole reason for this wasteful over-production.

When the pound-rate law was enacted, the distinct purpose was announced that its effect should be educational. The contrary is unmistakably the case. The reading of the ten to twenty minute magazine article or the skimming over of the Sunday paper, seems to have become too often the limit of the intellectual activity of our people of average education.

To carry the Police Gazette at a cent a pound while charging eight times as much for a spelling book or Bible, and then to claim that the law permitting this discrepancy was enacted in the interests of education, is at least edifying. Archbishop Hare in his bright little volume Guesses at Truth once remarked that a very bad reason was in effect next to a very good one.

Mr. J. N. Larned the very eminent librarian says:

The so-called newspaper which interests itself and which labors to interest its readers in the trivialities and ignoble occurrences of the day—in the prize fights and mean preliminaries of prize fights, the boxing matches, the ball games, the races, the teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the dresses, the goings and comings and private doings of private persons—making the most in all possible ways of all petty things and low things, while treating grave matters with levity and impertinence—with what effect can such a newspaper be read? I do not care to say. If I spoke my mind, I might strike harshly at too many whose reading is confined to such sheets, but I will venture so much remark as this: That I would prefer absolute illiteracy for a son or a daughter of mine, total inability to spell a single printed word, rather than that he or she should be habitually a reader of the common newspaper of America of today, and a reader of nothing better.

According to Census Bulletin No. 57 for 1905, there was spent in the preceding year in the entire country for newspapers the enormous sum of $280,000,000, and for all textbooks for use in both public and private schools, sectarian and non-sectarian, and in all colleges, only some $12,000,000! More than $23 spent for ephemeral literature, much of which debases the literary taste of the community, for each dollar spent for literature whose function was technically educational.

To get a further idea of the literary pabulum that the government subvention is creating for us, let us consider an average magazine of the so-called popular sort. Someone defines it as follows:

"A magazine is a small body of literature, entirely surrounded by advertising. In this respect, it resembles a railroad ham sandwich with the advertising bread cut very thick and the literary meat in especially thin slices. The situation is well summarized when Dooley says: 'Hinnessy, mon, last night on my way home from wurruk I bought one of them popular magazines expectin' after I had eaten me supper and put on me slippers, and lighted me pipe, to sit down for a quiet avenin's enjoyment looking over the advertisements, and do you know, mon, twinty-five per cent of the dommed thing was just nothing but "litherachoor."'"

The magazine frequently gives great prominence to pictures of actresses—doubtless by favorable arrangements with their managers. With these may appear an article with an alliterative title, showing How Cleveland was Cunningly Conned; How Placid Philadelphia's Putridity was Purged; Why Denver went to the Devil; etc. Then may follow an article explaining how our reporter Wily Willie went under "Jawn Dee's" window and, by making a noise like an extra dividend, secured an interview with him. Then a trifling poem or two, and a long continued dry-as-dust serial story, which serves in some measure as the talcum powder to disinfect, so to speak, the rest. Then may follow a Retraction article, showing that whereas we stated in our latest issue that an emissary of the Standard Oil Co. was responsible for the Chicago Conflagration by sneaking up behind Mrs. O'Leary's cow and sticking a pin into her while she was being milked, we wish to inform our readers that we are now convinced that this was incorrect. Further investigation shows that the Standard Oil Co. was entirely innocent. It was an employee of the Packing House Trust who was guilty of the dastardly deed. Then perhaps will follow a Passionate Personal Appeal from the publisher for subscriptions to about $10,000,000 worth of stock of the Magazine Company. (Send in any sum from $1 up, use the corner coupon.) All of this will be encased in a gaudy, if not neat, cover bearing a design showing a girl's face and some of her form. If you want to see the rest of that, look at the corset advertisements inside. An old lady lately said that when she read her modern magazine, she felt that she had been to an undress party where the men all came in their "unions" and the women in their "nemos." Then will follow advertisements of soaps, soups, shoes, massage creams and a thousand other articles.

As illustrating another abuse that results from the pound-rate privilege: Let me refer to some periodicals that are light in weight; certain small magazines, for example, weigh but a fraction of an ounce, and the government must distribute many of them in order to secure one cent. We have in our possession a little Farm Journal so light that it takes forty copies to make a pound. As it is published monthly, not until the Post Office has served a subscriber with this journal for three years and four months, will it get as much as a single cent for the entire service.

And the government carries this kind of literature, advertising and all, at one cent a pound—$20 per ton, and charges for books eight cents per pound—$160 per ton, and for the social-letter and business mail, 84 cents per pound, $1680 per ton!!

Bryan's philosophy was sounder than it sometimes has been, when he said:

The Supreme Court has described unjust taxation as larceny in the form of law. If one citizen is compelled by law to pay ten dollars for the support of the government where he ought to only pay five, and under the same law a neighbor is required to pay but five where he should pay ten, the law which causes this inequality simply transfers five dollars from one man's pocket to another's.

Then a law which is each year taking over seventy-five million dollars of net profit, above cost of service, from the ninety-three million people who benefit from letters, in order to give the thirty thousand periodical publishers service for ten million dollars which costs many times that sum, is certainly not merely petty larceny or grand larceny, but larceny that is absolutely grandiose.

To illustrate: One publishing company, it is reported, made last year a net profit of over two million dollars. Their postage was about $650,000, and it cost the government over $4,500,000 to handle the output. Moreover, more than $11,000,000 of advertising was borne on the pages of those publications, and for it the company also received virtually free distribution.

Had a special privilege as great as this of the second-class mail rate been enjoyed at national expense by any class of citizens other than its publishers, the publishers would not have permitted it to exist a year. Yet the loss has long been well known to post-office officials and members of Congress, though for a time it was kept from the knowledge of the public, because practically the sole means the public has had of obtaining the knowledge, has been through the columns of journals that enjoy the privilege. The North American Review for February, 1908, had a most scathing article by Professor Munroe Smith, entitled The Dogma of Journalistic Inerrancy that illustrated this situation forcibly.

No lobby sent to Washington in furtherance of corrupt legislation has ever been more persistent or dealt less fairly with both legislators and public than the lobby that has worked for retention of the second-class mail rate. Some able editors have been accused of hunting very jealously for other people's pulls while maintaining a pretty heavy one of their own.

And the ceaselessly increasing monthlies of mammoth circulation that so nobly, though with somewhat of iteration, harp upon the graft of our plutocrats, our patent medicine manufacturers, our frenzied financiers, our food trusts, our fraudulent insurance officials—is it possible that none of their diatribes, worthy though they may be, are never to be directed against themselves? Let us hope that some of these public-spirited citizens so patriotically intent upon ridding a much-suffering land of its various forms of organized rapacity, may be led to see a great light in connection with the one industry of this country that is by law largely relieved from subjection to those competitive forces to which producers and distributors of all other articles are keenly alive.

We may in time realize the truth of Emerson's remark that "though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear." For it is fast becoming notorious that that advertising which is as the breath of life to all those low-priced periodicals, has passed beyond the line of marginal utility, and will not compensate the farther sale of the magazines at less than cost of production.

A generation ago an English-born resident of Australia was homesick. He thought how charming it would be to see gamboling about his place an English rabbit. He imported a pair. The soil and climate proved congenial. They multiplied with enormous rapidity, and recently the Australian government had a standing offer of £25,000 for anybody who would devise some practical method of exterminating the rabbit pest. Another settler, this time a New Zealander of Caledonian birth, recalling to mind the rugged beauty of the Scotch thistle, imported that, and planted it at his doorway. The resultant development was similar. There are hundreds and hundreds of square miles of Scotch thistles in New Zealand. A few years ago, a scientist imported for experimental purposes, the gypsy moth, and caged it in his back yard in one of the suburbs of Boston. A storm of wind and rain wrecked the cage, and some of the moths escaped, with the result that the state of Massachusetts has spent over three million dollars in an effort to exterminate this pest that is devastating its forests and bids fair to extend over the entire United States with a resultant loss of countless millions of dollars.

In legislation as in biology, it sometimes seems easier, even with good motives, to spread noxious things than useful ones. Our postal legislation has bred a swarm of periodicals of which the vast majority are but a swarm of pests.

In attacking them "at the source"—the cheap postage by which we ourselves superficially seem to benefit, we are entitled to no credit. On the contrary, while we think our action is in favor of the good literature which we try to serve, we still must own up to selfish motives. The rank growth of worthless periodical literature tends to smother the kind which we and a few of our colleagues are trying to make. We think some of those colleagues are standing in their own light when they advocate the policy which breeds their worthless competitors. Periodicals are like currency: the bad always drives out the good.

The publishers of this Review hope that, without having their motives misconstrued, they can add, from their own experience, a very suggestive illustration of the main contention of the foregoing article. Most of the readers of the Review are familiar with the Home University Library, and some of them have praised it highly. In England it has had a phenomenal success, in America but a very moderate one. The American publishers are constantly being told that in England it is on every railway news stand, and asked why it is not here. The answer is that here the flood of cheap periodicals leaves no room for anything more substantial. The Home University Library appeals to a popular constituency, and there is a tremendous popular demand for it in England, while in America there is none: its circulation here is virtually restricted to the highly educated. The rank and file of American readers have their tastes formed and supplied by the Sunday newspapers and the cheap periodicals. The idea of gathering a library of cheap books on substantial subjects is virtually unknown among them.

The worst feature of the whole case is that the enormous demand for inferior stuff limits the field for writers who can produce valuable matter, and consequently checks the development of such writers. It would be as difficult to produce a Home University Library in America as it is to sell it. We have men of the requisite knowledge, but our conditions do not attract them to cultivate the literary art. Few of our scientific men and scholars are writers, many more of those in England are. And as for imaginative literature!

The cheap carriage of our periodicals was avowedly enacted as a government subvention to literature. Why was it not extended to books? In a year's shipments they do not bulk nearly as large as periodicals. Are we forced to the conclusion that at the present stage of evolution, a helpful subvention to literature is beyond the power of a pure democracy? If so, that is one reason for working all the harder to raise the character of that democracy. Would the withdrawal of the subvention be a good beginning?