There is a precisely parallel tendency in print—more action, fewer words; more suggestion, less description.
The future novel will leave more and more to be supplied by the reader. Paragraphs, pages, whole chapters now deemed essential, will be omitted.
In books such as histories, philosophical works, scientific treatises, &c., &c., the skill and art of the printer will be exhausted to make the page not only attractive but expressive—readable at a glance, instead of, as now, to make the volumes as forbidding as possible.
The much-despised “yellow journal” of America has taught a valuable lesson in the art of emphasis, and its effect is seen not only in the make-up of newspapers but of periodicals, and will be felt in the make-up of books.[64]
In America the art of advertising has far outstripped the art of literature. The advertising pages of our periodicals are often more interesting and always more alive than the literary.
A magazine devotes pages to an article or a story every line of which betrays the writer’s evident desire to write as many words as possible. In the advertising pages, to every square inch, the minds not of one but of three or four experts have been concentrated upon the attempt to express an idea in as few words as possible and in such a manner it will stand out and be read with a minimum of trouble.
Why should not stories be told that way? Why should not all literature be written and printed that way?
The proposition may seem a startling one, but the tendency is that way.