CHAPTER IX
THE PRESENT LIMITS OF THE BOOK MARKET
In Spite of the Many Books Issued and the Many “Large Sellers,” the People Are Very Poorly Equipped with Good Books—Circulating Libraries and the Sale of Books—Many Neglected Subjects on Which Successful Books Could be Written—The Lack of Good Writers the Main Source of Poor Sale of Books.
How large the book market is, nobody knows. Still less does anybody know how large it may become, say, in another decade of our present prosperity and spread of intelligence. Beyond any doubt more books are bought in the United States than in any other country. Yet it is a constant surprise to discover how ill supplied the mass of the people are with good books. But the enormous increase of the market in recent years gives hope of a still greater increase to come. The number of books published every year in the United States and in the United Kingdom is about the same, but more American than English books run to large editions.
Leaving out fiction, which is the spectacular and sensational part of publishing, books of reference, of standard literature, of history, of applied science and even of poetry are sold in constantly increasing quantities. The public hears little of these because the literary journals pay little attention to them. There is, for instance, one publisher of subscription books who now adds few books to his list of which he does not expect to sell 100,000 copies. He has agents in every part of the United States, and they probably sell more books in a year than all the publishing houses in the United States put together sold thirty years ago—excluding textbooks, of course. Last year a literary man went to a remote railway station, 1,000 miles from Boston or New York, to shoot quail. One day he saw men unloading boxes of books from a freight car on the side track. The wonder was that there should be even a freight car in that corner of the woods; and that the freight car should be filled with books was simply incredible. But there were wagon loads of Thackerays, of Dickenses, of Eliots, and even of sets of the poets, fairly well-printed, fairly well-bound volumes which had been sold to the country folk for miles around. Perhaps there has been more money spent for encyclopædias and dictionaries than Noah Webster could compute, these last ten years. The book market, therefore, is very much bigger than persons who live outside the book selling world are likely to think.
Still, relatively it is small. The largest retail book store in the country is a department store in New York or Philadelphia; but the book department is not considered one of the important parts of the store. The much-abused department store, by the way, has done much to bring a new class of persons to acquire the book-buying habit. It has made books common merchandise for the first time. Since the “Century Dictionary,” to take a definite example, was thus made common merchandise, the sets of it that have been sold are incomparably more than were ever sold in any other way. Yet how small the book market yet is, is shown by this fact—that a novel of which one hundred thousand copies are sold reaches only one person in every eight thousand of the population.
Do circulating libraries lessen book sales? Yes, I dare say they do. But you will find that the publishers do not complain of them. They are disposed to accept the comforting doctrine that everything which encourages the reading of books in the end helps the sale of them. In the end—yes. But for the moment probably no.
One man will tell you that he used regularly to buy a novel a week—sometimes two novels. He was a pretty good customer of the publishers; for fifty-two novels a year is about as many as the most avaricious publisher could reasonably expect one man to buy. But now he says he does not buy three a year. A circulating library will for $5 bring him all he wants. The publishers have, therefore, lost him as a good customer. On the other hand it is a working theory that every subscriber to a circulating library who reads a novel and talks about it at the woman’s club may induce somebody to buy a copy who otherwise would never have heard of it. At any rate, the total number of novels, or of books of other sorts, now sold is not less than the number that was sold before the libraries found subscribers. The discussion is, after all, a vain one. The publisher and the author must do the best they can by the help of the libraries or in spite of them.
Yet I am sure that the great widening of the market for which we are all looking will be found, when it is found, not by any special machinery or mechanical device; but the person who will really find it—or make it—will be a great writer. Whenever books are written that are interesting enough to compel the attention of the whole people, the poorest publishing house can sell them. The secret of success, after all, is the secret of writing books that touch masses of men deeply and directly. We have much to learn from the careers of such books as “Progress and Poverty” and “Looking Backward.” They reached their great sale not by the ingenuity of their publishers, nor by their literary merit, but only because they carried messages to many minds. However delusive these messages may be, they were sincere. The truth is that the publisher (exalt him as I am trying my best to do) is, after all, only a piece of machinery. The real force that makes itself felt in the world that has to do with books is the initial force of the men and women who write. Whenever a great mind, or a great sympathy, be found which puts forth an appeal or a hope in the form of a book that has the power to touch those emotions or aspirations that all men have in common—then the trick’s done. The mechanical plans that we make have power to carry only as far as the book has strength to go. If I had five great living writers on my list, my publishing task would be easy.
For the broadening of the book market, then, what we need is writers—writers of the proper quality. Of novels, we have enough and to spare, such as they are. But not of good books of other sorts. Let us take a hint from the novel writers. Twenty years ago or less the American public was amusing itself with novels written by English writers. But about that time came those story tellers, a whole army of them, who began to write about life in different parts of our own country. Of New England, Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins and Mrs. Austin and many more; in the Middle West, Mr. Garland, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Tarkington and half a hundred more; in New York, the author of “David Harum,” Mr. Frederick, Mr. Bacheller and others; of the South, Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, Miss Glasgow and more; and there are California stories in profusion. In other words, an army of men and women began about the same time to write stories of local history and manners.