The Tribulations of an Amateur Book-Buyer

ANTOINETTE being naturally somewhat satirical, I have become used to hearing her describe the family as a small body of humanity entirely surrounded by books; but this morning, when she observed at the breakfast table that, ‘There are books everywhere in this house except the bathroom and the fire-escape,’ I felt obliged to reply with a certain show of firmness, —

‘My dear, your statement is incorrect.’

‘Indeed?’ — with an indescribably ironic rising inflection, of which only the feminine voice is capable. ‘ And may I ask why?’

‘Because, my dear, the fire-escape is not in the house. It is something quite exterior. However,’ I went on hurriedly, seeing my chance and boldly resolving to seize it, ‘ I have been thinking of the fire-escape for some time. It has occurred to me that it could be enclosed at a trifling expense and would in that form afford a good deal of wallspace and shelf-room which I could utilize to advantage, at the same time leaving ample room for egress in case of need.’

The worm turns so seldom in our household that I knew this would have an immense effect upon Antoinette, especially the closing allusion, for she is fond of remarking that in case of fire I would look out for my Japanese vellum Don Quixote, with illustrations by Vierge, first, and her afterwards. And I was right. My temerity, so sudden and so extreme, smote her speechless, and in that condition I left her, making a skillful exit to ruminate upon some problems which Mr. George P. Brett, in his admirable article entitled ‘Book-Publishing and Its Present Tendencies,’ in the April Atlantic, failed to fake into account.

For Mr. Brett’s article, so informed and informing as it is, so authoritative and so carefully considered, is written from the professional standpoint. And so have been all the articles devoted to this subject, and kindred ones, that I recall having seen. Their authors have been either publishers, editors, or writers; the general body of the book-buying public has remained inarticulate, and what, in default of anything better, I may term the ‘amateur spirit,’ has remained unexpressed. Yet it is a very considerable factor in the equation to be solved, and what it represents deserves, perhaps, some attempt at elucidation.

For the book-buyer, like the bookpublisher, like the editor and the writer of books, has his troubles, and one which cannot be avoided is precisely that which gives rise to so many of Antoinette’s caustic sallies. I sometimes wonder if the book-publisher of to-day ever really takes into full consideration the question of the space which even a private library of moderate size demands? It is true that pocket editions, flexible covers, and India paper display a tendency to increase and multiply, but thus far they are not more than a drop in the bucket. While, on the other hand, the books which the publishers apparently aim at making as large as possible have come to be the rule. In these days, when rooms, apartments, and houses are constantly diminishing in size, particularly in all large centres of population, where the bulk of the book-buyers reside, while rents and taxes are as constantly increasing, the resultis inevitable: namely, a forced decrease in the number of books bought, from sheer inability to house them.

The format of a book is something at once artistic and utilitarian, — or properly should be,—and when either of these features is unduly exploited at the expense of the other, the mistake is a palpable one. The number of these mistakes, nevertheless, appears to be legion. Take, for instance, such a representative one as this: —

There have been for some time past in course of publication, in both England and America, the complete works of a celebrated French writer, in an English translation. This writer is above all things what we term an ‘intimate’ one; with the exception of one excursion into the field of historical biography, his works consist of novels, romances, tales, essays, criticism and causerie, all eminently distinguished for the quality to which I have referred. While a man of immense erudition, he carries it so lightly that his words are always winged — there is not a longueur or a heavy page to be found in any of his books. Fitness, then, should dictate for the format of the translation something similar. Instead, it is being brought out in a series of large, bulky volumes, in size and appearance resembling formidable works of history or science, and printed upon paper so thick that the amount of space which the books take up is inordinate. I began to buy these volumes as they were first issued, but after I had accumulated a half-dozen or so I was compelled to stop, for I found that one of them which contained but two hundred and forty pages took up nearly half as much space again upon my shelves as a work like George Brandes’s critical study of Shakespeare, although the latter contains seven hundred and nine pages, and is well printed upon good paper. I estimate that when the entire set of these volumes is complete it will require at least one and a half sections of any modern sectional book-case. I cannot afford the space, particularly when I am able to house the whole Comédie Humaine in less than one section, well printed, tastefully bound and illustrated, while in gross amount of printed matter it far exceeds the works of the ot her writer.

This is only one typical case, but it is excellently illustrative. From the point of view of the average book-buyer, this set of books is a failure, alike art istically and economically. Despite wide margins, rubricated title-pages, and decorated end-papers, it is not so tast eful as the familiar originals printed in Paris in that format so much more appropriate in size, in shape, and — a very important factor — in price. For the Parisian originals can be obtained in the familiar yellow paper covers for 75 cents per volume, or neatly bound for $1.25; whereas the purchaser of the edition under discussion must pay $1.75, net, per volume. I have, howexer, a stray volume of a translation of one of this author’s books, beautifully printed on line paper, in a format resembling the Parisian original, and bound in full flexible leather, which sells regularly for $1.00, as one of a copyright series of selected novels by French writers. It is a pleasure to read this book, to own it, to handle it; for it gratifies the eye, does not burden the hand, and occupies but a fraction of the space which one of the volumes of the edition referred to requires. As between it at $1.00 and the other at $1.75, it is much to be preferred — indeed, from my standpoint, it still would be were the prices reversed.

I have now been buying books, and forming a library, for over thirty years, during which period I have bought books personally in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, Berlin, and Moscow, while by mail I have acquired them as far afield as Yokohama. I now have something like three thousand volumes of all sorts and conditions, bought, direct from the publishers, from middlemen, at regular retail stores, at department st ores, at secondhand shops, at auction, from solicitors, and in various other ways. My financial resources have never enabled me to become a ‘collector,’ and such first editions as I possess are, with few exceptions, books which I purchased on the date of original publication or chanced to pick up unexpectedly without paying fancy prices. I have also been obliged to deny myself, for the most part, such things as ‘de luxe’ editions, Zaehnsdorf bindings, and elaborately illustrated works devoted to the fine arts; nor have I ever practiced the gentle art of Grangerism.

My one wanton extravagance in these directions has been that Japanese vellum Don Quixote with Vierge illustrations, for which, in a moment of madness, I affixed my signature to the cont ract presented by a solicitor whose seductive and well-chosen words I could not choose but hear, for he had nothing to learn from the songs which t he Sirens sang to Ulysses, and I was not subtle enough to seal my ears with wax and have my hands tied behind my back. Of course I had to conceal this transaction from Antoinette as long as possible; but in order to preserve the books from the moth and worm that devour and the smoke and smut that besmudge, after they were delivered, I at length had to bring them home from the office; and then—alsoof course — I was obliged not only to represent to her that I had bought them on the installment plan, but to lie, deliberately to lie, about the price. Otherwise I should not have dared to bring them home at all. I never flattered myself that Antoinette regarded them, and my representations about them, without suspicion, but, fortunately, that set of books was not widely advertised in the magazines, or I should have been detected and disgraced, and left with nothing to console me but the knowledge that I had made a sublime sacrifice to the benign shade of Cervantes.

In all this time, — the thirty years of which I have spoken, — ray tribulations as an amateur book-buyer have arisen, chiefly, from two causes: the question of price, and the question of storage. And while I am not, perhaps, exactly what I have termed myself, an ‘average book-buyer,’ these questions are, undoubtedly, those which give the average book-buyer the most of his or her troubles. Reduced to its essentials, the problem, alike to the publisher, the distributor, and the purchaser of books, inheres in the fact that as our books are published, distributed, and purchased to-day, they are a luxury instead of a necessity, whereas the exact opposite should be the case. In one of his Lettres à l’Etrangere, Balzac announces that, although in the nethermost deeps of financial despair, he has taken a box for the season at the Italian Opera,

‘ because opera is as necessary to me as bread.’ We all ought to look at books in the same manner, and, if I were a legislator, to bring the recalcitrant into line and encourage the habit, I should advocate a statute providing that every person with an income above a certain fixed sum, should be obliged to expend a certain percentage of it annually for books. Many a possessor of such an income might never read any of the books that he bought (that attitude of mind being by no means uncommon among the financially elect), but some one else would, and they would get into circulation instead of gathering dust on the booksellers’ shelves or having their covers ripped off and going back into the vats of the paper-mills. Along with this I should also advocate some sort of Government inspection of books thus purchased. Not one that in any way interfered with the palladium of our liberties, but one unmerciful to false labels, light weights, bogus bottoms, red gauze, etcetera, promptly confiscating any and everything transgressing the literary pure food laws.

But — even assuming these Utopian impossibilities were possible — what then? Well, the probable result would be little change in the present situation unless many other present methods were altered. For it is a melancholy fact that as a rule the true book-lover, the book-buyer actual or would-be, is not often a person whose income would place him within the provision of the law; while in case he were, that law would, in his case, be unnecessary. You may recall that Erasmus (I made my ‘approach’ to Erasmus via The Cloister and the Hearth, as, O reader, you too may have?) once wrote to one of his friends that when he could get some money (of which he had not at that time a groat) he would first buy some books, and, if any were then left, some clothes. Many of us resemble Erasmus in this respect if in no other; and if we did not we should never have any books. (That Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly is a negligible detail.) I suppose there are large numbers of persons with incomes of as much as $5000 per year, but personally I have not attained that pleasant estate, nor do I indulge any fatuous hopes of ever being able to do so. I have to be content with much less than that, — very considerably less,—and the great majority of my bookish friends are in the same predicament. But let us imagine that the average book-buyer had an income of even $3000 per annum, and that he was able to set aside six per cent of it for the purchase of books (these are Utopian assumptions, as incredible as the building of an aircastle in a vacuum; but once we pass the line of incredibility everything becomes credible, so let us complete the assumption), how far would such a sum carry him in the purchase of such books as he desired? I mean not first; or ‘ de luxe ’ editions, or other potential impossibilities, but mere current, publications of the day? At the present scale of prices it would not, in the expressive vernacular of our Olympic Games, get him to first base. For it is the deplorable fact that the price of the average ‘serious’ book precludes any other result.

Most of the books which I acquire at first-hand I purchase from what is said to be the largest retail book-store in the United States, and as I have bought books there for years, I have a regular salesman to whom I always look for service. In the course of time we have become good friends, and he often talks over the book-buying question with me. It is his conviction, as expressed frankly to me, that the prices of ‘serious’ books are, except in occasional instances, prohibitive. ‘Seventy-five per cent of my sales are of fiction,’he avers, ‘and I have found it impossible to do better with serious works. Many people look them over, and many would like to buy, but when they learn the prices they put them down and go back to the fiction counter, where the average price is something like $1.35, or else they go out without buying at all. There is a small class of works that will sell well, or comparatively well, at almost any price, owing either to their subject or their author; but there is no proper gradation even in these respects. And they are all too dear. Quite a good many people will pay as much as $5.00 for a two-volume set, of history, biography, science, or the like; but when the price goes up to $6.00, $7.50, $8.00, or more, as is so apt to be the case, only people either wealthy or extravagant can afford them, save as a rarity. I sold quite a number of sets of Wagner’s My Life at $8.00, for there was wide interest in it; but I could have sold three times as many, I am certain, at $5.00.'

I pointed out a new work, in two bulky volumes, written by a celebrated explorer and describing his latest and greatest achievement, and asked how it was selling. ‘ Fairly well,’ was the response, ‘there is certain to be quite a demand for such a thing; but nothing like what you would expect. The author recently visited this city, as you may recall, and lectured upon the explorations described in the book. This lecture, which he repeated several times, was illustrated by colored views and motion pictures, and probably five or six thousand people heard it, perhaps more. The best, seats were $1.50 each, I believe. After these lectures a good many people came into the store and inquired for his book, but when they found that the price was $10.00 most of them did not buy, as after they had heard his lecture for $1.50, or less, they thought the price of the work excessive; which, in fact, it is.’

I have before me, as I write, a publisher’s announcement of new and recent. works of ‘travel, adventure, and description,’ which he is ‘featuring’ this season. The lotal number of items in the list is ninety-six, of which only sixteen are priced at less than $2.00 each, as against eighty ranging in price from $2.00 up to $15.00 each, though in no case does any item include more than two volumes. A brief computation discloses the average net price of the entire ninety-six items to be $3.46. Most of the really desirable ones cost more than that, while those that list at $2.00 or less are, for the most part, either guide-books or works strictly ephemeral.

This is only one publisher’s list. There are many others, and they Include numerous books, which I ardently desire to buy; but I cannot afford them, save in isolated instances. The prices estop me at every turn; while, in addition, their almost invariably unnecessary bulk acts as a strong second deterrent. As a devout Erasmian I may manage to squeeze out the money to pay for a few of them; but, having bought them, what am I to do with them, with no space left either beneath the bed or in the kitchen cabinet?

It is the contention of Antoinette, which she upholds with rigor, that the number of books published is monstrous and immoderate, and that this is the real cause of all the mischief; she is becoming embittered against all publishers, and their activities she openly denounces. But this phase of t he problem has been subtly argued by many massive intellects and I will not attempt to lay any of the ghosts that haunt its hinterland. As a lover of good books, it is difficult for me to argue myself into the opinion that too many of them can be published. Moreover, if the activities of the publishers were to be curtailed, what would become of the ‘remainder’?

As all book-buyers probably knows there is growing up a large trade in ‘remainders of editions’; and, as many of them are equally well aware, the ‘remainder’ is oft times much larger than that portion of the edition of which the publishers were able to dispose in regular course. This practice is becoming so general that many bookbuyers — I am one of them — wait before purchasing many books of more than moderate cost, knowing that frequently the ‘remainder’ will save them many dollars. The trade in this class of works is at present very large, thriving in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Indeed, I know of one broker in a small city of less than 25,000 inhabitants, who handles, in the course of a year, thousands of volumes of this description.

‘Remainders’ are purchased by all classes of book-buyers, and if I am correctly informed, librarians are coming to lean heavily upon them as an everpresent help in time of dismay caused by the treasurer’s report. I have seen it stated, and, I presume, correctly, that publishers nowadays rely largely upon the purchases by libraries for the successful market ing of their wares. But, as a matter of fact, only the libraries of large financial resources can stand the strain of present-day prices for serious books in large quantity. In consequence, the minor libraries buy comparatively few such works first-hand, at time of publication, and supply their needs later on by means of the ‘remainder’and the second-hand store. There is one second-hand dealer of my acquaintance who tells me that, the bulk of his trade comes from the libraries, and that he could double the volume of his business if he could fill all their orders promptly. Does not this in itself reflect a condition radically wrong?

The philosophy of the ‘remainder’ — for which I have the most distinguished consideration, it being replete with the quality of mercy for the impecunious book-buyer — is something which I will not attempt lightly to expound; but in nine cases out of ten I believe it to be true that it exists not because the books so offered failed to reach their public upon their literary merits, but because that public could not afford them at the publication prices. But, in any event, their get-up is often more than insensately extravagant. Those people who are desirous of reading, let us say, the Life and Letters of a Great Man, are willing to pay adequately for the privilege; but they do not ecstatically yearn or feverishly desire to pay also for etched portraits of his wet nurse, color-plates of his kitchen-garden, photogravures of the back stairs at No. 411 Rue des Maisons Mauvaises, where he had apartments during his memorable visit to Paris, or for half-tones of the ink-stand from which he dipped up The Economic Determinism of the Subliminal Ultimate, or of the umbrella that he carried during his tour of the Hebrides. These things are all delightful — but, alas, the cost of their purveying renders them, as one of my friends is wont to remark, ‘structural incongruities.’ So also are works which, by means of large type, wide margins, and heavy paper, the publisher swells from one volume to two or three, at a proportionately increased tariff.

This brings me naturally to another crux — namely, the apparent and frequent failure of the publisher to consider and plan for the different publics to which his dilferent publications make each its special appeal. It is an incontrovertible and unhappy fact that, class for class, readers interested in special orders of books are unable to indulge in expensive ones, and unwilling to indulge in unworkmanlike or impracticable ones. This applies particularly, as a case in point, to that species of works devoted to literary subjects — namely, books about books and the writers of books, of which in these days there seems to be an everincreasing horde. These are, for the most part, caviare to the general, and always must be; while the readers to whom they are well-nigh indispensable, being usually of limited, often of uncertain income, cannot purchase them unless they are moderate in price. I lately saw announced a volume of essays on literary subjects by a very agreeable writer. I had read several of these essays in the magazines and enjoyed them, and I thought that I should like to possess them in permanent form. But when I inquired for the volume I found that the price was $2.50. As the contents did not extend to two hundred and fifty pages, and the type-matter per page was small, while none of the essays was new, all having previously appeared in various periodicals (which, indeed, the prefatory note candidly stated), of course I did not buy; for, plainly speaking, the price was preposterous.

The same condition obtains in many other fields. Philosophy, for example, is terribly dear. He who would keep pace with Pragmatism alone needs an unequivocally pluralistic pocket-book, one quite capable of ‘adaption to reality’ in the matter of book-prices current. As those of us philosophically inclined are notorious for our lack of affluence, is it surprising that so many of us adhere to systems and sages which flourished before the age of international copyright? Only the drawingroom philosopher with coupon-clipping facilities can hope to become a complete Bergsonian or aspire to reach the high altitudes of the Dionysiac superman. Alas, the olive grove of Academe has been cut down and converted into woodpulp, and Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird trilled her thick-warbled notes all summer long, resounds with the roar of the printing-presses turning out twenty-volume philosophic systems and swarms of commentaries and expositions thereof which it would bankrupt any ordinary individual to acquire. Antoinette is perpetually protesting that I buy altogether too much philosophy, as it is; but as most of it bears the imprint of Bohn or Everyman, I feel that in this regard I am beyond her reproaches, even if behind the times.

Antoinette, whose literary tastes are, I regret to state, neither classic nor philosophical, often feels impelled to apologize to those of our friends and relatives who honor us with occasional visitations, by remarking that we have a house full of books but nothing to read. She refers, in this elliptical manner, to the paucity of current fiction on my shelves, which is another of her standing grievances. But why should I buy current fiction when that is the one thing that every one else buys? If I, and such as I, did not buy ‘serious’ books, who else would, even in ‘remainders’?

Indeed, I often wonder how the publishers, or the booksellers, can expect to market anything but current fiction, so preoccupied are they with its exploitalion. And the same thing is true of our literati, to use the term now somewhat déclassée but, after all, more descriptive than any other. The ‘serious’ book is reviewed, often conscientiously and competently, sometimes even illuminatingly and entertainingly — and there’s an end on’t; for if it is criticized, if it is really taken up and discussed, it is in the controversial or the laboratory style, which means death to it so far as any stimulation of the interest of the general reader is concerned. With the literati the ‘literature of power’ no longer has any chance to succeed unless its power takes the shape of a fictitious personality, as, for instance, that of Jean Christophe.

To all intents and purposes, modern literature is the literature of personality, of so-called ‘human interest,’ purely. It is only in fiction, in some of its protean shapes, that our critics seem capable of becoming eagerly interested. The ‘book of the week,’ or the month, or the year, is almost inevitably a work of fiction, preferably a novel — an immortal masterpiece destined to be forgotten in a week or a month or a year. Our literary arbiters seldom concern themselves with anything else unless in deference to that impulse which prompts the Thespian momentarily to desert Pinero for Shakespeare in order to prove that he is ‘really an actor.’ I am informed that this is because the true critic devotes himself only to work that is ‘creative.’ But most of the ‘creations’ produced nowadays impress me as if their creators had labored upon them not to exceed six days and promptly rested upon the seventh and called them perfect. Moreover, as the populace can always be trusted to find its way without a guide to the big tent which houses the sawdust, the spangles, the trick mule, and the bass drum, where the experienced prestidigitator and the unabashed mountebank borrow its empty hats and take out of them the best-sellers which they put into its empty heads, how or why is profound critical interpretation of the performance other than a melancholy waste of intellectual effort?

Meanwhile, the genuine literary event, creeps past, unattended by the drums and tramplings of conquest, and secludes itself in its obscure corner, there to await the future which belongs to it. Has any other event so important in the literary history of America as the publication of Emerson’s Journals occurred since the twentieth century was ushered in? Yet it has not excited a tithe of the interest that has been lavished upon a succession of besl-sellers, most of which are already disappearing in oblivion, hopelessly out of date, while many of its pages read as freshly, although written generations ago, as if inspired by the life of this very day and hour. Here is a work that, if any ever printed in this country can be said so to have done, fulfills the high Miltonic definition that a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life. Imagine how such a thing would be received by the literati of France, supposing it were to be a legacy from the pen of Montaigne, or by that of Germany supposing it were one from the pen of Goethe, and contrast it with the reception which the literati of America have accorded this one, and we may begin dimly to realize the why of the everlasting aridity of the Great American Literary Desert, and of some of the conditions of which publishers, book-sellers, and writers so bitterly complain. How can we expect such works to interest the general reading public if they do not interest those whose function it is to indicate to that public what is worthiest of its interest, and to do so in a dynamic, stimulating way?

Consider, likewise, the cases of the two most significant serious writers of recent times identified with American literature, the one as thinker, the other as artist —I refer to William James and Lafcadio Hearn. Beyond brief magazine articles, no leading American critic has occupied himself with Hearn. The only independent book upon him thus far published in this country is one that was, apparently, published solely in order to air a personal grievance of the author’s against him, he being dead and unable to defend himself. If we desire one truly critical, we must go to France, to England, or otherwhere beyond seas. As regards James, while he has inspired numerous books and articles here, it was not until Europe had acclaimed him that America discovered him to be eminent, and no American critic has as yet attempted any adequate interpretation of him that is neither polemical nor pedagogical.

But this is becoming — or appearing to become — a piece of literary criticism, which I have neither the purpose nor the talent to make it; so I must return to my last and give it a final tap by alluding to a feature which deserves a set article of itself, but to which I can devote only a word in passing. That is the ever-encroaching sea of newspapers and magazines, destined, so those with accurate barometers are foretelling, eventually to swallow up the Book completely; which, thereafter, will survive only mythically as a sort of lit erary Atlantis. This will not come to pass in my time; but when it does come, no gift of seership is required for me to name the two principal causes of the catastrophe. Newspapers and magazines are moderate in price — when they are not downright cheap — and convenient in form. That is to say, they are calculated, to the last detail, to reach their public and make themselves necessities, not luxuries. By that sign will they conquer. That and the coördinate one which Antoinette, who is devoted to their perusal, is fond of introducing to my attention: namely, that they contain all the best reading matter of the day, in advance of its appearance — if at all — in book form. And as she is always ready to prove her assertions by the citation of chapter and verse, what is there left to be said? The rest, indeed, is silence.