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THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH. SATURDAY,
DECEMBER 18,
1937.
28
How would you like to read
I find it almcult to get to sleep these nights, I don't count sheep jumping over fences. I count books tumbling over pub.
shers' counters.
New books in gay-coloured jackets, one after the oilier, they stream down iko a miniature Niagara, flashing hypnotically in their fall. "One, two, three, four. lve... fty ... Ave hundred thousand.
But, tung before "eleven thousand the round total of new books issued in a year), I am dozing off-to dream fl- fully, perhaps, about a publisher.
+
Any morning for the past few weeks I have found ten or twelve or twenty volumes plled on my desk, waiting my Considered Critical Opiuton. And so it will continue. for this in the peak period of publishing. Longer nights, chairs by the fireside, presents for Christman—— all that means more books.
That is the publisher's dream.
Of that eleven thousand, about one half are novela. Eight hundred come under "Biography and Memolra." And six hundred are political. But, remen- ber, more than five thousand novels.
Now, it is not only physically im- possible for me to read all those booka. I cannot read even half of those that look worth while.
They float away, lost la the flood of lodifferent and bad books that awirla nlong. Victims of the indiscriminate inetics of so much publishing today. they polit the moral of my argument here that publishers do not sun. clently realise their duty towards the people who keep them in being by buying their books.
· Por publishing is no ordinary busk nesa. should like to see written over. 'every publisher's door, "The goods we bando here can be social stimulus or tocin) dope."
I know publishers who choose their authors with discretion and a definite sense of their responsibility to the rending public. Firms with the high standard that goes with a Social conscience.
Despite which, ns that spale of liter. ary team and Jetnam so clearly pruves, certain aspects of publishing Are giving the profession an increasing ale of irresponsibility,
Remember that the publisher is
11,000 BOOKS you can't take it
EVERY YEAR?
naturally in the business-and it in essentially 'a chalicy, hazardous busi- ness-for a proft, although the eco- nomics of públishing—and, sill more. of authorship—are among the higher mysterica. A male of five hundred copies of a novel has been described to me by a publisher as "a good sale for a naancial failure." On sale of two thousand He author stands to earn about £75 and the publisher £50.
What Above
gure income and profits increase proportionately. A novel selling ten thousand is in the best-selling cinas, In the extremely rare case of a novel whose sales have reached hundred thousand, the author should inake from £0,000 to 410,000 and the publisher rather more, Non-Action?” Well, 1 biography selling a thousand coplew at 155, might make £150 for He author and rather more for its publisher. But the close- packed ranks of that eleven thousand, invris and general literature, are thinned by hundreds of dead-loss casualties. "
Which goes to show why the pub. isher'a
day-to-day 'philosophy Is, "Let the successful books pay for the falltres." He is therefore, always hoping that at least one goose out of his crowding seasonal flocks will tur out to be a shining, best-selling owan.
Such successes are few and far between, but the publisher goes on hoping and publishing. This is still a free country for publishers. Anyone, with the time and money, can launch a book. regardless of whether it 18 really needed or not, regardless of the ominious fact that the great bulk of contemporary fiction 15, sooner rather than later, sunk without trace.
That. I am sure, is one of the main reasons why we are overwhelmed with books, choked and suffocated by them -and, more often than not, I fenr, bemused and doped. For indiscriminate
Asks Roger
Pippett
publishing tends to indiscriminate reading. Bome experts say it is the other way round. Anyway, there they both are, mwinging along in their vicious circle.
No, what Douglas Jerrold himself a publisiter) has just called the New Dispensation in publishing has a lot to answer for.
Books are "stunted" too much and too often. Book after book is boosted clean out of Ra class--to the occasional demoralisation of the author and the neglect of other, and often worthier, books that come out at the same time.
And, long before that author is rendy to write it. the publisher--and thaithor's public-is demanding an other book from him. Very few novelists-I would almost Bay no novelists in siglit—have it in thêm to turn out really good stuff every year for year after year. And so we get a stumbling procession of tired, under. written tales from over-driven pens.
What with the invasion of the "sixpennles," the rise of the book club and the mushroom spread of the twopenny libraries, the immediate future of the world of publishing Is supremely unpredictable,
Of one thing I am certain-the more the publisher realises his responsi bility
the public, the more he discriminates between the go and bad, the original and the hackneyed. the stimulating and the merely enter. taining, the better it will be for all of us-readers, reviewers and put Hatters, Log.
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