THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 Ernest Dawson 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Robert B. Campbell
 
 ^
 
 THE READING PUBLIC
 
 THE 
 
 READING PUBLIC 
 
 BY 
 
 MacGREGOR JENKINS 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9I4, BY MACGREGOR JENKINS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Fuhlished October iqi4
 
 J-f) fv 
 
 TO 
 BLISS PERRY 
 
 ABLE EDITOR, ACCOMPLISHED WRITER 
 
 KNOVVER AND LOVER OF THE 
 
 MAN IN THE STREET
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 IN the first place let it be under- 
 stood that I am not a man of 
 letters. Just what relation I bear to 
 the literary activities of my associates 
 it would be hard to say. As nearly 
 as I can diagnose the situation I 
 represent to them, with more or less 
 accuracy, the "average" reader of 
 books and magazines. I seem to stand 
 in their minds for that nebulous per- 
 sonage, " the man in the street." For 
 this reason a doubtful manuscript, an 
 untried author, or new editorial policy 
 is tried on me. I am, in fact, the lit- 
 erary dog of the office. 
 
 This exalted position is not without 
 its compensations. It enables me to 
 speak freely as one without authority. 
 
 56GG57
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 I am an utterly irresponsible person; 
 consequently I can give free rein to 
 valueless opinions with the cheerful 
 assurance that no one will attach any 
 importance to them. 
 
 What I say, then, about the mak- 
 ing and reading of books and maga- 
 zines must be regarded as nothing 
 more than the random reflections of 
 "the man in the street," and it is from 
 this standpoint that I discuss the au- 
 gust body of people known as the 
 " reading public." 
 
 This group of people constitute an 
 interesting phenomenon, but they are 
 more than that. From the point of 
 view of the publisher and the author, 
 they are the ultimate consumer. The 
 lot of the ultimate consumer for the 
 most part is not a happy one, but in 
 this one connection, at least, his con- 
 
 2
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 dition is not desperate. He can stop 
 buying books and magazines ; that is, 
 he can theoretically; some of us can- 
 not, some of us are as helpless to 
 pass a bookstore as the most besotted 
 drunkard is to veer from the swinging 
 doors of his favorite saloon. But there 
 is no question that most of us could 
 give up buying half the books we buy 
 if we made what the social workers 
 call " an earnest effort for self-better- 
 ment." 
 
 To this end we are being helped 
 by the soaring prices of the things we 
 have to buy, and right here comes in 
 one of the interesting things about 
 the reading public. For as the neces- 
 sity not to buy books increases, the 
 author and publisher redouble their 
 blandishments to keep us in line. 
 
 So the reading public, unlike the 
 3
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 beef, shoe, flour, and clothes -buying 
 pubHc, is a petted and pampered dar- 
 ling, and is lured to the satisfaction of 
 its desires by all the charms and 
 graces known to the ingenuity of sci- 
 entific salesmanship, and is not aban- 
 doned to the curt take-it-or-leave-it 
 attitude of the Beef Trust. 
 
 This reading public is composed of 
 many varieties of readers of widely 
 differing tastes, but in general they 
 can be divided into two pretty clearly 
 defined groups, — those who pur- 
 chase and read books, and a vastly 
 larger group who confine their liter- 
 ary activities to the consumption of 
 magazines. For the orderly discussion 
 of our subject let us treat the two 
 groups separately. 
 
 Yieldins: once more to the scien- 
 tific impulse, we can divide readers 
 
 4
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 of books into three roughly defined 
 classes that will help us to continue 
 our discussion in an orderly fashion. 
 They are: — 
 
 The Sponge-Reader. 
 
 The Sieve-Reader. 
 
 The Duck-Back-Reader. 
 These classes form a pyramid, the 
 apex the sponge-reader, and the base 
 the duck-back-reader — between them 
 the great class of sieve-readers. 
 
 The sponge-reader absorbs what he 
 reads. He is not as a rule a gregari- 
 ous or an attractive person, he is apt 
 to have a little too much information 
 for human nature's daily needs; but 
 he is the stuff that scholars are made 
 of and is the highest type of reader, if 
 reading be regarded as anything but 
 a time-killing operation. This group 
 is small in number, and almost en- 
 
 5
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 tirely ignored by authors and publish- 
 ers, save the most enlightened, for the 
 sponge-reader reads fewer and bettei 
 books than his fellows. 
 
 The sieve-reader is more catholic 
 in his tastes, and as he absorbs nothing 
 an almost infinite amount of printed 
 matter can pass through his intellectual 
 organism without occasioning distress. 
 His desire to read is abnormal. This 
 desire springs from obscure sources, 
 but its manifestations are obvious. He 
 becomes a walking directory of the 
 titles and authors of hundreds of books, 
 and on a pinch can present a very cred- 
 itable appearance in literary circles. 
 He loves the shallows and dabbles 
 gracefully in them. He executes mar- 
 vels of grace and agility on the thinnest 
 of literary ice and comes safe ashore. 
 In the company of sponge-readers he 
 
 6
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 is apt to be quiet and deferential, recog- 
 nizing that in that course lies his only 
 chance to escape detection, shrewdly 
 guessing that profound silence can 
 often produce the effect of even pro- 
 founder wisdom. But get him among 
 his inferiors, let him find himself by 
 any chance in company with a group 
 of common or garden duck-back- 
 readers and he is in his glory. 
 
 He bristles with facts, with titles, 
 with authors' names. He can rattle 
 off the entire output of a popular au- 
 thor; he retails the gossip from the 
 literary journals, and incidentally al- 
 ludes to obscure and half-forgotten 
 earlier performances. He thrills, he 
 irritates, he bewilders. He is fond of 
 relating with astonishing fidelity to 
 detail the involved plot of a recent 
 best-seller. I once rode from Worces- 
 
 7
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ter to Boston with the most pro- 
 nounced type of this specimen I ever 
 encountered. He happened to choose 
 Mr. Nicholson's " House of a Thou- 
 sand Candles," and from the shadow 
 of the Worcester Station to his de- 
 parture into the bleak twilight of the 
 Back Bay he gave me the entire nar- 
 rative. It was a stupendous feat, and 
 as I left him enveloped in the gloom 
 of that underground chamber of hor- 
 rors he solved the mystery. "I sell 
 suspenders and read a book a day on 
 the train." It is obvious that the sieve- 
 reader is the darling of the publisher's 
 heart. It is he who keeps the best- 
 sellers selling. 
 
 The third and by far the largest 
 group of readers is the base of our 
 pyramid, the old reliable duck-back. 
 Unlike the sponge-reader he does not 
 
 8
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 absorb; unlike the sieve-reader there 
 is no easy access to or egress from his 
 intellectual citadel. In fact his read- 
 ing has absolutely no effect upon him 
 at all, except to employ his hands to 
 hold his book and his eyes to read the 
 words. 
 
 As a rule this type of reader chooses 
 newspapers and magazines ; but many 
 read books. I have in mind one of 
 these readers, a very good friend of 
 mine and a man of sense and charac- 
 ter. I have studied his reading habits 
 for years on the train, in his house, 
 and at his club. It is simplicity it- 
 self. Purchase a paper, fold it con- 
 veniently, and begin at the top of the 
 first left-hand column, read to the bot- 
 tom, and continue at the top of the 
 next. If a particular narrative breaks 
 off at the bottom of the first column 
 
 9
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 and you find yourself referred to col- 
 umn 3, page 6, ignore it. Quietly be- 
 gin at the top of the second column 
 on something fresh ; it will all come out 
 right in the end. You will ultimately 
 get it all and that is what you want. 
 
 This method has many advantages. 
 It lends itself to absolute physical and 
 mental rest. It uses up a prodigious 
 amount of time that would otherwise 
 hang heavy on your hands. It is ideal 
 for the commuter; in fact I fancy that 
 the commuting habit is largely respon- 
 sible for the enormous increase in the 
 ranks of the duck-backs. 
 
 They read their magazines and 
 books with the same singleness of 
 purpose and achieve the same results, 
 — a quiet hour of physical repose 
 with no exactions on the brain. A 
 real duck-back remembers nothing 
 
 10
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 that he reads — titles, authors, pub- 
 lishers, mean nothing; but he goes 
 on buying and reading, reading and 
 buying, to the infinite delight and 
 profit of author and publisher alike. 
 
 These gentlemen who sit at the lit- 
 erary throttle are keen observers, and 
 they study their market like the saga- 
 cious business men that they are. For 
 the duck-back-reader they have con- 
 trived an elaborate and smooth work- 
 ing machine known as the subscrip- 
 tion book business. They employ 
 armies of canvassers, they print tons 
 of circulars, and make prodigious sales 
 of books which are never read, but 
 which ornament the center-tables and 
 book-shelves in the houses of their self- 
 satisfied owners. 
 
 A friend of mine once bought at a 
 large price an elaborate set of books 
 
 II
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 in which he took infinite pride. A year 
 or two after their purchase I happened 
 to be in his library, — that was what 
 the room was called, — and having an 
 idle five minutes, and being attracted 
 by the glitter of the volumes, I ven- 
 tured to satisfy my curiosity in regard 
 to their contents. I took one from the 
 shelf. I could not open it. It was as 
 firmly sealed as if set with the most 
 elaborate timelock. I put it back and 
 took down another with the same re- 
 sult ; still a third with no better suc- 
 cess. Then I realized what had hap- 
 pened. In the hasty manufacture of 
 the volumes the gilt edges had been 
 improperly applied, and instead of 
 yielding easily to the opening of the 
 volumes had made a solid coating of 
 glue and gilding powder which made 
 each book as solid as a brick. 
 
 12
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 I heard my host coming and hastily 
 slipped the volume into place. In he 
 came aglow with outdoor exercise and 
 beaming with pride and delight in his 
 home. " Nice books, are n't they ? " he 
 said, as he hurried me to his waiting 
 motor. " I tell you a fellow can't get 
 along without books." " Some cannot," 
 I answered evasively. 
 
 This type of book-buyer exists the 
 country over, and while they do not 
 betray the most exacting literary taste, 
 their purchases are inspired by an 
 honest desire to adorn their homes 
 and to appear well before their neigh- 
 bors ; and who will say that these mo- 
 tives are not commendable ? 
 
 I knew a man once who amassed a 
 fortune by studying the needs of the 
 rural duck-back. To be sure, the books 
 he published were not beautiful as 
 
 13
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 works of art, or inspiring as works of 
 literature, but they served their pur- 
 pose and they certainly never did any 
 harm. Most of his publications were 
 of a semi-religious character, were 
 printed on wood-pulp paper, and orna- 
 mented with the cheapest wood-cut 
 illustrations. His genius lay in mak- 
 ing just what his public wanted, and 
 his unerring judgment in the choice 
 of titles was little short of wonderful. 
 He had a book on the press at the 
 time I met him. He explained that 
 he had long confined himself to reli- 
 gious books, but there was an uneasy 
 stirring of the scientific spirit and he 
 felt that it had spread even to his cross- 
 roads customers. So he had antici- 
 pated changed conditions and was 
 putting out a scientific book. He 
 called it " The Wonders of Nature." 
 
 14
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 The cover bore a bewilderinsr mixture 
 of volcanoes and rainbows, elephants 
 and boa-constrictors, tigers and birds- 
 of-paradise. The introduction was writ- 
 ten by the Professor of Natural Science 
 in a rural academy, and with it the 
 volume was ready to stand the test of 
 changed conditions. 
 
 To his amazement the book did not 
 sell. He could hardly persuade him- 
 self that he had missed a trick, but the 
 reports of his agents were not to be 
 argued away, — the book did not sell. 
 The truth was that while the cross- 
 roads buyer was beginning to taste the 
 forbidden fruit of scientific thought, he 
 was still far too wise to flaunt his back- 
 sliding by putting on his center-table 
 anything except the long-accepted vol- 
 umes of his fathers. 
 
 The canny publisher took counsel 
 15
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 with his experience and concluded that 
 like other great men he was ahead of 
 his time. The books were all called in, 
 the covers and introduction removed, 
 and when they reappeared they bore 
 the same resplendent confusion of flora 
 and fauna on the cover, but no longer 
 was the title " The Wonders of Na- 
 ture " ; it was now, in its changed and 
 chastened condition, " The Architec- 
 ture of God." The preface, so elabo- 
 rately prepared by the budding scien- 
 tist, was gone and in its place appeared 
 another by the Reverend Mr. Blank, 
 of Bucksport, Maine ! 
 
 There was no trouble with sales 
 now. The book was bought by thou- 
 sands and all went merry as a wedding 
 bell. The duck-back-reader had stood 
 to his guns and won a famous victory. 
 
 For the most part, however, the 
 i6
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 sponge -reader alone, of the three 
 classes of readers we are discussing, 
 has much to say as to what literary 
 provender is provided for him. The 
 sponge-reader has less to fear than his 
 brothers from the makers and writers 
 of worthless books, for he does decide 
 in a measure what he will and what 
 he will not read, and it is to him that 
 the author of honest work must look 
 for an audience. 
 
 I once had charge of the stock room 
 of a large publishing house, and it was 
 interesting to watch the piles of books 
 dwindle. The progress of a real reader 
 from bookstore to bookstore could be 
 noted. 
 
 I grew to have a real affection for 
 the neglected books. The little piles 
 seemed to shrink into the corners of 
 the bins as if ashamed and a bit lonely. 
 
 17
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 The fives and the tens looked so piti- 
 ful beside the thousands — great heaps 
 of good sellers resplendent in crimson 
 and gold. 
 
 I remember one little pile of slender 
 brown volumes which I never dis- 
 turbed. I knew nothing of the author 
 except that he wrote verse, and this 
 little book was his literary output. His 
 gentle life had long since closed. Few 
 recalled him and fewer knew his book. 
 One day a miracle happened. I was 
 told to deliver one copy of this little 
 book to a local bookstore. A half-hour 
 passed and another was ordered for a 
 second dealer. Later still a third little 
 volume rose up, and shaking the dust 
 from its cover went out into the wide 
 world. I guessed the truth. There was 
 no great revival of interest in this 
 gentle singer. It was only a sponge- 
 rs
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 reader making his toilsome way from 
 shop to shop trying to find a book he 
 really wanted. 
 
 The sponge-reader is known in the 
 book trade as a man of independent 
 notions in regard to the books he will 
 or will not read. 
 
 The sieve-reader is the creature of 
 the publisher and commercial author. 
 He may flatter himself he has literary 
 taste, but he has not. His reading is 
 decided for him. He makes the " best 
 sellers," for he buys what he is told to 
 buy, and while he affects tremendous 
 erudition he really is the publisher's 
 plaything. In fact he was brought into 
 being by the publisher. The process 
 is very simple. He is provided with 
 books which make reading the easiest 
 thing in the world. Then reading is 
 made fashionable to the same degree 
 
 19
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 that phonographs and lodge member- 
 ships are. His love of gossip and inti- 
 mate nothings is created and pandered 
 to by the so-called " literary " papers. 
 His taste is not exacting, it is easy to 
 provide him with what he wants. 
 
 There are countless stories told of 
 the genesis of best-sellers: many, no 
 doubt, quite without foundation in fact; 
 but enough is known to show that many 
 of them were the result of a painstak- 
 ing effort by author and publisher to 
 provide the sieve-reader with the easi- 
 est possible reading. 
 
 There is one story to the effect that 
 a wa2:er was made between two men 
 that one of them could produce a 
 best-seller in a stipulated period of 
 time. This he did by carefully analyz- 
 ing a dozen or more such books and 
 finding out just how they were put 
 
 20
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 together. So enamored of the game 
 did he become that he produced half 
 a dozen. 
 
 These various yarns must be ac- 
 cepted, however, with a bit of salt, but 
 it is quite evident that a good many 
 very popular books of late years have 
 been written more with an eye to 
 meeting popular demand than to the 
 production of a really good piece of 
 work. Witness the countless inferior 
 books which follow in the wake of a 
 successful one. After such a great suc- 
 cess, for instance, as " David Harum," 
 the bookstalls were flooded with the 
 type of story soon known in the trade 
 as the " by-gosh story." If the gossip 
 of the bookstores can be believed, one 
 at least of these stories was a machine- 
 made product. A short story by an 
 unsuccessful writer which had been 
 
 21
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 hawked about magazine offices for 
 months was padded out to the pro- 
 portions of a full-length story. The 
 author worked while the publisher 
 held the stop-watch and the story was 
 produced in the stipulated time. 
 
 I recall once making a visit to an 
 inland city where I called upon two 
 friends who for some months had been 
 engaged in the daring attempt to pub- 
 lish really good books in a small way. 
 My arrival was inopportune, as I ap- 
 peared at their office at just the mo- 
 ment the sheriff was departing with 
 their last chair. There were, however, 
 empty packing-cases, and on these we 
 sat while we discussed the vicissitudes 
 of a publishing career. 
 
 There were five of us, the two part- 
 ners, calm and undisturbed by the 
 disaster which had overtaken them, 
 
 22
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 and two authors who had, perhaps, 
 called in a faint hope that they might 
 secure something on account of long 
 overdue royalties, but who stayed to 
 sympathize and to help. I completed 
 the circle, and being the only mem- 
 ber of the party who had any real 
 money I invited my friends to lunch. 
 Warmed by the genial influence of a 
 friendly meal together, the future be- 
 gan to take on a rosier tint. Plans 
 were formulated. I recall at this 
 luncheon that one of the two authors 
 gave expression to a new and interest- 
 ing theory of literary production. He 
 remarked that in his wanderings about 
 the city he had observed that the 
 largest groups of idlers stood as a rule 
 in front of the stores displaying pic- 
 tures in their windows, and of two 
 given picture-stores the larger group 
 
 23
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 was invariably in front of the store in 
 which the largest number of pictures 
 of beautiful young women was dis- 
 played. From this he justly reasoned 
 that the world was more interested in 
 feminine youth and beauty than any- 
 thing else. He announced that he 
 was about to return to his humble 
 garret and produce a story governed 
 by this great literary principle. He 
 determined to cast to the winds all 
 notions of probability or possibility 
 and of literary conventions. He pro- 
 posed to produce a book which would 
 be a whole gallery of alluring pictures 
 of the same radiant young woman. 
 
 The second writer, not to be out- 
 done in optimism and cheerfulness, 
 announced his intention to construct 
 either a book or a comic opera from a 
 series of cartoons which he had once 
 
 24
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 drawn and unsuccessfully offered for 
 sale to a number of metropolitan 
 dailies. Both of these men kept their 
 word. The radiant heroine appeared 
 before many months, and for a very 
 considerable time brought her cre- 
 ator handsome royalties. The choice 
 of the second man ultimately was in 
 favor of the comic opera, and this was 
 forthwith produced with enormous 
 success. This was many years ago, 
 but the production is still on the 
 American stage, and I am not at all 
 sure that our children's children will 
 not see it in some modified form. 
 
 In these instances one of the pro- 
 ductions, at least, was designed along 
 scientific lines to meet the taste of 
 the sieve-reader at the moment. 
 
 I once knew a man who had so 
 perfectly gauged the taste of this great 
 
 25
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 class of readers that he used his skill 
 to pay for practically all the luxuries 
 he enjoyed. Having convinced him- 
 self that there always had been and 
 always would be an unfailing demand 
 for a certain type of story, my friend 
 addressed himself to the problem of 
 producing them just as rapidly as his 
 professional duties would permit. 
 
 The chosen type of story was the 
 well-known " Beautiful -Girl -Mill -Op- 
 erative and Handsome- Son -of -the 
 Owner " type. He found that by ex- 
 treme diligence he could turn out 
 four a year. They were of consider- 
 able length, and they were written 
 under a variety of feminine noms de 
 plu7ne. He did not concern himself 
 with any questions of copyright or 
 royalty, but having found his market 
 made an out-and-out cash sale of his 
 
 26
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 product and dismissed it from his 
 mind. The proceeds from this liter- 
 ary activity he devoted to frequent 
 trips to New York, during which he 
 and his wife reveled in the theater 
 and the opera and other luxuries 
 bought with his ill-gotten gains. 
 
 These men are doing honest work, 
 however, and, while they write for an 
 entirely unintelligent public, they do 
 their public no special harm, and are 
 not to be confounded with the liter- 
 ary fakirs who abound to-day as they 
 always have and always will. 
 
 But enough of the sieve-reader and 
 sieve-reading. Board any gorgeously 
 appointed '* limited " train, sit in any 
 one of the plush-covered air-tight cars, 
 and look about 3^ou. Gaze on your 
 fellow beings employing a few hours 
 of enforced leisure in literary pursuits. 
 
 27
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 Look at the books they are reading, 
 and then raise your eyes to the faces 
 above the books. Do such books make 
 such faces, or do such faces demand 
 such books? I do not know, but I do 
 know that one such experience makes 
 me want to be a Hottentot quite 
 ignorant of the ABC. 
 
 I recall that on one such trip I de- 
 cided to subject myself to the spell of 
 a best-seller vociferously recommended 
 by the newsboy on the train. For over 
 an hour I struggled manfully to inter- 
 est myself in a machine-made story. 
 Finally I gave it up, and for the only 
 time, I think, in my life I abandoned 
 a half-read book. I left it in my chair 
 to be picked up by some one who had 
 not been unfortunate enough to ac- 
 quire, quite unconsciously, perhaps, 
 some of the characteristics of a sponge- 
 
 28
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 reader. To this day the incident recurs 
 to me, and I have as guilty a feeling 
 as if I had abandoned a baby in that 
 train. 
 
 The duck-back-reader is by far the 
 least picturesque of the three groups, 
 but he has, after all, a certain charm 
 for the sympathetic observer. He is 
 the placid hippopotamus of the liter- 
 ary zoo, munching his food in stolid 
 contentment without an emotion, with- 
 out a sensation of any kind. But he is 
 honest, — he makes no pretensions, he 
 knows no affectations. Why he reads 
 is a mystery, but read he does, or the 
 publishers would go out of business, 
 that is, many of them would. A few 
 of them really rely on the discrimin- 
 ating reader for their support. It is 
 a wonder that he can be found, 
 for he is a shy bird who has been 
 
 29 -
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 cheated so often that the lure of the 
 advertisement is lost upon him. 
 
 I met a real reader once, and the 
 experience had as far-reaching an ef- 
 fect on my intellectual development 
 as anything that ever happened to me. 
 It was in this wise : I once found my- 
 self late at night the sole occupant of 
 the smoking-compartment of a sleep- 
 ing-car. Presently a man slouched into 
 the compartment and threw himself 
 wearily into the seat opposite me. Be- 
 ing constitutionally unable to remain 
 long in the presence of a fellow being 
 without talking to him, we drifted into 
 conversation, and by some curious 
 chance we spoke of reading. The mo- 
 ment the subject was introduced, my 
 unknown friend became interested. 
 He confided to me that he was a 
 track-inspector whose work called him 
 
 30
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 from home at all hours of the day and 
 night, and consequently he had found 
 little time for literary pursuits. He had 
 confined himself, so he said, to the 
 reading of one author whose books he 
 read over and over again, never weary- 
 ing of them and always finding in them 
 new interest and inspiration. In an- 
 swer to my inquiry he told me that 
 this one author was Victor Hugo. "I 
 shall get off at the next station," he 
 said, " and make my way home. I will 
 find a lamp burning in the kitchen, 
 my slippers by the stove, and my book 
 face down on the table where I left it 
 early this morning." For the remain- 
 ing half-hour of our interview he talked 
 to me of Victor Hugo in a way which 
 convinced me of the wisdom of con- 
 fining your reading to one author, pro- 
 vided, of course, he be big enough. 
 
 31
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 That incident taught me a great 
 deal. It taught me that the most deadly 
 and dangerous thing in the world 
 is intellectual insincerity. It is bad 
 enough to be insincere with other 
 people, but to try to cheat yourself is 
 both stupid and immoral. 
 
 Real reading is a mighty serious 
 matter, but it can be made interesting 
 and inspiring. Think for a moment 
 what life would be if no one of us could 
 read, and then think for a moment 
 how most of us employ the God-given 
 gift of communion with other minds 
 through the printed page. I think if 
 we tabulated the results of our last 
 year's reading it would not make an 
 impressive showing. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. I make 
 no plea for the " high-brow " book be- 
 cause it is " high-brow." I hold no 
 
 32
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 brief for the dull and pedantic. I only 
 ask that I get something more out of 
 reading than physical rest or the mild 
 tickling of my intellectual palate. 
 
 A farmer told me once he liked a 
 certain book because there was some- 
 thing "into it." What does it mean? 
 Such a book is the Book of Job. Such 
 a book is "Alice in Wonderland." 
 The book that lasts has something 
 " into it." 
 
 Most of us who have much to do 
 with the making or selling or reading 
 of books acquire a very superior atti- 
 tude of mind toward the books loved 
 and read by persons a little less so- 
 phisticated than ourselves. It is the 
 easiest thing in the world to brand as 
 inferior a book which may not happen 
 to appeal to us, but which has held a 
 great audience through many years of 
 
 33
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 changing literary fashions. But, after 
 all, a book which persists and retains 
 in every generation its hold upon a 
 larse number of readers must have in- 
 herently great qualities. 
 
 There are hundreds of such books 
 being read to tatters in our public li- 
 braries which are practically unknown 
 in what are, perhaps erroneously, called 
 more " cultivated circles." 
 
 I recall being asked once by a little 
 serving-maid in my home if she might 
 have access to my limited library. 
 Scenting an opportunity for literary 
 experimentation, I gladly gave permis- 
 sion, though I am free to confess that 
 the library contained a number of vol- 
 umes desi2:ned for readers of some- 
 what more mature mind. I did not 
 feel that she could come to any harm, 
 because I was positive that the vol- 
 
 34
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 umes which she would better not read 
 she would not find interesting. For 
 several days I watched her tentative 
 nibblings at unfamiliar fruit, noticed 
 this or that modern novel taken away, 
 only to be replaced within a few hours. 
 Finally, one day I passed through the 
 room where she was seated and my at- 
 tention was attracted by mufHed sobs. 
 Glancing over her shoulder as I passed, 
 I was amused to see that she was hud- 
 dled in her chair crying her heart out 
 and having a perfectly lovely time 
 reading " Queechy." 
 
 I have no doubt that few, if any, of 
 that extremely small portion of the 
 reading public whose eye will ever fall 
 upon this page have ever read this 
 book. If so, they have probably read 
 it only to scorn it; yet it is a book 
 that always has kept its place, and it 
 
 35
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 must be that it possesses some real 
 quality to have been the final selec- 
 tion of this roving, inquisitive little 
 mind. 
 
 It is very easy to classify the readers 
 of books, but like all generalizations 
 such a classification is only half true. 
 There are a great many people of sense 
 who have bad reading habits, and no 
 one to correct them now that the day 
 of real literary criticism has past. If 
 all the people who have literary taste 
 would exercise it, the ranks of the 
 sponge-reader would increase enor- 
 mously. 
 
 There always will be the unworthy 
 book, just as there always will be de- 
 based forms of expression in every 
 art, but why people of sense should 
 encourage them is a mystery. 
 
 There has been, since man began 
 36
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 to reason, a question unsettled and 
 still open to debate, "Which came 
 first, the first hen or the first egg ? " 
 So there is the question, " Do books 
 make readers' appetites, or do appe- 
 tites for special types of books create 
 those types ? " 
 
 Let us look back a little. Some of 
 us remember " Oueechy." All of us 
 remember the melting heroine. 
 
 Then came the romantic novel. 
 Then came the historical novel. These 
 were followed by the political novel. 
 Now we are wading through a swamp 
 of financial and political stories with a 
 mixture of bloodshed and twentieth- 
 century swashbuckling. 
 
 One day I found myself seated in 
 a train beside a friend of mine who is 
 a confirmed sieve-reader. After we 
 had exchanged a few commonplaces 
 
 37
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 on business and the weather, I retired 
 behind my evening paper. My friend 
 drew from his pocket a copy of his 
 favorite periodical. Before he opened 
 it, I said, " Wait a minute, let me see 
 if I cannot tell you exactly what you 
 are going to find in this week's issue. 
 Just what the stories will be called, I 
 do not know, but I can name with 
 considerable accuracy the illustrations 
 which will accompany them. You will 
 find at least four illustrations in which 
 a man or a woman will be flourishing 
 a revolver. You will find two illustra- 
 tions in which a stock-ticker will fig- 
 ure. There will be, at least, two groups 
 of struggling Chinamen on the slant- 
 ing deck of a sailing-vessel. There 
 will be an indefinite number of illus- 
 trations depicting very long girls and 
 
 longer noblemen." 
 
 38
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 We opened the paper and found 
 that my prophecy was in the main cor- 
 rect. I had overestimated the week's 
 production of revolvers, as there were 
 only three, but the stock-tickers and 
 the girls and the noblemen were there. 
 The only inaccuracy was that the 
 struggling figures on the vessel's deck 
 this week proved to be of Latin ex- 
 traction rather than Asiatic. 
 
 This is the provender which is be- 
 ing provided for the sieve-reader. Not 
 that he likes it particularly, but he is 
 being educated in the belief that he is 
 a robust, virile, " red-blooded " crea- 
 ture, and to this end is being assidu- 
 ously supplied with stories of specula- 
 tion, murder, and court intrigue. As 
 a matter of fact, he does not care a fig 
 for any of these things, but, being a 
 perfectly obliging person, he permits 
 
 39
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 the publishers to provide for him what 
 is most convenient at the moment. 
 
 I have spoken of a story written on 
 a wager. I have spoken of a story 
 written around " a radiant heroine " ; 
 but that is not the whole of the pic- 
 ture. With all their weaknesses and 
 vanities there are a lot of sincere men 
 and women writing to-day. They are 
 trying, among other things, to inter- 
 pret life, to bring about reforms, and 
 to show some of our national weak- 
 nesses. Many of them fail because 
 they are dull, untruthful, or pedantic. 
 But a goodly number succeed because 
 they make an honest and direct ap- 
 peal to the real fundamental humanity 
 in their readers. 
 
 It seems to me to be important for 
 any person of intelligence to consider 
 what his attitude should be toward 
 
 40
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 literature. I do not mean by litera- 
 ture so-called "high-brow stuff," pe- 
 dantic preaching, and books about 
 books or about men who wrote books. 
 Nor do I mean the endless discussion 
 of the intricacies of literary art. I 
 would not have the remotest interest 
 in a six-hundred page volume on ut 
 with the ablative in Plautus. This to 
 my humble way of thinking is not lit- 
 erature; it is chemistry or higher math- 
 ematics. 
 
 I mean by literature, at least I 
 think I mean, that it is after all only 
 a form of expression, an interpretation 
 of the phenomena of human existence, 
 the painting of pictures of life. His- 
 tory, biography, romance, poetry, and 
 humor all do this. The trick is to 
 know which is which. I know of no 
 way better than to go back to the old 
 
 41
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 definition and cling to the book with 
 " something into it." 
 
 I think every intelhgent person 
 ought to elect himself into one of the 
 three classes we have been discussing. 
 If he be a duck-back, let him remain 
 so if he must. If he be a sieve, let 
 him try to be as inoffensive a sieve as 
 possible. If he really gets something 
 out of his reading, let him rejoice and 
 give thanks. 
 
 What should we expect to get from 
 our reading? I am enough of a Phi- 
 listine to believe that the least impor- 
 tant thing to strive for is instruction. 
 The accumulation of facts seems to 
 me an extraordinary waste of time 
 when life is so short and there is so 
 much that is more worth while. Why 
 not try to have our reading give us a 
 little more human sympathy for our 
 
 42
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 fellow beings, a little wider horizon t^e 
 our own little life, a little more love 
 for the other fellow, and incidentally 
 as much amusement as we can derive 
 from it? 
 
 We are all engaged in the interest- 
 ing experience of living, wise and fool- 
 ish alike, and it would seem that each 
 of us could sustain a much more nor- 
 mal relation to life if we acquired 
 an ever so shadowy historical back- 
 ground, some general knowledge of 
 present conditions, and possibly some 
 faint idealism. There is no doubt that 
 the joy of living would be enormously 
 increased if we read wisely. 
 
 It may seem very presuming for a* 
 layman to attempt to prescribe for 
 present-day literary ills, but I am 
 tempted to do so. 
 
 In the first place, in this connection, 
 43
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 if I were a woman, I should demand 
 among other rights the return of my 
 literary heritage. The women buy ten 
 books to-day where the men buy one. 
 I should repudiate in no uncertain 
 voice the kind of thing that is pro- 
 vided for my special benefit. I should 
 demand emancipation from the so- 
 called women's publications, with all 
 their tawdry make-believe and literary 
 cant, with all their pretty little literary 
 paper dolls and their pseudo-scientific 
 nonsense. I should realize that all 
 this stuff with its sickening sentiment 
 and doubtful sex -consciousness is 
 vastly more dangerous to our daugh- 
 ter's mental and moral integrity than 
 many robust writers from whom she 
 is shielded. Having secured my free- 
 dom, as many have, I should use it to 
 get the very best out of life. 
 
 44
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 At the best we can only touch life 
 physically at a very few points. All 
 other contact must come through good 
 talk and good reading. We choose our 
 friends, why not our books. 
 
 Looking on life, after all, in its final 
 analysis as a purely social affair, — I 
 mean purely a question of our relation 
 to our fellow beings, and a right ad- 
 justment of our conflicting claims, — 
 I should put first in importance a sym- 
 pathetic understanding of my fellow 
 men. History, biography, personal rem- 
 iniscence, and some fiction will help 
 us do this. Never mind the dates, 
 never mind who fought or won or lost 
 the Punic Wars (I am sure I have not 
 the faintest idea), but hold fast to the 
 truth that our problems are not new 
 problems ; they are as old as man. 
 Even the Phoenicians struggled with 
 
 45
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 the high cost of living. History read 
 in this spirit has enormous rewards in 
 interest and humor. Fiction can help 
 you know a little about life of to-day, 
 but be sure that it deals with a phase 
 of life that has real significance and is 
 not the highly colored imaginings of 
 some social parasite. 
 
 Of poetry each must judge for him- 
 self. But as man does not live by bread 
 alone, so the mind needs some ideal- 
 ism, and poetry ought to give it. Read 
 it if you can, but for Heaven's sake, 
 do not pretend to like it if you do not. 
 
 And humor; above all, let us not 
 forget humor. It is the salt of life ; it 
 is the one thing that keeps us sane. 
 Don the cap and bells at pleasure and 
 refresh your souls. We can learn a 
 great deal in very pleasant fashion 
 from the jesters. They are the only 
 
 46
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 people who really prick the bubblej 
 of our vanity in a pleasant and pain, 
 less fashion. You can get an amazing 
 amount of history out of TroUope and 
 Mark Twain, philosophy from Lewis 
 Carroll, and politics from the incom- 
 parable Dooley ; and I know no liter- 
 ary criticism equal to some of J. K. 
 Stephen's estimates of writers, he who 
 wrote the famous 
 
 " When the Rudyards cease from Kipling 
 And the Haggards ride no more " ; 
 
 or — 
 
 " Two voices are there : one is of the deep ; . . . 
 And one is of an old half-witted sheep 
 Which bleats articulate monotony, . . . 
 And, Wordsworth, both are thine," etc. 
 
 When we think of the tons of infe- 
 rior books which we, the reading pub- 
 lic, devour year in and year out, it 
 would seem as if we were in a rather 
 
 47
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 bad way. But let us not despair. We 
 are not utterly unregenerate and lost. 
 We, like every other mass of human 
 beings, have a substratum of surpris- 
 ingly sound common sense. We do 
 like good things, — witness the avidity 
 with which we buy the good, the whole- 
 some, the sweet and unaffected. What 
 mountains of " Mrs. Wiggs of the Cab- 
 bage Patch " and " The Birds' Christ- 
 mas Carol " and " The Lady of the 
 Decoration " we have purchased. Only 
 we do not stand by our guns like the 
 duck-back. We run after strange gods 
 and infinitely stranger goddesses. We 
 tolerate, if we do not worship, the 
 Mary McLeans, the Baroness This or 
 That, the — but I promised to name 
 no names. 
 
 If we stand up in our boots and say, 
 " We, the reading public, in conven- 
 
 48
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 tion assembled, do hereby demand our 
 inalienable right to the best in letters," 
 we shall get it, and not only shall we 
 profit enormously, but we shall be 
 called blessed even to the third and 
 fourth generation. 
 
 And it would seem as if this happy 
 day were really coming; for with all 
 their defects the magazines are edu- 
 cating a lot of people in the art of 
 reading, and a few of them will ulti- 
 mately crave better and better literary 
 provender, and so the ranks of the 
 real readers will be slowly and pain- 
 fully recruited. 
 
 But in the mean time the sieve and 
 the duck-back are coming into their 
 own more than ever before. Not con- 
 tent to allow them to remain the pri- 
 vate prey of the commercial book 
 publisher, the magazines have made a 
 
 49
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 frantic and fairly successful effort to 
 prevent their development into real 
 readers. This has been accomplished 
 in various ways. In the first place, the 
 numerical strength of the reading pub- 
 lic has been vastly increased until now 
 nearly every human being with eyes 
 to see reads at least one magazine, and 
 frequently a dozen. This newly cre- 
 ated reader is kept as much as possi- 
 ble in ignorance of better things, and 
 then, lest he feebly try to free himself 
 from the shackles of the "popular," 
 he is told that " popularity " is the final 
 test of excellence. He is solemnly in- 
 formed that muck-raking makes for 
 good citizenship, that the sensational 
 is the virile, and often that the obscene 
 is in its final analysis educational. So 
 he is frequently content to remain 
 where he is and to wallow in the pop- 
 
 50
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ular under the impression that what 
 makes his reading so easy really edu- 
 cates and uplifts. 
 
 This enormous number of people, 
 either kept in intellectual bondage by 
 such specious arguments, or blindly 
 rebelling and groping their way to 
 better things, is the really significant 
 element in the intellectual life of our 
 country to-day. 
 
 The hope of the future is the one- 
 hundredth man who emerges. And 
 emerge he does, for never before have 
 good books and magazines been sought 
 as now. 
 
 It may be interesting to study this 
 spectacle from the viewpoint of the 
 magazine publisher, even if our de- 
 ductions must of necessity be based 
 on the happenings in one magazine 
 office. 
 
 51
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 In my perusals of many learned 
 manuscripts I have frequently been 
 struck with the free use of statistics 
 by writers of all degrees of promi- 
 nence. The secret seems to be that 
 their use always lends an air of pro- 
 fundity to their utterances, and they 
 are also the most easily procurable 
 things in the world. Let us by all 
 means begin with some. 
 
 How many magazine readers, I won- 
 der, realize the number of periodicals 
 poured out annually upon the Ameri- 
 can reading public ? There are over 
 three thousand monthly publications 
 in this country, and over fifteen thou- 
 sand publications of all kinds. Cheer- 
 ing figures to paper manufacturers and 
 to authors, but forbidding to any one 
 who contemplates starting a new pe- 
 riodical venture. 
 
 52
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 Of this vast number, however, there 
 are comparatively few of general in- 
 terest. A scant dozen would cover the 
 monthly periodicals familiar to most 
 magazine readers. This dozen can 
 again be divided into two groups about 
 equal in size, one representing the pe- 
 riodicals published with some serious 
 purpose in view, and the other those 
 which are conducted purely as money- 
 making ventures. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, there are 
 some periodicals of general circulation 
 whose publishers care more for the 
 service they can render to American 
 life and literature than for the profits 
 they make. 
 
 I once asked the owner of a very 
 flourishing popular magazine, who was 
 editing his periodical. He answered 
 with evident pride, " I have no editor. 
 
 53
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 My magazine is a business proposi- 
 tion." Unfortunately I can speak only 
 of magazines which have editors. 
 
 There is a good deal said about the 
 "editorial policy" of various maga- 
 zines, and each of them has a distinct 
 character of its own, but it is doubt- 
 ful if a single magazine published to- 
 day has any very definite editorial 
 policy. 
 
 Any publication in course of time 
 builds up traditions of its own, and 
 finds its own particular field; but few, 
 if any, are conducted by rule-of-thumb 
 methods. In the old days Robert 
 Bonner had a few simple rules for 
 the editorial conduct of the " New 
 York Ledo:er." No horse could trot 
 under three minutes; no character 
 ever smoked or drank, much less 
 •swore; divorce was never mentioned; 
 
 54
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 and the curtain always fell on romances 
 before the lovers exchanged a single 
 kiss. 
 
 The application of somewhat simi- 
 lar rules might benefit current litera- 
 ture not a little, but I doubt if even 
 in the conduct of the most exquisitely 
 edited women's publications there are 
 any hard-and-fast rules. 
 
 No, the magazines that have sur- 
 vived the fearful competition of the 
 last ten years have done so by the sim- 
 ple process of remaining in the field 
 which they have preempted and by 
 having in the editorial chair a man 
 who can find in that field fresh and 
 invitinsf material for his readers. De- 
 
 O 
 
 spite the magazines that are " business 
 propositions," this brings us to the 
 very evident fact that the editor is the 
 most important element in the success 
 
 55
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 of a magazine, — really everything 
 depends upon him. There is really 
 such a thing as " editorial instinct." It 
 is not, however, exactly what a young 
 man of my acquaintance thought it 
 was. 
 
 This young man had recently be- 
 come the editor of a very successful 
 woman's publication. On the occasion 
 of my first visit to him, I was con- 
 ducted through a labyrinth of outer 
 offices resplendent with Grand Rapids 
 furniture, plaster casts, and rubber 
 plants, and ushered into his presence. 
 He greeted me with that curious com- 
 bination of cordiality and condescen- 
 sion with which a New York business 
 man always greets a visitor from Bos- 
 ton, and we talked of many things. 
 My attention was attracted by a pile 
 of small pasteboard boxes on the top 
 
 56
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 of his desk, and I made bold to in- 
 quire as to their contents. " Those," 
 he said, — " oh, those are the doilies 
 submitted in our last needlework con- 
 test." Here truly was something new 
 under the editorial sun, and I am 
 afraid I betrayed my surprise. 
 
 " But surely," I said, " you don't de- 
 cide the needlework contests." He 
 looked a bit pained. " Of course I do," 
 he responded ; " and the curious thing 
 about it is that when I finally reach a 
 decision my wife often says, ' My dear, 
 how do you do it ? How do you man- 
 age always to select the best and pret- 
 tiest ones, for you always do } ' And 
 I answer, ' I 'm sure I don't know, my 
 love, but I fancy it is the editorial 
 instinct.'" 
 
 Now, while discriminating taste in 
 doilies is important, it is not the elu- 
 
 57
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 sive thing we call " editorial instinct." 
 To me this "editorial instinct" seems 
 to be the power to detect at a glance 
 the significant things in life and in 
 letters and in society; then to know 
 intuitively how they should be pre- 
 sented to make one's readers listen ; 
 and then, the most difficult of all, to 
 put one's finger on the man or woman 
 to do the work. 
 
 There are some subjects which are 
 always in the public mind, just as 
 there are some figures in history, the 
 interest in which ebbs and flows as 
 regularly as the seasons come and go. 
 Of these Lincoln, Napoleon, and Lu- 
 ther are conspicuous examples. These 
 three gentlemen, whatever their use- 
 fulness in the past may have been, are 
 now recognized as " circulation rais- 
 ers " of the first order. There are other 
 
 58
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 subjects of perennial interest, how- 
 ever. 
 
 In this country it is a poor day that 
 does not bring to every editorial desk 
 from Maine to California a paper on 
 the negro problem. Now the " Atlantic 
 Monthly" has done its share for the 
 colored brother, particularly under the 
 editorship of Mr. Walter H. Page, 
 a Southerner by birth and education. 
 One day a colored man of cultivation 
 was talking with Mr. Page, urging the 
 publication of a series of conventional 
 papers on the subject. Mr. Page knew 
 he had printed as much of this mate- 
 rial as was wise, he knew more of the 
 same sort would weary his readers 
 and do more harm than good, yet the 
 question is a big and pressing one. 
 Could it be approached from some 
 fresh point of view? He was pacing 
 
 59
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 back and forth in his Httle office while 
 the eloquent negro talked. Suddenly 
 he stopped and said, " No, I won't 
 print another line of the material you 
 are talking about, but I tell you what 
 I will do. You tell me ' how it feels 
 to be a negro ' and I '11 print it." 
 
 That was editorial instinct. 
 
 Most of the really successful maga- 
 zine papers, the ones that seem most 
 spontaneous and incidentally sell the 
 best, are the result of some such flash- 
 ing realization on the part of an editor 
 that a really vital subject can be ap- 
 proached from some fresh point of 
 view. Such men, then, the editors of 
 magazines must be, and American 
 mag:azines have been fortunate in 
 bavins: a number of them. 
 
 Perhaps the most complex and most 
 interesting feature of magazine work 
 
 60
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 is the relation of a publication to its 
 authors. Of this it is well to speak in 
 guarded terms, for almost every hu- 
 man being in the world is either an 
 author or likely to become one at any 
 moment. 
 
 The most popular superstition in 
 regard to editors is that they do not 
 give consideration to the work of new 
 and unknown writers. This notion 
 persists in the public mind for the 
 same mysterious reasons that cause 
 generations of small boys to believe 
 that toads give warts, or that snakes 
 swallow their tails. If authors only 
 realized the eagerness with which the 
 work of unknown writers is scanned, 
 they would soon see the folly of any 
 such idea. 
 
 There is no mystery about it. A 
 new and untried author demands and 
 
 6i
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 receives, as a rule, a lower rate of pay- 
 ment than those of established repu- 
 tation, and rightly so. But more than 
 this, — they are vastly more amenable 
 to suggestion. They have no fixed 
 habits of thought, less marked char- 
 acteristics of style, and can be moulded 
 to meet the needs of an editor much 
 more freely than their more well- 
 known brothers. 
 
 But they ask, "What of all these 
 rejections ? " One reason for them is 
 the limited possibility of choice. The 
 average magazine prints about twelve 
 body articles a month. That means 
 that one hundred and forty-four papers 
 supply the needs of the magazine for 
 a year. The accumulation of a large 
 number of manuscripts is unwise, as 
 long-deferred publication always de- 
 tracts from their freshness, and the 
 
 62
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 necessity of printing material already 
 accepted deters an editor from buying 
 what may be better and fresher. 
 
 So the skillful editor sails pretty 
 close to the wind. He buys only what 
 he can publish with reasonable prompt- 
 ness, and while he always will have 
 enough material to tide him over one 
 of the rare periods of unproductiveness 
 on the part of authors, he must always 
 be free to make immediate purchases of 
 the unexpected windfalls which come 
 to every office. 
 
 This accounts for many rejections, 
 and for the non-committal form of re- 
 jection. These courteous phrases fa- 
 miliar to so many of us are really the 
 children of necessity. Disgruntled au- 
 thors to the contrary notwithstand- 
 ing, acceptable manuscripts are con- 
 stantly being rejected, for precisely 
 
 63
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 the reasons given, by long-suffering 
 editors. These rejected manuscripts 
 often cover precisely the same ground 
 as others already on hand, they are 
 strikingly similar in plot and setting, 
 or are written in the same period. 
 Stories, particularly, drop into groups 
 in the editorial mind — sea stories, 
 horse and dog stories. New England, 
 Western, child, school and college, 
 slum and settlement work, business — 
 there are countless classifications. 
 
 Now if a story chances to drop into 
 one of the familiar groups it must be 
 distinctly better than those already on 
 hand if it is to gain acceptance, and 
 there is a surprising amount of literary 
 work of about the same degree of ex- 
 cellence. 
 
 Editors are human, and it is no won- 
 der that after reading three stories of 
 
 64
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 the Maine woods an editor wearies a 
 little when the next manuscript in the 
 pile proves a fourth story with the 
 same background. It may be thor- 
 oughly good, but its chances of ac- 
 ceptance are slight. But let a new 
 writer submit a manuscript original in 
 subject and treatment, and see what 
 happens. The editor, if he is really an 
 editor and not a mere adjunct to an 
 advertising sheet, will do his utmost 
 to accept it. If it is not in proper form 
 he will sit up nights to smooth it into 
 shape. Authors will not believe this, 
 but it is true. 
 
 Authors object to printed rejection 
 slips. The printer will tell you they 
 are ordered by the thousands. Enough 
 clerks could not be hired or housed to 
 do the work they do. " Well," the re- 
 jected say, " give us printed ones, but 
 
 65
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 let them tell the truth." Now the fact 
 of the case is that an editor often does 
 not dare tell the truth. His lot is hard 
 enough as it is ; he does not court as- 
 sassination. Now let us be reasonable 
 for a moment. Are all the people you 
 know agreeable, wise and cultured, 
 witty, engaging, and prepossessing ? 
 Not unless you live in the islands of 
 the blessed. By the same token do all 
 the people who send manuscripts to 
 an editor betray the same agreeable 
 characteristic ? Far from it. 
 
 Writing is a serious business. Would 
 that the budding author realized it! 
 It is, after all, self-revelation. Let two 
 men describe an incident, a chance 
 meeting on the street, or what not. 
 One will tell you a dull tale; the other 
 will leave you chuckling for an hour. 
 Both stories would be competent testi- 
 
 66
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 mony in a court of law. Both stories 
 mieht well meet the bare technical re- 
 quirements of narrative, but one is a 
 good yarn and the other is not. Both 
 would be regarded as available by the 
 authors and their families, but one re- 
 veals an agreeable personality and the 
 other does not. This in varying de- 
 grees solves the mystery of editorial 
 "availability"; at least it seems tome 
 to do so from the standpoint of the 
 man in the street. 
 
 What would the author prefer .f* The 
 agreeable evasiveness of a printed slip, 
 or a letter saying, " Sir, — Looking 
 through your manuscript I see in the 
 person behind it an insufferable bore." 
 Or, " Madam, — Your manuscript, en- 
 tirely acceptable as far as technical re- 
 quirements are concerned, reveals so 
 vapid a personality behind it that we 
 
 6/
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 cannot believe our readers will care to 
 make your acquaintance." 
 
 Now I am going to use a word I 
 hate, but I know no other to fit. That 
 is the word " taste." I have read in my 
 capacity as a literary dog hundreds of 
 manuscripts which were so good I 
 wondered why they were not better. 
 Slowly it dawned on me that the au- 
 thors in many instances knew the 
 craftsmanship of their trade, but they 
 were deficient in that subtle thing we 
 call " taste." I recall one story in which, 
 to create an atmosphere of superlative 
 luxury around the heroine, she, poor 
 girl, was compelled by the heartless 
 author of her being to step in and out 
 of a limousine fourteen times in the 
 narrow compass of a four-thousand- 
 word story. A man or woman who 
 talked like that would be laughed at 
 
 6S
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 As a writer he wonders why his stories 
 do not succeed. 
 
 The man in the street could tell 
 him. One does not need the editorial 
 gift to know he is a cad. So, after all, 
 I am convinced that all the fine phrases 
 that my literary associates use, tech- 
 nique, mood, restraint, and all the rest, 
 come to the same thing after all. It is 
 the personality back of the manuscript 
 that often makes for acceptance or re- 
 jection. 
 
 Let writers write less, read more, 
 live wisely, deeply, and humanly, — 
 make themselves, in other words, good 
 fellows, and with reasonable technical 
 skill their chance is good of being a 
 best-seller. 
 
 Editors are often charged with be- 
 ing influenced by distinguished names. 
 It is claimed that they publish inferior 
 
 69
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 work by famous writers to the exclu- 
 sion of better work by unknowns. 
 Guilty in the first degree. No other 
 verdict is possible from a jury of un- 
 prejudiced magazine readers. But the 
 real answer to this charge is that the 
 men who are guilty of it are not edi- 
 tors. They are hired choremen doing 
 the work their employer sets them to. 
 This is no place to discuss the edi- 
 torial function, but it is well to bear 
 in mind this question : Is this editorial 
 function an honest effort to aim at and 
 hit as often as possible a fixed target of 
 excellence, or a frantic effort to shoot 
 as rapidly as possible at the moving 
 target of public taste? If it is the 
 former, then few, if any, real editors 
 are guilty of this charge of subservi- 
 ency to a famous name. If the latter, 
 then they are only doing their duty, 
 
 70
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 for the public demands stories good, 
 bad, and indifferent from writers of 
 note. 
 
 The fact that a famous author sells 
 to the same editors the identical manu- 
 scripts they curtly declined when the 
 author was unknown proves nothing 
 except that the editors are giving the 
 public exactly what they want. The 
 stories may have been inferior when 
 first offered and declined, and they 
 may have been no less so when the 
 same editors bought them a year later 
 under the pressure of public demand. 
 So the editor turns over his pile of 
 manuscripts in his search after either 
 the good or the popular. 
 
 These manuscripts come in shoals 
 from every quarter of the globe. There 
 are somewhere between ten and twelve 
 thousand handled every year in the 
 
 71
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 "Atlantic" office, from which a selec- 
 tion of a scant two hundred and fifty 
 is made. They run the whole gamut 
 of human interest and experience. 
 There are quatrains and two-volume 
 novels, and the most remarkable thing 
 about them is that they are all read, 
 except that hopeless, pathetic minority 
 that bear the familiar earmarks of 
 insanity. 
 
 A considerable portion of the in- 
 habitants of this country are still at- 
 tempting to square the circle, explain 
 the pyramids, or invent perpetual mo- 
 tion. Some of these contributors of 
 crank literature are amusing, some 
 alarming. I recall one fearsome per- 
 son, seven feet high, more or less, with 
 bristling whiskers and flashing eyes, 
 whose manuscript was an exhaustive 
 study of the interesting thesis that 
 
 72
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was a reincarna- 
 tion of St. Paul. Through an inaccu- 
 rate address, or on account of the 
 migratory habits of the author, the 
 manuscript never reached him after 
 an entirely unjust and prejudiced edi- 
 torial judgment had been made against 
 it. The author afterwards recognized 
 his brain child in a publication of the 
 Smithsonian Institution. It did not 
 matter that the monograph in ques- 
 tion happened to discuss the water- 
 shed of the Missouri Valley; it was 
 his and he knew it. He hurried to 
 our office and charged us with the ne- 
 farious crime of having sold his man- 
 uscript to what he described as " the 
 vermin of the White House." We 
 were given our choice, ten thousand 
 dollars cash, or we were to be blown 
 up ! How little he knew of the maga- 
 
 73
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 zine business ! Any magazine pub- 
 lisher would welcome complete and 
 painless annihilation when faced by 
 the alternative of finding ten thousand 
 dollars. 
 
 For weeks we came to and departed 
 from our office with furtive glances up 
 and down the street. For a month our 
 sensitive nostrils detected daily the 
 odor of a burning fuse. 
 
 Editors and publishers frequently 
 have a rule that contributors are not 
 to read their compositions aloud to 
 them. One day I received a call from 
 a gentleman who announced on his 
 arrival, " I come not to sell my wares, 
 I come for human sympathy." So 
 unusual an introduction enlisted my 
 interest at once. Before I could stop 
 him he had his manuscript out and 
 was well under way. He read me a 
 
 74
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 poem of some forty stanzas, each one 
 ending with the eloquent and sugges- 
 tive monosyllables, " Ho, Ho, Ha, Ha." 
 It was an extraordinary elocutionary 
 feat, for he gave to those monosyl- 
 lables forty different inflections. With 
 no offer of barter he thanked me for 
 my wealth of human sympathy and 
 withdrew. 
 
 Some authors are timid about sub- 
 mitting their manuscripts; some want 
 payment in advance of examination ; 
 some inquire the price paid for "good 
 poetry"; some are trustful and send a 
 sample, like the gentleman from Indi- 
 ana, that home of poesy, who sent 
 four verses and wanted to know what 
 we would pay for them and for forty- 
 two " extry fine stanzas." 
 
 Some transpose a couple of pages 
 in the middle of the manuscript and 
 
 75
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 write back in glee when the manu- 
 script is returned with the pages still 
 out of order, proving beyond doubt 
 that the deceitful editor never read it. 
 The writers who resort to this well- 
 known trick usually submit manu- 
 scripts the value of which would not 
 be greatly affected by the transpo- 
 sition of a considerable number of 
 pages. 
 
 I do not want to dwell too long on 
 this element of magazine work, but, 
 after all, the rejected manuscripts and 
 their authors bring to an editorial 
 office not a little humor and relief 
 from more serious duties. These of- 
 ferings are vastly interesting. Often 
 I suspect that they are submitted by 
 some wag with whom it would be a 
 pleasure to foregather. 
 
 Between the specialist whose work 
 76
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 IS always in demand, and the writer 
 of habitually declined manuscripts, 
 there is, however, a large group of 
 writers who challenge every editor's 
 attention. And it is with this group 
 that most of his work is done, and 
 upon his relations with them depends 
 largely his editorial success or failure. 
 This is the great group of occasional 
 writers, some writing from the fullness 
 of a life's experience, some making 
 their first attempts, some writing for 
 the sheer pleasure of self-expression, 
 and other from stern necessity. 
 
 It is with this group that a skill- 
 ful editor most concerns himself, for 
 among the hundreds there may be 
 found the one bright particular star 
 that may guide his magazine on to 
 success, the one writer who may give 
 expression to half -formed editorial 
 
 17
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 plans and perform the service he has 
 so long waited to see performed. 
 
 And in passing, it is pleasant to 
 note that where an author has been 
 helped and encouraged, when he or 
 she has, perhaps, been guided away 
 from mistaken standards and started 
 toward success by some editor, I have 
 yet to know an instance where such 
 glory and reputation as was gained 
 did not fall entirely to the lot of the 
 author. I have never heard an editor, 
 publicly, at least, claim an iota of 
 credit for any author's distinction, and 
 if the truth were known, there are 
 dozens of conspicuous instances where 
 unknown editors have actually made 
 authors who to-day enjoy world-wide 
 reputation. Perhaps it is because years 
 of labor full of disappointments and 
 unfulfilled hopes keep an editor hum- 
 
 78
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ble. Perhaps it is that he knows only 
 too well his own liability to error. 
 Whether these things have burned 
 into the editorial mind or not, I do 
 not know, but I do know that the 
 best editors are the humblest and 
 least likely to boast of their successes. 
 
 Of this group of occasional writers 
 the most interesting and the most 
 vexatious are what are called the 
 " one-story writers." How faithfully an 
 editor tries to develop such a person, 
 how he warns against overproduction, 
 and counsels reading and study. Once 
 in a great while, once in a very great 
 while, his advice is followed, and the 
 writer profits by it; but more often it 
 is not and rejection follows rejection. 
 
 The " one-story writers " are an in- 
 teresting problem. They are hard to 
 explain, but I will venture to give 
 
 79
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 what seems a reasonable explanation 
 of them. 
 
 I believe that almost every person 
 of cultivation has somewhere in the 
 recesses of his consciousness some pet 
 idea or the recollections of some pe- 
 culiarly vivid experience. It has been 
 moulded by unconscious thought into 
 some literary form, a story, an essay, 
 a poem, or what not. Then comes the 
 impulse to write, to express this 
 thought, and it leaps on to paper in 
 more or less perfect form. 
 
 Its form depends upon how much 
 natural gift for literary expression the 
 writer may have. Often it is thor- 
 oughly good and has the essential 
 literary qualities, sincerity and lack 
 of self-consciousness. It gains accept- 
 ance and the bewildered writer finds 
 himself in print. Nothing seems easier, 
 
 80
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 SO he proceeds at once to write in a 
 week, without thought, something as 
 good as he has developed by months 
 or years of unconscious mental incu- 
 bation. His product is stilted, self- 
 conscious, written to sell, and fails. 
 Then, despite the appeals of his friend 
 the editor, he thinks himself badly 
 used. 
 
 There are hundreds of such in- 
 stances. I have a friend, a brilliant law- 
 yer, who printed a sonnet in " Scrib- 
 ner's " years ago. It was a good sonnet, 
 too (though I know less about sonnets 
 than any living man). He wrote it 
 after a month's cruising along the 
 New England shore. For a year he 
 did nothing but write sonnets, but 
 never published another. Then he 
 gave up. He said he thought that 
 ^'Scribner" sonnet was born in him; 
 
 8i
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 it probably was, but it was all alone 
 by itself. He now writes very good 
 legal opinions, but no poetry. 
 
 Yes, there is something in this the- 
 ory, for how else can you explain the 
 worthy fathers of large families, sober 
 business men, lawyers and coal-deal- 
 ers in middle life, who come shyly in 
 with their solitary manuscript, ask for 
 our judgment, implore us not to tell 
 their wives, and then disappear from 
 our office horizon? 
 
 Often, however, the " one - story 
 writer" has proved a veritable liter- 
 ary gold mine. In every instance, 
 however, it has been due to the au- 
 thor's willingness to act on sugges- 
 tions, to cut and prune and revise 
 until the technical craftsmanship of 
 his trade has been learned. 
 
 The relation of an editor with 
 82
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 writers is not without humor, although 
 they can be at times what Mark 
 Twain calls " very trying." As a rule 
 the most successful ones are the most 
 difficult, and the men are quite as 
 difficult as the women. 
 
 I recall one classic instance where 
 an author of reputation obliged his 
 hero to smoke cigars offered him by 
 a widow who described them as hav- 
 ing belonged to the dear departed. 
 As in an earlier paragraph the author 
 had placed the time of the gentle- 
 man's death as eight years previous, 
 the conclusion was irresistible that the 
 cigars would be a bit dry. But the 
 author was one who permitted no lib- 
 erties with his manuscripts, and the 
 suggestion of the editor in regard to 
 this incident was ignored. 
 
 I do not want to leave the discus- 
 83
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 sion of an editor's relations with his 
 authors without adding a word in 
 their behalf. No one is less willing 
 than I to leave in your minds any im- 
 pression that the author is regarded 
 in any editorial office with anything 
 but respect and affection. I have, 
 perhaps, overemphasized the human 
 aspects of the relationship, but only 
 because they are the least under- 
 stood. 
 
 The men and women who are do- 
 ing the writing for the best of the 
 magazines are quite human, but they 
 constitute a group of high-minded 
 and delightful gentlemen and gentle- 
 women who are serving high ideals 
 and with whom it is a rare privilege 
 to be associated in even the most cas- 
 ual manner. 
 
 Editorial problems do not end, how- 
 84
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ever, with the mere selection of the 
 copy for each issue. From the mass 
 of accepted material the editor must 
 build his number. First he will select 
 his leader. This is the article which 
 in his opinion will arrest public atten- 
 tion most quickly. It usually has 
 "timely" quality, and has been ar- 
 ranged for months in advance. This 
 is the paper relied upon to cause 
 newspaper controversy and general 
 comment (the best possible form of 
 advertising), and leads the issue for 
 this reason and because the eye of the 
 casual buyer will catch it more readily 
 on the news-stand. Here enters the 
 commercial element. 
 
 Occasionally the experiment is tried 
 of using a long poem as a leader. This 
 is a mistake, as diminished sales al- 
 most always show. Evidently the pub- 
 
 85
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 lie are a little frightened by a long 
 poem. It looks too literary. It is 
 astonishing how afraid people are of 
 anything they suspect to be litera- 
 ture ; they think it must be dull and 
 pass it by. What a pity it is that this 
 bugbear should be allowed to roam at 
 large. 
 
 After the leading article the rest of 
 the contributors follow, not in the 
 order of their importance, but so ar- 
 ranged as to create the greatest pos- 
 sible effect of variety, and to appeal 
 to as many different interests as pos- 
 sible. 
 
 What to do with poetry is a great 
 question. Editors do not believe in 
 placing it in a number so as to appear 
 as if used to fill up blank spaces at 
 the end of articles, for they do not 
 buy poetry for that purpose. The ex- 
 
 86
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 periment has been tried of grouping 
 it together, making two or three pages 
 of it, but the typographical effect is 
 bad, and this is not often done now. 
 So it is still used on so-called " broken " 
 pages, because the typographical effect 
 is best, and it is a wonderful aid in 
 meeting the exacting mechanical de- 
 mands of make-up. The material 
 chosen must fill, as a rule, just so 
 many pages, — no more, no less, — 
 and these little spaces are precious. 
 
 The editorial guess is often a bad 
 one as to the feature of an issue, and 
 the paper put first may not cause a 
 ripple of interest, while some other 
 buried in the middle of the issue will 
 bring scores of letters to the office. 
 
 Having constructed his issue, the 
 editor now girds up his loins for the 
 battle of the proofs. Changes in type 
 
 87
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 are expensive and very few corrections 
 can be made in an hour, and the pub- 
 lisher objects to many of them. It is 
 unreasonable not to let an author make 
 such changes as will manifestly im- 
 prove his product, but when he wants 
 to rewrite his story or article, or, as in 
 one historic instance, to change the 
 tense of every verb in eleven type 
 pages, the editor must rebel. 
 
 After the proofs are all back from 
 the authors, and usually one never 
 comes back or comes so late as to dis- 
 arrange completely the editor's nicely 
 balanced make-up, the plates are cast 
 and the issue is turned over to the 
 business department to market just as 
 if the completed magazines were shoes 
 or potatoes. The editor heaves a sigh 
 of relief, and then begins to make up 
 the next issue, and so it goes twelve 
 
 88
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 months in the year with no omission 
 of summer numbers or sabbatical 
 
 years. 
 
 Another matter of interest in the 
 ofifice of a magazine is the relation of 
 a periodical to its pubHc. Let us stop 
 for a moment and calculate the num- 
 ber of copies of magazines circulated 
 this month. Estimating their circula- 
 tions from ofificial figures, nine of the 
 big sellers have distributed over eight 
 million bound periodicals this month ; 
 only nine of the thousands published 
 give a combined circulation of over 
 eisht million. These enormous circu- 
 lations bring problems of their own. 
 
 One publisher, who has achieved a 
 circulation of over a million copies, 
 employs an expert who provides him 
 with the latest figures from the Census 
 Bureau. He knows the proportion of 
 
 89
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 illiteracy in every State, and in gen- 
 eral how rapidly the population is be- 
 ing educated to a point where it can 
 read his publication. 
 
 It is very difficult to conceive of a 
 magazine circulation so nearly cover- 
 ing our entire reading population, and 
 it is doubly difficult to conceive of a 
 great public entirely ignorant of many 
 people and things which are house- 
 hold traditions with us. 
 
 An editor once told me that at con- 
 siderable expense he secured the right 
 to use on his cover the portrait of a 
 popular actress by a world-famous art- 
 ist. He printed beneath the picture 
 the names of the actress and the art- 
 ist. " Portrait of Miss by Mr. 
 
 ." He lost thousands of sales of 
 
 that issue and shrewdly guessed the 
 reason. In his audience few had ever 
 
 90
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 heard of the actress, and practically 
 none of them knew even the name of 
 the artist. If he had called his lovely- 
 picture " Youth," or " Happiness," or 
 "An American Queen," the result 
 would have been very different. As 
 these abstract things are known and 
 understood, there would have been no 
 diminution of sales. 
 
 It is not, however, with so great and 
 so diverse an audience that the so- 
 called •' standard magazines " have to 
 concern themselves. But in associa- 
 tion with the subscription list of even 
 one of these there is month after month 
 food for thought for the mind of philo- 
 sophic habit. 
 
 The mild pleasures of conjecture 
 are in themselves a luxury. It is agree- 
 able to be carried out of the routine 
 of one's work, if only for a moment, to 
 
 91
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 wonder what manner of place Rabbit 
 Hash, Kentucky, may be, for it is from 
 this appetizing post-office that a sub- 
 scriber writes. 
 
 The old-fashioned subscriber who 
 "stops his paper" exists to-day, and 
 his letters of angry protest must be 
 answered. It seems to be very difficult 
 for many people to realize that a well- 
 conducted magazine has no editorial 
 bias. No matter what the editor's per- 
 sonal opinions may be, he tries to keep 
 his columns open to the fair discus- 
 sion of both sides of every big ques- 
 tion. 
 
 The publication of any paper on 
 such subjects as "Woman Suffrage" 
 or " Vivisection" will swell the editor's 
 mail for weeks, and the letters are 
 not unwelcome. Many suggestions of 
 value come, and how can an editor 
 
 92
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 know if he pleases or displeases his 
 readers unless they tell him? 
 
 The same article will be interpreted 
 by readers in exactly opposite ways. 
 One irate gentleman will attack the 
 editor for being anti-Catholic ; an- 
 other will detect evidence in the same 
 article of his rapidly " going over to 
 Rome." 
 
 As a rule all such letters are care- 
 fully answered and an effort made to 
 show the reader just what the editor's 
 position is. Occasionally letters of un- 
 qualified denunciation reach him, as 
 in the case of a breezy Westerner who 
 wrote recently, " Your articles are weak 
 and vapid, your essays nonsense, your 
 stories utterly without interest, and 
 your poetry is rotten. If you only 
 would listen to reason and try to learn 
 how to make a magazine, but you 
 
 93
 
 r 
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 Easterners know it all, so Hell ! what's 
 the use ! " Such a letter tends to a day 
 of humility in the office, and is a diffi- 
 cult one to answer. 
 
 The circulation of such a magazine 
 as the "Atlantic Monthly," for in- 
 stance, is built up in quite a different 
 manner from that of more popular pe- 
 riodicals. The publishers' problem is 
 to find the largest number of people 
 who will care for the magazine, not to 
 make a magazine to suit the taste of 
 the largest possible number of peo- 
 ple. To this end they try to put it 
 into the hands of as many people as 
 possible for trial subscriptions at a 
 nominal price. For this purpose they 
 frequently use the alluring coin-card 
 with a neatly cut hole for a half-dollar 
 and an attractive red label to paste 
 over it. 
 
 94
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 These coin-cards return with won- 
 derful contents. One affluent gentle- 
 man sent a twenty-dollar gold-piece by- 
 mistake, and its return was a heroic 
 instance of business virtue. An attrac- 
 tive young woman from Peoria sent 
 her photograph neatly framed in the 
 card and asked if it would be accepted 
 for three issues of the magazine. 
 
 One gets very human little flashes 
 of life from subscribers' letters. Every 
 editor and publisher receive hundreds 
 of letters, many of them betraying a 
 pathetic desire for self-expression. It 
 is flattering to be taken into a reader's 
 confidence, but how can you answer 
 such a letter as this : — 
 
 " The November ' Atlantic ' came 
 here all right, and when my mother 
 and father called one pleasant after- 
 noon she took it home. I forget what 
 
 95
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 I said on my postal, and do not know 
 how long I shall be here, but I think 
 it will be safe to send it here until you 
 hear from me to the contrary. Win- 
 ter is coming, and however much my 
 mother may miss me she would not 
 wish me to be at home now. Why I 
 am so sensitive to the cold I do not 
 know, but I am, and the house that 
 has been my home ever since I was a 
 child, even if I have been away more 
 than (or about) two years at a time, 
 was built between forty-five and fifty 
 years ago, and is only warm in the 
 two rooms where the stoves are. My 
 sleeping-room has the same air-tight 
 stove in it that was in the sitting-room 
 when I was a child, and if at home, I 
 have a fire in it night and morning in 
 cool weather. One day last winter 
 (January?) it was so warm that I did 
 
 96
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 not need a fire, but that was a great 
 exception. The main part of the house 
 has twelve good-sized rooms and a Ht- 
 tle square room over the front entry ; 
 then there is the 'L' with four or five 
 rooms, and only my father and mother 
 for occupants by day, and my brother 
 in addition nights and mornings. My 
 father is one of a pair of twins, eighty- 
 five years old, and my mother is eighty- 
 four. Their sleeping-room opens into 
 the sitting-room and into the summer 
 dining-room and winter general-utility 
 room. The house was painted in the 
 autumn, but the blinds are dispersed 
 throughout the house, so we must trust 
 that all will get through the winter all 
 right, but it does seem as though there 
 could be more than two or three people 
 in a sixteen- or seventeen-room house." 
 This letter I confess to be an ex- 
 97
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 treme example, but magazine readers 
 are very varied in character. 
 
 On the back of a poem I once found 
 this list of housewifely duties jotted 
 down by the writer : — 
 
 Brown and white silk Get up laundry 
 
 Brown plush Post bills 
 
 Black and white seersucker Write for samples 
 
 Send gloves to be cleaned Stitch apron 
 
 Chicken Telephone 
 
 Creamed potatoes Water plants and fix bird 
 
 Spinach Wash spinach 
 
 Cranberries Steam the chicken 
 
 Baked apples and cream Make cranberry jelly. 
 
 Clean upstairs 
 
 Truly a nice sort of person this, and 
 how much better this list made me like 
 her than the perusal of her poetry. 
 
 A Missouri farmer's wife takes the 
 magazine and pays for it in four in- 
 stallments as her accumulated egg- 
 money will permit. A Nantucket fish- 
 erman sent thirty-five cents in stamps 
 every month for the current issue. 
 
 98
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 This he did for twenty years, and when 
 death claimed this faithful reader, and 
 we no longer received his quaintly 
 written monthly letter, the office felt 
 a distinct sensation of personal loss. 
 
 A Montana sheep-herder takes it 
 because it is a " readable proposition." 
 He was immortalized by Professor 
 Bliss Perry in the " Jack Rabbit Son- 
 net" which some of you may recall. 
 A Wisconsin banker writes that he | 
 " always thought the ' Atlantic ' a high- | 
 brow publication, but I like it and I 've i. 
 one high brow and one low one." '■ 
 
 With more readers come greater 
 responsibilities. I hope you will not 
 receive the impression that the Amer- 
 ican magazine is a very spineless sort 
 of thing. I have denied it " editorial 
 policy," and I think rightly in the old- 
 fashioned sense of the term, but the 
 
 99
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 standard magazines have been busy of 
 late years in divers good causes. 
 
 Much of the most radical academic 
 thought of the day has appeared be- 
 tween their covers. They have at- 
 tacked the defects in our schools and 
 colleges ; they have pleaded for our 
 forests; they have steadfastly stood 
 for the cause of peace; and only re- 
 cently the "Atlantic" was daring 
 enough to criticize the manners of 
 the rising generation. 
 
 Despite the very stern commercial 
 consideration which they have to meet, 
 despite the fact that they are all, in 
 the last analysis, " business proposi- 
 tions," they have given, I think, a 
 fairly good account of themselves. 
 
 And now a word in behalf of my 
 friend the editor. 
 
 lOO
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 A popular conception of him is 
 either as a grim ogre deHghting in 
 the discomfiture of aspiring authors, 
 or as a man with no ideals pandering 
 to the most unworthy tastes of the 
 reading public. 
 
 He is neither. The editors I have 
 known have been gentlemen earnestly 
 engaged in what they regard as a dig- 
 nified profession, honestly trying to 
 meet the demands of a very exacting 
 position. For the most part they try 
 to make their publications reflect as 
 far as possible the best in the life of 
 the people they reach. 
 
 Few are actuated by business mo- 
 tives. The owners of publications are 
 editors only in rare instances, and in 
 every publication office which has any 
 standing at all the business depart- 
 ment has little or no control over 
 
 lOI
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 the editorial policy of the publica- 
 tion. 
 
 The making of a magazine is a la- 
 borious and often a thankless job. To 
 one letter of sympathy or commenda- 
 tion an editor or publisher receives 
 one hundred of criticism. But the la- 
 bor is its own reward to one who will 
 make an effort to find it. In almost 
 no other business is one brought so 
 closely in touch with thousands of his 
 fellow beings. 
 
 I may be an optimist (I hope I am), 
 but after twenty years' experience I 
 can honestly say that in the mass I 
 have found my fellow being an inter- 
 esting and attractive person. Any pub- 
 lisher, I believe, will tell 3^ou that most 
 people have the humble (and now, per- 
 haps, unfashionable) virtue of business 
 honesty; the average of intelligence 
 
 I02
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 is high, and a well-developed moral 
 sense is conspicuous sometimes where 
 you would least expect to find it. 
 
 I have spoken of the humor of 
 rejected manuscripts, — they are fair 
 game ; but such contributions are not 
 the object of ridicule in any office. 
 We know too well the reason back of 
 many of them. Illiterate, unformed, 
 and unintelligible as many of them 
 may be, they often sober rather than 
 amuse. 
 
 No intelligent person has reached 
 years of maturity without feeling within 
 him a vague desire for expression ; no 
 one of us has lived a life untouched by 
 grief or disappointment ; and these are 
 the sources from which much of this 
 rejected material springs. No editor 
 can open his mail day in and day out 
 without being astonished at the num- 
 
 103
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ber of poems beginning, " Be still, my 
 heart," etc. ; or, " Oh ! heart, what 
 wouldst thou ? " etc. There are often 
 found in these manuscripts the wretched 
 affectations and posings of insincere 
 mediocrity, but there is found, too, the 
 patient pathos of old age and the shrill 
 cry of impatient, suffering youth. 
 
 And now, no New Englander ever 
 put pen to paper without pointing a 
 moral to adorn a tale ever so dull, and 
 I should be unfaithful to a long minis- 
 terial ancestry if I did not do so now. 
 What should be your attitude toward 
 those editors and publishers who are 
 trying to give you decent magazines ? 
 
 Let me tell you how you can help. 
 They want you to share with them 
 their attitude toward that long-suffer- 
 i-jg and much-abused thing "litera- 
 
 104
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 ture." Do not regard it as a thing re- 
 mote from life. Do not regard it as a 
 black art familiar only to a chosen 
 guild, as something dull, and in the 
 parlance of the day " too high-brow " 
 for human nature's daily needs. But 
 share with them the conviction that it 
 is but a mode of expression, a medium 
 through which we can interpret this 
 beautiful complex thing about us we 
 call life. 
 
 Turn from the writers of cheap and 
 meretricious stuff who are debasing 
 this plastic medium to paint for you 
 untrue and distorted pictures, and 
 cling to and encourage those who 
 would use it (with little skill, perhaps) 
 to bring about a better understanding 
 between man and man, to draw for 
 future generations pictures (truthful 
 and unashamed) of the life of the most 
 
 105
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 
 
 wonderful period the world has ever 
 known. If you will do this the day of 
 the ignoble in letters will surely pass, 
 and literature will take its rightful 
 place among the arts. 
 
 THE END
 
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