Morning journal and courier., 1886-06-21
A PUBLISHERS TALK.
What He Said About Books and Their
 Buyers.

know the names of all our books and other peoples books, and the dates of edition. A shepherd knows the faces of all his sheep as goose herder knows his geese.
 'I will dig at once into the lower stratum and there you find the cook book. All kinds of people make cook books. We have them offered to us in manuscript every day. Once 8 very pretty little woman came with port able stove, basketful of eggs, butter, sugar and spice, and wanted to prove practically in the office the excellence of her receipts. There was a time when the cook book made money. There was handsome church built on the sales of a religious cook book. But fancy If you would put in the scales the cook books now printed in the United States they would outweigh, pound for pound, all the beef or bread. The quack medicine people killed the cook book. Instead of fill ing up their almanacs with meteorological improbabilities in the good old times, they put in cooking receipts and that dished the cook book. There is book that always sells, and that is one on manners, the eti- quette thing. There are thousands of peo- pie who want to be told that they ought nev- CT to drink out of finger bowl nor pick their teeth with fork. Just remember that ours is state of transition, and there exists a happy belief that good manners can be &C., quired for twenty-five cents.
 ALL THE OLD STANDARD WORKS.
 "All the old standard books, as of syno. nyms, sell just as we'll to-day as fifty years ago. There are more Robinson Crusoes , 'Bunyans,' Swiss Family Robinsons,' 'Thad- euses of Warsaws,' and Scottish Chiefs sold than ever. They are stock like nails and Jacks. Histories of tue old fashion, Hume and Gibbon, never are out of demand. Ma caulay sells we'll, but shows no increase, as it should. I am convinced that people buy histories because they are cheap and fill up spaces in their bookcases They never can
 
 want good history of the United States from the beginning right up to to day. The last word should be the death of Mr. Hen dricks. It must not be addressed to any particular class, but must be book under standable from Brazos to Bangor. Some new man might make much credit and profit out of it.
 Religious books, no matter what you may hear about the raids of agnosticism and inf delity, are just as good to sell ever. The demand for sermons never ceases. The old worthies-Hooker, Taylor-are dropping off though studious clergymen buy them still, and there is no knowing what a studious clergyman will not read Biblical histories have been the most wonderful of successes. Books of this kind thirty years old work off as well to-day as ever-eVen better-but we want new one, something fully abreast of the travel and erudition of to-day. Art books, to fly off to another quarter, are of J spend an endless amount of money in illus trations. Make an art book with bad art ID it and you have an absurdity. The sale of such books is limited because the highly cul l tured class of the artistic profession is small Not one person in five thousand really does ! paint or draw. It is the same way with books on music. Even the biographies ot ! great musicians find scant readers. The mu sical novel had its one great success and has never been repeated. A hero who blows the trombone or plays the double bass does not fascinate the ordinary woman who reads. ''The old French novel of the Sue kind is dead. The Wandering lew is shelved and no creature cares to probe the Mysteries of Paris. Zola is not a success. We would not, if we were quite certain of selling million copies of Zola, touch him. We may sell goods that are garish or not tasteful in pat tern, but nothing that we know is off color.
 CHEAP BOOKS, GOOD AND TRASHY.
 "English stories of the very poorest kind with blood and murder in them, women drowned in bath-tubs or in ub-cellars, when republished here, work off first rate Their cheapness creates the demand. Why should I annoy myself in trying to produce fine mir TOTS where the whole human form is reflect ed if I can only sell a hundred of them? If the public wants to look at distorted image of itself in little bit of cracked and tar nished glass with pinchbeck frame around
  must manufacture that class of goods. The public is right always right. Granted that nine hundred and fifty tons of paper run ming from my presses are printed all over with what you call fribble, pray remember that there are fifty tons of this cheap read ing which reproduces the thoughts of the greatest thinkers the world has known When you think of 1t the few really good cheap books act as tonics, and tend toward the cure of that fatulenoy brought about by over-indulgence in what is trashy or un- wholesome.
 "You, who plume yourself on literary ac- quaintanceship, advise some writer to make me story like 'Snoodle's Bubby.' Have that infant say fchuok-a-chuck and fgoo- goo' Invent workable down that baby's bubblings phonetically, and above all have it slobber all over it's pretty bib. Keep on fgoo-gooing' te the end of the chapter and it will be capital hit. You see it touches human nature. Almost everybody has a baby. Suppose they lost their baby and some other fellow found Goo-goo and ted it carefully with pap. Don't you that mil lions on millions of fathers and mothers would melt at onces The mistake people who write fall into is to think that a baby is a common, we'll known thing. It is not. It is always a novel creation. Ever since the Babes in the Wood was written human sympathy craves for that kind of thing"