The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-07-23
THE END OF BOOK BOOMING.

Ill E EN- UT bOOh boohlINH'
 The most interesting phase of the book business at the present time is represented by the undoubted fact that no one book of any sort is now enjoy ing an extraordinary sale. This is an assertion that could not have been made with thuth at any previous time within the past five years. Ever since David Harum' began its phenomenal career as a seller" there has always been some book, and often there have been three or four books, so much in vogue that for the moment the publish CTS could hardly manage to supply the demand. Presses were kept running day and night; the binderies hummed with excitement; and the bookshops of- fered the favorite of the moment, not by the dozen or the score, but in great mountains heaped up to gorge the pub lie, who ere buying sometimes at the rate of thirty or forty thousand copies month. This sort of thing continued steadily throughout the period men, toned, first one book and then another coming up into a phenomenal popular ity and then giving place to an equally popular successor.
 Such a state of affairs was wholly without precedent. Particular books in former years had had great sales; put hitherto, the intervals between these It. erary hits had been long: and whenever il book such as Uncle Toms Cabin" or Little Ncnen." or The Woman III N'!l;e" won Sopular favor it was for some special reason inherent in the book itself and one that everybody could readily recognize and understand. With "David Harum" however, came in a new order of things. Almost every publisher had his turn at producing a best selling book" and unless at least a hundred thousand copies of novel were sold. it was considered. from q comercial point of view, almost fail- ure
 Naturally such an extraordinary de- mand on the publics part was the sub~ feet of a good deal of theorizing among critics and literary chroniclers. They tried to get at the philosophy of the
 
 unprecedented eagerness for light read ing. Some said that it was due to the cheaper processes eployed in fthe man ufacture of books, which lowered the price and thus brought them within the means of every one. This was hardly an adequate explanation for the partic- uIar sort of books which attained these spectacular sales were little if any cheaper than they had been hitherto. Others thought that the American reading public had beone immensely increased by the spread of education and that the book-sales were 8 witness to the fact. This explanation also failed to satisfy the mind since the de- mand was not for books in general and for books representing diversified de- partments of literature, but it was con- fined to light fiction and, within that sphere, to certain special novels. A few amiable optimists tried to persuade cause was the high merit of contempo- rary novelists as compared with those who used to write. They said that whereas in former days a great novelist appeared only once in a quarter of a century, our Golden Age was giving if not superior to the great ones of the past This doctrine, however, while it was popular in Indiana, never took much hold upon critical minds else where: and it's serious expression was mainly confined to publishers adver- tisements. Finally. it was claimed that the great sales of particular books were effected by strenuous, ingenious and persistent advertising, in other words, by blooming" reduced to something that resenbled an exact science.
 This last hypothesis has, on the whole, been generally accepted, and it certainly contains ore truth than any of the others. Publishers have picked out some one novel from their entire list and have concentrated all their ef- forts upon pushing it into an enormous circulation. This was all very we'll and, in fact, entirely legitimate so long as they selected book which had some merits of it's own to justify the adver- Using and to satisfy the public expec- tation, Indeed, the early books which experienced the boom were distinctly readable if nothing more. David Ha- rum" in many ways was very well worth while. So was "The Bonnie Bri- CT Bush,' and so were Miss Mary John- ston's first success, and Mrs. Majors Tudor story and MT. Tarkington's deli cately executed little romance of Mon sieur Beaucaire." But later on, many publishers became reckless and forgot