Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1918-06-15
Beware of the Six Best SteHars
Noc That the Spirit of Mark T,can Has Taken Up the Oua
Board, the Old Masters May Be Heard From
By SIMEON STRUNSKY

in this business Of authorship. Your Remng-
wood No. competes not only against every
other typewriter in existence, but against
every pen. stylus Chinese inkbrush and
chise that ever created literature. back to
the hunting knife that scratched things on
mastodon skins. Your author must stand
up against the tremendous competition of
the dead. with all the publicity that attaches
to being dead, with all the advantage the
dead ancients have in the matter of no
overhead, no club expenses, no free copies
exacted by friends twho make their demand
on the ground Of friendship, but in reality
because you cant quite convince them that
you have actually written something worth
sl.35 neD. It's perfectly absurd when you
come 10 think of 1t, that the butcher around
the corner doesn't have to mark down prices
against the prime Warwickshire ham for
which Stratford -on-Avon was famous in the
Elizabethan times, and the fruit grocer
hasn't a rival next door offering choice Tro
jan figs and olives from the vintage of
900 B. c.
DUT now it's a good deal worse With
ID astral authorship In the field, competition
grows cut-throat. With only forty plays by
Shakespeare to buck, as they say nowadays
in the House Of Commons. there was some-
thing of chance for the contemporary
scribber. In forty plays you cannot, after
ALL suit every kind of human taste. and SO
here or there you might find somebody who
will pass up the great William for some
thing in the Tabasco Weekly. Then there
are the young men and somewhat older
young women who will not read Shake
speare because he dates further back than
1907. Altogether, therefore there is small
non-Shakespeare audience, and the living
practitioner has chance.
But with Shakespeare working like mad
indefinitely after his demise? With 500 plays
by Shakespeare on the market-forty writ
ten In his ridicuously cramped and llegible
Shand and 460 dictated in the limpid ouija-
board style-what chance Is there for the
newcomer? / don't want to produce panic
in the Authors League, but / am In duty
bound to point out what will happen to the
book market II from somewhere out In the
remoter cosmogony the manuscripts begin
TO pour out: Newest Fction-Homer, Apu-
leius, Cervantes, Dickens, Turgenieff, Victor
Hugo-Ths Six Best Stellars-You Can't
Afford to Miss Them-The Newest Poetry
Psalms-Second Volume; Newest History
Herodotus on the Galipoli Expedition; New
est Everything by every author you can find
in the Britannica. We can afford to sell
cheap because the authors pay no rent"
All you will say. but these old boys can't
n compete with us, after ALL they're
classics and they don't know how to snuggle
close to the tired business man. They're over
his head. There's level they can't come
down TO. and that's where we come In.
Can't they. though? Presumably, before
embarking on this paper. should have read
this spiritistic first novel of Mark Twain's
that the Harpers are making such fuss
about but have not had the least temptation
to read II, and have resisted manfully. But
from what these Harper people say about
the book and from what know Of other
nonmanual literature these ancients can
turn out as acceptable gun and slush as any
of us once you turn down the light and put
your fingers on the table
Get busy, Authors League.
tcopyriEht