The sun., 1919-04-06
CIR Ethrariat,'a Gnrnrr
CONDUCTED BY
FRANK PARKER STOCKBRIDGE.
A LITERARY EXPLORATION.


Washington. He led the way through that wing OF
the huge bookstacks known as the copyright Sec
ton Tier upon tier of iron shelves, nine stories
high and running to the length and almost tho
width of city block, crowded with books as tightly
as they could be packed in; 100000 titles or more
my friend told me; one copy Of every book copy
righted in the United States since 1878.
1t was like sauntering through graveyard
Names of dead and gone publishing houses, once
familiar and now no longer heard of stood out here
and there, fanked by long rows of other names to-
tally unfamiliar even to the librarian with his
twenty years of intimate association with all sorts
of books Titles there were that brought back boy
hood pictures of long forgotten incidents and asso-
Citations names of authors that once were house
hold words, but that nowadays never sees out
side of the second-k hand bookstalls.
Books One Never Knew.
And just as in the burying ground, even IN ones
home town, the names of most Of the gravestones
are, after all, those of persons never knew in
life so the great bulk Of these dead and buried
volumes were the sort of books one never knows In
life. Somebody had written every one of them;
somebody had printed and bound them, somebody
had, perhaps, made money out of them in way
or another but that anybody had ever read them
was difficult to believe. County histories with
their biographies of local celebrities, fantastic
treatises on absurd and amateurish theories of the
Creation, pathetic thin volumes of sermons by
earnest unknown preachers thousands upon thou
sands of books of verse bearing upon the very con-
tours and embellishments of their the inde6n-
able earmarks of the job printing Office that stamps
them ndeliby as having been printed at the au-
thor's expense
And then there were that other class of books
that nobody ever hears Of but that sell by the hun
dreds of thousands, by the Millions the output Of
the big subscription book publishers whose adver-
Using appears only in the agents Wanted col
umn, and who never send copies Of their publica-
tions in to the literary editor for review Presum
ably people read these books. They buy them, or
at any rate they are sold to them, which is not
quite the same thing. These are the books one sees
in the farm house twenty miles from the railroad
pathetic evidences of certain cropping for some
thing which those who seek it would not recognize
under the name of culture.
Subscribe Now!
Every great event brings its crop of these SUBJ
scription books. The Martinique disaster, the San
Francisco earthquake, the sinking of the Titanic,
the assassination of President McKinley-these and
a thousand other catastrophes have furnished the
themes for subscri pton book literature. Time
illness is the essential element for big sales.
lunched the other day with the head Of one of the
largest subscription book publishing houses. He
was tired, he said.
at has been hard winter, " he remarked 1.-THE
armistice caught us all unprepared, and we have
been swamped with demands from agents for war
books. Then Colonel Roosevelt's death came with
out any warning, and of course we had to put out
a Life of Roosevelt. That's going pretty good,
though
How many have you sold so far9'' asked.
"Close to 100000, and it will run mill
ion, was the startling reply. "You see, when we
do get good book in our business we sell a lot Of
them. have not had book in ten years that
sold less than 100000
t'Do yoTr bonks sell in the Stores - I asked