Nobody who has examined the question of book production in
war-time could contend that there has been any real absence of good intention, either on the part of the publishers, or on the part of the authorities concerned. From the first days of the war the publishers offered to cut down their production to 6o per cent., and to reduce the paper consumed both in size and weight. The authorities for their part have not been unaware of the im- portance of books to national morale at home and national prestige abroad. The Chancellor of the Exchequer readily gave way to Parliamentary pressure and exempted books from the incidence of the purchase tax. The Paper Controller has never been unenlightened or subjected book-production to a purely quantitative test. The Ministry of Information and the British Council have done all they can to support the interests of the book-trade, and to confirm the principle that books of high quality are one of the most valuable forms of British export. The
fact remains, however, that, in spite of goodwill in every quarter, the book trade will, unless further steps are taken, suffer grievously in the present year. The paper ration allowed to publishers has been reduced progressively from 6o per cent. to 5o per cent., to 42 per cent., and now to 374 per cent. Most publishers have by now run out of such stocks of paper as they happened to possess, and can no longer find chance reams of paper in odd
corners. Enemy action has added to the shortage. More recently an agreement has been reached under which publishers are given some extra allocation of paper to replace such losses. But this allo- cation is only 71- per cent. of the amount destroyed. The effect of this shortage of stock is already apparent in the present famine in text-books or in those cheap editions of the classics for which there is a constant demand. Take, for instance, a great national institution such as the Everyman Edition ; of the 970 books published in Everyman, something like Soo are today unobtain- able at most booksellers The demand also for popular text-books today far exceeds the supply, and the complaint goes up from every quarter that our young people simply cannot obtain the text-books which they need.
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