LIBRARY NOVELS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,---AS I was reading Mr. A. T. Sheppard's The King's Goose, which I have borrowed from the Cambridge Borough Library, an idea occurred to me, which might be worth discussing in your columns. The King's Goose is an excellent book, but the copy I hold is a rebound volume, rather dirty and dog-eared and with the interior margins so narrow that
I cannot read the book with comfort. I have submitted to the Library Committee the following proposition :
" That when novels, and other relatively inexpensive books, become soiled and loose in their covers through much use, they should be scrapped and not rebound, a new copy of the same book being purchased."
We pay an author, whose works we read for our amusement or instruction, by buying his books. If we rebind a soiled
volume, instead of replacing it by a new copy, we deprive the author of a payment which we owe him.
As a matter of -economy it is doubtful whether rebinding is sound policy. To rebind a single volume must cost•more than one-thousandth of the expense of printing and binding 1,000 similar volumes. Presumably there are spare copies of all popular novels to be bought. If they are not pur- chased, they are in the end wasted. Is it too far-fetched to regard rebinding as a form of " sweating," the victim in this ease being the author, perhaps with the publisher as his partner ?—Yours faithfully, J. E. ALLEN.
2 St. Peter's Terrace, Cambridge.
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