MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WEwere told during the war that one of the lasting benefits which would be derived from that otherwise destructive experience was that the younger genera:ion had acquired the reading habit. Almost any book upon almost any subject would, once it had been bound and printed, be snatched off the bookstalls by a voracious and impatient public ; the booksellers and the pub- lishers were able to profit by the occasion to discharge upon this new-found literary world a large amount of accumulated stock, which, until then, had mouldered in brown paper parcels in their warehouses and on their shelves. When great fires were set alight in the Paternoster Row area by the bombs of the German air force, a regular book-famine resulted ; young backs in the place of old backs could be observed bent over the shelves and cases in the Charing Cross Road ; and the more patriotic among us were impelled by this scarcity to raid our own bookshelves and to send to the Red Cross large parcels of books, destined for the prisoners of war, who (so we were assured) " devoured4' a book per man a day. It was a pleasing. picture that we framed for ourselves of corporals and bombardiers, of petty officers and naval ratings, tearing open their book parcels and hurrying off to some quiet edge of the camp to devote happy hours To devouring The Mill on the Floss or poring over the neat pages of Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son. I am not suggesting that the stories that we were told were untrue stories. I have had it confirmed from many competent quarters that men and girls who had until then been among the great illiterate, suddenly during the war developed a taste for reading and would be found with The Waste Land in their studious if slightly bewildered hands. All this may well have been true ; but once the war was over and these boys and girls returned to civilian life, they appear to have given up reading almost completely. I had always supposed that the reading habit, once acquired, remained a permanent resource ; and that it would be as difficult to forget how to read as it is to forget how to swim or bicycle. This comforting assumption was incorrect.
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I am assured on one side that my pessimism on the subject is ill-founded. Those who work in public libraries assert that, although a marked declension can be noted in the number of books borrowed in 1950 from the number taken out in 1942, yet the general level of reading; both-in quantity and quality, remains far higher than it was before the war. On the other side I am told, by booksellers and publishers, that the demand for books has in the last three or four years dropped considerably and that they are finding it increasingly difficult to cover :their overhead expenses. It may be that both sides, are correct in what they say. Books have become more expensive owing to the fact that production costs have much increased ; the people who before the war made a regular habit of buying a certairr-number of books annually can no longer afford to do so ; moreover the large country-house libraries have ceased to exist- and the ordinary citizen .simply has not the space in his little flat Zif gonverted garage to house the books he buys. As a result an ever-increasing number of people have dropped the habit of buying books for ,themselves and resorted to the public or other librarieg for their reading. All of which hits the publisher and the bookseller very hard indeed.
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In spite of the difficulties which today assail all publishers, in spite of the precarious nature of their business, there is no trade or profession which attracts so many of the young, black-coated unemployed. The boy or girl who, before the war, decided on leaving the university to read for the bar, or have a shot at the Foreign Service, now smacks his or her lips at the prospect of entering some publishing firm. The queue of applicants is both brilliant and long. Is it that they imagine that from the moment they enter the firm they will spend sun-lit hours fondling master- pieces and employ their eveningi giving rich dinners, at the firm's expense, to distinguished historians or young poets with -flashing Keatsian eyes ? Or is it that, while realising that their labours at the outset will be drab and dull, they see in the risks and oppor- tunities implied a scope for that sense of adventure which would have sent their fathers off to Klondyke or Ballarat ? Assuredly the risks are great and the opportunities few and often fatal. A publisher today has to sell at least two thousand copies of a 12s. 6d. book before he covers the cost of production, to say nothing 6f his over- head expenses. In.lthe present condition of the book market it is doubtful whether more than two or three of the books on a small publisher's list will exceed or even reach a two-thousand sale. He aims at financing his failures out of the profits, of his successes. Such hopes are all, too often disappointed. Once in a while a publisher may have a sudden and delightful success with a small masterpiece, such as Olivia; but only once in a while. For the rest of his business years he is obliged to eke out a precarious existence' by issuing cheap editions of the classics or by specialising on children's books at a marketable price. The older firms, with their powerful back-list and their perfected sales organisation can perhaps weather the storm. But the lives of the younger, smaller, firms may prove to be brutish and short.
* * * * In such circumstances of risk and danger it is inevitable that the publishers should concentrate on best-sellers and should resort to high-pressure salesmanship. It must be worth their while to push a book such as The Wooden Horse or even to devote capital to erecting in metropolitan and provincial book-shops small models of the Libyan desert as a background to Rommel. Yet I doubt whether the practice of plugging (I trust that word is correct) best-sellers is of benefit either to the repute of publishers or to the taste of. the reading public. I have been. reading this week, in the Journal of the National Book League, a most alarming review in which Sir Stanley Unwin examines the effect of this practice upon publishing in the United States. Even the most old-established and powerful firms in America are becoming increasingly dependent for their profits on what are called " subsidiary rights," by which are meant fees paid for film or literary-digest rights and above all the selections of the many Book Clubs and Guilds. The domination exercised by the Book Clubs upon American publishers results in their concen- trating all their energies upon such novels as may be adopted by some club or guild and ignoring what one might call the general level of literary output. Moreover, in order to attract the attention of the 'Book Clubs, many American publishers now employ their own " editors " who arrange a book in such a manner as to accom- modate it to Book Club taste. A serious book on soil-erosion, for instance, will be dolled up to provide human interest and will be so arranged by the editor as to open with a conversation between a Buganda boy and his father on the theme: " Why are there no bananas ? " The self-respect of both author and publisher can only be vitiated by such methods.
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In this country, as Sir Stanley Unwin points out, we have not as yet succumbed to the Book Club danger. The Publishers' Associa- tion have had the wisdom to see to it that they do not fall under the'domination of these literary guilds. But the grave position into which publishers over here are forced by the high costs of produC- tion and the decline in public purchasing power may lead to the same orgy of " best-sellerdom " as is degrading public taste in the United States. In the end such practices must have a bad effect upon writers themselves. Either they must resign themselves to remain- ing eternally unpublished, or they must consent to the " editors " dressing up their books in the silly, flashy clothes which may attract the Book Clubs. The splendid traditions of our publishing trade will be damaged h the scramble ; and literature, under such high pressure, will wilt and die.
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