"AS CAPTIVATING, AS DELIGHTFULLY ARRESTING AS 'THE CONSTANT NYMPH' "Unforgettable pictures -The Forum The Polyglots is one of the big books of the year. Its satire is well nigh perfect . . . how unerringly each shaft is aimed."- from Henry Longan Stuart's Full Page Review in The New York Times. "He has gusto, charm, wit." "A grace that seduces." -LEE WILSON DODD, Saturday Review. -SIDNEY WILLIAMS, Phila. Inquirer. "It is quite frank, yet this flagrant amour has a dewey freshness about it. A clergyman could read it without shame."-Harrison Smith in The New York Herald Tribune. 120. 375 pages, $2.50 DUFFIELD COMPANY AND 211EAST 19TH ST NEW YORK MORE OR LESS SOCIAL New York, July 4 THE SPECTACLE of a well known We have been informed that Harcourt, Sauk Centre, Minn., has recently been AIN LIBRA The PUBLISHERS WEEKLY THE AMERICAN BOOK-TRADE JOURNAL NEW YORK, JULY 4, 1925 HERE are Authors and Their writers-I am un T ashamedly one of them-who quite sincerely say they write to please themselves. But what such writers mean when they loosely add "they don't care in the least how many or how few readers they have," is simply that they don't intend consciously to go out of the only way in which they feel they can best write, in order to gain more readers. Every writer, of course, would like to be read by as many people as possible that's common sense and human nature. The best way in the end, even to gain readers, is to present life as one sees it, as sincerely and perfectly as one can, and trust to the intrinsic value of the presentation to make its mark with the public. In the long run, I can assure young authors that this is the only way to secure a worthy public. It is a naked and uncompromising truth that to assess the real great Public's taste is quite beyond the power of any writer; he may discover formulas to suit a certain section of the Public, and go on turning out an article to pattern; but that way lies rank mediocrity or worse. The real great Public, the Public of the future as well as of the present, can only be reached by a very single-minded attention to doing the best work one can, guided by one's own conscience, and by the conscience of nobody else For consider! Of what does a writer form his work, if it is to have any value, or to please any one worth pleasing? Out of his own fancy and vision, his own first *Reprinted, abridged, from the Author (London, April, 1925). hand observation of life and character, his own moods, his own temperament, all trained and tempered to economy and clearness by his own experiments with words. I don't We are ever being educated by our own efforts and our own reading; but we do nothing but waste time if we dwell morbidly on whether this or that creation will please these or those persons of our acquaintance, which-mind-is all we can really know of the public taste. hesitate to say that a writer who flounders about, consciously groping for indications from other people of what will give him a market or a name, will never achieve a real name, and will never survive his own day; nor will he even attain the market value accorded to those of sterner stuff. And then there is this to be considered. To talk of Public Taste as if it were a "constant" is an absurdity. It is an ever moving variant. But what varies it? Why! the writer. That is his duty and his privilege. It is he who moves on the Public's taste in literature. With every real piece of literary creation Public Taste gets a fresh jolt; it alters just a little. No writer of sense, none with anything of the artist in him, attemps consciously to influence the public taste; but every sincere writer with any vision brings something into that pool, and helps to widen it. If this were not so, if Public Taste did not follow the writer, we should all to this day be confectioning our sales in the picaresque manner of Fielding and Smollet and others popular at the outset of the British novel. The advice I always give to young or would-be writers rash enough to ask me for any, is this: "Don't trust to what you can make by fiction; if you have not independent means, however small, then have another job as well, which will enable you to live until your work-the best work you can turn out, the most satisfying to yourself-finds its legitimate place and price." I think it's bad for both them and for literature that they should succumb to the demands of publishers, editors, or agents, for this or that kind of story. No one is bound to write fiction for a living. No one should write fiction for a living unless it's the very best fiction, light or serious according to his grain-that he can turn out. . them. Nor does anyone regard the heavy father-(or mother-) to-the-public attitude in fiction with greater horror than myself. But what I do feel is that the writer, like any other artist, must be absorbed by his subject, must feel a real interest in his theme and his characters, and must not plunge into ink lukewarm, or reproduce to pattern because he's got to write a book a year to line his pockets and please his publisher. Authors and publishers ought to pull together more than they do. This is an excellent general principle far too much neglected of late years. I don't believe that a publisher should be consulted by his author as to the type of book he should write next; but, short of that, the more confidence there is between a writer and his publisher, the better for both. When authors persist in treating publishers as if they were natural enemies Fiction is an important thing-whatever may be the view of those who suffer from it; one could go almost so far as to say that it's now more important to human society than reality, because, thru fic-seeking to get as much out of them as tion, most people experience at second-hand far more than humdrum life gives them at first-hand. Surely, then, those who write fiction ought to make the best fist they can of it, and must lose their self-respect if they don't. Now to come back to the question of "pleasing oneself." I would rather use the words "satisfying oneself." No one thinks less of flighty stuff written pour épater les bourgeois and to gratify momentary spleens or whims than I. Authors of that sort don't count, anyway, and are so few that we needn't consider T possible-and publishers try to steal marches on inexperienced authors, the whole fine effort of book-making suffers. We do want cooperation, and again cooperation. The real use of an agent to an author lies, or should lie, in his knowledge of the serial and film markets, English and American; in arranging foreign translation; in keeping accounts straight, and so on. I believe in an author finding a publisher to his taste, and sticking to him. Only in that way can warm and confident relations between the pair of them grow up. A California Patio By Dorothy H. Knight HERE are gardens and gardensall sorts and varieties from the window-box makeshift of the city, to the flowering beauty of a suburban lawn or a country estate. But a garden in connection with a bookstore is something out of the ordinary, even in July when the whole world seems full of gardens. Tea rooms and little gift shops often have adjoining courtyards or gardens adding to their air of intimacy and charm, but to be led from a modern and very up-todate bookstore into an old-world patio, such as that of A. C. Vroman's in Pasadena, is so unexpected that even a blasé visitor must admit surprise and delight. Opening as it does from a distinctive and very beautiful reading room, finished in fumed oak with beamed ceiling, carved bookcases and heavy furniture, upholstered in dark red leather, this courtyard at once AN ORDINARY BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPH GIVES LITTLE IDEA OF THE ACTUAL such a picture and you have a little idea of its real loveliness. The garden has a funny little old-world gate of heavy wood leading into a sidestreet, so that customers approaching the shop may enter this way if they so desire. Another heavy door leads into the aforementioned Spanish reading room or library whose soft rugs and rich heavy furniture make it an ideal sort of browsing room. This room has been specially fitted up as an appropriate setting for the shop's most beautiful books-rare items, fine bindings, special sets, etc. It also stands as a link between the practical and the artistic, for looking from it in one direction one views the well-stocked retail room of a busy, progressive western bookshop; while looking back thru open casement windows one catches a last fond glimpse of the colorful garden outside. |