irically by the press; it
became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that
people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and
nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful
comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was
a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they
reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to
own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books
would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the
book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves
seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his
wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical bookseller. They
said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask
nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they
said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now
and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted
to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But
if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps
something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the
experiment tried.

Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless
chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the
ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised
were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed
the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed
at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could
not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.

He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places
where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their
opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as
they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but
unbound volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form
that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their
contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the
taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more
he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand
as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town