s slow work, and such friends as Hueffer,
Clifford and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-rolling. Even
after the splash made by "Youth" his publishing arrangements seem to
have remained somewhat insecure. His first eleven books show six
different imprints; it was not until his twelfth that he settled down to
a publisher. His American editions tell an even stranger story. The
first six of them were brought out by six different publishers; the
first eight by no less than seven. But today he has a regular American
publisher at last, and in England a complete edition of his works is in
progress.

Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that American publisher (who
labours for Gene Stratton-Porter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the same
manner) Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in the United
States, and it is the fashion among all who pretend to aesthetic
consciousness to read him, or, at all events, to talk about him. His
books have been brought together in a uniform edition for the newly
intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the "complete library sets" of
Kipling, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and Paul de Kock. The more literary
newspapers print his praises; he is hymned by professorial critics as a
prophet of virtue; his genius is certificated by such diverse
authorities as Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I myself
lately sat on a Conrad Committee, along with Booth Tarkington, David
Belasco, Irvin Cobb, Walter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland--surely
an astounding posse of _literati_! Moreover, Conrad himself shows a
disposition to reach out for a wider audience. His "Victory," first
published in _Munsey's Magazine_, revealed obvious efforts to be
intelligible to the general. A few more turns of the screw and it might
have gone into the _Saturday Evening Post_, between serials by Harris
Dickson and Rex Beach.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully growing celebrity as a
novelist, Conrad takes on consideration as a bibelot, and the dealers in
first editions probably make more profit out of some of his books than
ever he has made himself. His manuscripts are cornered, I believe, by an
eminent collector of literary curiosities in New York, who seems to have
a contract with the novelist to take them as fast as they are
produced--perhaps the only arrangement of the sort in literary history.
His first editions begin to bring higher premiums than those of any
other living author. Considering