to publishers, not only interesting men and women, but candid and
reasonable human beings. Probably the most delightful rewards of the
literary adviser's calling come from the opportunities it gives him to
extend his friendships among charming people.

Any house which is large enough to employ a literary adviser will
probably receive, in the course of a year, at least one thousand
unsolicited manuscripts, which will come from every part of the
country. They will naturally be of widely varying degrees of
excellence; quite two-thirds of them will be fiction, and a
considerable number will bear convincing evidence of having already
been for some time in search of a publisher. Testimony from various
houses has at different times been given as to the percentage of
volunteered manuscripts which eventually find acceptance. It does not
materially vary, being from one to two per cent. Some years ago, in
order to test this estimate, I went carefully over the unsolicited
manuscripts which had reached a large publishing house during a period
of several months, and found that exactly one and one-half per cent of
them had been published.

This small showing should not imply that the remaining ninety-eight or
ninety-nine per cent could in fairness be called worthless. With
occasional exceptions, rejected manuscripts have been prepared with
considerable intelligence; knowledge of themes is shown in them;
there is some real literary skill in evidence, and particular care has
been taken to secure legibility, about nine-tenths of them being in
typewritten form. What they lack is certain other qualities more vital
in the formation of a judgment as to their availability. In the case
of fiction, they lack novelty of treatment, or for some other reason
fail to be interesting, and in general there has not been infused into
them the real breath of life. When they deal with serious subjects,
they often cover ground which has been better covered before, or they
attempt to achieve the not-worth-while, or the impossible.

There is always a small number of manuscripts against which no other
objection can be raised than that it would be impossible to secure
from the public an adequate return in sales for the expenditure
necessary in the manufacture and distribution of the books. One of the
pathetic sides of the publishing business is the fact that manuscripts
of this kind cannot oftener, in this day and generation, secure the
amount of attention