t does stand low, at least
in England, for it is almost impossible to sell it. Inquiries made of
publishers show that they expect to sell to the circulating libraries
seventy to seventy-five per cent. of the copies printed. To sell to a
circulating library is not selling; it is lending at one remove; it
means that a single copy bought by a library is read by anything between
twenty and a hundred people. Sometimes it is read by more, for a copy
bought by Mudie's is sold off when the subscribers no longer ask for it.
It goes to a town of the size of, say Winchester. Discarded after a year
or so by the subscribers it may be sold off for a penny or twopence,
with one thrown into the dozen for luck, and arrive with its cover
hanging on in a way that is a testimonial to the binder, with its pages
marked with thumbs, stained with tears, or, as the case may be, with
soup, at some small stationer's shop in a little market town, to go out
on hire at a penny a week, until it no longer holds together, and goes
to its eternal rest in the pulping machine. On the way, nobody has
bought it except to let it out, as the padrone sends out the pretty
Italian boys with an organ and a monkey. The public have not bought the
book to read and to love. The twenty-five or thirty per cent. actually
sold have been disposed of as birthday or Christmas presents, because
one has to give something, and because one makes more effect with a
well-bound book costing six shillings than with six shillings' worth of
chocolates. Literature has been given its royalty on the bread of shame.
Yet, impossible as the novel finds it to tear its shilling from the
public, the theatre easily wheedles it into paying a guinea or more for
two stalls. It seems strange that two people will pay a guinea to see
_Three Weeks_ on the boards, yet would never dream of giving four and
sixpence for Miss Elinor Glyn's book. That is because theatre seats must
be paid for, while books can be borrowed. It goes so far that novelists
are continually asked 'where one can get their books,' meaning 'where
they can be borrowed'; often they are asked to lend a copy, while no one
begs a ride from a cabman.

In England, the public of the novel is almost exclusively feminine. Few
men read novels, and a great many nothing at all except the newspaper.
They say that they are too busy, which is absurd when one reflects how
busy is the average woman. The truth is that they are slack and
ignorant. They