Another element has come in since the publishers have
awakened to the fact that literature can be treated like merchandise. To
use their own phrase, they "handle" books as they would "handle" patent
medicines, that is, the popular patent medicines that are desired because
of the amount of alcohol they contain; indeed, they are sold along with
dry-goods and fancy notions. I am not objecting to this great and wide
distribution any more than I am to the haste of fruit-dealers to market
their products before they decay. The wary critic will be very careful
about dogmatizing over the nature and distribution of literary products.
It is no certain sign that a book is good because it is popular, nor is
it any more certain that it is good because it has a very limited sale.
Yet we cannot help seeing that many of the books that are the subject of
crazes utterly disappear in a very short time, while many others,
approved by only a judicious few, continue in the market and slowly
become standards, considered as good stock by the booksellers and
continually in a limited demand.
The English essayists have spent a good deal of time lately in discussing
the question whether it is possible to tell a good contemporary book from
a bad one.
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