I know what I am talking
about.
* * * * *
A third agency is the book-pedlar. There are firms of publishers who never
advertise in any literary weekly or any daily, who never publish anything
new, and who may possibly be unknown to Simpkins themselves. They issue
badly printed, badly bound, showy editions of the eternal Scott and the
eternal Dickens, in many glittering volumes with scores of bleared
illustrations, and they will sell them up and down the provinces by means
of respectably dressed "commission agents," at prices much in excess of
their value, to an ingenuous, ignorant public that has never heard of
Dent and Routledge. The books are found in houses where the sole function
of literature is to flatter the eye. The ability of these subterranean
firms to dispose of deplorable editions to persons who do not want them is
in itself a sharp criticism of the commercial organization of the more
respectable trade.
* * * * *
Let it not be supposed that my group is utterly cut off from the newest
developments in imaginative prose literature. No! What the bookseller, the
book-pedlar, and the Free Library have failed to do, has been accomplished
by Mr. Jesse Boot, incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and
the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists with branches in
scores, hundreds, of towns.
Pages:
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99