AMERICANS are the greatest readers on earth. Any one can tell you this—any one from a college president down to the newsboy on a railway train.

They read pretty much everything, and never are at a loss for ways of obtaining something to read.

Books are cheaper here than anywhere else in the world, thanks to immunity from arrest and punishment for theft of literary property. We can take the brains of all Europe, as expressed in printed pages on the other side of the Atlantic, and reprint them here without fear of the sheriff, and what man can do without fear of the law he is likely to do so long as he sees any money in it.

There is no section, State or town so poor that its people cannot find something to read when they want it. The inhabitants of a township whose centre is nothing but a post-office, a store and a blacksmith shop, may be too poor to buy{532} a paper of pins, unless they have credit with the storekeeper, but they always are able to find something to read. If there is nothing else, they can fall back upon the Sunday-school books, and nowadays Sunday-school libraries are not as bad as they used to be. Almost any book that is respectable and has any feature of interest can be worked into a Sunday-school library by an enterprising publisher. A Methodist parson, who was congratulated a short time ago on his great success in organizing a Sunday-school in a sparsely settled district in one of the Western States, said, with a long sigh: “These children don’t come here to learn the truths of the Gospel; they come to get books for their families to read during the week.” Perhaps the old man was right in his fear that the religious work of his parish was not going on as well as he wished; he certainly was entirely correct regarding the demand for the books. Children who were dull and listless while the prayers and singing and lessons were going on brightened up quickly when the librarians came in to distribute the books which had been asked for, and the worst boys in town would cheerfully forego base-ball, swimming parties, watermelon stealing, cock-fighting and card-playing for an hour or two on Sunday for the sake of borrowing a book upon which to spend the spare hours of the week that was to follow. A good many people were drawn{533} to Jesus by the loaves and fishes, but books are the most successful bait of the modern church.

But the Sunday-school library is the most modest of the many sources from which the poorer class of Americans draw their reading matter. There are at least a dozen series of novels being published in the United States at the present time on a plan which enables the publishers to dodge the postal laws regarding printed matter by assuming to be serial publications. Under the law any book sent out by a publisher should pay postage at the rate of half a cent an ounce; but a library, so called, may send out its publications under the rules governing serials of every kind, which can be paid for at the post-office at the rate of two cents per pound; consequently for several years there has been an absolute inundation of fiction. Stimulated by this feature of the law, a number of enterprising men have reprinted all the standard novels of the past century in cheap form and distributed them broadcast over the entire country; and, to do them justice, have also issued a number of histories and other standard works in the same manner, and as people have purchased them, it is reasonable to suppose that they have read them.

But books are not all that is read by that great portion of our people who have a great deal of leisure time and no sufficient means of{534} enjoying it beyond reading. A million magazines are circulated every month, and twice as many weeklies. Some time ago the newspapers began to realize this fact, and straightway they supplemented their Saturday or Sunday editions with additional sheets containing miscellaneous reading-matter of all kinds, some of it as good as any that appears in the magazines. The worst of it is quite as good as the majority of current novels; and as the highest price of a newspaper in the United States is five cents per copy, and the supplementary sheets of some papers contain as much as an entire magazine, there is no lack of reading matter for any one who has the price of a glass of beer or a cheap cigar.

Not only is the supply of printed matter great, but the demand is being increased in many ways that are entirely admirable. There are now several societies which at a very trifling cost advise people what to read, and in what order to take certain books in hand. Some of them—notably the well-known Chautauqua Society—have reading circles under advice and partial supervision which number as many people as the students of all the colleges in the country. A number of societies of similar purpose are scattered about the country, each with its list of books which its members are advised to read—books which are carefully selected by men whose literary judgment{535} would be accepted in any intelligent circle in the union.

One result of the American avidity for reading matter is that the guild of American authors is becoming quite as numerous as that of any other country in the world. The American who does not write a book is almost a curiosity at the present time, and generally thinks it necessary to explain why he has not already done something of the kind, and when and how he would be able to do it. The stories which are published in cheap form in the United States are largely from foreign pens, but it is known to those who observe the subject closely that the number of American authors is increasing more rapidly than in any other country. Any one here who knows anything on a particular subject, or who has any reputation or prominence for any reason whatever, is asked to write a book, and such invitations are very seldom declined; for if the man cannot write, he can at least hire some one to put his thoughts into words. Men who in older countries would be ashamed to take pen in hand at all to produce anything for publication, have here received enormous compensation for single volumes on subjects with which they merely were acquainted, not those upon which they had any reason to be quoted as authority.

Even in the serious department of history we{536} have recently seen numerous books from men notoriously unfit in point of judgment to inflict anything of the sort upon a confiding public. But money is offered as an inducement, pen and ink are cheap, type-writers are plentiful, so the work goes merrily on, and it may need all the wisdom of another generation to correct the mistakes which have been made in print by writers of the present time.

Nevertheless, the steady demand which seems to be profitable to both authors and publishers is inciting the intelligent and educated class to efforts which once would have been impossible except to the very small number who were sufficiently well off to regard their literary work as a labor of love, and to expect no compensation except what might come from approving consciences. The modern novelist frequently gets more for a single volume than the elder Hawthorne received for all the books of his incomparable series. Literature has become a business as well as an intellectual occupation. Mr. Bancroft probably expended more money upon his well-known “History of the United States” than was received by those who sold his books at retail, but nowadays the writer of an alleged history can count upon as much pay for a hastily prepared book as a prominent lawyer would expect to receive for handling a case requiring long study and effort.{537}

These things being true—and authors and publishers will assure the public that they are—it is entirely safe to assume that we are soon to have a highly successful and valuable class of writers in the United States. “The coming book,” an expression which must soon go out of date, may be a history, a poem, a biography or a novel, but there will be so many more books than heretofore, that a work of great merit in any department of literature will possibly have to wait until another generation for proper recognition. There is so much to read that no book-worm can keep pace with the publishers’ presses. The last new novel may be very good or very bad, but whichever may be the case the general public stands very little chance of knowing, for before it has had time to reach the hands of many readers a dozen more have come from the press, and it is only chance or an exceptional degree of merit, which it is unfair to expect of any one more than once in a century, that will bring a book properly to notice.

For instance, some years ago Gen. Lew Wallace wrote a story entitled “Ben-Hur,” which sold fairly for a little while, but made no great excitement in the literary world. Fortunately for the author and the book, which certainly was an original and meritorious production, Gen. Wallace had an immense host of personal friends who little by little had the book brought to their{538} notice; they read it and talked about it, until finally, by this unsolicited and unpaid advertising, his story became famous and is now in its third hundredth thousand of circulation, with a promise of going on perhaps indefinitely.

Two years ago Mr. Edward Bellamy wrote his “Looking Backward.” It was a thoughtful, able story, touching many of the nearest interests of humanity, but it sold only a few thousand copies, and seemed making its way to the backs of booksellers’ shelves, when two or three essays upon the general subject recalled attention to it. The people of a single city—which, of course, was Boston—took it up first as a fad, and afterwards as a serious study, and now the book is in general demand and promises to renew and widely stimulate public discussion of a very old subject which must come to the surface once in a little while until perhaps it becomes a recognized principle of human conduct and existence.

These are merely two of many books of great value, or at least great interest, which have been saved from the general literary deluge by means which seem merely accidental. Of the many which have been lost perhaps irrevocably the publ............