Abstract

This Week: Books of the Month

Selling books is rapidly becoming a business similar to that of selling washing machines or motorcars; it is in the very process of being "rationalized." Not that the mass production and distribution of books in the United States is a new thing. On the contrary, from the early days of the dime novel and the sale of standard books and "sets" through mail-order houses and traveling agents, the methods of high-or low-pressure salesmanship have been employed; but on a modest scale and in rather humble spheres. It is a development of much more recent years that good new books, the better products of contemporary literature, should be spread by the hundreds of thousands through areas of the population which have largely been cut off from this sort of reading.