Abstract

Literature De Luxe

The World War I, has a strange trick of turning the tables on a guileless public. When a beneficent U.S. Government asked the public to practice thrift, those that dwell apart from the world of best-seller books and fifteen-cent magazines serenely awaited a cataclysm of cheap literature under the law of diminishing returns. All the queer little magazines, the rare books for the fit but few, the free copies were cut off, while war books and cheap newspapers flourished. People of the U.S. demanded that same rule should apply for other forms of art too. So likewise, the painter whose pictures no one wants, the playwright whose plays few wish to see, the composer whose opera wins a prize, but not an audience should demand a higher price because of his "relatively limited appeal."