MORE ABOUT NOVEL-READING.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1581, 26 October 1912, Page 9

MORE ABOUT NOVEL-READING.

To those (says an English journal) who have been congratulating themselves and the nation on the waning interest in fic : tion as shown in the statistics of public libraries, a letter published .in tho "Daily Telegraph" may be disconcerting. This is from Mr. W. Grierson, the geLeral manager of George Newnes, limited, and he suggests that some account should be taken ol the twenty-five millions or so of sixpenny novels that have been issued of lato years by his firm. Mr. Grierson estimates that altogether something between four and five million sixpenny novels are sold every year, and there is ono happy novelist who is selling at the rate of 35,000 a week. "--Perhaps sixpenny is used in its comprehensive sense as it eluding sevenpenny, for if we are to add a few millions of sevenpennies to the estimate the number would become staggering indeed. There is, however, a considerable modification in Mr. Grierson's remark that ho does "not say that these are all read in the United Kingdom." Anyhow, tho purchase and reading of fiction is prodigious, and as it is reasonable to suppose that the standard of tho free libraries is something above that if the bookstall we may presently have librarians pointing to the increase of these percentages as an indication of tho refinement of taste—of the preference, for instance, of George Eliot to Mr. Garvice. Mr. Grierson supports the opinion that book-buying is preferable for everyone concerned to borrowing from tho libraries, but as to the readers this must de- ■ pend on what books arc bought or borrowed. As a class casual readers of sixpenny novels may perhaps be described as skimmers, but the reading of these millions of hooks must have a great effect of some kind on people's minds, and nobody with an interest in' social de\e!opnients can'be indifferent to their quality. Perhaps a few literary geniuses migfit he induced to devote their genius in good citizenship to the cutting out of the lower kinds, and of course in tho process they would make their fortunes:,. But perhaps it is a reflection on those who produce tho best "sellers" to.; assume,, rhat->this ; is.; not what has happened in their case... ■'