HOW BOOKS ARE MADE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 18, 27 May 1913, Page 4

HOW BOOKS ARE MADE.

Novelists doubtless follow different methods in their work and some of them have been telling us how the tiling is done. Sir Gilbert Parker, for instance, utterly disclaims being a mere photographer. He also tells how ho had, in his early days, prepared a series of stories and sketches, entitled, “Pike Pole Sketches on the Madawaska.” Before publication he showed them to the late Archibald Forbes, whose criticism was; “You have the best collection of titles 1 have ever known.” The author saw the point. Ho took his bag, and going to his rooms, sat down by the fire. Taking his two years’ work j on his knees, ho committed it, story by story, to the flames. His sensations as he did so were of a grim character, but he declares that he has never felt any regrets since. The work he undertook next was inspired primarily by the sight of the uniform of an officer of the time of Wellington in a Covent Garden second-hand shop, and beside it the leather coat and fur cap of a trapper ,of tho Hudson’s Bay Company. This was that well--1 known book “Pierre and His People.” “Tho Seats of the Mighty,” Sir Gilbert Parker describes as the first of his works which was really planned on an ambitious scale. “1 believe,” says Sir Gilbert Parker in connection with this volume, “that every book which has taken hold of the public has represented a kind of self-hypnotism on the part of the writer. lam farther convinced that the book whi’ch absorbs tho author, which possesses him as he writes it, has the effect of isolating him in an atmosphere which is not sleep and which is not absolute wakefulness, but a place between the two, where the working world is indistinct, and the mind is swept along a flood submerging the self-conscious but not drowning into unconsciousness.” : m'il