WAR THE ONE TOPIC.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 8, 11 January 1915, Page 6

WAR THE ONE TOPIC.

EFFECT OM FIGTIGN. ENORMOUS INCREASE IN NEWSPAPER CIRCULATIONS. Autumn leaves are falling so fast from the publishers’ presses that we ere in deadly danger of being snowed nmlerrCp’tites the London correspondSun.) When the war beg§.Ui* tOYbiybody associated with the printing industry gave way to lamentations. The publishing houses, with a large stock of fiction and general literature upon their hands, cancelled orL deis wholesale. The daily papers, seeing their advertisements shrink almost to zero, gave themselves over to woe. TheVeekly papers, dependent upon the joyous life of the capital, saw them-selves-bankrupted by the gloom which attempted to settle down on the Wfold’s Capital, and the lithographers and the engravers thought their last hour had come. But even the Greatest War hak its compensations. The novel market is in the dumps, but a war-ridden; people have displayed an omnivorous appetite for every scrap of literature pertaining to the war. The newspaper ; * advertisements became beautifully less, but confidence has been re-established. The advertiser has discovered there are still 45,000,000 people in Great Britain, and circulations have risen prodigiously. The domestic touch has disappeared from the weekly illustrated, but the war pictures attract quite as many customers. It would he impossible to" enumerate, the works of fiction which owe their inspiration to the war. Only H. G. Wefts dr Arnold Bennett or Marie CortfclK dare launch one of their own cliar•actefistic novels. Lesser public favourites would not be tolerated, and cvenV these giants have tp,,Lb-..-content Ivith much smaller returns. Every short story; 1 ' every serial story, every feuilleton, every personal sketch, every pamphlet, must have a surcharged,war atmosphere. Take up any weekly publicatiqW \witte’ a large circulation, and you ri?ill / flncl ! 'it ]ittle else but but warlike echoes. The hero of?the factory girl’s novelette is no longer a strawberry duke, he is a Colonel of Hussars, or a .Major of Artillery, and the villain of Suburbia’s penny dreadful is, no mtfftf‘4iiid.: - htfrgling desperado, hut a highly acomplished German spy. Some flowerets of Eden we still inherit, ftut the; trail of the German is over them all. 4 '

Of new-:.weekly papers there is no end. There are more than a dozen Histories, each’ most graphic, most accurate, and most ‘ complete, more than a dozen publications devoted entirely to war pictures, more than a dozen Literary Magazines, filled with i articles of prophetic insignt, and nearly all of them are showing a good • profit. They are not interfering with the. old-established illustrated papers or with the great dailies, rather they are whetting the public appetite for w!hat these purvey. There is- only one paper which has had t.he misfortune to decline in circulation during an unexampled demand for newspapers. It was when the \vsr -started, and thojighd .its .conductors have tried to revive, it, the worst is feared... Other journals .have, made enormous strides. The Chronicle has gone up from something dike 650,000 to 1,250,000. It has had to alter its shape and its|size, because its presses could not pryit- fast enough. The new Chronicle is in conformation patterned upon the New York World, and is a very serious corhpetitor with the Daily Mail for the place of predominant' partner amongst the half-penny •press. But the achievement of the Chronicle is itself dwarfed by the jump made by the Weekly Despatch. Under ;the stimujjjs of Lord Northeliffe’s driving personality, this Sunday paper has risen froijf <450,000 tor 1,500,000, and the figures care still on the upgrade. What Fleet street'has lost—and it hasfhot been very much— in it has. been recouped in circulation..