LITERARY TASTE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 April 1938, Page 8

LITERARY TASTE

GAUGING PUBLIC DEMAND. There are various means of gauging the public’s literary taste, remarks Mr R. F. Scott, writing in the “Spectator.” The lending libraries, proprietary and and free, are in a particularly good position to do it, but the cheap reprint has provided a new criterion. Series like the well-known Everyman and the more recent and remarkably successful Penguin (fiction) and Pelican (non-fiction) libraries provide a clear indication of what the public wants. The conclusions to which their experience points are well worth study. Take first Everyman, as the older of the two. Among its volumes such weighty works as Ricardo’s “Principles of Political Economy," Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” “The Iliad” and the plays of Sophocles and Euripides have shown a steadily increasing demand during recent years. Byt perhaps even more interesting as a gauge of popular literary taste is the fact that, of the volumes recently included in the Everyman edition, Eddington’s “The Nature of the Physical World” is in even greater demand than is “The Tales of Detection” edited by Miss Dorothy Sayers. This same tendency—preference for the serious rather than the trivial —is also substantiated by the by the Penguin and of the former, with the one exception of the detective thriller, it is invariably those of real worth which have the largest sales; and in the Pelican library—which contains no fiction- — Shaw’s “Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism,” Wells’ “Short History of the World,” “Vision and Design,” by Roger Fry, "Practical Economics,” by Cole, and Jeans’ “Mysterious Universe” are the most popular.