The public already know something of the painful difficulties under which novelists labour at the present moment owing to the paper shortage and the enhanced cost of book production. But "the economic consequences of the Peace" by no means exhaust the handicaps of the conscientious and sensitive novelist. We are glad therefore to note the efforts of _The Daily Graphic_ to enlist the sympathy of the public on behalf of this sorely tried and meritorious class. Our contemporary tells us, for example, of one momentous writer who was reduced to dictating blindfold "because the facial peculiarities of first one and then another amanuensis" upset her equanimity. Then there is the tragic story of Mr. R.L. HITCHENS, who, being engaged to write an article against time, sent out for a stenographer, who on arrival proved to be a man with a large black beard of so sinister an aspect that Mr. HICHINS was forced to dismiss him and write the article in his own hand. Yet Mr. HICHENSis not easily put off, for we learn that he finds he works best in big hotels and not, as we might have guessed, in the sequestered tranquillity of a minaret. To some writers solitude is the true school of genius. Yet Sir LEWIS MORRIS found some of his happiest thoughts come to him while travelling in the underground, while Mr. W.B. YEATS records a similar experience as the result of a journey on the top of a tram-car. Your advanced modernists, with MARINETTI at their head, find their best stimulus to creative effort in the clang and clatter of machinery. _per contra_, to return to _The Daily Graphic_, Mrs. C.N. WILLIAMSON must have pretty things to look at "in business hours." But the happiest of all our authors is Madame ALBANESI, who "finds her brain-spur in a blank sheet of paper, and not the ghost of an idea what she is going to write about." Less fortunate writers labour assiduously only to leave the minds of their readers a blank, without the ghost of an idea of what the author has been writing about.