Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem to hear murmurs. What has all this about the genesis and nature of good reporters to do with the publication of new books? Why, this: The only person who can deal adequately and amply with 99 new books out of a hundred--the 99 that require to be taken as they are--is the good reporter. He’s the boy who can read the new book as he would look and listen at a political convention, or hop around at a fire--getting the facts, getting them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them straight) and setting them down, swiftly and selectively, to reproduce in the mind of the public the precise effect of the book itself. The effect--not the means by which it was achieved, not the desirability of it having been achieved, not the artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or a deduction, however obvious--just the effect. That’s reporting. That’s getting and giving the news. And that’s what the public wants. Some people seem to think there is something shameful in giving the public what it wants. They would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer who gave his customer something “just as good” or (according to the grocer) “decidedly better.” But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of intention can take it out of the class of deception and cheating. But, they cry, the public does not want what is sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants. So they shift their ground and think to escape on a high moral plateau or table land. But the table land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that they are confidently setting their judgment of what the public ought to want against the public’s plain decision what it does want. They are a few dozens against many millions, yet in their few dozen intelligences is collected more wisdom than has been the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the other sons of earth. They really believe that.... Pitiable.... 10 A new book is news. This might almost be set down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing formal demonstration by the Euclidean process. Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we shall demonstrate accordingly.