The question will at once be raised: How is the specific interest of a new book to be determined? We answer: Just as the specific interest of any kind of potential news or actual news is determined--in competition with the other news of the day and hour. What is news one day isn’t news another. This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader of every daily paper is more or less consciously aware. There are some days when “there’s no news in the paper.” There are other days when the news in the paper is so big and so important that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting a white paper supply which does not at present exist, it would, of course, be possible on the “big days” to record all these lesser doings; and consistently, day in and day out, to print nicely proportioned accounts of every event attaining to a certain fixed level of specific interest. But the reader who may think he would like this would speedily find out that he didn’t. Some days he would have a twelve page newspaper and other days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his attention would be lost in the jungle of events that all happened within twenty-four hours, with the profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fellows were doing would be alternately starved and overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hateful misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and having a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) of the New York _Evening Journal_. It is really dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to the motto of the New York _Times_--“All the news that’s fit to print”--would work in New York City. No mortal has more than a certain amount of time daily and a certain amount of attention (according to his mental habit and personal interest) to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently the whole problem for the persons engaged in gathering and preparing news for presentation to readers sums up in this: “How many of the day’s doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of public interest and importance, shall we set before our clients?” Easily answered, in most cases; and the size of the paper is the index of the answer. Question Two: “_What_ of the day’s doings shall be served up in the determined space?”