Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his remarks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story called _Whispering Wires_ in which the explanation of a mysterious murder depended upon the telephone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the booksellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone receiver about the country with him, unscrewing and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put against your ear and showing how the deed was done. 5 The bookseller, like every one else, goes by experience. It is, or has been, his experience that collections of short stories do not sell well. And this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at short story volumes. Where there is a name that will command attention--Alice Brown, Theodore Dreiser--or where a special appeal is possible, as in Edward J. O’Brien’s _The Best Short Stories of 191-_, books made up of short tales may sell. But there are depressing precedents. In his interesting article on _The Publishing Business_, appearing in 1916 in the _Publishers’ Weekly_ and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites Henri Bergson’s _Creative Evolution_ as a modern instance of a special sort of book finding its own very special, but surprisingly large, public. “Nine booksellers out of ten ‘passed’ it when the traveller brought it round,” observes Mr. Scott. “Fortunately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of the expert, and public attention was secured.” Was the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not. _Creative Evolution_ is nothing to tie up your money in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel. Mr. Scott’s article, which is inconclusive, in our opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are like each other no two books are really the same article. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp; many books, and here we are by no means limited to fiction, have whatever unity comes from the authorship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elusively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may be confined almost wholly to the presence of the same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that _The Virginian_ and _The Pentecost of Calamity_ are both the work of Owen Wister.