The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great foundational demand for headgear. The best way to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home. It might be supposed that the best way to sell books would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies of any particular book. Of course every publisher knows this and of course all the publishers, associating themselves for the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably allied to the general welfare, spend time and money in the effort to make readers--not of Mrs. Halcyon Hunter’s _Love Has Wings_ or Mr. Caspar Cartouche’s _Martin the Magnificent_, but of books, just good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course.... This would be--beg pardon, is--the thing that actually and immediately as well as ultimately counts: Let us get people to read, to like to read, to _enjoy_ reading, and they will, sooner or later, read books. Sooner or later they’ll become book readers and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as well as automobiles.... On the merely technical side of bookselling, on the immediate problem of selling particular new novels, collections of short stories, histories, books of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, collectively at least, not much to learn from their fellow merchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so highly developed in America that many of the methods resemble the interchangeable parts of standardized manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a look at these methods. 7 The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered by at least two American publishing houses. With their very large lists of new books they contrive to avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six months ahead, these publishers are moving largely but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and less largely but with swift certainty three months, two months, even one month from the passing moment. And they are absolutely right and profit by their rightness. For this reason: Everything that is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that ephemerality if you like but also that widening ripple of human interest which is the unique essence of what we call “news.” This quality is present, in a perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. Oh! exclaims the reader, there surely is a book with no ephemerality about it! No? But there was an immense quantity of just that in its publication. It came at the right hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone unnoticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of biological knowledge that Darwin knew not.