In the spring of 1919 one of the principal publishing houses in America and England undertook the publication of a very unusual sort of a novel, semi-autobiographical, a work of love and leisure by a man who had gained distinction as an executive. It was a fine piece of work, though strange; had a delightful reminiscential quality. The book was made up, a first edition of moderate size printed and bound. It was not till this had been done and the book was ready to place on sale that the head of this publishing house had an opportunity to read it. The Head is a veteran publisher famous for his prescience in the matter of manuscripts and for honorable dealings. He read the book through and was charmed by it; he looked at the book and was unhappy. He sent for everybody who had had to do with the making of this book. He held up his copy and fluttered pages and said, in effect: “This has been done all wrong. Here is a book of quite exceptional quality. I don’t think it will sell. Only moderately, though perhaps rather steadily for some years to come. It won’t make us money. To speak of. But it deserves, intrinsically, better treatment. Better binding. This is only ordinary six-months’-selling novel binding. It deserves larger type. Type with a more beautiful face. Fewer lines to the page. Lovelier dress from cover to cover. “Throw away the edition that has been printed. Destroy it or something. At least, hide it. Don’t let any of it get out. For this has been done wrong, all wrong. Do it over.” So they went away from his presence and did it right. It meant throwing away about $2,000. Or was it a $2,000 investment in the good opinion of people who buy, read and love books? THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER VII THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER By “best seller” we may mean one of several things. Dr. Emmett Holt’s _Care and Feeding of Children_, of which the fifty-eighth edition was printed in the spring of 1919, is one kind of best seller; Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_ is quite another. The number of editions of a book is a very uncertain indication of sales to a person not familiar with book publishing. Editions may consist of as few as 500 copies or as many as 25,000 or even 50,000. The advance sale of Gene Stratton-Porter’s _A Daughter of the Land_ was, if we recall the figure exactly, 150,000 copies. These, therefore, were printed and distributed by the day when the book was placed on sale, or shortly thereafter. To call this the “first edition” would be rather meaningless. One thousand copies of a book of poems--unless it be an anthology--is a large edition indeed. But not for Edgar Guest, whose books sell in the tens of thousands. The sale, within a couple of years, of 31,000 copies of the poems of Alan Seeger was phenomenal.