Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/282

 moral which these few pages will do their best to indicate. For the situation, which one is first inclined to laugh away as ridiculous, has its serious side as well, and it is a question whether the time has not arrived when we should take the literary auctioneer at his own valuation, and write him off the books.

The first thing that strikes one, I suppose, is the consideration of how immensely things have changed in the last few years to make such utterance as that which opens this paper possible. Except for a few dingy and detached houses here and there, houses which seem to break out in the centre of our trim red-brick lines of villadom—like ghosts—to trouble joy except for these (and they are few), Grub Street is no more. We all remember, or our fathers at least have declared unto us, the old-world vision of the publisher. He was a Colossus, set up at the receipt of custom, under whose huge legs the wretched authors, petty men, peeped about, striving to rivet his attention with humble tributes of carefully copied manuscript. For such as he regarded there remained hard terms and an invidious reputation. To-day all this is changed. It is now the author (have we not received it on his own authority?) who mounts into the rostrum, hammer in hand, and having at his side a bundle of type-writing, distributes to the struggling middle men a printed synopsis of the material on offer, and proceeds to start the bidding with a wholesome reserve price. Then the publishers continue one against the other, pitting royalty against royalty, advance against advance, till down comes the hammer and off go the copy and the profits. Nor, mark you, is the auctioneer contented yet; the open market, he says, is still not open enough for his desires. It seems that these men of business do not know the secrets of their own beggarly trade (have we not this, too, on the authority of the author?). They are the victims of a miserable niggardliness which forbids them to bid to the value of the material