125 Years Ago: A Letter to the Editor
“Alas, alas! Twenty-one years have passed (all too quickly). During all these years I have struggled first to attain to earlier ambitions, later to keep a semblance of a bookstore.
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“Oh, no. Now and then callers drop in to see about discounts, or if we can furnish such and such books as cheap as Cut-em-up & Divide-em, or to let me know they always order direct from the publisher, or Wanamaker or Alden, or from ‘clearance-sale,’ or from the ‘Library Association,’ or Macy’s or the ‘cheapest book-store on earth’
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“In vain do I call attention to a well-selected stock, good editions, fine bindings, etc. In vain do I call in play all the resources of a tongue made eloquent by the necessity of making sales to meet coming bills. To all these blandishments — including the piece de resistance of 20 to 25 per cent — he ventures the unanswerable argument of a clearance catalog in his pocket, or the catalogue of the ‘Home Library Association,’ or quotations from the ‘cheapest.’
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“Mr. Editor, you have championed the book-seller, pleaded his cause, deplored his decline, offered sage words of advice, counselled patience and prudence, advised enterprise and wide-awakeness, and altogether in a general way said as comfortable things as could be said under the circumstances. But, if you will permit me, I will say frankly that if you regard the booksellers as a part of your constituency valuable enough to be saved, if indeed their destruction would imperil you own existence, then you must make your paper more a ‘booksellers’ than a Publishers’ Weekly, and take hold of the vital questions that are sapping the foundations of the trade, and hammer away on them until publishers recognise that the inevitable result of the present policy is the certain ruin of bookselling in its legitimate and best sense. The decadence of publishing follows quickly that of bookselling.
“No bazaar man, or agent, or association, or any other method can take the place of the bookseller proper who studies his business as a profession and makes books his chief thought. It is useless for publishers to claim a want of enterprise booksellers and hash up complaints of his inability to give customers information, or lack of enterprise in ‘stocking up.’ Pray, Mr. Publisher, whose fault is it? I believe booksellers (what there is left of them) do not lack in energy, ability, or will. What they do lack is encouragement from you — you who give freely with one hand and take away with the other — you, sir, must foster, aid, encourage, and protect, in all possible ways, the agents upon whom you most rely to distribute your products — the bookseller if he is that agent. It not, than the other.
“I believe the remedy for the greater evils of the trade is in the hands of the publishers. The publisher can, if he will, control his own productions. It is easy to trace his stock from the moment it leaves his hands, and if he really desires it can be kept out of the hands of the slaughterers.
“But at last the whole question hinges on a single proposition : Is the bookseller any longer desirable : is he any longer indispensable in the estimation of publishers? If not, then all arguments are useless and all pleading vain. Booksellers can make up their minds to waste no time or money in useless endeavors to right an ever-increasing wrong.
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“Summing up the whole matter, Mr. Editor, it seems to me that you, the publishers, and the trade must unite in an effort to bring about such reforms as will save what there is left and build up a new generation of booksellers. Can it be done? I have no doubt it can,”
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“This is the only way to bring the matter on a practical basis. Neither limited discounts nor any special plan will ever accomplish the desired end.”
— A letter to the editor from one A. Setliff in the 7 January 1888 issue of Publishers’ Weekly. Emphasis in original. A Google Books version of the original document is embedded below:
From the same:
“in the course of the competition, the discount system developed until the nominal or advertised price of books did not correspond to the practical selling price. The result of this has been to decrease not only the number of book-stores in proportion to the community, but probably the actual number of book-stores throughout the country.”
I had previously cited different parts of this every same 1888 PW issue in a March 2011 blog post titled “The more things change…”
