Peculiar Editorial Problems of the Little Blue Books
AS I look back at the history of the Little Blue Books, from those first two volumes of poetry—Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (No. 1) and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (No. 2)—to the list as it is now, totaling 1,260 different volumes, 1 am amazed at the panorama of experience spread out before, or rather behind, me. Nine years have contained a surprising number of things. When I began with two fairly well-known classics, and poetry at that, I had not the least inkling that my top number would be a book by my wife on a
contemporary sociological situation, Story of a Southern Lynching.
Nor had 1 any idea, either, that the next to the top number would be a reference volume such as A Dictionary of Geographical Names,
compiled by Leo Markun. But those four volumes, the first two and the last two, numerically speaking, are an epitome of the wide range of editorial growth and change through which the Little Blue Books have carried me.
It was Frankenstein who created a monster and gave it life,
whereupon it leaped beyond his dreams and terrified him. Sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes 1 am awed by contemplating how I started the Little Blue Books—pocket classics for the people—and how they leaped into the impressive conception of a "University in Print,"
finally realized. Of course, the series is incomplete. I haven’t been able to keep pace with it at all. I candidly admit that the series has grown like some mighty beast, now and then obeying my command, but just as often cavorting here and there seemingly of its own free will.
But what would you have in nine years? According to arithmetic, which is practical enough certainly, the average increase per year is 140 titles. That is an aggregate of 2,100,000 or so words. As a matter of fact, some years I added more than that, for many of the
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years, especially the first ,years, the expansion did not proceed to anywhere near that speed. I am not ashamed that I made mistakes. And I do not hesitate to be proud that I have behind me a record of real publishing achievement.
All of which is intended as a preamble to saying that there is nothing else quite like the Little Blue Books. I had newspaper experience before I tackled this pocket series idea. I cannot imagine what other background could have helped me at all. I was plowing a virgin field, and I knew that I had to hit stones and that I had to risk the harvest, good or bad. As I have emphasized in
another place, there was only one principle to guide me in editing a series of this kind—a Little Blue Book would be bought only to be read.
Problems that arose in editing the Little Blue Books were unique. I had nothing to guide me except my own experience, and why shouldn’t I confess that my own experience was precious little at times? I was getting that experience even as I struggled along. Occasionally it was costly. Often it was profitable. But I did not hesitate; there was never any backsliding, never any attempt to pass the buck, never any claim that my inspiration was infallible, never any admission that I was failing. For after all, as the present list of Little Blue Books shows, it was a magnificent success all around. Now the story can be told. Now I can tell, and I am doing it, exactly what nine years of publishing and editing these 1,260 Little Blue Books have taught me.
The series had not progressed very far—possibly there were 250 titles in print—when the first important editorial step had to be taken. Up to this point the series had been strictly made up of reprints of classics—and by that I mean books which had appeared in print before, most of them by writers already dead, most of them in the public domain, which is to say that there was no longer any copyright making them the exclusive property of any individual or corporation. The series had to start this way. There could not be any payment to authors, for special manuscripts for the series, until capital accumulated to justify such an expenditure. But the success of that first 250 books, reprints though they were, opened
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the way for a new era of publishing pocket-sized books. It meant that writers could be hired to prepare manuscripts of exactly the right length, in exactly the right style, on exactly the right subjects, to embody the Little Blue Book idea.
I am tempted into an aside about copyrights and the so called public domain of literature. I sincerely beg the pardon of any readers
whose sense of coherence and unity and all that pedantic ritual is outraged, but the story of the Little Blue Books contains so many interesting cases along the route that I cannot help being lured into bypaths. Many people have not the least idea what a copyright is or what it means. Most people stand in considerable awe of the majesty of the law anyway, and seem to have the strange notion that it is all beyond their puny understanding. I have frequently had the question put to me, for example, how it is that I am able to publish Shakespeare in the Little Blue Books without paying colossal
royalties.
Again, many people have been under the impression, fostered largely by the beginning of the Little Blue Books, that the entire series, even today, is made up of reprints. Such people are always astounded when I tell them that fully three-fourths of the list is protected by copyright. They are incredulous when they are informed that a large part of the material in the Little Blue Books can be obtained in no other form. But that is the actual state of things—the
copyright records and documents of the Little Blue Books occupy an important niche in the plant’s huge vault. This sounds puerile, but I give you my word that it will be news to some of my readers.
Copyrights have a definite life. When they expire they may be renewed, but renewed only once. After that the work automatically becomes a part of the public domain, and may be published by anyone without payment of royalty. Unfortunately the United States
copyright law is in many ways inefficient and unjust, but I cannot go into the technicalities of the law here. The general statement is enough to give an understanding of the situation. Shakespeare,
Boccaccio, Irving, Poe, and so on, are in the public domain. It is rather funny, then, to have someone ask me how I can publish these works.
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Affidavits for copyright registration are always made out by a girl in the office and this has given rise to some amusing incidents. I remember how one of the girls who had this among her duties, once asked me if Boccaccio was a citizen of the United States. I think she was intending to slip in a copyright on The Falcon and Other Tales, by Boccaccio of Decameron fame. At another time she, in an absent moment, handed me the form properly and correctly made out for 4,000 Most Essential English Words, which has no author, but lo and behold! in lieu of an author she had drafted the book’s subtitle into extra duty and entered, in the blank space for author, "A Basic Literacy Test."
In contrast with such anecdotes is one I read somewhere about a plagiarist who tried to foist Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp on an editor of a fiction magazine. The amateur pirate insisted the story was his own work, and when told that, due to some irony of fate, a gentleman by the name of Bret Harte had written it long before him, he retorted that it was true but made no difference since the story was in the public domain. All of which adds to the merriment of life, but is not getting me on in my chronicle.
The Little Blue Books, as I said, soon entered the field of including copyright works especially written or edited for the series. Immediately this necessitated a somewhat unusual editorial policy. Due to the strict mechanical requirements, which at first were confined to 64, 96, and 128 pages in the completed book, and later were standardized to 64 pages or occasionally 32, it was
impossible to consider unsolicited manuscripts in the manner of most publishing houses. In other words, I could not go into the general publishing field and pick out here and there a book or two from the great mass of freelance manuscript. It was impossible. It could not be thought of—manuscript already written was so much flotsam and jetsam as far as I was concerned, no matter how excellent.
Manuscripts for the Little Blue Books are now strictly standardized to 15,000 words each. This is the absolute mechanical requirement, and although it may and does vary a trifle, the margin of variation is very small. In the first place, a 64-page Little Blue Book must contain at least 60 pages of type matter or the man who buys it will
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feel cheated. This is a fact that always has to be kept in mind.
After all, there is always that sales resistance to a "pamphlet,"
and when I advertise that a Little Blue Book contains 15,000 words it simply cannot contain, with any frequency, only 10,000. In the second place, type is not infinitely elastic. If the manuscript for a Little Blue Book, when set in the usual style of 8 point on an 8-point slug, 16 ems wide, runs beyond the bottom of page 64, it has to be cut, and that is expensive. When you are producing a five-cent product expense must be reduced to a minimum. Hence, manuscripts are written strictly to order.
Of course I have had the accusation of "hack-writing" flung at me time and time again. The implication is silly, as any editor knows.
Art is one thing, well enough, and literary craftsmanship is
another. Whether a thing is written to order, or comes from "divine"
inspiration, matters very little. The result is what counts. An
editor can tell a good book when he sees one and he bothers his head not at all about how it came to be written if it meets his need. The folly of crying "hack-work" at anything done on order, and according to specifications, is easily shown. But the prize incident which comes to my mind is the slurring letter I once received which accused me of hiring an ordinary hack by the name of Francis
Thompson to write a stupid essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley. That is No. 10 in the Little Blue Books. I would have been proud to hire Mr.
Thompson—but the work had been done for some other editor before me, and it was my honor only to reprint it.
I do not pretend to imply that I am the only editor who corresponds with writers and tells them what he wants. That would be
preposterous. All editors do this regularly, especially with writers from whom they can expect work to meet their requirements. It is even done with fiction, that standardized fiction which entertains the masses from week to week, and I see no objection to it as an editor. I do not use that kind of fiction, for with fiction I have other standards, but then, I am doing a different work. But I do say, flatly, that my particular method of eliciting work from writers by correspondence was induced by the requirements of the Little Blue Books and has peculiarities all its own.
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The Little Blue Books are quite different from the publishing program of any publisher of clothbound "library" volumes, which arbitrarily includes from 20 or 30 to 100 or so new volumes every year. There is seldom a peak in the sales record of an individual Little Blue Book, and then a steady decline until the hook is sold out and never reprinted. It is my intention, when I schedule a Little Blue Book for publication, that it shall remain in the list indefinitely. I am not clairvoyant, and many a Little Blue Book has had to be withdrawn, as my Morgue readily shows, but in general the life of a Little Blue Book is the life of the series itself. If it is a genuine Little Blue Book, filling all the requirements of the series, it stays for good.
Thus, you can begin to see how the Little Blue Books have blazed their own trail, so to speak. They have made it necessary to impress upon writers these special requirements, and they have eliminated at once those writers whose work is creative along rather indefinite artistic lines. For example, I might not have published the stories of Sherwood Anderson if he had submitted them to me originally. But it fitted into my plans admirably to be able to make arrangements with Mr. Anderson’s publishers for two volumes of his representative stories, after he became known. The same has been true of Ben Heeht, Stephen Leacock, Fannie Hurst, Theodore Dreiser, Wilbur Daniel
Steele, etc.
In a manner of speaking, the Little Blue Books have been a kind of periodical, each volume being an issue, of which the best-selling
"back numbers" are continually kept in print and on sale. This illustrates rather well the necessity for general and constant appeal in considering a manuscript for publication, combined with the excellence and high literary standard which I have always set for my writers. The original works have been confined to the
preparation of specially written biographies, brief histories, self-teaching educational volumes and to a slight extent volumes of
literary criticism. Original works of fiction, poetry, and belles-lettres, not previously published, have not been sought.
From the first, then, my contact with writers has always been—when they have been working for the Little Blue Books—through extensive
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correspondence and frequently by discussions in personal interviews.
One of the first writers to work for me, Charles J. Finger, I made all arrangements with in person. I remember when the Little Blue Books were still young—it was along in April, 1923 —that I drove from Girard to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Mr. Finger has his workshop, expressly to talk over the matter of Little Blue Book manuscripts with him. He had already done some books for me, and there was waiting for me, when I arrived on that trip, Oscar Wilde in Outline.
It was to introduce a number of classics that Charles J. Finger was specially needed at that time. He wrote the introduction for
Burton’s Kasidah, which later had to be consigned to The Morgue.
Among his books still in the list are such unique Little Blue Book features as Sailor Chanties and Cowboy Songs; A Book of Strange Murders; Great Pirates; Lost Civilizations; Historic Crimes and Criminals; Adventures of Baron Munchausen, etc. Of his biographical and literary introductions, among the best liked are Barnum and His Circus; Robin Hood and His Merry Men; Thoreau, the Man Who Escaped from the Herd; Mark Twain, the Philosopher Who Laughed at the World, etc. Mr. Finger helped the Little Blue Books wonderfully in those early days. He was close at hand, which was necessary, because many a conference was imperative before these manuscripts could be
properly prepared.
Murray Sheehan was another resident of Arkansas who wrote for me in the beginning. Some of these names, I take pride in pointing out, were but little known when they began to appear among the Little Blue Books, but have leaped into more prominence in recent years. A most remarkable case was Will Durant. Mr. Sheehan was especially helpful along practical lines, writing such books as Hints on News Reporting, A History of Architecture, A History of Painting, etc.
Anyone who has followed the Little Blue Books closely will have
noticed that certain of my writers gained rather rapid prominence in the list and then ceased work so far as the Little Blue Books were concerned. I made use of a writer only so long as he could serve the purpose of the series itself. The requirements of the Little Blue Books, in different phases of their growth, have sapped several
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prolific writers dry. Names that loom large in the list have been seemingly spasmodic, because the Little Blue Books have been able to absorb all of a writer’s work that would fit. Such names, besides the two already mentioned, are those of Leo Markun, Carroll Lane Fenton, William J. Fielding, Hereward Cartington, Theodore M.R. von Keler, Vance Randolph, Clement Wood, Lloyd E. Smith, Isaac Goldberg, Alexander Harvey, Julius Moritzen, James Oppenheim, Ralph Oppenheim, R. A. Power, Maynard Shipley, Miriam Allen deFord, Henry C. Vedder, Nelson Antrim Crawford, George Sylvester Viereck, Keene Wallis, Clarice Cunningham, Josephine Headen, etc. Each of these writers either wrote or edited several Little Blue Books—they were good workmen, within their limitations, and their work was needed.
Some of these people have written for me over a long period. William J. Fielding is a notable example—without doubt the most popular
writer in the entire series. More of him in due course. Of those still at work, Joseph McCabe is the outstanding king of them all. In the list I have given you see at once the small army which the
Little Blue Books have put to work, a veritable battery of busy
typewriters. (Of them all Joseph McCabe is the only one who prepared his manuscripts by hand, with pen and ink.) Nor is this all. There are two or three dozen names of writers who prepared from one to three or four books which I have not mentioned, among them such familiar ones as Floyd Dell, Ludwig Lewisohn, Pierre Loving, Thelma Spear, B. Russell Hefts, etc.
I haven’t the space to discuss each of these writers at length.
George Sylvester Viereck I put to work at a time when, because of the aftermath of the World War, he was finding it hard to get into the swing of things again. Prejudice has never meant anything to me if a writer can the work I want the way I want it, particularly that prejudice which comes from difference of opinion. Julius Moritzen I accepted at his own valuation as the semi-official representative of Georg Brandes and Scandanavian literature in America. Henry C.
Vedder, as a religionist, served very well to give the Bible and
Vedder, as a religionist, served very well to give the Bible and