D.N.B.

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24814, 2 March 1946, Page 5

D.N.B.

MINUTE

The case is very rare in which the world would be benefited by the appearance of books which do not pay their expenses; and there is no obligation upon a publisher to bestow such gifts upon the public. Smith*, however, soon became aware, if he was not aware at first, that this book would not pay commercially, and that his reward must be the consciousness of haying done a real service to the national literature. One point, however was evident to me. If an intelligent Government had appointed this work, and promised me a comfortable salary till it was finished, I might have taken my time about it. Probably in that case Sn^ lc , Uonary mi ght by this time L1903J have reached the middle of the alphabet. But as it was, after all, done by private enterprise, I had to take c^ re that the self-imposed sacrifice should not be made greater than even a generous proprietor could be expected to stand. I made up my mind in the first place that the book should be fimshed therefore, if possible, within the lifetime of Smith and myself .... I thought that it was plainly due to Smith that he should be able to reckon upon the completion of his project. For the same reason it was desirable to convince the public that the work would not, like many predecessors, come to a premature end, or be finished in a perfunctory spirit. We four volumes annually, and the promise was kept. In spite of a good many forebodings, every volume, up to the sixty-third and last, appeared up to time. —Leslie Stephen: “Some Early Impressions.” *The founder, and publisher of the great Dictionary of National Biography, the first volumes of which appeared in 1885, the last in 1900. The original 63 volumes—there have been supplements—contained something like 30,000,000 words.