FORTUNATE AUTHORSAND OTHERS.

Evening Star, Issue 12763, 16 March 1906, Page 6

FORTUNATE AUTHORSAND OTHERS.

The statement has recently been circulated that, Mi ssi« Macmillan paid Mr Winston Churchill £B.OOO down for of his father. If this be tree, the scale of remunerat ion, for the labor of the anther ■works out at 6d a wood. It is certainly beyond question that enormous prices have been paid far great biographies—for instance, the sum of £IO,OOO which Mr Morley received for bis life of Glacbtono. The fact comes to us with a, shock of contrast when we remember the paltry sain of £5 paid to Milton for the first, edition of 'Paradise Lost ’ and the £6O which Goldsmith received for ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ No doubt there will at once occur to my readers many instances of high or low prices paid for books. Though information with regard to this side of the making of books is scanty, one or two cases may be cited. 'Phere are immortal works which were published, not at the munificent rate of pay which the successful biographers just mentioned received, but actually at the authors’ own risk. Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ was so issued originally. Keble offered hie ‘Christian Year’ to a publisher for £2O. This being refused, he had the hook published at his own risk, with satisfactory results, the work bringing him in, it is said, £40,000 during his lifetime. James and Horace Smith, too, naked the modest sum of £2O for their ‘Rejected Addresses.’ The work was declined by Murray, and the authors, bringing it out at their "own risk, netted more than £I,OOO from its sixteen editions. Murray buying the remaining copyright for £l3l. From Mr Edmund Downey’s mniniscences vre loam that Mr Thomas Hardy received the small sum of £25 from Tirsfey for ‘Under the Greenwood Tree.’ Such facts are simply staggering when we remember that only recently Mr J. J. Bell made about £4,000 out of his tiny book ‘Wee Macgreegor,’ though in tlhas case it is » matter of history that publisher after publisher refused the book when the author would have sold the entire copyright for£lo.—From ‘T.P.’s Weekly.’'