RUDYARD KIPLING'S FIRST BOOK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 9711, 5 January 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

RUDYARD KIPLING'S FIRST BOOK.

♦ It was a volume of verse, and was brought out by himself in India. He calls it) a book" —with quotation marksthough from his description it resembled an official Government envelope rather than an ordinary volume. The contents had been contributed by him from time to time to the columns of a journal in India. of which he was sub-editor. He gives a humorous account of the whole literary project in McClure's Magazine (November), of which the following is an extract:— " My verse had the good fortune to last a little louger than some others which were more true to facts, and certainly tetter workmanship. Men in the army, and the civil service, and the railway wrote to me saying that the rhymes might bo made into a book. Some of them had been sung to the banjos round camp-fires, and sorae had run as far down coast as Rangoon aud Mouhnein, and up to Mandaiay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Kukn-Din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I did nob use the office time. Also, I had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of a book, a lean, oblong docket, wirestitched, to imitate a D.O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years' service. Of these ' books' wo made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, 1 took reply-post-cards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteen?, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but . honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and tho ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has still prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down country papers complained, of the form of the thing. The wire-binding tore the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not intentional, but heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over tho counter for that of seeing a real publisher's imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and pub in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little faster, and at last the book came to London with a gilt bop and a stiff back, and was advertised in the publishers' poetry department. " Bat I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string round its stomach ; a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments ; and before people had learned, beyond doubt, how its author lay awske of nights in India, plotting and scheming to write something that should'take' with tho English public."