THE BOOK FLOOD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19496, 27 November 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE BOOK FLOOD.

STEADY GROWTH OF .OUTPUT, Every publishing season—and we are now in the middle of a new one—books, and more books, pour forth from the presses, says a London paper. How many are published every year? An expert puts the figure at 200,000. What happens to this gigantic flood of reading matter? The bulk of the volumes published every year are fiction. The average novel sells around 1500 copies. A few " best-sellers " run into hundreds of thousands; other books fail altogether. Those which 'cannot be sold mostly find their way back to the paper pulp from which they came. Many a hopeful young novelist has the mortification to be told that 'the remainder of his book is to be pulped. How many books are there in the world to-day? One expert reckons that the world's total of books published since the days of the first printing presses is around 16,500,000. Appalling as this figure is, the steady increase *of .output is° still more alarming. For instance, in the fifteenth century the output was 40,000 books 1 , in the eighteenth it had risen to 2,000,000. The twentieth century will dwarf even the latter figure if the rate of production of the first quarter is maintained—and it is more likely to be increased than to slow down. Yet one' 1 copy of every book that is published in Britain has to be preserved in the British Museum. Already that vast library is overcrowded. What will it be like a century hence ? It will pro-. babJy be engulfed 'in the rising flood-tidg of books.