WHAT PEOPLE ARE READING

Southland Times, Issue 22969, 15 August 1936, Page 13

WHAT PEOPLE ARE READING

Changes In Public Taste: Fiction Down, Facts Up

“What is being read?” The answer to that question, obtained by The Observer, London, from sixteen publishers, shows a remarkable change in public taste. Of the hundred most widely-read books of the moment, only onethird are novels. Fiction is down; facts are up.

Facts are the rage—nicely dressed, pleasantly narrated, entertaining facts. Readers demand them; publishers are tumbling over each other to supply them.

The facts for which the book-buy-ing public are at present eager are alarmingly varied, nor are they all necessarily “hard facts.” They may be facts historical/ biographical, scientific, archaeological, critical, or simply travellers’ facts. But they may also be facts philosophical, religious (the fact of a writer’s faith), or facts political and economic (the facts of opinion and theory), or sensitive, perceptive facts, the facts of the poet.

The decline in novel-buying, reported by booksellers as well as by publishers, has narrowed the fiction field. Two types of novel sell. First, the highly sophisticated novel by the author of established reputation; second, the novel of action, the thriller, the detective story.

Sophisticated. S accesses.

It is now, say several publishers, more difficult than ever to persuade readers to accept a new novelist, particularly a novelist of what one of them called “the competent, fairly highbrow type.” The sophisticated successes of the moment include Charles Morgan’s “Sparkenbroke” (Macmillan— nearly 30,000 sold in this country), L. H.

Myers’s trilogy, “The Root and the Flower” (Cape), which won the Femina Vie Heureuse prize, “The Singing-Men at Cashel,” by Austin Clarke (Allen and Unwin), “Green Gates,” by R. C. Sherriff (Gollancz), “Third Act in Venice,” by Sylvia Thompson and “Here Lies a Most Beautiful Lady” by Richard Blaker (Heinemann), “Rose and Thom” by Mary Lutyens (Murray), “South Riding” by Winifred Holtby (Collins), “Regency,” by D. I* Murray (Hodder and Stoughton), “Feather in Her Cap,” by Barbara Worsley Gough (Cassels), “Fourth Pig,” by Naomi Mitchison (Constable), and Aldous Huxley’s “Eyeless in Gaza” (Chatto and Windus) which, according to its publishers, has had a more striking opening success than any ten and sixpenny book in their experience. The Crime Club. Among novelists of action or mystery the sales of Mr John Buchan, Mr P. C. Wren, Miss Faith Wolseley, Mr Cecil Freeman Gregg, Miss Georgette Heyer, Mr Austin Freeman, Mr Leslie Charteris, and Mr E. C. Bentley have all recently shown considerable increases. Messrs Collins report that the sales of their “Crime Club” novels have had a more outstanding increase during the past six months than at any time during the past six years, and Messrs Heinemann claim that several hundreds of their half-crown detective novels are being sold every day.

Between these two extremes come the new “best-sellers,” if it is permissible to apply such a misused term to authors whose work often has a specialized appeal. In numbers they are at present almost exactly double those of successful novels.

Foremost among them is Mr Beverley Nicholls’s apology for the Oxford

Group “The Fool Hath Said” (Cape), of which 38,000 copies have been sold. The demand for books on religion is also proved by the outstanding successes of “The God Who Speaks, by Canon E. H. Streeter (Macmillan), “Healing in the Name of Jesus,” by John Maillard (Hodder and Stoughton), “Idea of the Holy,” by Rudolf Otto (Oxford University Press), and Canon Shepherd’s “Some of My Religion” (Cassels). Popular Biography.

Such is the increasing interest in biography that several publishers are beginning to prepare lists for next spring which will contain a much higher proportion of biographical works than hitherto. At present Karl Geiringer s life of Brahms (Allen and Unwin), Heiden’s “Hitler” (Constable), Viscount O’Sullivan’s “Aspects of Wilde” (Constable), W. B. Yeats’s “Dramatis Personae” (Macmillan), Hector Bolithos “Lord Inchcape” (Murray), Edith Sitwell’s “Victoria of England” (Faber), and Duff-Cooper’s “Haig” (Faber) are all successes.

Books on history, whether biographical or otherwise, are also enjoying great popularity—such, for instance, as “Ramblin’ Jack,” the seventeenth century journal of Captain John Cremer, and Auguste Bailly’s portrait of Richelieu, “Cardinal Dictator” (Cape), both of which have had an average sale of 140 copies a week; The Babington Plot,” by Alan Gordon Smith (Macmillan), “World History, by Flenlcy and Weech (Dent), The Last of the Empresses,” by Daniele Vare (Murray), “History of Ireland,” by Professor Curtis (Methuen), Black’s “Reign of Queen Elizabeth” (Oxford University Press), and the last volume of the Cambridge Medieval History, the publication of which has revived the sales of the earlier volumes. Seeing the World.

Books of travel, particularly those which reveal a personality, are so much in demand that one or two publishers have felt justified in increasing their prices. Since the beginning of this year, 5600 copies of Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (Cape), have been sold. The average weekly sale is 250 copies. Also widely read are Graham Green’s “Journey Without Maps,” and Cunninghame Graham’s “Rodeo” (Heinemann), Freya Stark’s “The Southern Gates of Arabia,” and Professor Starkey’s “Don Gypsy” (Murray), and Eric Shipton’s “Nanda Devi” (Hodder and Stoughton). Political and economic best-sellers make an impressive list. Proof of the demand for books with a political theme is the growth of the Left Book Club, sponsored by Gollancz, to a membership of 15,000 in two months. The Left Book Club’s first two choices were “Hitler the Pawn,” by Rudolf Olden, and “France To-day and the People’s Front,” by Maurice Thorez. The list also includes Professor Laski’s “The Rise of European Liberalism” (Allen and Unwin), Sir Alfred Zimmern’s “The League of Nations and the Rule of Law” (Macmillan), Sir Norman Angell’s “The Money Mystery” (Dent), and Professor Huizinga’s “In the Shadow of Tomorrow” (Heinemann). Popular science continues its appeal. “Biology for Everyman,” published by Dent, has a steady sale at fifteen shillings. So have “You and the Universe,” by Paul Karlson, and “Vitamins,” by Dr Harris (Cambridge University Press). Books of the open-air help to swell the lot of fiction-ousting successes. Prominent among them are the England, Scotland and Wales for Everyman series (Dent), “Gone Afield,” by Cecil Roberts, and “England Have My Bones,” by T. H. White (Collins). Shakespearean curiosity is mounting, to judge lay the sales of Professor Dover Wilsons’ three volumes on Hamlet, and of the “Companion to Shakespeare’s Studies,” edited by Granville Barker (Cambridge University Press). Tire last and most unexpected competitor for best-selling place is modern poetry. Mr T. S. Elliot’s “Collected Poems” (Faber) has already run through its first edition of six thousand copies, and the Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts, of which several thousand copies have been sold, is already being reprinted.