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BOOKSELLERS
Address at banquet on Wednesday evening, May 20, 1908, of the
American Booksellers' Association, which included most of the
leading booksellers of America, held at the rooms of the Aldine
Association, New York.
This annual gathering of booksellers from all over America comes together
ostensibly to eat and drink, but really to discuss, business; therefore
I am required to, talk shop. I am required to furnish a statement of the
indebtedness under which I lie to you gentlemen for your help in enabling
me to earn my living. For something over forty years I have acquired my
bread by print, beginning with The Innocents Abroad, followed at
intervals of a year or so by Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Gilded Age, and so
on. For thirty-six years my books were sold by subscription. You are
not interested in those years, but only in the four which have since
followed. The books passed into the hands of my present publishers at
the beginning of 1900, and you then became the providers of my diet.
I think I may say, without flattering you, that you have done exceedingly
well by me. Exceedingly well is not too strong a phrase, since the
official statistics show that in four years you have sold twice as many
volumes of my venerable books as my contract with my publishers bound you
and them to sell in five years. To your sorrow you are aware that
frequently, much too frequently, when a book gets to be five or ten years
old its annual sale shrinks to two or three hundred copies, and after an
added ten or twenty years ceases to sell. But you sell thousands of my
moss-backed old books every year--the youngest of them being books that
range from fifteen to twenty-seven years old, and the oldest reaching
back to thirty-five and forty.
By the terms of my contract my publishers had to account to me for,
50,000 volumes per year for five years, and pay me for them whether they
sold them or not. It is at this point that you gentlemen come in, for it
was your business to unload 250,000 volumes upon the public in five years
if you possibly could. Have you succeeded? Yes, you have--and more.
For in four years, with a year still to spare, you have sold the 250,000
volumes, and 240,000 besides.
Your sales have increased each year. In the first year you sold 90,328;
in the second year, 104,851; in the third, 133,975; in the fourth year--
which was last year--you sold 160,000. The aggregate for the four years
is 500,000 volumes, lacking 11,000.
Of the oldest book, The Innocents Abroad,--now forty years old--you sold
upward of 46,000 copies in the four years; of Roughing It--now thirty-
eight years old; I think--you sold 40,334; of Tom Sawyer, 41,000. And so
on.
And there is one thing that is peculiarly gratifying to me: the Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc is a serious book; I wrote it for love, and
never expected it to sell, but you have pleasantly disappointed me in
that matter. In your hands its sale has increased each year. In 1904
you sold 1726 copies; in 1905, 2445; in 1906, 5381; and last year, 6574. |
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