A New Profession for Women
I
THE book trade in the United States is in a bad way. A few textbooks, like Fry’s Geographies or Myers’s Histories, have made their publishers rich, for these are sold by the million copies. Such sales do not, however, in any way represent the general book trade; they furnish a standard commodity required for all school-children, and the textbook publishers have a highly developed system of distribution, independent of the bookstores that handle general literature. But even among the one hundred and sixty-two educational publishers listed in the Publishers' Weekly for 1913, there are only a few that are winning such prizes, and most of them are making only a very moderate financial success.
In the regular lines of publisbing.conditions are probably fairly represented in Mr. George P. Brett’s article in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1913. As president of the Macmillan Company, he is in a position to know; and he tells us that while the number of books printed in America increased from 8,000in 1901 to 13,000 in 1910, the book trade was not appreciably greater in volume in 1910 than it was a decade earlier. In these ten years we had added 15,000,000 people to our population; but while the number of new books had increased, the editions had dwindled.
Our present Ambassador to England, Mr. Walter H. Page, has had a long and successful experience as editor and publisher, and he says that American men spend more for neckties and our women spend more for buttons than either of them spends for books. Mr. Joseph B. Gilder, who gathered the opinions of representative publishers on Mr. Page’s dictum and gave the results in the New York Evening Post for June 20, 1914, found that most of them agreed that the per capita consumption of books in the United States is ridiculously small. Mr. W. W. Ells worth, president of the Century Com pany, is on record as lamenting our slack sales and poor means of book-distribution.
That this difficulty is due to the fewness of buyers rather than to the multiplicity of publishers is shown by the recent estimate made by the Publishers’ Coöperative Bureau, that, in the United States, but one person in 7300 buys a book in the course of a year, while in Great Britain, it is one in 3800; in France, it is about the same; in Germany and Japan, it is rather better; and in Switzerland, it is one in 872. Cheaper books, in paper covers, account for some of this difference; but, whatever the cause, it remains true that the Europeans buy twice as many books per capita as we do.
In the hope of saving themselves financially the publishers have tried many expedients. They have turned aside from general literature to periodicals and textbooks; but periodicals have been difficult to float of late and few of them represent easy money. Other reputable publishers have been driven to send out canvassers, selling special editions from house to house, and even offering premiums to buyers. But in spite of their efforts to increase their incomes, it is matter of public gossip that some of our largest book producers are passing dividends, while others are in actual financial difficulties.
On the other hand, any one who is acquainted with the country at large, and who occasionally buys books, knows how difficult it is to find even standard works on sale anywhere outside the largest cities. In two cities of the Middle West, each with a population of more than two hundred thousand, I recently tried in vain to find a copy of either, the Statesman’s Year Book or the American Year Book. They could be ordered from New York or Chicago, but they were not in stock.
In fact, bookstores are steadily disappearing in all of our cities and towns. The old-time bookstore, managed by a man who knew books and loved them, is now little more than a tradition. On the book-counters of the department stores, which have nominally taken the place of the old time bookstores, one finds big piles of the ‘best sellers,’ and, with a dozen marked exceptions, little else.
Cultivated men and women have always counted good books among their most valued possessions, and one cannot believe that this taste can be sacrificed without definite loss to our civilization. The spoken word can never supplant the written word; and in fact the present tendency is all toward substituting print for speech. Nor can reading in public places take the place of reading one’s own books in the quiet of one’s home. Books that are owned wait patiently on the reader’s leisure; and to have just the book one wants, when one wants it, is and must remain one of the supreme luxuries of a cultivated life.
Books, too, when personally owned, gather around themselves a wealth of personal associations. The very binding, paper, and title-page recall the conditions under which the book came into our possession. As we open its pages we remember the last time we read it, the place and circumstances, and the people with whom we discussed it. Books have personality; and they must always remain the warm friends of their possessors.
In cultivated homes, even young children love and cherish their books more than they do their toys. Human nature is open to the appeal of books; but the taste for literature, like the taste for music or conversation, must be cultivated. Music may largely disappear in a community where it is neglected, though the natural instincts of man still demand it. Fiddles may become as rare as hoop-skirts, though music is not a fashion, but a primitive fact of man’s nature. It is the same with literature and with the books which are its instruments. The taste for literature is persistent, deep-seated in the nature of cultivated people; but, being less exigent than the hungers for food and social intercourse, it may be greatly augmented or diminished through attention or neglect.
What then is t he reason for our present neglect of good books? Many people claim it is the expense, but experiments in bringing out cheap editions in America do not encourage this view.
The Macmillan Company recently republished forty volumes of successful works in fifty-cent editions; but even with abundant advertising it was found that they did not sell as well as in the more expensive form. Publishers sometimes think that authors demand too large royalties, and it is charged that they are sometimes unwilling to coöperate in bringing out cheaper editions by accepting a smaller share of the income from sales. But, at the same time, Mr. Brett says that a large publishing house accepts only about two per cent of the manuscripts that come to it and that many good books remain unprinted. Surely such competition should temper the avarice of authors. Englishmen are not richer than Americans, and English books are not very much cheaper than American books, but in England, as we have seen, twice as many books are sold per capita as with us.
When we are uncertain as to the cause of any social conditions that we regret, it is our national habit to blame the public schools. Personally, I feel that they have much to answer for in this case. The schools teach children how to read, and they do it admirably well; but they have never been successful in cultivating the habit of good reading so that it becomes a part of the daily life. A great institution like our state school system should turn out generations of art-appreciating, musicloving, book-rending, and book-buying graduates. In a recent examination of four thousand children, I found that while thirty-nine per cent chose reading as their favorite subject before the age of nine, while they were learning to read, after that the percentage fell off year by year, until at the age of fourteen, — when they leave the elementary school, — only six per cent chose reading as their favorite subject, while five per cent declared it the most disagreeable subject they had in school.
Possibly the multiplication of public libraries makes it unnecessary for most of our people to buy books; but our most thoughtful publishers and librarians feel that public libraries should strengthen private book-buying by strengthening the taste for reading and the consequent love of books. Some critics think that we are not a bookbuying people because we read too many periodicals, ride about in automobiles, go to moving-picture shows, and have our music produced mechanically without any effort on our part; and that our power of application is thus weakened.
We are increasingly numerous, increasingly well educated, at least so far as schools can educate, and increasingly rich. Why, then, do we not buy books? May it not be mainly because of our imperfect means for bringing the books and the prospective purchasers into relations with each other which will encourage buying? Whether it be cause or effect, no one can doubt that the distributing facilities of the book trade are strangely lacking. It is true that we have book catalogues and reviews; but most of us would dislike buying our clothes from a printed advertisement, and with books even more than with clothes, immediate contact incites desire for possession.
A new book should find as ready an outlet from the publisher to the reader as there now is for a new kind of collar, a breakfast food, or a pill. Through the wholesale dealers in men’s furnishings, groceries, or drugs we can cover the country in a few days. Through the system of small stores in all parts of the city, and at every important crossroads in the country, the new product is brought to the attention of millions of people almost automatically. If advertising has prepared the way, the public looks at the new product, and, if it is attractive, buys it. These conditions are what we need in the book trade.
Meanwhile ihe Curtis Publishing Company and Mr. Hearst seem to have solved this problem for their periodicals. One finds them in every village and even at the railroad junctions. The resident and the traveling man buy them because the goods and the purchasers are both there; and neither of these publishers is on record as lamenting slack sales. The Curtis Publishing Company discovered schoolboys and studied their psychology. The writer of this article believes that if book publishers would discover universitytrained women and study their psychology, terminal facilities for the book trade might be found that would bring books and their buyers close together.
II
We have in this country a large number of young women who have had the advantages of a college or university training. About 70,000 women are now undergraduate students in American institutions of higher learning. When they graduate, many of these women will face a period of unemployment. Of 1076 women who had graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1911, 27 per cent were married, 28.5 per cent were teaching, while 25.6 per cent were unmarried and without paid occupation.
College women are widely distributed, so that they are found in every city and considerable townin the United States. Their home connections make it desirable to remain in the localities where they were born; but in many cases there is nothing there for them to do, at least nothing which corresponds with their long academic preparation. Many of them belong to well-to-do families, and they generally command the respect and confidence of the public. When they first began coming home from the colleges they naturally went into teaching. The higher schools are now overcrowded with them; and teaching has not proved to be the open sesame to the larger life which many of them had hoped it would prove. In any case, that branch of work is greatly overcrowded and underpaid, with small chance for individual ability to make itself felt.
Some thirty years ago, the genetic theory of life brought public consciousness up to the point where it recognized the need for continuous education of all the people at all ages. It was seen that public libraries ought not to be mere book depositories; circulation, not saving, became the motto. If the people would not come to the libraries, then the libraries must go to the people. To do this they must find new terminal facilities. But this demanded a great increase in libraries and a large number of intelligent librarians not bred in the old traditions. Mr. Melvil Dewey, and others, discovered the college-bred young woman, conveniently distributed, and lacking only technical knowledge to take up the work. In 1887, the Columbia College School for Library Economy was started, with a three months’ course, and it gradually developed a curriculum fitted to the needs of the new librarians. The course was soon extended to two years and the school was removed to Albany, while new ones grew up in connection with such technical schools as Pratt and Drexel, or in connection with summer schools like Chautauqua.
Young women found in this work an attractive field for their energies; and their bookish habits made them quick students in the technical courses of preparation. Exact statistics are lacking, but granting that we have 5000 public libraries, there must be at least three or four times that number of women engaged in library work. But that field is now in turn overcrowded, and many of these women, because they can live at home and the work is attractive, are serving the public for nominal salaries.
Still more recently, various fields of social service have been opened up in consequence of this same broadening social consciousness. Again there has been a demand for trained workers, and the educated young women, conveniently distributed and many of them unoccupied, have been drafted into service. As in the case of the librarians, technical knowledge was needed, and so special schools of philanthropy and of social service—some of them affiliated with older institutions of learning — have sprung up. They are gradually perfecting a curriculum, and their graduates are taking places with state departments of charity or correction, the Associated Charities, Public Playgrounds, College Settlements, and a score of other institutions that are shaping social service.
But here, again, the supply of young college women has proved inexhaustible, and pecuniary considerations have taken a secondary place. Many of the recruits are working for a nominal fee, or for nothing, and not infrequently the young woman who draws a fair wage in the published accounts turns a part or all of it back into the general treasury of the charity.
These women under consideration have certain qualities that especially fit them to serve as the connecting link between publishers of books and their readers. As has been said, they are widely distributed in every town and city; they wish to remain at home; they have an intimate acquaintance with their communities, and they are esteemed. In addition to this, they all have a bookish habit of mind. They have had eight years in an elementary school, four years in a high school, anti four in college. Sixteen years of daily association with books and with abstract knowledge, in the impressionable years between six and twenty-two, must leave an impress upon any mind; the book habit must be at least begun in all these women.
Beyond this, such women have, almost always, a desire for social service. Brought up on abstract ideals, separated, in most cases, from the grind of daily work, at the marriageable age they instinctively desire to lose themselves in service. With the weakening of the older type of home they seek some new means of social connection through which they can influence the public life around them. And while they have not become sufficiently emancipated socially to break the home ties and go out and search for employment as easily as their brothers do, they still have a desire for economic independence. They at least feel that they should make some reasonable return to society for the food they eat and for the clothes they wear.
And meanwhile, the emancipated woman in all classes of society is facing grave difficulties in entering industrial life. We are all becoming conscious of woman’s physical limitations, so ably presented in Mr. Louis D. Brandeis’s brief in the Portland Laundry case, and public opinion will make it increasingly difficult for women to invade lines of work requiring long hours of standing and heavy lifting, such as mining, iron-working, and general transportation. The passage of special legislation limiting woman’s working hours and debarring her from night-work, such as has now been passed in a dozen states, will automatically remove her from many positions where she has formerly worked and where occasional overwork or night-work is still thought necessary, or at least desirable. Agriculture and stock-raising will appeal to a limited number, and meanwhile the callings of teacher, librarian, and social worker are already over-supplied. What are educated young women going to do?
III
Why may they not establish bookstore in their own cities and towns in all parts of the country? Such stores would meet the need for a calling, and should yield a fair income. The wares are familiar to these women, who have at least a cultivated interest in them. Periodicals, music, photographs, and other art-products could be added to the stock, and the desire for social service could be met naturally by making the store a centre where people could meet, where they could examine books and periodicals while waiting, and where public opinion could be formed. The store might also sell tickets for concerts and lectures; and the right woman could exercise a large influence in directing the public taste in these matters.
It is clear that such enterprises, as in the case of the librarians thirty years ago and of the more recent social workers, would have not only to furnish what the public needs but would also have to educate the public to want what it needs. This would require skill and technical knowledge, exactly as in the case of the libraries and the socialservice movement, and special schools would have to be developed to meet this need.
The young woman would have to know something about books as an industrial product, their paper, print, and binding. She should be acquainted with the great publishing centres, organizations of publishers and booksellers, and the present machinery for book distribution. Catalogues and tradelists should be familiar tools to her. She should also know something of the lore of the bibliophile concerning old editions, fine bindings, rare copies, and the like. It would be even more important for her to know the psychology of book-buyers and the art of selling; and she must be prepared to make an intensive study of the mental and social conditions of her community. Added to this, she must know something of bookkeeping, banking, and general business usage.
Something more than a beginning has already been made in this direction. In New York City, a committee of the Booksellers’ League, under the chairmanship of Mr. B. W. Huebsch, has established the Booksellers’ School; and for three winters it has held meetings in various bookstores. Lectures have been given on ‘The Making of a Book,’ ‘The Psychology of Salesmanship,’and similar subjects; and sometimes these lectures have been accompanied by demonstrations. Mr. Huebsch is now conducting a course in bookselling at the West Side Y.M.C.A. in New York.
As publishers, Mr. Huebsch and his associates have been anxious to train salesmen, in the hope of meeting the problem of establishing connections with the buyers. In Philadelphia, Mrs. L. L. W. Wilson, in the Girls’ Evening High School, offered a course in bookselling during the past session; and in Cleveland similar work is projected. In Germany, such schools are already well established. The Leipzig School for Booksellers was founded in 1852, and in 1913, 430 students were enrolled. In this country, such schools may well have a development similar to that of the schools for librarians.
It is singular that in this work women have been so largely overlooked. There are a few women now in the business, some as successful proprietors, but most of them acting as buyers or clerks, mainly in the deportment stores. At a recent meeting of the Booksellers’ Association of Philadelphia, where this general subject was discussed, not a single woman was present, and there was decided objection to encouraging women to enter the l>ooksclling business. This is the more striking because in Philadelphia one of the best-informed and most capable booksellers is a woman, Miss Georgiana Hall, and many untrained women are now working at the book-counters of the Philadelphia department stores. At the thirteenth annual convention of the American Booksellers’ Association in New York, in 1913, while there were three hundred and forty-three members enrolled, there were only about a dozen women present. Possibly booksellers do not want women competing in their business. If so, this would make the conquest of the field more difficult; but, as in the case of teachers, librarians, and social workers, the women would win if they could offer superior preparation, numbers, and consequent willingness to work for less money.
The most difficult factor still remains to be considered. How could all these small bookstores be financed? Most of these women whom we are considering possess little money, but they often belong to families that could put up a small capital, and, their reputations being good in their communities, they could float small loans more easily than men could float them in establishing similar industrial undertakings. Still this would not be enough; and probably this reason, together with the prejudice of young college women against commercialism, has so far prevented them from going into business on their own account. The steadily growing desire for economic independence must inevitably break down this prejudice against direct money-making, and then the need for initial capital must be faced.
Of course, in the last analysis, the American public should be more interested than any individual or group in increasing book-circulation; but it does not know its need. The publishers have the immediate need and they know it; they are fairly well organized, and, if the solution here offered would give them a large buying public, they ought, simply as a matter of self-interest, to reconsider even old and wellestablished practices. At present they demand that the seller shall purchase outright the books he proposes to sell; and they look with profound suspicion on any proposal that he shall be allowed, under any circumstances, to return any part of his unsold stock.
The publisher selects the books to publish which he thinks will sell; then he sends his salesman to the bookseller and induces him to buy as many copies as possible. The bookseller must be guided largely by the reputation of the author and of the publisher, and by the statements of the salesman, who is naturally eager to turn in a large order. In no other commodity does the retailer buy with so little real knowledge of what he is buying as in the book trade. If the books do not sell in that particular community, then the dealer has them on his hands; and in no other business does the left-over remnant represent such depreciation in value as in books.
In a paper which attracted great attention at the thirteenth annual convention of the American Booksellers’ Association, Mr. W. H. Arnold urged that the publisher should allow the return of unsold copies within a year, under certain conditions. He suggested that they might credit the dealers with the money they had paid for the copies, less ten per cent. The proposal aroused great opposition; but if the publisher cannot satisfactorily market his books under present conditions, then he must at some time consider other possibilities.
Mr. Arnold’s proposal is a modification of the system already existing on the continent of Europe. There the returning of unsold copies works more easily than it would here, because so many French and German books are bound in paper, thus making the recovering of soiled books possible at very slight cost.
The plan could be further modified with us so as not to disturb seriously the publishers present relations with the booksellers. The venture might, for instance, be made by arrangement with one or two publishing houses. This would limit the ‘on sale’ account; and would lessen the need for immediate capital. The young woman who had the books of one or two publishers on sale, with the privilege of return, might sell any others, either through dummies or simply through catalogues and general orders.
A further modification might be made by which the young women might have two possible ways of handling their stock. If they had capital enough to invest outright, they could receive the usual bookseller’s discount of approximately thirty-three and one third per cent; if the publisher bore the risk of returns and of damaged copies, then the retailer might receive a discount of something like twenty per cent.
In order to succeed, however, the plan would require the hearty coöperation of the book publishers of the country. A store here and there would produce little effect. Every important city and town in the country should have its store; and if large numbers of young women are to make the necessary preparation, and take the risk of time and money involved, they must have the sympathy and support of the publishing business.
The obvious objections to this plan seem easy to answer. To say that the dealer should know in advance whether he can sell a book is absurd. Even the publisher, who has carefully examined the manuscript and has had the advice of his critics, is never sure that a book will sell; and the retailer, having to cater to a smaller community and not knowing the books at first hand, must expect to buy some stock that will not sell. The difficulty in settling author’s royalties could certainly be adjusted.
The objection that the books would be spoiled through shipment and exposure on the shelves has validity; but Mr. Arnold claims that several years’ experience shows that an initial advance of four per cent on the price charged the retailer, with the ten per cent penalty on returned volumes, would cover such losses, if reasonable precaution were exercised in stocking the retailer. Of course, annuals like Who’s Who could be excepted from this arrangement, and other practical arrangements could be made.
If a book fails to sell in a particular locality, the one man in the country who ought to know where that book will sell, after a year’s trial, is the publisher who brought it out, for he has presumably kepi in contact with the public interest. The local dealer cannot seek an active market away from his own locality, but the publisher can. If the result were to make the publisher still more careful than he now is with regard to bringing out worthless books, that would be an end in itself desirable. If the publisher could establish vital relations with the book-buying public, he could certainly afford to take a fair amount of risk. As we have said, bookbuying is not, like bread-buying, dictated by necessity. The public might stop buying books and still live comfortably; on the other hand the taste for reading one’s own books might be vastly increased if we could find a way.
This plan would not require the publishers to capitalize the terminal bookstores. The books would still be bought as at present, probably subject to a slight increase in initial price to the retailer. But the local store would be relieved from the burden of dead stock which now makes a steadily increasing investment of capital necessary and makes a very complex and difficult business problem for the retailer. Under this plan, the retailer would need only the capital to buy the initial stock, and she could not lose in a single year more than her rent, her time, and ten per cent of her investment, even if she did not sell a single volume.
Of course, the traveling salesman would have a new problem to meet. Instead of trying to sell stock, regardless of the ability of the retailer to dispose of it, he would face the task of selling just what the local market would demand. Instead of being tempted to exploit and ultimately to destroy his own terminal facilities, he would be driven to aid the local dealer with his knowdedge of the books; and in the long run such treatment would serve the best interests of every one concerned.
If some such system as this could be worked out, the capital required to stock a small store would not be greater than a woman of good reputation and standing in the community could hope to borrow; and if she could turn her capital once a year, and avoid dead stock, she ought to be able to make a financial success of the venture.
IV
The universal criticism raised to my plan at this point is that young college women have no financial skill and no interest in commercial life. Their whole tendency is to spend, and they are not only impatient of financial details but incapable of mastering them. This is undoubtedly too true as matters stand at present. The most educated women in the community are probably doing less to create an intelligent public attitude toward property than any other equivalent group of people in our midst. Many of them look down with a kind of contempt upon the moneygetting which makes their own spending possible. But it is a shame that it should be so, and we must recognize that the same criticism holds, though possibly in a less degree, with regard to many men who leave college.
But once in the business world, the young college man often makes a very quick adjustment. Is it not possible that the women possess the same aptitude, and that, having had special training in the bookselling schools, a part of which will have dealt with business training, they may show skill equal to that of their brothers? It is remarkable how well women’s clubs are now handling their budgets; and some of them represent large sums. With nearly eight million wage-earning women in the country, there must be a growing commercial sense reaching over even to college graduates.
And many college women have already demonstrated their ability to carry on an independent business. In every modern city we have restaurants like the Green Dragon in Philadelphia and the Tally-ho in New York, managed by women. In most of our smaller cities, young women are conducting candy and pastry shops, flower stores, or toy shops like the Mariana Kindermarkt in Harrisburg, that yield an income which most men would accept with complacence. For years, in all of our city markets women have tended stalls, where they have sold meat, butter, eggs, and vegetables, often with men acting as their assistants. Surely a college education does not destroy the executive qualities of a capable woman.
The critics must remember, too, that any one of these young women thinks herself able, when she marries, to handle her husband’s income, or at least the part of it that goes into the household budget. Of course, she would have her husband’s advice; but the young women we are considering would have no lack of good advisers among their friends. The women of America are spending the family funds; and there must be many young women who are as ready to begin a business life as their brothers are.
Such an undertaking would demand sound business sense from the woman who wanted to balance her accounts with a profit. She would have to recognize that her business engagements must take precedence over everything else, and she would have to put in regt ular hours of service. If she hoped to run the store as an interesting moneymaking incident in her day’s activity, depending on clerks to handle the del tails, she would be almost sure to fail. If she wanted to make her store into a reception-room or an art museum, she would do well to cut out the bookselling part. Flowers, polished tables, cosy corners, easy chairs, and an attractive color scheme might be good business, if kept in absolute subordination to bookselling. If they came to be an end in themselves the proprietor might build up a large calling acquaintance and spend a series of pleasant afternoons, but she would be in a bad way when she came to balance her accounts at the year’s end.
In the meantime the opportunity which would be thus opened for young women of the college class would help in every way to settle the vexed question of such women’s relation to the economic life of the community. At present they confuse all of our thinking; they often imagine they are doing something important when they are not; and they drive to despair the woman who must support herself, through the fact that they live partly on unearned incomes from their homes, and so are willing to work for impossible wages as teachers, librarians, or social workers. In selling books, they would be face to face with their balance-sheet; and while they might still live at home and demoralize the labor market, they would be in no doubt as to what they were really worth in the economic world.
And, on the other hand, it would give young women of ability and devotion a wide range of useful exercise for their talents. As industrial agents, they would be handling goods that would make for larger intelligence and for social betterment. They could help individuals and the community at large.
The work would be active and varied but not too laborious; and they would be meeting men and women under conditions of freedom and security which might naturally lead to their largest possible life. Even if it did not, it would still be an interesting and useful life, independent of the caprice of directors, and admirably fitted for youth, middle age, and old age.