Among the Literati

can readers buy in large quantities. He discovered with practically no exceptions, that a novel to enjoy a wide sale must contain, “a lively story, largely romantic in theme or setting, fairly conventional characters and an essentially conventional plot; and some pretension to a thesis or message, apparently profound but actually commonplace.” In the matter of non-fiction, his research resulted in a similar discovery. He found that the books that were successful were most often shallow and inconclusive. He expresses it in this way; “people are rather dissatisfied but want to be reassured rather than forced to think and act.”

How to change the reading tastes and habits of the book buying public is a vast task and naturally nobody believes that the banning of the publication of bestseller lists by edict would in itself immediately lift these tastes into a utopian height wherein honest and sincere writers could actually find their rightful places in letters. If less attention were paid to best-seller lists by magazine and newspapers and more space given to a continuous “whooping it up” for really worthwhile publications, the public might be inveigled into sampling some of the better books. Even though they were to go back to their sugarcoating, they would have been exposed at least once to an injection of printed matter that had as its object the awakening in the minds of the reader of some realization of the true problems of life.