Monday, December 25th., Cadogan Square, London.
The Christmas book season is over for another year. Publishers and booksellers will have sent out their final parcels and closed their doors on the last undecided customer. Sales and profits (though most of them say they never make a profit) will be closely estimated and distribution staff will take a well-deserved rest. Popular and unpopular authors will have ceased to pester their publishers by telephone inquiries concerning the exact sales figures foir their books up to the hour of telephoning.
Some authors will be enjoying a merry Christmas in a world where readers have shown a taste for good books. Other authors will be experiencing a dismal season in a world where readers simply don't recognise a good book when they see it. Reviewers, an unthanked and misunderstood class , will be preoccupied with hateful questions relating to quarter day.
The huge book departments of the big stores will be sheeted over, and the booksellers will have put up their shutters, knowing that when they take them down again they will do so in an atmosphere of slack leisure and hope deferred. Which leisure I trust they will devote to good resolutions towards improved methods of trade.
And the books? How many, having been received with protestations of extreme pleasure, will lie unread in a convenient, conspicuous book trough and will, in due course of time, find their way to an unregarded high shelf?
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