Mr. John Murray, the famous publisher, has recently given a representative of The Pall Mall Gazette some interesting facts and figures bearing on the impending crisis in the publishing trade. It is a gloomy recital. Men doing less work per hour with the present forty-eight hour week than with the old fifty-one hour week, and agitating for a further reduction of hours; paper rising in price by leaps and bounds. “Between the two they are forcing up the price of books to a point when we can only produce at a loss.” In other words, we are threatened with not merely a shortage but an absolute deprivation of all new books. The horror of the situation is almost unthinkable, but it must be faced. We can dispense with many luxuries—encyclopÆdias and histories and scientific treatises and so forth—but among the necessities of modern life the novel stands only third to the cinema and the jazz. It is possible that in time the first-named may reconcile us to booklessness, but that time is not yet.

What amazes us in Mr. John Murray’s pessimistic forecast is his failure to recognise and advocate the only and obvious remedy. By the reduction of the Bread Subsidy fifty millions have been made available for the relief of national needs. We do not say that this would be enough, but if carefully laid out in grants to deserving novelists, so as to enable them to co-operate with publishers on lines that would allow a reasonable margin of profit, it might go some way towards averting the appalling calamity which Mr. John Murray anticipates.

The Ministry of Information is closed, but should be at once reorganised as the Ministry of Fiction, with a staff of no fewer than five hundred clerks, and installed in suitable premises, the British Museum for choice, thus emancipating the younger generation from the dead hand of archÆology. Similarly the utmost care should be taken to exclude from the direction of the Ministry any representatives of Victorianism, Hanoverism, or the fetish-worship of reticence or restraint. But no time should be lost. The duty of the State is clear. It only needs some public-spirited and respected Member of Parliament, such as Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy or Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, to promote the legislative measures necessary to secure a supply of really nutritious mental pabulum for the million.

For Prospective Centenarians.

“Salary, £50 per annum, rising upon satisfactory service by annual increments of £5 to a maximum of £880.”—Welsh Paper.

“Conscience Money.—The Chancellor of the Exchequer acknowledges the receipt of 10/- from Liverpool.

The charge for announcements in the Personal Column is 7/6 for two lines (minimum), and 3/6 for each additional line.”—Times.

Any large outbreak of conscientiousness on this scale will mean ruin for the country.

“A band of armed ruffians disguised as soldiers held up a train near Parghelia, in Calabria, and carried off the contents of two vons, consisting chiefly of sausages.”—Scotch Paper.

This is an abbreviated way of speaking. By “the contents of two vons” the writer evidently means the contents of the baggage of two German noblemen.