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Special to our Readers

Those of you who have not received your Reviews on time will probably now find a double interest in the article in the last number, on Our Government Subvention to Literature. In conveying periodicals so cheaply, not only is Uncle Sam engaged in a bad job, but he is doing it cheaply, and consequently badly, and he has more of it than he can well handle. He is at length carrying them as freight, and most of you know what that means. We are receiving complaints of delay on all sides, and an appreciable part of the unwelcome subvention Uncle Sam is giving us, goes in sending duplicates of lost copies. We don’t acknowledge any obligation, legal or moral, to do this; but we love our subscribers—more or less disinterestedly—and try to do them all the kinds of good we can. Partly to enable us to do that, as long as the subvention is given, we follow the example of the excellent Pooh Bah, and put our pride (and the subvention) into our pockets. Even if we did not love our subscribers so, we should have to do the pocketing all the same, because our competitors do. Competitors are always a very shameless sort of people.

We wish, however, that Uncle Sam would keep his subvention in his own pocket, and so lead to a higher plane all competitors in the magazine business, including some of those who don’t want to rise to a higher plane. The best of such a proceeding on his part would be that he would also, through the complicated influences described in the article referred to encourage up to a higher plane [pg 206]those who write for popular magazines. Those who write for The Unpopular Review are, of course, on the highest possible plane already. This remark is made solely for the benefit of readers taking up the Review for the first time. To others it is superfluous, and if there is anything we try to avoid, it is, as we have so many times to tell volunteer contributors, superfluities. Even popularity we do not try to avoid, but—!

The foregoing paragraph was written with little thought of what was coming to be added to it. You and we have something to be proud of. Our Review has been doing its part in saving all Europe from the waste of hundreds of millions of money, and the literatures of all Europe from a degradation like that through which our own is passing. Read the following letter:

Dear Mr. [Editor]:

I have already sent a line through —— thanking you for the copy of The Unpopular Review, which you were good enough to send me, but I should like to repeat my thanks to you again direct, and at the same time, tell you how the Review has been of service to European publishers.

The article in the last number entitled Our Government Subvention to Literature naturally interested me very much from a personal point of view, but the statistics you give showing the effect of second class matter rate on book sales was very valuable to me as the representative of the English Publishers on the Executive Committee of the International Publishers Congress.

At the Congress held at Budapest last June, a resolution was adopted instructing the Congress to press for a reduced rate of postage on periodicals, and an international stamp. The steps to be taken in order to carry out this resolution were discussed at the meeting of the Committee last week held at Leipzig, when I produced the copy of your article, and gave the Committee a summary of the statistics. The result was the unanimous decision to take no further steps in the matter.

I tremble to think of what might have happened if I had not had your article before me, for the point of view which you have put forward was one that had not occurred to anyone else connected with the Congress, and if the resolution had not been cut out at this last meeting of the Executive Committee, it would [pg 207]have gone before the Postal Conference which is to be held in Madrid this autumn, backed by practically every European country.

I feel we all owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing out the facts so clearly, and believe that you will like to know what has taken place.

While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly to accept the lion’s share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W. Burrows of Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon the country.

Demos is a good fellow—when he behaves himself, and that generally means when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.

Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation of a friend, writes:

“I am told it is the best gentleman’s magazine in the United States.”

Now, somehow, “gentleman” is a word that we are very chary of using. We couldn’t put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it—and that we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that [pg 208]it was just what we were after—that it includes, or ought to include, about everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation, it is certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.

Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the Casserole of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous contentment with existing conditions. This inference was probably drawn from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man’s fortune depends more upon himself than upon his conditions.

As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure to call attention to the following still more remarkable one. It is from a printer—not one in our employ.

I wish to congratulate you on the excellence of the Review, both from a literary and mechanical standpoint. As a “worker,” “a member of the Union,” it might be inferred that I endorse the views of the critics given on page 432 of the second number. Not so. It is such views as his that harm the unthinking—those who think capital is the emblem of wickedness.

I believe that individual merit and worth are the only things worth while. The workman who puts his best efforts into his labor, and takes a personal pride in making his productions as nearly perfect as possible, will be recognized, and his individual worth to his employer will raise him above the “common level.” All this rot about a “ruling oligarchy” “grinding down the poorer class” is dangerous. The man who has no ambition above ditch digging, and who endeavors to throw out as little dirt in a day as he possibly can, will always be one of “the submerged.” It lies with each one—outside of unavoidable physical or mental infirmities—whether he shall rise or sink.

Again I must congratulate you on the stand you are taking in The Unpopular Review. I “take” and read twenty to twenty-five magazines and for over forty years have been trying to educate myself to a right way of thinking, and the result is I believe as above briefly outlined.

Especially good is The Greeks on Religion and Morals, also The Soul of Capitalism, Trust-Busting as a National Pastime, and Our Government Subvention to Literature.

[pg 209]Possibly some of you are disappointed at not finding this number as full as the daily papers of wisdom on War and the Mexican situation. In one sense we are disappointed ourselves: for we had made arrangements for at least one article of that general nature from one of our best qualified contributors; but when it came time to write it (speaking by the calendar), he showed the excellence of his qualifications by saying that, considering the situation and the function of this Review, it was not time—that the situation had not yet become mature enough or broad enough for any general conclusions—for any treatment beyond that already well given by the newspapers and other organs of frequent publication, and that they were giving all the details called for. We will wait, then, and try to philosophize when the time comes.

We find, however, that with little deliberate intention on our part, this number has turned out “seasonable” in another sense, and hope you will find it so. Witness the articles on Chautauqua, and Railway Junctions, and Tips (entitled A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism) and several others.

Philosophy in Fly Time

In the old days, before the destruction of the white pines removed the chief source of American inventiveness—the universal habit of whittling—every boy had a jackknife, and also had boxes, sometimes of wood, sometimes of writing paper, in which he kept flies. Now he has neither flies nor jackknife.

Then, when he wanted a fly, nine times out of ten he could catch one with a sweep of the hand. That was before the fly was charged with an amount of bad deeds, if they really were as bad as represented, which would have destroyed the human race long before the plagues of Egypt; or if not before the fly plague, would have caused that plague to leave no Egyptians alive to enjoy the later ones. With these new opinions of the fly, began a crusade against him; and now the boys can’t have any more fun with [pg 210]him—that is, only good boys can—the kind that catch him with illusive traps, for a cent a hundred. The other kind of boys may occasionally be sports enough to hunt him with the swatter; but it’s pretty poor hunting: for the game is so shy that generally before you get within reach of him, he is off: so swatting him is difficult, while catching him by hand, as we boys used to, is virtually impossible.

Now for some questions profound enough to befit our pages. (I) Have only a select group of very alert and quick flies survived? or (II) Have the flies told each other that that big clumsy brute with only two legs to walk on, and two aborted ones which do all sorts of foolish things—the brute with only one lens to an eye (though he sometimes puts a glass one over it) and a pitifully aborted proboscis—the brute that has no wings, and can’t get ahead more than about once his own length in a second—that this clumsy brute had at last got so jealous of the six legs, hundred-lensed eyes, proboscis, wings and speed of the fly, that he had started a new crusade against him, and must be specially avoided?

Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies is because this story has been passed around among them, or only because men have already killed off all but the specially quick and timid ones; we hope our investigators may find an answer to the farther question: (III) How, if a tenth of what some folks say against flies is true, the human race has so long survived?

To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don’t like ‘em, especially when they light on our hands to help us write articles for this Review.

Setting Bounds to Laughter

That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth, is one of our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by design. For liberty is loved neither [pg 211]by the many nor by the few; its defense has always been unpopular in the extreme, and can be manfully undertaken only in an age of moral heroism. The present is no heroic age, and hence our personal rights fall one by one, without defense, and apparently without regret. The losses thus incurred must be left to future historians to weigh and to lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now cruelly beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to laugh.

It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance of organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men and women were hectored into believing that one should weep, not laugh, over the absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man’s discomfiture—an awkward social situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a poem spoilt by a printer’s stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional. Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the expense of their race are “in bad taste”; and country life enthusiasts solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers, politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.

But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to digestion, more or less discredited by [pg 212]current medical authority? It is time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first stage in the process of understanding one’s fellow man. Professor Bergson to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.

When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school readers narrated, with naïve surprise, this maiden was destined to become Franklin’s faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced to Bret Harte’s gambler:

The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written. At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well. This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or profession is employed merely as [pg 213]a cloak for common humanity. The successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity. Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity to the father of lies and the lord of hate.

A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors

At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of donors to colleges and universities was reported on by a special committee. The majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It was shown that the givers to colleges and universities seldom considered the real needs of their beneficiaries. Donors liked to give expensive buildings without endowment for upkeep, liked to give vast athletic fields, rejoiced in stadiums, affected memorial statuary and stained glass windows, dabbled in landscape gardening, but seldom were known either to give anything unconditionally or, specifically, to destine a gift for such uninspiring needs as more books or professors’ pay. The result of giving without first considering the needs of the benefited college or university, was that every gift made the beneficiary more lopsided. Certain universities were almost capsized by their incidental architecture. Others were subsidizing graduate students to whom the conditions of successful research were denied. Still others were calling great specialists to the teaching force without providing the apparatus for the pursuit of these specialties. Others preferred to offer financial aid to students who were poor—in every sense. Donors apparently without exception had single-track minds. They saw plainly enough what they wanted to give, but never took the pains to see the donation in its relation to the institution as a whole. The majority report, which was [pg 214]drawn by our famous Latinist, Professor Claudius Senex, concluded with the despairing note Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The minority report was delivered orally by young Simpson Smith of the department of banking and finance. He “allowed” that everything alleged by the majority report was true, but saw no use in dwelling on such truths, since donors always had done and always would do just as they darned pleased.

The Club took a more hopeful view of the case, and it was voted that our Club should resolve itself into the trustees and faculty of a Post Graduate School for Academic Donors. Our committee recommended that we qualify our advanced students by conferring the lower degree of Heedless Donor (H.D.) every year upon all givers who can be shown to have given at random. No method of instruction seemed more appropriate than the seminar plan of practical exercises based on concrete instances. The first laboratory experiment was performed in the presence of a Seminar of seven H.D.’s. in a specially called meeting of married professors attired only in bath gowns borrowed from the crews and base ball teams. Into this assembly the class of H.D.’s was suddenly introduced. They naturally inquired into the meaning of the spectacle, and were informed that in no case did the mere salary of these professors enable them to wear clothes at all. “But you do usually wear clothes?” inquired a student of a favorite professor. “How do you get them?” “By University extension lecturing at ten dollars a lecture” was the quiet answer. Another professor explained that he got his clothes by tutoring dull students, another by book reviewing. One somewhat shamefacedly said the clothes came from his wife’s money. One declined to answer, and, as a matter of fact, his clothes are habitually first worn by a more fortunate elder brother.

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were satisfactory. One student immediately drew a considerable check for the salary fund, another, who [pg 215]had been planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over. Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with the university treasurer, “for whom it might concern.” Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly. He admitted that low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also felt that these outside activities advertised the university and were good business. Of course you wore out some professors in the process, but you could always get others.

Our second seminary exercise was of a less spectacular sort. The post graduate donors were each provided with a bibliography. This in every instance contained the titles of books that a particular professor or graduate student in the university would need to consult for his studies of the ensuing week. It was briefly explained by Professor Senex that original research could not be successfully accomplished without reference to all the original sources and to the writings of other scholars. The bibliographies ran from ten titles or so to nearly a hundred, according to the nature of the particular research involved. The exercise consisted in going to the university library and matching these titles of desiderata with the books actually in the catalogue. After varying intervals, the post graduate donors returned with their report. Nobody had found more than half the books sought for: many had found less.

The effect of this demonstration was interesting. The donor who had tended towards the hockey rink, instead transferred his $100,000 to the book purchase fund. He said he guessed the old place needed real books more than it needed artificial ice. Others followed his example according to their ability.

The student who was satisfied with our bath robe faculty meeting, came back from the library equally pleased. He had not compared his bibliography with the catalogue, but a brief general inspection had convinced him that there were already more books in the library than anybody [pg 216]could read. His intention held firm to give his Alma Mater a tower higher than any university tower on record and containing a chime of bells that periodically played the college song. The tower was naturally to bear his name, which was also his dear mother’s.

A Suggestion Regarding Vacations

Why wouldn’t it be well for the country colleges to shorten their summer vacations, and lengthen their winter ones? Then urban students would not, for so long a period in summer, be put to their trumps to find out what to do with themselves; and, what is more important, in winter both faculty and students would have increased opportunity for metropolitan experience. In the summer vacations, the cities are empty of music, drama, and most else of what makes them distinctively worth while. Intellectually, the country needs the city at least as much as, morally, the city needs the country.

Advertisement

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Help Wanted. From a young gentleman of education, leisure and energy, who desires to devote a part of his time, in connection with scholars and philanthropists, to a reform of world-wide importance. Such a person may possibly learn of a congenial opportunity by addressing.

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A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their hands. But somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the desire; and those who have the desire generally lack the leisure.

[pg 217]

Simplified Spelling

After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first number, a few bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have felt like apologizing each time we approached the subject. Perhaps the best apology we can make is that apparently the majority of our readers are interested in it. Therefore we hope that the others will tolerate as equably as they can, the devotion of a little space to it in the interest of the majority. Perhaps the objectors may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as we and our house have settled another unconquerable nuisance—the dandelions on our lawns—: we have concluded to like them.

Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both:

To a leading Professor of Greek:

I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the preceding syllable, as in “differ”, “fiddle”, “gobble”, etc., wil “be generally accepted”, especially in view of the fact that it is alreddy “generally accepted”, and needs only to be extended to a minority of words.

“Annutther” is not “a fair illustration”. On the contrary, it is an exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence you too much. If a good simplification is ever effected, it will be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely incapable of anything of the kind. I don’t expect anyhow to make much out of a man who will spell “peepl” “peopl”. Imagine all this said with a grin, not a frown!!

You wil never get back to “the old sounds” of the vowels, in God’s world.

As to the long sounds, I am going in for all I am worth on the double vowels. I alreddy agree with the English Society on [pg 218]“faather”, “feel” and “scuul”, and am going to do all I can for niit, and for spredding the oo in floor and door into snore, more, hole, poke, etc. “Awl”, “cow” and “go” are spelt wel, and their spelling shoud be spred. These seem to be the lines of least resistance. I find that they work first-rate in my own riting.

You make enuf serious objections to diacritical marks, but my serious objection to them is that they ar obstacles to lerners, especially forreners.

From his answer:

All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back. The business of a scholar (Emerson’s “man thinking”, Plato’s [Greek: philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time. The more you people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can arrive at any general solution. So, more power to your elbow!

Meantime my own spelling will continue to be—like the conventional spelling of the printers of today—a hodge-podge of inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and varying with circumstances. Of course the rational way to spell people is piipl, or pipl.

Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause.

From another reader:

Your closing sentence in the first number of The Unpopular Review states with a most distressing combination of vowels and outlandish collocation of consonants that you would like to hear from your readers on the subject…. Z is not a pretty letter, and to see it so frequently usurping the place so long held by s is far from gratifying to the eye….

Suppose you establish to your own satisfaction a method for assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New Englander’s mouthing of a differs from that of the Northern New Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the Southerner—indeed, in the different Southern States there is variation…. At first I was interested in simplified spelling, but the eccentricities developed by its advocates alienated me long since, so I beg of you, drop it.

[pg 219]From our answer:

I delayed thanking you for your letter of the 29th until there should be time for you to see the April-June number.

I hope you are feeling better now.

If you are not, I do not think I can do much to console you, because when a man has been irritated into that position where the alleged beauty of a letter counts in so serious a question, he is probably beyond mortal help.

I have no desire “to reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States”. There is not much difference among cultivated people. Probably a fair standard would be the conversation at the Century Club, where there are visitors from Maine to California, and hardly any noticeable difference in pronunciation.

There seems to be no disagreement among authorities that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children….

Of course I have not been able to answer most of the letters I have received on the subject. I single yours out because you have had a fall from grace, and I feel guilty of having had something to do with it, by presenting stronger meat than was necessary, in our January number. I have fought on the Executive Committee of the Spelling Board against publishing anything of the English S.S.S.’s proposed improvements, for fear of arousing such prejudice as yours; and yet in our first number, I was insensibly led into, myself, publishing things that looked just as outlandish.

As I said at the outset, I hope you feel better since seeing the April-June number, and should be glad to know how you do feel.

From his reply:

Thank you very much for the courtesy of your letter of 9th April. I was surprised to receive it, as I did not suppose that your multifarious duties would permit you to notice my rather feeble protest. I was somewhat amused that you should think my irritation so extreme as to call for an effort to console me. I am sure I appreciate your attempt to do so. But really, I was not so hard hit as you thought, because I do not expect in my day (I am no longer a young man) to see the champions of “simplified spelling” (some of it seems to me the reverse of “simplified”) gain such headway as to materially mar my pleasure in the printed page, for I do not believe you will allow the atrocities of the last few pages of your first number to creep [pg 220]into the delightful essays which render The Unpopular Review such pleasant and profitable reading….

I do not think any great respect is due the opinion of those who think that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children, for it also seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system….

Why thru? U does not always have the sound of double o—very rarely in fact. Why not throo—if the aim is to make the written sign correspond to the sound. Thru suggests huh.

From our answer:

Regarding “thru”, you justly say that u does not always have the sound of oo. The only sound of oo worthy of respect, with which I have an acquaintance, is in “door” and “floor”. The idea of using it to represent a u sound is perhaps the culminating absurdity of our spelling.

Your statement that simplified spelling “seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system” overlooks the advantage that writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over writing with purely conventional characters, as in China. Now English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe. Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be making it more phonetic, and consequently easier. At present it is a mass of contradictions, and the rules that can be extracted from it are overburdened with exceptions. Simplification will decrease both the exceptions and the rules themselves. There are now several ways of representing each of many sounds, and therefore several “rules” to be learned for each of such sounds. Simplification will tend to reduce those rules to one for each sound, and so far as it succeeds, will not “present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system.”

All the degrees of reformed spelling now in use are professedly but transitional. They may gradually advance into a respectable degree of consistency, but we expect that to be reached quicker by a coherent survival among the warring elements proposed by the S.S.S., the S.S.B. and the better individual reformers. Probably there is already more agreement than disagreement among these elements.

[pg 221]While the others are fighting it out, the various transition styles will do something to prepare parents to accept a more nearly perfect style for their children, and perhaps take an interest in seeing the various counsels of perfection fight each other.

A few words have already found their way into advertisements—tho, thru, thoro (a damnable way of spelling thurro), and the shortened terminal gram(me)s, og(ue)s and et(te)s; and these and a few more have found their way into correspondence on commonplace subjects; and the interest in the topic, especially among educators, is spreading. But most of the inconsistencies will probably bother and delay children and forreners until they are given something with some approach to consistency.

After we fight to something like agreement on a system, how are we to get it going?

It does not seem extravagant to expect that as soon as the weight of scholarly opinion endorses a vocabulary from our present alphabet consistent enough to afford a base for a reasonable spelling book, spelling books and readers will be prepared for the schools, and adopted by advanced teachers. Many are clamoring for such now. When the youngsters have mastered these, which they will do in a small fraction of the time wasted on their present books, they will of their own accord pick up without troubling their teachers a knowledge of the present forms. This they have always done when their teaching has been by the various phonetic methods with special letters, and have done both in much less time than they have needed for learning in the ordinary way. But they will prefer the reasonable forms, and this demand the publishers will probably not be slow to supply.