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Let it not be supposed that my group is utterly cut off from the newest developments in imaginative prose literature.  No!  What the bookseller, the book-pedlar, and the Free Library have failed to do, has been accomplished by Mr. Jesse Boot, incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists with branches in scores, hundreds, of towns.  He has several branches in my group.  Each branch has a circulating library, patronized by the class which has only heard of Mudie, and has not heard of the Grosvenor.  Mr. Jesse Boot has had the singular and beautiful idea of advertising his wares by lending books to customers and non-customers at a loss of ten thousand a year.  His system is simplicity and it is cheapness.  He is generous.  If you desire a book which he has not got in stock he will buy it and lend it to you for twopence.  Thus in the towns of my group the effulgent centre of culture is the chemist’s shop.  The sole point of contact with living literature is the chemist’s shop.  A wonderful world, this England!  Two things have principally struck me about Mr. Jesse Boot’s [Now Sir Jesse Boot] clients.  One is that they are usually women, and the other is that they hire their books at haphazard, nearly in the dark, with no previous knowledge of what is good and what is bad.

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It is to be added that the tremendous supply of sevenpenny bound volumes of modern fiction, and of shilling bound volumes of modern belles-lettres (issued by Nelsons and others), is producing a demand in my group, is, in fact, making book-buyers where previously there were no book-buyers.  These tomes now rival the works of the brothers Hocking in the stationer’s shop.  Their standard is decidedly above the average, owing largely to the fact that the guide-in-chief of Messrs. Nelsons happens to be a genuine man of letters.  I am told that Messrs. Nelsons alone sell twenty thousand volumes a week.  Yet even they have but scratched the crust.  The crust is still only the raw material of a new book public.

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If it is cultivated and manufactured with skill it will surpass immeasurably in quantity, and quite appreciably in quality, the actual book public.  One may say that the inception of the process has been passably good.  One is inclined to prophesy that within a moderately short period—­say a dozen years—­the centre of gravity of the book market will be rudely shifted.  But the event is not yet.

H.G.  WELLS

[4 Mar. ’09]