e made clear, with winning
frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home.

Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels,
where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took
me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds;
and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable
prize fowls.

"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for
which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to
buy them!"

Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few
of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the
bargain.

Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of
which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had
dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over
to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what
he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up
another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he
had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the
point of beginning it!

Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since
then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards
the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of
production.

I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less
than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among
his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a
novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on
twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred
thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me,
too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to
supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to
not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with
his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?"

Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such
appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like
verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to
writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what
your shoulders refuse, what they are a