"?--is the great American novel (whatever that means), and
that its influence on the reading of unborn generations will be
measured by the rank it holds in the list of the six best sellers.

The salesman is handicapped not a little by the fact that it is
neither shoes, nor pig-iron, nor even mess-pork that he is selling,
and, therefore, superior quality of workmanship, inferior price, and
personal magnetism count for little. Persuasiveness, which, perhaps,
is a part of personal magnetism, counts; so does an intelligent
knowledge of the contents of the book; likewise hard work and tactful
persistence; also, honesty. But opposed against the combination is the
bookseller, on guard against overstocking, to some extent a purchaser
of a pig in a poke, conscious that one unsold book eats up the profit
on five copies safely disposed of.

Time was when good salesmanship consisted in overstocking a
bookseller; this was occasioned less by persuasiveness than by
overpersuasiveness. Regardless of the merits of the book and with no
more than a nodding acquaintance with its contents, a persuasive
salesman could "load" a customer--as he called it out of the
customer's hearing--with two hundred and fifty copies of a novel that
had no other merit than that it had been written by a novelist whose
previous book had met with success. The significance of these figures,
two hundred and fifty, is to be found in the maximum discount to
retailers of forty and ten per cent on that quantity. Latterly, the
publisher has found that a bankrupt bookseller has few creditors
besides publishers, and has come to a realizing sense of the futility
of clogging the distributing machinery. He is disposed, therefore, to
exercise some restraint upon his salesman's ardor. Perhaps it were
better to say that the salesman, grown wiser, is more disposed to aid
the bookseller in his purchases to the end that no monuments of unsold
failures will stare him in the face on his next visit to the
customer's store. Yet even to this day, such restraint is tempered by
a certain amount of moderation.

All of which, while interesting to the historian of the publishing
trade, carries us too far in advance of our text. Let us therefore
return to "Last Year's Nests"--12mo, cloth, illustrated, gilt top,
uncut edges, price $1.50.

The first edition--it may be one thousand copies or ten thousand--has
been delivered to the publisher by the beaming binder, who alone, in
some instan