ecause a book does not go into its second edition it is necessarily
good. I find that the problem of circulations is a difficult one. I
cannot, for instance, understand why _The Young Visitors_ sold in
thousands; I failed to raise a smile at it. Again, there is my friend
although publisher, Herbert Jenkins. I didn't think _Bindle_ funny,
yet it has been translated into umpteen European languages. Jenkins
himself does not think it funny, and that, possibly, is why he is my
friend.

The most surprising success to me was Ian Hay's _The First Hundred
Thousand_. I read Pat MacGill's _Red Horizon_ about the same time, and
thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's
patronising Punch-like attitude to the working-class recruits. I
thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not
reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the
impression of a warm, passionate, intense knowledge of men; he wrote as
one who lived with ordinary men and knew them through and through. Yet
I fancy that _The Red Horizon_, popular as it was, did not have the
sales of _The First Hundred Thousand_.

I was lunching with Professor John Adams one day in London. We got on
to the subject of circulations, and he said that he had just been
asking the biggest bookseller in London what novel sold best.

"Have a guess," said the Professor to me.

"_David Copperfield_," I said promptly.

He laughed.

"Not bad!" he said, "you've got the author right, but the book is _A
Tale of Two Cities_."

He then asked me to guess what two authors sold best among the troops
at the front during the war.

"Charles Garvice and Nat Gould," I said, and the Professor thought me a
wonderful fellow, for I had guessed aright.

There is a whiskered Ford story which tells that Mr. Ford took a new
car from his factory and invited a visitor to have a spin. They
started off, and went seven miles out. Then the car stopped. Ford
jumped out and lifted the bonnet.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "the engine hasn't been put in! The car must
have run seven miles on its reputation!"

I think that books run many miles on reputation alone. Like a snowball
the farther a circulation rolls the more it gathers to itself. But
what is it that makes a book popular? The best press notices in the
world will not send the circulation of a book up to a hundred thousand
level. What sells a book is talk. Scores of people said to