translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. We had a
little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at
each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score
of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English,--a
lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent
Englishman--and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in
Arabic. We meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so
comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was
real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of
subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere,
desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our
lists.

Ours was to be in the first place a world literature. Then afterwards
upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant
to publish new work and new thought. We were also planning an
encyclopaedia. Behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were
getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers,
dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing
a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping
them up to date. It was our intention to make every copy we printed bear
the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to
get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and
to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new
copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow
margin of profit. Then we meant to spread our arms wider, and
consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and
gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a
new World Encyclopaedia, that should also annually or at longest
biennially renew its youth.

So far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of
information, and of a kind of gigantic modern Bible of world literature,
and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an
immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding
congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and
drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and
rearrangement. We had branches in China, Japan, Peru, Iceland and a
thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off