BY K. S. VENKATARAMANI

The West is now under a deluge of books. The annual output in Europe and America is amazing, running to several thousands of new books every year. Book production has now become a highly organised Industry. It has reached its present state of enormous quantity and poor quality, because of over-specialisation and the application of mass production methods. Division of labour is healthy when a broad, natural need dictates it. But specialisation to a very high degree merely for money or trade convenience is a fateful attraction, and this is just what has been going on in the book trade. There are too many middle-men, and like an inter-leaved book, the bulk is only discomfort without adding to the value. The result is overlapping and conflict, leading to the creation of several alien minor vested interests. The health of books is being slowly undermined. A kind of obesity lowers the vitality, while it increases the bulk.

The remedy is simple but needs courage and self-denial. The publisher is an anomaly even in a world which has well reduced everything to market-values. You have made your publisher a speculator in a commodity which has the least affinity with grains and pulses. The author goes on writing novels of standard length whose value does not depend on their intrinsic worth but on the intrepidity and resourcefulness of his publisher in forging a market. The work is unreal and the methods are speculative, and the fruits are random and mixed. The result is a deluge of books which carries with it to the waste of the sea even the occasional particles of gold-dust which crumbling rocks have slowly yielded to the wooing of many monsoons.

Small measures will do no good. Lift book production from the base ethics and economics of a trade with the false coin crowding the market and keeping out the true. A publishing house which need publish one hundred books a year to cover at least their ‘over-head’ charges cannot afford to have scruples about the quality of production. And there is not one house but tens of hundreds. Every unemployed is an author and his dug-outs crowd the channels. Book writing, like printing and binding, has become a profession.

The ideal condition is to combine all in one, the author to be his own bookseller and publisher. For one thing, he would not have the heart or the time to go on thoughtlessly producing two books a year, tempted by a cheque. No one should advance money to produce another's book, and put up for sale at his risk the brain product of another and thus forge the first links of commerce. One who has earned nothing to pay for the production of his own books, is not likely to know much of life of which he pretends to write with sympathy and insight.

Nowadays everything is turned into a profession. Literature, like religion, can never be a profession. The curse of the professional is now choking the throat of the song-maker. Literature is a personal expression of experience caught in rare and sunny moods of intimacy and communion with the All. The very rarity of their occurrence is the very test of their genuineness. An adventurous and busy publisher wants to make money, and in his attempt he does not scruple to reduce the art of writing to a profession, like rope-making, so many hundred feet per hour.

Some sincere attempts should be made to preserve writing at a level somewhat higher than book-binding, and rescue literature from the importunities of paper merchants, printers and publishers–all eager to make money rapidly, while good writing requires leisure, peace and inspiration. At this rate, I am sure that humanity will die some day of ignorance amidst a plethora of books, even as the ship-wrecked mariner of thirst, on his lonely plank, amidst the endless and lapping waters of the salt sea.