INTRODUCTION
BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
An article excerpt from the Danton Burroughs Family
Archive
Books
appeal to me in a way that is difficult of either expression or analysis.
I like to handle them and to own them. I hate to see them abused.
I sometimes fancy that an adult who habitually marks his place in a volume
by turning down the corner of a leaf would kick a dog or strike a horse
without even provocation of anger. I think I love books, though God
knows I am about as far from being high-brow as one can get and yet pass
the literacy test.
But underlying all this is the stern necessity that
prompts (the marketer) to sell books and me to write them - the thing that
is the real thing in life after all. I mean the ability properly to provide
for ourselves and our families. It is the box office receipts that
really count most while we live. No man can go out after fame, as I rode
out this morning, after a young bull I have in pasture, and achieve it.
Incidentally I failed to achieve the bull.
But what I started to get over is that if a man is
entitled to fame it will come -- usually after he is dead -- but he can't
rope it and drag it in. He can, however, go out after box office
receipts, and if he shoots straight and plays fair he need not be ashamed,
whether his success is great or small.... Since I started writing
I have learned that our readers like to meet us -- why, God alone knows;
but they do. If Mary Roberts Rhinehart is anything like her books
and her pictures I can understand why people should want to meet her; but
just why they should hone to know a bald-headed old man is beyond me --
the world is already too full of bald-headed old men.
* *
*
Anything that might help to make books more saleable
would be welcomed by the retailer. I know, because I used to sell
books myself. I had a book shop in Pocatello, Idaho, when cheap editions
cost me fourteen cents and Munsey's Magazine sold for ten cents and cost
me nine and weighed over a pound and the postage wa a cent a pound and
I am still trying to figure where my profits occurred, especially in those
recurring periods that it was non-returnable.
That reminds me that I also sold books at another time
and in another manner. I was equipped wit a long thing that telescoped
like an accordion and Mrs. Burroughs made me a little black bag with a
shoulder strap, that I put on over my vest. I carried the THING in the
little black bag hidden under my coat tails. It might have looked as though
I was ashamed of it; but I was not supposed to be and I was. And
I wandered around a large city shoving my foot inside front doors before
weary house-wives could slam the doors in my face and if I succeeded in
getting in and planting myself on their best plush furniture I commenced
to recite, parrot-like, a long and hideous lie, interspersed occasionally
with facts. The initial and most colossal falsehood of that shameful
aggregation still haunts my memories. It was: "Mr. Stoddard has asked me
to call on you, Mrs. Brown." Even now I blush as I type it.
From an article written by Edgar Rice Burroughs
for
The American News Trade Journal
at Tarzana Ranch on February 12, 1921
ERBzine
1165
