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-5- THE WORLD'S WORK DOUBLE DAY, PAGE COMPANY-PUBLISHERS 34 UNION SQUARE, EAST NEW YORK WALTER H.PAGE EDITOR Mr. John
muir-- 3 Of course, books of mere transitory value ought to be thus pushed aside, but the rush is so great that it pushes
aside good books as well. Now our energies have been particularly directed toward an effort to prevent this. I am going to
bore you even with some details. We publish, for instance, two books that have a good deal of stimulus in them in their way.
One is the autobiography of booker T. Washington, the negro leader, and the other is the autobiography of Helen Keller, the
remarkable mute. Now these books both attracted attention when they were first brought out, end reached a good number of people.
But they would have been pushed aside if we had gone on in the conventional way. Instead of doing that, we organized a distinct
department of our business (which, by the way, is practically new in publishing activity) which sells single books by agents,
as sets of books arc sold. We have a man at the head of this whose whole business it is to find book-agents all over the country
who will sell these books. -6- One group of them give their whole attention to the Washington book, another group of them
give their whole attention to the Keller book. After the book-stores, therefore, have come to look upon these books as old,
these agents are everywhere reaching people who never go to the book-stores. This is one piece of machinery. We have another
piece even more effective. We have a department that is given wholly to selling books by mail. The man at the head of this
sends out circulars and letters to thousands of people whose names he gets in an ingenious way, and he carries on a regular
business of making them buy the book through the mail. Nor is that all. We have another department whose activity is directed
wholly to selling books to the libraries and to schools, for such books as these are used as illustrative reading in many
schools, and there is a chance for all such books to be bought by teachers and by schools and libraries. Finally, we are always
offering through still another department books of permanent value in connection with subscriptions to our two magazines,
and we have found that a number of people will buy books in this way who would not buy them through other channels. 03452