Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 136, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1910 — “DECLINED WITH THANKS. [ARTICLE]

“DECLINED WITH THANKS.

Pamon* Book* That Had a Bard Times, Getting Into Print. Zangwill once offered a poem to an American magazine ''which the editor spurned. Years passed and brought changes. Then the editor wrote and asked the poet to favor him with a poem and name his own price. Zangwill lahghed, product* the despised poem and received a substantial check very substantial check. ' “Robinson Crusoe” begged at nearly every publisher’s door, only to be turned away. When at last it was “Printed for W. Taylor, at the Sign of the Ship, in Paternoster row,” it netted the lucky publisher £IOO,OOO profit. Jane Austen ranked toward the top of English women novelists, sold “Northanger Abbey” to a publisher at Bath for £lO. The publisher then feared failure and kept the manuscript a long time before he mustered courage to launch It; it at once jumped Into enormous popularity. Thackeray tried “Vanity Fair” with so many publishers only to meet with rebuffs that he at length ran It as o serial in Colburn’s Magazine'; it was the best he could do with it. Every publisher in Copenhagen rejected the manuscript of the first volume of Hans Apdersen’s “Fairy Tales.” When eventually he was compelled to bring out the volume at his own expense it jumped into immediate popularity, and the publishers, paying nothing for it, are still making money out of it as a classic. Parker, the Oxford publisher, declined to give £2O to Keble for hlu “Christian Year.” During the forty years which followed Its eventual publication 400,000 copies were sold and Keble made £14,000, one-fourth of the retail price. No publisher was found to accept “The Professor,” the first novel of Charlotte Bronte, the highly successful novelist. John Murray, the publisher, returned the manuscript of “Sartor Resartus” to Carlyle with a courteous note stating that he had not time to read It. Fraser ofTered to print It If Carlyle would pay him £l6O. Bentley and Colburn would have none of It Finally Fraser let it run serially in his magazine, paying in all for It £B2 Is. Since he could not find a publisher In London that would give him £6O for the manuscript of his “Tristram Shandy,” Lawrence Sterne issued it himself, so that publishers are. still profiting from it after the centuries. After “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had run through Its magazine form a publisher’s reader pronounced It of .Insufficient Interest to print as a book. However, the publisher’s wife advocated its publication, and in four years it had sold 313,000 copies In America alone.