_Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York_.
_Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York_.
The significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits “the road.”
The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until _Joyce of the North Woods_ went into reprint.
The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”--is 10,000 copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the best novels.
_Joyce_ went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, did _Janet of the Dunes_ and _A Son of the Hills_. In a little more than three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since then _The Place Beyond the Winds_ and later books have been put out by the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We think not.
But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest--you have to dig things out of her about herself. But--is this the answer? Is there something else?
Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.
What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a literary idealist?