An Example of Enterprise

     Already the country is overrun with book agents selling the history of William McKinley. It is especially remarkable as showing the push, enterprise and energy of the publishing firms of the United States. There is nothing like it in the world. No nation ever displayed the energy or activity that is constantly shown by American firms, not alone in publishing, but in countless ways. William McKinley, twenty-fifth president of the United States, died last Saturday. On Monday, publishing firms in half a dozen different cities had publised [sic] printed and illustrated prospectuses of as many different complete and authentic lives, giving the president’s ancestry, boyhood, manhood and “remarkable career, from the cradle to the grave.” One of these volumes, conceived, planned and epitomized in a day, contains (to use the tense of the prospectus, or will contain to use the tense of the reality) sketches of President Roosevelt, a history of anarchy, estimates of the president from the pens of his political contemporaries, and engravings to the number of more than a hundred. And such books as these, if we are to believe the publishers of timely subscription volumes, sell like wildfire. When Garfield died it is said that more than a million copies of his life were sold in ninety days. But the publishers declare to possible agents of McKinley books that this assassination is the “First Bold, Calculating, Desperate and Awful Stroke of Anarchy in Our Country, and We Believe That Two Million Copies of McKinley’s Life Will Be Sold.” And from the way agents rush to do the selling there seems some reasonable ground for their belief. Experienced book peddlers who are always on the lookout for timely volumes have been equipping themselves rapidly with prospectuses and expect to make many sales and big profits. Good, experienced men call sell an incredible number of volumes in a very short time. Many of them, in fact, expect to sell many volumes even on the first hurried prospectus—without the larger outfit, having sample bindings, etc., which comes for their use a little later.