rarely gone beyond 6,000 for the supply of above thirty millions of
people. Occasionally, a single author is enabled to fix the attention of
the public, and he is enabled to make a fortune--not from the sale of
large quantities at low prices, but of moderate quantities at high prices.
The chief case of the kind now in England is that of Mr. Dickens, who
sells for twenty shillings a book that costs about four shillings and
sixpence to make, and charges his fellow-laborers in the field of
literature an enormous price for the privilege of attaching to his numbers
the advertisements of their works, as is shown in the following paragraph
from one of the journals of the day:--

"Thus far, no writer has succeeded in drawing so large pecuniary profits
from the exercise of his talents as Charles Dickens. His last romance,
"Bleak House," which appeared in monthly numbers, had so wide a
circulation in that form that it became a valuable medium for advertising,
so that before its close the few pages of the tale were completely lost in
sheets of advertisements which were stitched to them. The lowest price for
such an advertisement was £1 sterling, and many were paid for at the rate
of £5 and £6. From this there is nothing improbable in the supposition
that, in addition to the large sum received for the tale, its author
gained some £15,000 by his advertising sheets. The "Household Words"
produces an income of about £4,000, though Dickens, having put it entirely
in the hands of an assistant editor, has nothing to do with it beyond
furnishing a weekly article. Through his talents alone he has raised
himself from the position of a newspaper reporter to that of a literary
Croesus."

[Footnote 1: The tax on advertisements has just now been repealed, but
that tax was a small one when compared with that imposed by
centralization.]