27/78 Not many of course--I soon discovered that outside the small library set in London no one had ever heard of me. When I was younger I had fancied that that to me fiery blazing advertisement: "New Novel by William Magnus, author of ..." must cause men to stop in the street, exclaim, rush home to tell their wives, 'Do you know Magnus' new novel is out ?'--now I realised that by nine out of every ten men and five out of every ten women the literary page in the paper is turned over with exactly the same impatience with which I turn over the betting columns. And then by this time I'd seen my old books, often enough, lying scattered amongst dusty piles in second-hand shops marked, 'All this lot 6d.' Hundreds and hundreds of six-shilling novels, dirty, degraded, ashamed ... I'd ask, sometimes, when I was very young, for my own works. |