the life of a writer who is a free-lance writer, who never, perhaps, makes a great success, who has children to bring up, who never knows whether that success is going to be maintained. If you are ill for a few months, if your children are ill, and you get out of the public eye something happens to you then. We have not the protection by our present laws to which we are entitled.

I will just add another little footnote to what has just been said: I had one ambition. I am a New England woman. I live on the seacoast. I have written a great deal about sea people, and I always wanted a moving picture in my own home town that our fishermen would go to and see and like.

I wrote a story and I called it "The Scar." It was based on an old legend there of a conflict between two brothers, both of them fishermen. That was published in a magazine, which called it, without my consent, "The Run-a-way Enchantress." It was bought for the movies while I was abroad, and it appeared-Milton Sills played in it-under the title, I think, of "The Sea Beast." I was never consulted about that, either.

When it was played in my own town I was not there. In the picture they launched the dories wrong-the Hollywood people do not know how to launch a dory-and the fishermen laughed."

This covers practically what I have to say, a great insistence on better protection for us who work very hard at our trades, and who live under very precarious situations, and upon whom you are dependent for your news, for your entertainment, and often for the forming of your own opinions and those of your children. Mr. LANHAM. Thank you very much.

Mr. DAVIS. Our next witness is Mateel Howe Farnham.

I expect Mrs. Farnham is getting rather sick of being introduced with reference to some of her relatives, but it cannot be helped. Her father is Ed Howe, the "Sage of Potato Hill", Atchison, Kans. Her brother is Gene Howe, who has busied himself, as I need not tell you, Mr. Chairman, in raising hell in Texas when the natives were not turning out a sufficient product on their own account.

However, Mrs. Farnham is not merely a daughter and a sister by any means; she is an author. Her latest book is Great Riches. She has written a number of novels and she has also written a number of magazine short stories. She will present her views for this group. Mrs. Farnham.

STATEMENT OF MATEEL HOWE FARNHAM, AUTHORESS

Mrs. FARNHAM. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I hardly know how to begin, but yesterday I was handed this little pamphlet, being the report of the Committee on Patents of the Senate, submitted by Mr. McAdoo, in which it refers to us as the "rich authors." I am afraid we are all dwelling on that because it came home to us so very hard. Some people asked me if it did not make me mad. I said, "No"; I thought it was so funny, because I am quite sure if you would take the majority of the authors, even in the Authors' League, which includes practically all the big incomes in the writing world, and put to a vote the question of offering all writers $2,500 a year, I think they would vote for it so overwhelmingly that there would simply

be no question about it. If you could guarantee all of us $2,500 a year, we would jump at it.

I do not say that there are not some authors who are making big incomes, such as Sinclair Lewis and some others, and that is true. That is the thing to which we all aspire, and that is the reason it is fun to write, partly. There is always something in the future. We might sell a movie; we might have a best seller. But most of us do not, or if we have one 1 year, we go 10 years and do not have any big successes, and just barely make a living.

Just because there is a J. Pierpont Morgan in New York and many rich New York bankers is no reason that the great mass of bankers are making a great deal of money.

This committee report says [reading]:

So profitable has it become to be a successful author that, perhaps for the first time in history, authorship has been added to the list of professions which the fortunate may pursue as possible avenues to great material riches.

It also says [reading]:

During this period a veritable revolution has occurred in the means whereby literary and artistic works are communicated to the public.

We have had one revolution in the writing world, or at least as it applies to writers of books. A few years ago women or men who were writing books and were established could make a fair and reasonable living, not much over the $2,500 but a little more. Then suddenly the lending library appeared in the land. That has made an enormous difference not only to me-I am just one of the in-betweensbut to the big authors and the little authors and all of us.

I get 15 percent on the sale of a book. That is 30 cents for a $2 book or 37.5 cents for a $2.50 book. Incidentally, the man who sells the book, the owner of the bookstore, would get something like a dollar for selling the book. He has it in his store maybe a few weeks or months or days, but he gets a dollar for selling the book. He has expenses, but so do I have expenses during the year or the 2 years that it takes me to write the book. But that is just incidental.

There are very close to 100,000 lending libraries in this country now. There were 70,000 some time ago, and they have been growing. In New York the lending library sends out a book only say 20 or 30 times, and that is 5 cents a day, or something like that. Then he sells the book at a reduction, maybe taking 50 cents off, so he does not lose much. In the small towns all over the country the lending libraries will send books out and not renew them until they are practically worn out. My publisher has a record of one library that made $20 off the lending of a book. The author of that book got 30 cents.

The lending library has come to stay. We cannot fight that any more than we can fight anything else that is new. People are lending books. They have gotten in the habit now. But it is simply

fair and reasonable that we should have some share of the profit when a person can simply buy a book from the publisher and lend it out and average from $7 to $20 on a popular book. That has made an enormous difference in the sale of books. It has made a great many of us stop writing books, which we would rather do, and write

short stories, which pay a little better, or do pay better if we can sell them.

I seem to be telling our troubles. I am not prepared at all to make my speech, because I was told I would speak tomorrow. Anyway, writers sit in a library and we are interested in words. We want to say things the best we can, because that is our job. Then when we get up to speak we do not have our thesaurus and we cannot stop and look it up in the dictionary. So that I speak very badly, and I crave your indulgence, as I know you are all orators.

Nevertheless, I want to say a few things about our troubles. I think that we have a right to ask for consideration. Writers have a good time because they like to write, and they are doing what they want to do. I do not think that we want to whine. Painters and artists have just as hard a time. All creative workers do. I do not mean to whine, but I think we have a little right to crave your indulgence because we are carrying on our shoulders so many industries.

We are like the man in the Japanese tumbling act, where a man comes in and the others all pyramid on his shoulders. Some of the people that we are carrying are the publishers, the bookstores, the advertisers, the salesmen, the moving pictures, the theaters, the ticket sellers, the libraries, the lending libraries, and last and not least, the printers, and probably others I have forgotten. Of all those groups the only ones that are really our friends are the printers. The printers really work with us and help us. I feel that they have some of the same problems. But the printers-and I can say this, I hope, and you verify it-would not think of working for what we work for.

Another thing about the rich authors, another trouble-I do seem to be whining a little; I am not rich, either, so this is quite impartial-is that the man who makes a lot of money may work 2 years on a book—and not only the rich author but the "in-between" author like Mr. Berman and myself may work over 2 years on a book-and then sell the book and perhaps make some money, but he has to pay the income tax in the year in which he got the money, so that he may work over 2 years, but pay the tax as if it were only 1 year's work. So after all, the big writers, the rich authors to whom you refer as capitalists, are paying a double income tax, because most all the good writers take more than a year to write a book. Sinclair Lewis takes more than a year. He takes 2 years for a book; so that you are taxing him and the very successful ones double what you tax the bankers.

Mr. Berman talked about changing movies. It is always great fun to sell a movie, because you make more money than you have made perhaps in 10 years. I have written for 20 years and I have sold one movie. That movie was shot down on Long Island, and I was living in Westport, Conn. I did everything under heaven to go down and see them make that picture, but they said the last person they wanted on the lot was the author. Finally I bought myself a ticket and went in and saw the movie. I think it had just two lines of my story. If it had not had my name on it and the name of the people and the name of the town, I would not have known it.

It was a Pennsylvania story. My mother is a Pennsylvanian, and I have always visited there and feel very close to it. So I wrote about a small-town girl in a little town in Pennsylvania. They started it on the stage in New York with Nancy Carroll leading the chorus in the dance. That is what they do to our stories.

Perhaps it is all right, but if you are writing about a small town-this happened to be about the daughter of a German music master-and you are trying to give a picture of a small town, it does break your heart to have the leading character changed into a leader of the ballet, losing the entire spirit of the thing.

I know that you want to be fair to us. I know that you do not know our problems, but we are always glad to come and tell you, and we are very glad that you will let us talk to you. I do not think that we want anything that is not fair and reasonable, and that you would not give to the farmer or the inventor or the small-town grocer. We do not want anything more than that.

There has grown up a feeling among authors and I speak for authors all over the country; I was born in Kansas and I lived in Seattle and St. Louis and Portland, Oreg., and Westport, Conn., and very briefly in New York, and have always met writers, being interested in writing-that we are rather the stepchildren of the various administrations, that the things that we have struggled for so long we can not get.

We do not think we are asking anything unfair or unreasonable. We know you have many problems, but we do hope some day we can all get together.

Thank you.

Mr. LANHAM. Thank you very much, Mrs. Farnham.

Mr. DAVIS. If I may add one footnote to Mrs. Farnham's remarks, the reason we like to write books is that in a book you can say what you want. In the first place there is no limitation, practically speaking, on length. Since the success of Anthony Adverse, a book can even be as long as it wants to be, and it can be substantially as short as it wants to be. There is no artificial limit. You can go on and say what you want to say and stop when you get through.

Magazine stories are a very different thing. They are constricted within certain limits by practically all the magazines, roughly from about 5,000 to 8,000 words. Magazine stories must keep off of all sorts of topics. They must lay off of anything which might offend any large number of readers. When writing for a magazine with 2 or 3 million circulation, that means you have to lay off practically all controversial subjects.

In a book you can say what you like about anything, substantially; I mean when you are working within the limits of the laws governing libel and obscenity. You can say what you like. It will not be cut out; it will not have pieces chopped out at a critical point to make room for the illustrations, which frequently happens with magazine stories.

And yet, gentlemen, as Mrs. Farnham has pointed out, you may work a year or 2 years on a book, and you can say what you want, but you will not make as much out of it as you might make out of a short story in a magazine, that you can write in 2 weeks, and which is likely to be chopped up before it is in print to make room for the art or to suit some fear of the editor's, and for which still

greater opportunities of chopping up I think are afforded by the Duffy bill.

Our next witness, and probably our last this morning, is a gentleman whom we really ought to charge admission to see, because he is the fellow who understands the money question. He has just written a book about it, a book called Recovery Unlimited, on the monetary policy of the United States.

You gentlemen have probably heard enough about the money question in the last few years, so he is going to talk on the subject of the Duffy copyright bill. This gentleman, Mr. Chester Crowell, used to be a newspaperman in Texas. Then he came to New York and become a magazine writer, chiefly for the Post, Colliers, Scribners, and the Mercury. For the last few years he has been living in Washington.

STATEMENT OF CHESTER CROWELL, AUTHOR

Mr. CROWELL. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen:

I think it might be in order for me to give a little personal history along exactly the line that some of our other witnesses have been following, to wit, the personal experience in the matter of earnings.

I have been writing for about 20 years. My income has varied from about $3,000 to about $30,000 a year. I have always protected my copyrights, so I am not coming to tell you that I was abused or that I had bad luck or anything of that sort. These various protected copyrights now have from time to time been published in various forms in the expectation that there would be a secondary profit, you see, just as you sell a serial to a magazine, as I have done, and later publish it as a book, as I have done.

In 1930 I made about $30,000. In 1931 I do not think I made a thousand dollars. Now, back of that was all this various stuff that had been published from time to time, but I am here to tell you that I think the net royalty profit on all of it was less than $500 over 20 years.

I make this point to show that even when you have done your best on the thing you may never make a great amount of money; and I was never gypped or cheated nor did I overlook my rights. I took care of all those.

I had another friend whose earnings, I do not think, ever touched half or perhaps a third of my top over that long period. He had a little book that some obscure publisher induced him to write. I think it was called "Uncle Gadzooks, the Fireman", or something of that sort. It was a little reader for school children, to give them various warnings about not setting the house on fire, a little bit of a thing. I do not know what it sold for, perhaps 25 or 30 cents; but he rode through the depression beautifully because of the income from that. It was a supplementary reader in schools.

I think that has a direct bearing on the problem with which you are dealing. If you think now, "These fellows make a great deal of money, and now they want an airtight copyright; my God; how much will they make if we give them all that", then I will tell you what we will make:

In the course of 25 or 30 years, if one of us has a little story or part of one that is properly protected by copyright and has carried

53579-36-33

A