INTRODUCTION BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
An article excerpt from the Danton Burroughs Family Archive

Books appeal to me in a way that is difficult of either expression or analysis.  I like to handle them and to own them.  I hate to see them abused.  I sometimes fancy that an adult who habitually marks his place in a volume by turning down the corner of a leaf would kick a dog or strike a horse without even provocation of anger.  I think I love books, though God knows I am about as far from being high-brow as one can get and yet pass the literacy test. 

But underlying all this is the stern necessity that prompts (the marketer) to sell books and me to write them - the thing that is the real thing in life after all. I mean the ability properly to provide for ourselves and our families.  It is the box office receipts that really count most while we live. No man can go out after fame, as I rode out this morning, after a young bull I have in pasture, and achieve it. Incidentally I failed to achieve the bull. 

But what I started to get over is that if a man is entitled to fame it will come -- usually after he is dead -- but he can't rope it and drag it in.  He can, however, go out after box office receipts, and if he shoots straight and plays fair he need not be ashamed, whether his success is great or small....   Since I started writing I have learned that our readers like to meet us -- why, God alone knows; but they do.  If Mary Roberts Rhinehart is anything like her books and her pictures I can understand why people should want to meet her; but just why they should hone to know a bald-headed old man is beyond me -- the world is already too full of bald-headed old men.

*        *        *

Anything that might help to make books more saleable would be welcomed by the retailer.  I know, because I used to sell books myself.  I had a book shop in Pocatello, Idaho, when cheap editions cost me fourteen cents and Munsey's Magazine sold for ten cents and cost me nine and weighed over a pound and the postage wa a cent a pound and I am still trying to figure where my profits occurred, especially in those recurring periods that it was non-returnable. 

That reminds me that I also sold books at another time and in another manner.  I was equipped wit a long thing that telescoped like an accordion and Mrs. Burroughs made me a little black bag with a shoulder strap, that I put on over my vest. I carried the THING in the little black bag hidden under my coat tails. It might have looked as though I was ashamed of it; but I was not supposed to be and I was.  And I wandered around a large city shoving my foot inside front doors before weary house-wives could slam the doors in my face and if I succeeded in getting in and planting myself on their best plush furniture I commenced to recite, parrot-like, a long and hideous lie, interspersed occasionally with facts.  The initial and most colossal falsehood of that shameful aggregation still haunts my memories. It was: "Mr. Stoddard has asked me to call on you, Mrs. Brown." Even now I blush as I type it. 

From an article written by Edgar Rice Burroughs for
The American News Trade Journal 
at Tarzana Ranch on February 12, 1921
ERBzine 1165