An American kind of book?

I A vast number of new novels are published every year. Probably no ordinary reader gets through more than 1 per cent of the 2,000 or so new titles which are put out annually in the British and American markets. Even extraordinary readers-regular reviewers, for example-are unlikely to take in as much as 10 per cent of the whole. One year’s wave washes over the last, and in a decade hosts of literary aspirations, small achievements and potboilers are irretrievably gone. Few categories of book can be less disturbed in the six copyright libraries than the unmemorable bulk of this century’s 100,000 novels.