If a book is really successful the public may buy it in very large numbers. Sometimes we see figures showing that several hundred thousand copies of a book have been bought. It is of interest to ask : "What does the public ask for in the books which it reads for pleasure?" In this field, as with all other arts, there is the man or the woman who say : "I do not know much about writing, but I do not know what books I like to read". And if we may judge from the books which have been great successes it seems safe to say that what the masses of the people ask for in their reading is a book which tells a good story about interesting people, a book with movement and life in it. There are always people ready to give the public what it ask for in such respects, and writers who wish to make money from their writing have been almost forced to write books of the kind which please the people who make up the largest market for their work. Now a book written with this public in view may still be a good book, but very often it is not the book which the writer would have written had he been quite free to follow his won wishes. The form of book provided by many writers is the book which tells a clear story, which gives a picture of a number of men and women who at the beginning of the book are in one set of conditions, and who move step by step throughout the book into a different and more pleasing set of conditions. Such a book gives the reader a sense of order. The people in these books act and think along certain lines, and it is only in details that the stories differ. But during recent years the more thoughtful writers have been attempting a new form. It is said that the course which our lives take depends upon our personal thoughts, the thoughts which, if told at all, are told only to those nearest or dearest to us. It is in these personal thoughts that the writers are interested. The important thing, they say, is to set down the life which goes on in a man's mind - not so much the thoughts which result from the day-to-day happenings, but the long line of thoughts which makes up his real life.