March 10 Friday – Frederick J. Hall answered Sam’s Jan. 24 letter with a four-page, single-spaced typed response, which, among other things, asked about selling PW as a subscription book, published through American Publishing Co.

There is a good and profitable sale in the trade for any of your books that strike the public fancy. There is no sale at present by subscription for any book that you could write….all the books they [Am. Pub. Co.] sell now are sold through the trade and it is the trade sales of your books that keep them alive, and their subscription sales amount to nothing at all. … I wrote you some time ago about getting an “emergency account.” This will certainly be necessary before long as it is very embarrassing to run on as small a margin as we are now. [MTLTP 333n2, 341n1]. Sam wrote on the letter, “See below [indicating a lined sentence that AC had not sold well] Is that how we happened to increase to $30,000 instead of stopping at the agreed $15,000?” On the envelope, Sam wrote, “How the spreading of the Bank debt probably occurred.”

Note: Hall also included a detailed account of the monthly $500 checks and the drafts made against Sam’s Letter of Credit [n2]. By this time, the subscription method, with book salesmen working in rural areas, was moribund; likewise the large profit margin available to Webster & Co. Only FE (1897) would be sold by subscriptions in the days ahead.