Dear Sir and colleague
Those people who do not have very much money and those who have a lot are prevented from purchasing books, the former through poverty, the latter through greed. Lending libraries respond to their common passion which is to borrow books, but they impose a quaint obligation upon those people, which is to return them. Unfortunately the question becomes more complicated in that many publishers who have difficulty selling the books that they put out find it more convenient to lend them (such as is the case with motor cars). They will then be disencumbered (to the frustration of their authors) of one task that is already so problematic for them: the reprint.
Draft version of Proust's response published in L'Intransigeant
28 August 1920 on whether writers were in favour of the new lending
libraries.
Created 20.03.21