Publishers – especially British publishers – tend to guard their sales figures from the public the way generals hide their battle plans from the enemy. As a result, obtaining reliable figures about the sales of books published at any time has been difficult. However, a few major publishing firms have deposited their early records with libraries, making them available for inspection. More might have done so, except that their materials were destroyed in the Blitz on London during World War II, while others have been lost or simply discarded as having no further value to the company. Ideally, a researcher would examine the records of a cross section of publishers and extract from them something like a representative sample of novels and story collections published during the period, but this would be a gigantic if not impossible endeavour.

The records I have examined, housed now in the Reading University Library, pertain to two of London's most important publishers during the inter-war period, Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape. The sales figures and other information cited below for Chatto & Windus come primarily from the company's profit and loss ledgers, four thick volumes dated 1919–27, 1927–33, 1933–45 and 1946–7. The books are arranged alphabetically by author, and the dates in each case refer to the first publication of a work. Each entry meticulously lists the costs associated with the production of a book, including advances and royalties paid to authors, sales figures for six month periods and the net profit or loss earned by each book. The Jonathan Cape material comes primarily from the production and delivery ledgers, divided into segments of the alphabet (e.g. A–C) and dated 1924–. Unfortunately, not all the volumes survived, so that the record for Cape is incomplete. The Cape ledgers provide figures for production costs and sales, but not for authors’ advances and royalties.

Fortunately, between them these two firms published a wide variety of writers, from the famous to the obscure, from the bestselling to the barely profitable.