The Battle for Books
by CURTICE HITCHCOCK
» The graphic story of how English publishers did their job under bombing — and without paper.
1
THE importance of books in America becomes clearer after a visit to a land where they are rationed. England today is such a land. Not, of course, in the sense that the book buyer has to present a coupon for the latest novel, as he would for a pound of butter or a pair of shoes. But actually, new books are scarce, because the paper and ink and cloth and boards from which they are made, and the manpower for making them, are so restricted as to make it impossible to produce anything like the number of books which the public demands.
Before the war, British book paper was made primarily from esparto grass imported from North Africa, secondarily from wood pulp imported from Norway. With the cutting-off of those two sources began the battle for books in Britain, a battle which has certainly resulted in a moral victory — even though the buyer may have trouble in finding a copy of a particular Wells novel in his favorite London bookshop. For the battle has demonstrated two things: first, that an informed democratic community can be convinced that books are indispensable to a progressive civilization; second, that if restrictions have to be made in production, they can be applied by democratic processes without interfering ultimately with intellectual freedom.
British book publishers are allowed at present as a basic ration 37½ per cent by weight of the volume of paper which they used in the year prior to the war. This is about twice the allotment, in percentage terms, granted to newspapers, but in physical tonnage this differential is a very slight concession, since books use in England in normal times only about 2½ per cent of the national consumption of paper. (In the United States, books use only about one half of 1 per cent.) A publisher may occasionally secure a small additional quantity to take care of some book deemed important to the national interest, if he has exhausted his basic quota.
By virtue of the most careful economies, worked out by coöperative research, the publishing fraternity has been able to produce between 60 and 70 per cent of the number of volumes published annually before the war. These economies affect the bulk, margins, type size, leading, spacing of chapters and other “breaks” — anyone who has seen current English books is aware of the changed appearance, including often the cheapening of the quality of the paper itself.
The reduction in the current supply of books to approximately 70 per cent of the pre-war figure, coupled with the destruction of library, publishers’, booksellers’, and private stocks by enemy action, has been accompanied by a great increase in the demand. An increase of 150 per cent would certainly be a moderate estimate.
Reading is the most obvious resource for such leisure as the English have, now that private driving has been eliminated and there is total blackout in the evenings. True, theaters and cinemas continue, and are well patronized, but they are in the main for the townfolk and — as anyone who has experienced a London blackout well knows -— for the quick and the early. And reading in England means books, because four-page newspapers occupy little time, and the magazine assortment is meager.
The result in the book world is tantalizing. For the first time in his experience, it is possible for the publisher to sell — within reason — anything he can get the paper to print, and with little effort or incitement. On the other hand, some books cannot be published and someone has to make a choice as to which books shall fall by the wayside. Such a decision, involving the life or death of particular books, naturally partakes of the nature of censorship in the wider sense.
2
THE process as it works in England is enlightening. The most important, even though the most obvious, point to make is that the government has made no effort to bar the publication of any book or type of books as belonging to a non-essential class. It has confined its restrictions to the volume of paper to be used for books, leaving the choice of titles entirely to the taste and judgment of the publishers and the ordinary processes of the market place. This is the only way in which freedom of the press could be maintained, but it would have been easy for a hard-pressed government department to decide that this or that kind of book was unnecessary to the war effort and therefore should be abolished by decree.
The selection still rests with the publisher as in peacetime, and in Britain the challenge of restrictions has been met on two planes: first, by the individual firm; and second, by the publishing industry acting collectively.
The individual publisher’s problem is complex. He may have to stop printing a best-seller in the middle of its run in order to save enough paper for a medical book, an engineering book, or some important book on public affairs which he deems more essential to the winning of the war and the peace. Publishers have choked off the printing of such best-selling books as a Priestley novel or War and Peace at the point where they have sold 50,000 or 60,000 copies and would sell many more thousands, simply because they were using more than their fair proportion of available paper.
Apart from being fair to the nation, the publisher has also to be fair to his own authors and, so far as may be, give each one his due proportion of the precious means of life. Every publisher worth his salt — and this is a period which tends to bring out the best even among our tribe — has tried to give the preference to what I can only describe as the “more important” book, and that does not mean that it would always be a serious informational item. There is health in diversity in war as in peace and there are occasions when a good novel might be more important than anything else within the range of the publisher’s choice.
As a supplement, the government has provided a small pool of one thousand tons of paper a year to be allocated to publishers for the production of books of importance for which individual quotas proved insufficient. Here again, on the advice of the industry, the government chose to leave the allocation in private hands. This it could do effectively only because the British publishers, unlike ours up to this time, have for many years been building up an effective trade association. This organization was in a position to speak and to act for the industry as a whole. The allocation of the paper from the surplus pool is made by a committee of four publishers chosen by the Publishers Association and acting impartially for the whole group. Their decision is of course subject to appeal to the Ministry of Supply, but so far, although a few protests have been registered, the committee has not been reversed, and in the main its members have been supported wholeheartedly by their fellows.
In passing on the application of any publisher for additional paper for a book which he claims to be important, the committee considers not only the value of the particular book but the use which the publisher has made of his original quota. No one is allowed to exhaust his paper in profitable frivolity and come to the pool for extra paper for the important item. The committee in charge of surplus paper allocation is a genuine censor over publishing wastage, but not a censor of ideas.
It would be interesting to digress for a discussion of the possibilities of comparable trade collaboration in this country as materials and manpower become scarcer. We are not England. We differ in industrial tradition and — most importantly — in our possession of an institution known as the Sherman Antitrust Act, which has discouraged, rightly or wrongly, the building up of effective self-governing bodies in industry. Trade associations have their dangers. They can become smug, complacent, and dead hands over imaginative free enterprise. On the other hand, if they have genuine leadership, as for the most part the English book trade has had in this emergency, they can be of enormous service to an overworked government at a time of crisis, both in making the resources of the industry available and in saving much administrative manpower.
From what I have said, it may sound as if the British publishing lists had become hopelessly highminded and that the reader would find nothing in them but great literature and professional books for the war effort. This — without too much mourning — is not true. A good deal of tripe (the favorite example is No Orchids for Miss Blandish) still issues from the British presses, and publishers who have previously confined their efforts to that category continue largely as before. What is true is that the restrictions have resulted in a larger proportion of necessary professional and technical books (at the expense of general reading lists) and in a more conscientious scrutiny of the value of the books of entertainment which are permitted to see the light of day; and that they have on the whole tended to raise rather than to lower the general level of taste. And who is competent to say whether a considerable measure of what I have characterized as “tripe” does not remain a necessary ingredient in the publishing output for Britain’s weary population?
3
WHAT then is Britain mainly reading? The answer is: Very much what we are reading here, but necessarily in more limited quantities. There is the same stress on books about the war, although the British after three years of it seem to be rather more interested than we are as yet in books which constitute a complete escape from it. Since there is a vast unfilled demand for entertaining books of all kinds, it is difficult to assess the public taste in quantitative terms, but many more reprints of the classics and copies of current fiction could be manufactured and sold were the paper available.
The most striking single development in British publishing since the war began is the creation of a whole new field of informative government books, published by the Ministry of Information on its own behalf and for other departments. These are well-written factual accounts of various aspects of the war, printed, bound in paper, and sold in enormous quantities at low prices ranging from 3d. to 2/6. The more elaborate ones, such as The Battle of Britain, Bomber Command, Front Line, are heavily illustrated and are halfway between a book and a picture magazine in format. The circulation has reached in one or two instances a four-million figure. They are issued by H. M. Stationery Office and sold through the bookstores at ordinary discount rates. This is perhaps the first time a government has ever issued its propaganda at a profit. Some publishers look longingly at the amount of paper consumed and think they might in some cases have done a better job.
One extremely interesting fact to an American is that 27 per cent of the commercial output of the past year has been of American origin, including both fiction and non-fiction. This is a higher percentage of American authorship than has ever before appeared on British lists.
This emphasis on American books is only one element in a phase of the present British cultural picture which must strike any American visitor with great force. For the first time in history the English public is curious about and genuinely interested in the United States. Probably never before (not even during the last war) has any substantial part of the English public been much concerned about us — about what we are like and what we are up to. A few intellectuals, yes; a few politicians, yes; but the British people in general have been content to consider us as a rather curious monstrosity which developed in peculiar ways as an offshoot of the Empire — occasionally useful, occasionally a nuisance, but never anything vital to their own ways of life. That situation has changed.
I found many different kinds of audiences prepared to sit for hours asking questions about the United States and discussing different aspects of our life and our relations to the world. The questions ranged over the widest possible territory &emadsh; domestic and foreign politics, literature, journalism, our war preparations, how people here were taking the war, what war restrictions we had to endure, our ways of life generally. The British have begun to realize that while our older traditions and our older stock are Anglo-Saxon, both have been enormously modified by the influx of new people, new blood, and different geographic and cultural influences. No longer are they prepared to assume that, whatever our peculiarities, basically we are a kind of overgrown British dominion.
Substantial efforts are being made to introduce American history in British schools. The British War Office, with imagination and foresight, has also introduced into the British Army a highly successful program of adult education for citizenship. This program makes use of a series of excellent pamphlets on the world today which has a large infusion of well-written material about the United States — material which is not only issued to the troops but is discussed by them in a way to make one feel that the British people really believe in the idea of a well-informed world citizenship. We who have prided ourselves so long and so loudly on our system of public education may well ask ourselves why we have not kept the pace. To be sure, it has taken the British some time to develop their army educational projects, but we might take more advantage of their experience.
Finally, there is the rising percentage of books of American authorship on the British publishing lists. This naturally cannot be ascribed wholly to the awakened interest in America. In part it is merely a reflection of an increased virility and power in American writing. The British, like ourselves, are prepared to read the authors of any country if what they say is worth reading; and if our authors have developed larger audiences in the British Isles, it is in part because American writing during the past twenty years has been on the whole superior to British writing.
Nevertheless, in part this increase in the volume of American books, which is now being extended through projects for reprinting various American classics, reflects the awakened British attitude towards us, and has in turn stimulated the tendency it represents. At the present time it may be fair to say that, whereas we are more aware of the older British history than the English are of ours, they are far more awake to our present and recent past than the bulk of our population is to theirs. Our English stereotype is Victorian; their American counterpart is a cross between Hollywood and Sinclair Lewis. Grotesque as both may be, the more modern one is a better foundation for action.
From what does this greater mental curiosity about us arise? In part from reading, in part from the ubiquitous motion picture (which may give them a distorted view but does interest them). But fundamentally I think it springs from something deeper down in the English mind and heart. Like many of us, the English are profoundly ashamed of the social and political futilities and failures of the past twenty years. They believe that both they and we failed miserably in building that fairer world which was promised after the last war. They know that they alone are incapable of providing it at the end of this holocaust. They want help and — speaking of 90 per cent of the English public — they do not really care whether they are ranked as No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 in the conglomeration of power which must control the world to come. They want us with them, and they know that before they can persuade us, they must understand us.
One should add that they are equally interested — perhaps even more interested — in Russia, for the same or equally obvious reasons. At present, however, they are a little more starry-eyed about Russia than they are about us. But regardless of Russia or of us, there is a firm determination among the British public to carry out their own future internaitional obligations.
4
TO RETURN from this digression, British publishers are selling fewer books but selling them at less expense. Their advertising and selling costs are cut to a minimum; their working staffs, cut by demands for manpower, are still adequate to their needs and cost them less in wages and salaries. Even the blitz has contributed its part to supporting the balance sheets of some of the publishers. Most of those who lost large stocks of books were compensated by war risk insurance, in certain notable cases to the enrichment of the publishers involved because the destroyed stocks included much remainder material which was worth nothing like its book values. Gossip has it that several firms which were in a shaky condition before the war are now in excellent financial shape. However this may be, most of them have healthy bank accounts and are making substantial profits even though the corporate income tax leaves them little benefit from that happy state of affairs.
Apart from the financial benefit to some publishers, the destruction of stocks of standard books in publishers’ warehouses, bookshops, and public and private libraries is, of course, a catastrophe. The nation’s storehouse of the printed word has suffered many irreplaceable losses.
In this discussion of a gallant free industry, one fact, perhaps the most important of all, must not be overlooked. If the essential function of book publishing be, as its friends insist, the cultivation and spread of new ideas, the tendency of war controls is a thoroughly unhealthy one. If a publisher’s quota is inadequate for maintaining in print his established authors and the standard lines which constitute his basic bread and butter, he obviously has little financial incentive to experiment with new authors and with mass circulation cheap editions.
It is to the credit of English publishers that they have experimented and have issued cheap editions where it seemed to them important to do so despite the controls. Occasionally either process is assisted by the government, which in addition to the general pool sometimes makes available a special supply of paper for some book which it considers of special national importance, or for the issuance of a cheap edition for the use of the troops or the civil population or both, when the book has a direct bearing on the state of the public morale.
I have spoken earlier of the economies which have been introduced into book formats. No one who sees an English book at the present time can fail to be aware of them. Books are much thinner. Where before the war they bulked between an inch and an inch and a half, they are now more likely to run from one half to three quarters of an inch in thickness. They are smaller. Wherever it is physically possible, the book is made smaller — 12mo instead of 8vo. The type also is smaller — nine or ten point instead of eleven or twelve — and there are few if any leads between the lines. The margins are very slender indeed. Chapters are run on instead of starting on a new page. The paper itself, being frequently made from straw or odds and ends and without proper chemicals, instead of from esparto grass or pulp, is likely to be yellow and coarse. The thin, inadequate board in the covers tends to buckle on the slightest provocation.
Costs of manufacture, of course, have gone up in the face of shortages of all kinds. The process of manufacture is infinitely slower. But book prices, while higher, have not gone up proportionately so high as other uncontrolled articles. Perhaps on the average they are 25 to 30 per cent higher. Novels which once sold for 7/6 are now likely to be 9/6 or 10/6. Small books such as the popular Penguins have gone from 6d. to a shilling.
With respect to new authors, very few are showing their heads at the present time, and for obvious reasons. In no other country in the world can the young people who will be the writers of the future be more completely absorbed in the national effort than are the young men and women of Britain today. But no American can spend two months in Britain at the present time without a feeling that mentally Britain is a livelier and a more heartening place.
One hears also of a great stir of thoughtful discussion among the young men in the armed forces. The last war killed off an enormous number of promising young men in the British population. It is not without reason that the last twenty years in England have been relatively sterile and fallow in terms of creative literature. If this generation is not bled white as the last one was, there is every reason to hope in the next twenty-five years for a genuine British renaissance in literature as well as in political and economic life. The embattled island is still full of good human stuff.