The Revolution in Books

by DAVID DEMPSEY

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UNTIL the war, we Americans who bought books — and there were not many of us — constituted a fairly cohesive and civilized community, operating from a common set of literary values. We did not necessarily read the same books, but we agreed that books were necessary; and by our support of the book clubs and patronage of bookshops, by our approval of the titles stocked in public libraries, and by the occasional expensive set of classics that we installed in our living rooms we dominated literary taste.

Today we are being invaded by a multitude of people whose frantic appetite for books in paper covers accounted for the sale of 257 million copies in 1952 alone. Over the past few years these men and women, the majority of whom did not buy books at all before the reprint craze, purchased 40 million copies of Erle Stanley Gardner’s mysteries, 6 million copies of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, over 3 million copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1.6 million copies of The Pocket Book of Verse, a million copies of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 750,000 copies of George Orwell’s 1984, 300,000 copies of The Dialogues of Plato, and 200,000 copies of Susanne Lunger’s Philosophy in a New Key.

The success of the reprints is a logical expression of our times. These books are small, and adapted to the marsupial habits of a nation that does much of its reading on the jump. They are easy to buy (many are now sold in vending machines, like chewing gum), alluringly packaged, and available to millions of persons who live outside the range of a bookstore or are afraid to enter one.

There are today about twenty paperback houses in the field. Seven of these — The New American Library, Pocket Books, Bantam, Gold Medal, Popular, Avon, and Dell, in approximately that pecking order — account for about 85 per cent of the total business. Their product is a highly competitive and indiscriminate melange of serious literature and trash, of self-help and pseudo science, of sex and inspiration — never before has American publishing put forth such a nicely homogenized product, with the cream of letters so palatably disseminated in the total output. This explains why such books as Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way to Western Civilization and the novels of Kathleen Winsor can be sold bust by jowl on drug counters. It accounts for the fact that Faulkner’s The Wild Palms has been made available, if not necessarily comprehensible, to a million rank-andfile buyers. It has suddenly made the books of Flaubert, Hawthorne, and D. II. Lawrence contemporary with Marquand and Steinbeck. If the reprints have done nothing else, they have taken the classics away from the protective custody of the pedants.

Who buys them? At present, a million high school students use reprints through their membership in the Teen Age Book Club. Some 172 titles on the New American Library’s list, mostly from its excellent. Mentor nonfiction series, are required reading in schools and colleges. The United Automobile Workers, CIO, operating its own book club, uses reprints exclusively. The Armed Services buy millions of copies for distribution to troops, the State Department distributes them by the hundreds of thousands in countries such as India, and an estimated 20 million copies last year were sold abroad.

But the bulk of 1952’s astronomical total was sold to a hard core of 10 million “regular” buyers. In a survey for Bantam Books a few years ago, the George Gallup organization discovered that only one in every three of these people bought trade editions of books, and a high proportion of these sales could be attributed to interest stimulated by reprints. The fact, too, that quarter-book fans attended the movies more frequently than the population as a whole and spent more time viewing TV is evidence that they are not conventional book buyers — that the reprints, in fact, have created a new public for books.

One of the characteristics of this audience is that it comes to literature with a kind of healthy ignorance, willing to take the good with the bad, hardly aware of Faulkner’s reputation among professional litterateurs but profoundly affected by the vitality of his storytelling. But more than this, these readers are democratic in their allegiances — an “unknown" may do as well as or better than an established writer since, in a sense, to the new audience most authors are unknown. Richard Bissell’s A Stretch on the Hirer, that lusty book which first saw the light of day in the Atlantic, was an indifferent success in the trade but rolled up a sale of 750,000 at 25 cents. And the same thing happens to the established author who has never had a “hit”— the man who has lived on the admiration of a small group of critics and suddenly finds himself with a reading public.

Under hard-cover publishing, it is virtually impossible for a writer of books to make any kind of living unless he writes a best seller. If he does not, he is lucky to earn more than $2500 on his book. The reprints have suddenly given many of these “unsuccessful” authors a living income. Advances of $10,000 and $15,000 at the present time are not uncommon for novels that failed to earn their authors a third that much in trade sales. Indeed, they are not uncommon for books that have not even been published, for it is now customary to sell the reprint rights before the hard-cover edition appears, and many a publisher will not accept a book unless he can get a reprint house to take it on.

Publishers call this “getting off the nut,” but it might also be described as a case of the tail wagging the dog, since it puts the ultimate selection of a great many books at the disposition of the subsidiary market. The author can hardly be blamed for cutting his cloth to fit the reprint pattern, since it may mean the difference between eating and starving. “In my house in Florida,”writes an author whose latest book started off with an initial printing of 376,000 copies, “I have a couple of thousand reviews of my hard-cover books at which I never look. Few of them ever meant anything. None of them, even though prominent reviews, ever sold any books. . . . I would rather be the author of a live book being read by millions than the author of a relatively dead one being read by thousands.”

This, of course, is as much a commentary on the failures of trade publishing as on the success of reprints. In 1865 there were 2090 bookstores in the United States. Today there are fewer than 2000 although our population has more than tripled in the interim. Obviously, something is wrong with the old system when books can no longer be sold profitably in bookstores but are successfully merchandised in chain groceries, variety stores, and railway terminals.

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IT is easy to take a cheerful view of this turn of events and assume that the diffusion of books is proof of the diffusion of Culture. But the neat equation, inexpensive books plus 100,000 outlets equals 10 million new readers, leaves one factor unaccounted for. What kind of books are in greatest demand ?

One need not disparage the excellent work being done by the leading houses to point out that the vast majority of paperbacks sold today are something less than literature. Just about 4 percent of 1952’s crop was nonfiction, and although this represents three times as many copies as the 1945 figure, it is actually a smaller percentage of the total. Thirty-seven per cent of the reprints sold in 1952 were mysteries and westerns (a substantial decline from the 1945 figure of 57.8 per cent). Straight novels boomed from 16 per cent in 1945 to 51 in 1952, and now constitute the largest single category. “Love" novels and historicals account for 4 per cent of the total. The remainder (approximately 4 per cent) consist of puzzle books, sports, and miscellaneous subjects.

It is when we approach fiction that we meet the Mr. Hyde to the industry’s Dr. Jekyll. The thinly disguised bid for the semi pornographic trade is evident to anyone who has studied the lurid cover illustrations and come-on nature of the blurbs. Even the classics have been trotted out to satisfy this demand. If The Pocket Book of Old Masters is seized as obscene — as it was in Dubuque, Iowa — we may answer, Why should it be all right to look at paintings of nude ladies in museums but not in books? Is Petronius a classic as long as it is inaccessible at $5, but a menace to morals at 25 cents in a drugstore? Is there an element of opportunism in peddling The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Droll Tales to high school children, or should we congratulate the publisher for his service to education? These are some of the questions that are perplexing communities all over the country simply because books — good and bad — are available to everyone at the cost of a package of cigarettes. The abuse of good taste not only invites ill-considered and arbitrary attempts at censorship but needlessly sacrifices much of the good will which the industry has built up for itself.

Unfortunately, too, the discovery that good books can be sold in quantity has been followed by the discovery that more of them can be sold if presented as bad books. It is customary, and even charitable, to look upon the emphasis on sex as a necessary condition of the industry’s survival. Competition for rack and display space is keen. “You can’t sell ‘em if you don’t get ‘em up,” the manager of one reprint firm said to me. And your chances of “getting ‘em up” are increased as the neckline is lowered, whether it is the neckline of Amber or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The salacious jacket and provocative title are bad enough in themselves. But what is worse is the effect they are having on editorial trends. The “point of sale” dictation of title and jacket has put the fate of too much writing in the hands of quota-minded wholesalers and to that extent is taking literature away from editors who should be reasonably free of economic pressures. The result is that contemporary American reprint fiction, to an extent not typical of our fiction as a whole, is assuming a curious monotony. The sordid and sadistic, acting under a sort of Gresham’s law of literary taste, threaten to drive out the civilized and virtuous — at least from the reprint racks — leaving the American people (who know better) and the Europeans (who cannot judge fairly) with the impression that we are a nation of sex-starved idiots.

Since it is impossible to discuss reprints without referring to the current craze for Mickey Spillane, this is a good place to point out that the reprints did not create Spillane, but merely rescued him from the obscurity of trade publishing. Perhaps the craze (16 million copies of his books have been sold in the past five years) is merely a reflection of democratic taste in a democratic society. But you can argue that this subservience to the market is the vulgarization of literature, particularly when its influence reaches millions rather than thousands of readers.

And in this connection one must ask, Where is the book that is not reprinted? Where is Henry Green, that admittedly special but delightful satirist of modern life? Where is Joyce Cary? Elizabeth Bowen? Among Americans, where is Mary Ellen Chase? To call the roll of the missing is to suspect that too often they fail the reprint racks as prophets of violence and celebrators of sex. One wonders if the “happy ending” has not been sacrificed to an equally tortured “realism.” One questions whether there is a place in the reprint industry for the multitude of books which were never intended for the larger audience, the sort of thing that trade publishers do year after year because they feel a responsibility to their craft that transcends the purely commercial aspects of publishing.

Yet even this tradition is being threatened. Precisely because the reprints have made writing profitable for more authors, they have made trade editors more amenable to the type of book that can be most profitably reprinted. In many cases, literary agents now submit manuscripts directly to the paperbacks, who in turn line up a publisher that is willing to go through the motions of “ bringing out the book.”

The future of the paper-bound book lies in its ability to develop a creative counterpart to match its skill in selling. The reprints have proved that there is a mass market for books. They have successfully devised a whole new set of merchandising techniques. But they have not devised many new books. In thirteen years they have cheerfully plundered the literary wealth of the last three centuries besides skimming both the cream and the dirt from the year-to-year publishing seasons. But the very economics of this process is beginning to work against them because the authors, who must divide their subsidiary earnings with the trade publisher, are getting restive.

An increasing number are writing directly for the paperback market. One firm, Gold Medal, publishes nothing but originals, although of a decidedly second-rate nature. Dell will soon add an original line to its reprints. The Pocket Book of Child Care by Benjamin Spock, a book as common in nurseries as baby oil, was written expressly for Pocket Books (although a trade edition is available) and has sold more than 4 million copies, from which the author receives full royalties.

But the time bomb that is ticking away beneath the foundations of the publishing industry today is the Ballantine Plan. This is an arrangement whereby the hardand soft-cover editions of a book are published simultaneously. It represents the wheel come full circle in the gradual swing to paper covers, for under this plan the “reprint” is printed first, the basic costs amortized on this edition, and the “original” then published from the same plates, with the result that the price of hard-cover books published in this manner will average $1.50 instead of the present $3.

There are other portents. This year, Ballantine Books will inaugurate an annual anthology of new poetry, to be edited by Rolfe Humphries and sold, in paper editions, in the mass market. The New American Library’s scholarly Mentor line, now sold in a highly selective group of outlets, will soon be available on many general stands. This firm has already demonstrated, with its semiannual New World Writing, that serious original writing can be sustained in editions of 110,000. A similar venture, Discovery, will soon be launched by Pocket Books. Penguin Books, the British paperback firm, is now firmly established in this country with an enviable list of titles, although distribution is limited. Permabooks, a relatively new imprint, is proving that a major reprint line can be organized around a list that is primarily nonfiction.

Quite possibly the time will come when most trade books will be sold in paper covers — to the dismay of the book clubs and the dealers. As for the horrendous Spillane — perhaps he is the price we must pay, in a democratic culture, for being able to buy A Passage to India for 25 cents. As bargains go, it is not so bad.