A Companion to the History of the Book (64 page)

Measured by documented sales, the most popular novelists of the early twentieth century included the romance writers Marie Corelli (who averaged 100,000 books annually) and Ethel M. Dell (whose formulas would be explicitly copied by Barbara Cart-land). Hall Caine’s 1901
The Eternal City
sold more than a million, and Charles Garvice enjoyed better than 7 million total sales between 1899 and 1920, while Nat Gould hammered out several popular racing novels each year. Mrs. Henry Wood’s 1861 tearjerker
East Lynne
had nearly a million copies in print by World War I, most of them sold after 1889. Florence Barclay’s 1909 romance
The Rosary
surpassed the one-million mark, and Elinor Glyn’s notoriously sexy
Three Weeks
(1907) topped two million. These authors made “bestseller” a dirty word among more serious writers like H. G. Wells, though his
The Outline of History
would be one of the most widely read nonfiction books of the 1920s. A. J. Cronin’s
The Citadel
(1937), which sold more than 40,000 copies in nine days, proved that a novelist could address a serious social issue (in this case, national health-care policy) and still break sales records.

All the same, a 1947 survey of Middlesex libraries found that the most popular authors were still fairly lightweight: Hugh Walpole, Warwick Deeping, Jeffrey Farnol, P. G. Wodehouse, A. E. W Mason, and John Buchan. Only one-eighth of the fiction loaned represented “acknowledged classics and modern novelists who are appreciated in particular for the power and style of their writing” (Kelly 1977: 382). The intellectual difficulty of modernist literature initially limited its appeal, though it would eventually find a mass audience: E. M. Forster’s
Howards End
(1910) sold not quite 10,000 copies in its first three years, but a quarter of a million as a Penguin paperback (1942).

As George Orwell noted in his essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” school stories were a strikingly popular subgenre of children’s literature. By 1940, school stories accounted for one of every eight books read by boys in working-class secondary schools, and one in four among the girls. These yarns efficiently and thoroughly indoctrinated their readers in public-school values, as hatter Frederick Willis cheerfully recalled:

We learnt that boys of the higher class boarding schools were courageous, honourable, and chivalrous, and steeped in the traditions of the school and loyalty to the country. We tried to mould our lives according to this formula. Needless to say, we fell very short of this desirable end, and I attributed our failure to the fact that we were only board school boys and could never hope to emulate those of finer clay. Nevertheless, the constant effort did us a lot of good. We thought British people were the salt of the earth . . . The object of our education was to train us to become honest, God-fearing, useful workmen, and I have no complaints against this very sensible arrangement, (quoted in Rose 2001: 323)

Literary criticism was dominated by the mainstream
Times Literary Supplement
(founded 1902), which peaked at 49,000 circulation in 1950. Highbrow reviews appealed to much smaller “minority” audiences: the leftist
Calendar of Modern Letters
started with 7,000 subscribers and dropped to 1,000; T. S. Eliot’s
Criterion
had only 800;
Scrutiny
never more than 1,500. The brilliant, irascible, dogmatic F. R. Leavis used
Scrutiny
as a personal platform to denounce middlebrow writers and champion the very few authors he thought worth reading. Leavis himself wrote 15 percent of the articles in the journal: most of the rest were produced by his acolytes, including his wife, Queenie. She sneered at
John o’ London’s Weekly
(published 1919–54), a literary review aimed at the not-very-educated classes, but it attained a circulation of 100,000 in the 1930s.

The stress of World War II actually increased demand for books, out of a need for distraction, for understanding the world situation, or for something to do during long blackouts. In Halifax, public library loans jumped from 716,000 in 1938 to just over a million in 1945. A librarian reported that in Coventry, devastated by the Luftwaffe, “the distribution of reading matter to the people has become almost as necessary as the distribution of food,” and bombed-out areas were served by bookmobiles (quoted in Mc Aleer 1992: 51). In February 1940, 62 percent of adults were reading a book, falling to 51 percent in 1941 and 45 percent in 1946–7. And in 1944, Dickens, Hardy, and Jane Austen were the second, third, and fourth most frequently borrowed novelists at the Bristol public libraries. In the face of rising demand “You just sold out,” one publisher remembered. “You didn’t have to do anything in fact – people
begged
you for them, the suppliers, the booksellers, the wholesalers” (quoted in McAleer 1992: 52).

Yet the war also constricted the supply of books. Paper was rationed, beginning in March 1940, when publishers were allowed only 60 percent of what they had used in 1938-9. The proportion fell to 37.5 percent by January 1, 1942, when the Book Production War Economy Agreement took effect. This scheme mandated smaller type, less white space, and inferior paper and bindings. It resulted in some remarkably ugly books, but it conserved raw materials. Publication of new titles declined to roughly half prewar levels, and the production of reprints fell even more precipitously. German bombers damaged about fifty libraries and destroyed some 750,000 volumes, nearly a third of them in the British Museum. On December 29–30, 1940, a raid gutted Paternoster Row, the center of the book trade: 5 million volumes were lost in the warehouse of wholesaler Simpkin Marshall. Overall, about twenty firms were devastated in the Blitz, including Eyre and Spottiswoode, George Allen and Unwin, Ward Lock, Hodder and Stoughton, Methuen, George G. Harrap, Hutchinson, Michael Joseph, Nelson and Sons, Gerald Duckworth, and even Hurst and Blackett, the UK publisher of
Mein Kampf
(surely an historic low point in author–publisher relations). The resulting loss of company records has seriously handicapped book historians, though the Luftwaffe was not solely to blame for that: some archives were patriotically sacrificed to waste-paper drives.

After World War II, the world of British publishing expanded (rising from 320 firms in 1939 to 572 in 1950) and became distinctly less insular. While studying at the University of Zurich, John Calder read European books and noted that many of them were not available in English. His firm, founded in 1949, published Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras, as well as Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. John Lehmann’s imprint, in the span of its brief existence (1946–52), published Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Theodore Roethke, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Malraux. In addition to Henry Miller, Anaiïs Nin, Jean Cocteau, Octavio Paz, and Yukio Mishima, Peter Owen had the foresight to publish Hermann Hesse, in time for the
Siddhartha
craze of the 1960s. Jonathan Cape took the lead in introducing British readers to Latin American authors, including Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. This globalizing trend was due in part to the entry of some enterprising central European émigrés into the clubby circles of UK publishing, among them George Weidenfeld (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), Paul Hamlyn (Octopus Books), Walter Neurath (who made Thames and Hudson a major art publisher), and André Deutsch. Deutsch’s list included Norman Mailer, Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Andrei Sakharov, John Kenneth Galbraith, Simone de Beauvoir, and V. S. Naipaul.

The British book industry was still able to generate some staggering pop-culture successes. By 1964, there were more than 40 million copies of Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers in print, accounting for almost all of Jonathan Cape’s profit margin. Overall, by 1970, 23,500 titles were published, more than twice the figure for 1950.

Modern British publishers owed much of their prosperity to imperial and other overseas markets. Macmillan had launched its successful “Colonial Library” in 1886. The following year, Thomas Nelson and Sons issued a Nyanja-language reader for what is now Malawi, and went on to develop a lucrative imperial trade in textbooks, with branch offices in Canada, Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya. By the mid-1950s, Penguin was selling 10 million books a year, just over half of them overseas. In 1969, UK book sales totaled 77 million copies valued at £145.7 million, of which 47 percent were exported. Under the British Commonwealth Market Agreement, UK publishers agreed to retain Commonwealth rights to books whenever they sold US rights to American publishers, and to acquire Commonwealth rights whenever they bought UK rights to American books. That meant that Australasian readers sometimes had to pay more for British books than they might have had to pay for American editions. The agreement was terminated in 1976, having run foul of US antitrust laws.

Thus, by 1970, British publishing was a mature, modern industry. Along with rock music, books were one of Britain’s few flourishing exports. Old established firms and upstart houses were prospering, exploiting large markets for both light and serious literature. Public libraries were ubiquitous and well funded, and moral censorship was no longer a problem for serious literature. In contrast, after 1970, independent publishers would be swallowed up by conglomerates, book exports would be reduced by the growth of indigenous publishing in the former colonies, public library funding would be constricted, and Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
(1988) would incite a censorship threat more dangerous than anything Joyce and Lawrence had faced. But that would be in another era.

References and Further Reading

Alloway, Ross (2003) “Selling the Great Tradition: Resistance and Conformity in the Publishing Practices of F. R. Leavis.”
Book History,
6: 227–50.

Bassett, Troy J. and Walter, Christina M. (2001) “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by
The Bookman,
1891–1906.”
Book History,
4: 205–36.

Black, Alistair (1996)
A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914.
London: Leicester University Press.

— (2000)
The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000.
London: British Library

De Bellaigue, Eric (2004)
British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s.
London: British Library

Eliot, Simon (1992) A
Measure of Popularity: Public Library Holdings of Twenty-four Popular Authors 1883-1912.
Oxford: History of the Book on Demand Series.

Feather, John (1991) A
History of British Publishing.
London: Routledge.

Gillies, Mary Ann (1993) “A. P. Watt, Literary Agent.”
Publishing Research Quarterly,
9 (1): 20–33.

Kelly, Thomas (1977) A
History of Public Libraries in Great Britain 1845–1975,
2nd edn. London: Library Association.

McAleer, Joseph (1992)
Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

McCleery, Alistair (2002) “The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane.”
Book History,
5: 161–85.

McDonald, Peter D. (1997)
British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mumby, Frank Arthur and Norrie, Ian (1975)
Publishing and Bookselling,
5th edn. London: Jonathan Cape.

Nelson, James G. (1989)
Elkin Mathews: Publishers to Yeats, Joyce, Pound.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Rainey, Lawrence (1998)
Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rose, Jonathan (2001)
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

— and Anderson, Patricia (eds.) (1991)
British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1965,
2 vols. Detroit: Gale Research.

Stetz, Margaret Diane (1991) “Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-nineties.”
Victorian Studies,
35: 71–86.

Wexler, Joyce Piell (1997)
Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.

Wilson, Charles (1986)
First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith 1792-1712.
Garden City: Doubleday.

26

Modernity and Print II: Europe 1890–1970

Adriaan van der Weel

At the start of the twentieth century, Europe, along with the rest of the Western world, was gripped by a veritable reading frenzy. Agriculture as a way of life for the majority was coming to an end, and urbanization spread, favoring literacy. Photographs, especially of cityscapes, reveal how much lettering confronted people in their daily life. In all capital cities, countless kiosks sold a choice of newspapers, national and international, that would never again be rivaled. In Paris, in 1910, with a population of around 2.5 million, 5 million papers were printed every day. In 1900,
Le Petit Parisien
alone printed 1.5 million copies daily; it was to go on to become the bestselling international daily in the years leading up to World War I (Martin et al. 1986). People were reading on a scale never seen before, and newspapers and illustrated magazines were the first of the twentieth-century mass media. But books were becoming cheaper too, and available more widely and more readily than ever before.

The scale on which print was now spreading brought about tremendous changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of books everywhere. Just as the age of the mass-consumer society at large was dawning, so was the age of the cheap book series and the mass paperback. The individual ownership of books (as against, for example, borrowing from libraries, commercial or otherwise) grew alongside that of other consumer goods. Buying books was made easy by the large numbers of cheap, paper-covered series that appeared on the market. Many of these had started, in the nineteenth-century vein of improvement of the lower orders, as classics series. Some contained only national, others international literature. Still in existence today in Germany, for example, is Reclam’s “Universal-Bibliothek” (1867– ), which published German as well as other classics. There were series aimed at a wide variety of readerships and uses, such as the Dutch series “Voor den Coupé” (“For the Railway Compartment,” 1893–1918) for railway travel, or the Swedish “Verdandis smâskrifter” (“Brochures of the Verdandi Student Union”), small books of popular science for self-improvement published by the Bonnier publishing company from 1887 to the early 1920s. Cheap reprint series had usually been limited to books that the publisher already owned, or which were out of copyright, such as the series “Le Livre populaire” started by Arthème Fayard in 1904. Published at 65 centimes, these were well within popular reach. But now some series even began to offer current writing. In the Netherlands, where foreign rights were not protected, reprint series could also include the latest foreign (especially English, American, or German) books, either in translation or in the original language.

In a way, little of this was new. It simply continued the reading revolution of the nineteenth century, fueled on the demand side by rising literacy, increasing leisure time, and population growth, and, on the supply side, by cheaper and faster print production. But the dedicated reprint series that started to appear in the first few decades of the twentieth century, buying titles from other publishers, did represent a more market-oriented approach: for example, “Th. Knaur, Romane der Welt,” a series edited by Thomas Mann. What was most striking was the sheer scale on which print was now spreading, and especially percolating down into the lower reaches of society. The age of print as a mass medium ushered in the age of the masses.

Among the types of publication designed to reach these new readers all over Europe were endless series of cheap “penny dreadfuls”
(Groschenhefte, romans à quatre sous),
covering a wide range of genres, but especially serving poorer and less-educated readers, and children’s books and magazines. For example, aimed particularly at children – the readers of the future – was the French adventure series
Journal des voyages et des aventures de terre et de mer
(1877–1929). To supply the insatiable demand for the most popular genres, publishers in many countries, but especially those with a smaller home market, looked abroad. Translations, involving various degrees of adaptation – names, local color – were common. And so this French series found itself published in Italy as
Giornale illustrait) dei viaggi e delle avventure di terra e di mare
(1878–1931). Similarly, the “Biblioteca dei miei ragazzi” was modeled on and largely translated from the “Bibliothèque de Suzette,” a series started in 1919 by the publishers of the very successful children’s weekly,
La Semaine de Suzette
(1905).

In such children’s series, suitable texts by any author about any subject could be published (often written to order), but some of the most popular series were entirely devoted to one hero. One of the best-known examples was the Nick Carter series (New York, Street & Smith, 1886), stories about a master detective which were syndicated in most European countries by the firm of A. Eichler, and inspired many local imitations. Along with thrillers and westerns (such as the equally popular Buffalo Bill series), detective and crime novels are a typical example of the many new popular entertainment genres that made their appearance toward the end of the nineteenth century. The huge popularity of Sherlock Holmes (based on the model of Emile Gaboriau’s
l’Affaire Lerouge
of 1863), together with that of the penny-dreadful form, created the mold for much European detective fiction. Well-known examples were the French anti-hero Fantômas (sometimes dubbed the “Lord of Terror”) and Arsène Lupin (the “Gentleman Cambrioleur” or Gentleman Burglar) series. Arsène Lupin became no less famous than Nick Carter, and was translated into almost all European languages, as was the Lord Lister series (1908). Originally written by Kurt Matull in German and published throughout Europe by Eichler, after the tremendous success of the first 110 issues it was continued locally in many languages. The last issue in Dutch by Leo Felix Hageman (no. 3687) did not appear till 1967.

Detective novel series also appeared in regular book form. In the Netherlands, a series of
Amerikaansche detective-romans
in translation flourished from 1899 to 1905. Georges Simenon, a Belgian writer living in Paris, had already produced more than two hundred books of cheap fiction under several pseudonyms when, in 1931, he started writing the Maigret novels that were to make him famous. They were published by Fayard, with a photographic cover. English and American detective novels continued to set the tone, and “l’Empreinte” (“The Fingerprint,” 1932) was a well-known French detective series publishing most of the famous anglophone detective writers. In 1933, the weekly series “Détective” was the first to sport a photographic cover in color.

Cartoons were preceded, around the turn of the century, by the illustrated
historiette:
drawings with running text beneath. In France, the famous example was
La Famille Fenouillard.
The influence of American popular culture was strong in the case of cartoons, too, with such publications as
Buster Brown
(1902–26) and
Felix the Cat
(1931). By the 1920s, the use of speech balloons was common. The publication of the weekly
Journal de Mickey
(Mickey Mouse, from October 21, 1934) paved the way for further Americanization of the illustrated press in France. But European cartoonists were quick to pick up the craft. Among the famous European cartoon heroes was Belgian Hergé’s Tintin (1929) published by Casterman.

Distribution of such cheap reading matter was chiefly through kiosks and tobacco shops. In the late 1920s in the Netherlands, a sensational novel in a cheap series could be bought for between 17.5 and 45 cents, or an issue of Nick Carter for 15 cents (compare a carpenter’s weekly wage of about 16 guilders). By 1935, two-thirds of all books were published at less than 2 guilders. But despite the cheapness of these mass-produced publications, not everyone could, or wanted to, actually buy them. Commercial lending libraries remained significant at least until World War II. In Germany, they had been the most important channel for entertainment fiction from the late Enlightenment period until the Third Reich. In the late 1920s, partly as a result of the economic crisis, the lending libraries experienced a lift in their fortunes in Germany. In 1932, there were still some 18,000 such libraries.

It has been estimated that in Germany some 60 million
Groschenhefte
were published in the period 1933–9 (Wittmann 1991). With the extreme popularity of these cheap, weekly series, translated and adapted throughout Europe in the first few decades of the twentieth century, the internationalization of the entertainment industry began. It was the American flavor even of the German imitations of the heroes and their adventures that caused them to be blacklisted in Germany in 1940. In the genre of pulp fiction, Anglo-Saxon authors like Zane Grey and Edgar Wallace vied with Hedwig Courths-Mahler for popularity. Accordingly, in this period we witness a change from a predominantly national trade in books to one that was once again becoming international. But this time the traffic did not so much convey science, or the European classics, but a torrent of popular culture translated out of and into various continental languages. It was from this time that the fairly heavy admixture of Anglo-American ideas and forms began to promote a certain homogenization of European culture.

Mass culture rose on a tide that would not retreat. Even though many regarded reading and the knowledge it brought as a civilizing force, for others the wider spread of literacy was not a cause for rejoicing. The former reading elite, in particular, regarded the ubiquitous consumption of books and newspapers with disapproval. Apart from begrudging the masses a share in a reading culture that had previously been reserved for them, many people feared the new underbelly of literature with its mass-culture characteristics. Literary authors especially had grown increasingly self-conscious as artists. Many felt that they should not have to bow to the vulgar tastes of the plebs. The gap between the popular taste and those who catered to it and that of the cultural elites – who despised the masses and their tastes, and favored the expressions of a higher art – was widening. As a consequence of the growing dichotomy between artistic success and success in the marketplace, the book market was increasingly felt to be divided between high culture and popular consumption.

Amid the commodification of the work of the mind that could be observed taking place everywhere shortly after the turn of the century, the
Kulturverleger
made his appearance. The
Kulturverleger
zealously embraced his cultural mission, served as a partner to his authors, and was interested in making public a particular type of literature. In Germany, Stefan George and his circle (not just of authors, but also of artists, illustrators, publishers, printers, and binders) could be said to epitomize this phenomenon. Samuel Fischer was a patron of modernity, publishing foreign naturalists and expressionists like Ibsen and Zola, and German authors like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Arthur Schnitzler. Kurt Wolff was the publisher of Franz Kafka, and a host of other expressionist authors. A similar role was played by Querido in the Netherlands, and Gallimard (founded in 1911 to publish Les Éditions de
La Nouvelle revue française)
in France, with writers such as Proust, Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Valéry, and Larbaud. In 1933, Gallimard bought the famous Éditions de la Pléiade, founded by Jacques Schiffrin.

These
Kulturverleger
were also the main publishers who stimulated the
Buchkunstbe-wegung,
advocating new attention to typography and book design. The
fin de siècle
had created a distinctive typography of letter forms to look at rather than texts to read. The reverse tendency – emphasis on the purity of geometric form – could be observed in De Stijl, Bauhaus, and Nieuwe Zakelijkheid. Insel Verlag, for example, harmoniously integrated the aesthetics of book production with an impressive literary program, publishing Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Borchardt. The aim of the
Kulturverleger
was not necessarily to publish for an elite; most were eager to spread serious fiction to a wider readership by publishing it also in carefully crafted but cheap reprint series. They thus did much to present the well-designed
(sebönes)
book to a wider audience. This relationship between the author-as-artist and the publisher-as-civilizing-force served to emphasize the symbolic role of books. Distinguishing the discriminating owner from those who merely read for entertainment, many of these books were not necessarily bought to be read.

One of the attractions of the book series was the guidance this form of publication offered to the less-experienced book buyer. Membership of a book club offered a similar appeal, in addition to the lower price. But initially the club aspect, which gave its members a sense of belonging to a circle of like-minded readers, also played a role. When book clubs first made their appearance, in the Weimar Republic after World War I, it was their ideological nature that characterized them. Originally books were published by the club for the exclusive benefit of its members, with the obligation to buy all titles offered by the club. This model represented the ideal from a production point of view. Minimizing the risk of both overproduction and underproduction, it allowed for the lowest price for the consumer. In the course of time, many other business models have been tried. Books might be bought from publishers, or clubs might enter into co-publication arrangements. The model that became the standard in the 1970s was that of licensing existing book titles from other publishers. This had the advantage to members of providing a much wider choice of titles. Members agreed to purchase a minimum number of books annually (usually one per quarter), with the club offering a “club selection” for anyone who had not made a personal selection by a certain date.

In France, the first book club began operations in 1924; in the Netherlands, in 1937; in Italy, the Club degli editori was not founded till 1960. In Norway, the publication, both before and after World War II, of subscription series shared many characteristics with book clubs, but the first actual book club only appeared in 1961. The importance of book clubs in Europe, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, can hardly be overestimated. In 1960, the fifteen German book clubs had 5 million members between them, accounting for 20 percent of total book sales by value. In the 1990s, the number of members had risen to 6.5 million, or a member in one in four households (Wittmann 1991). Perhaps because the book-club phenomenon began in Germany, the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann continues its hold on the market in Europe, as it does elsewhere in the world. In the Netherlands, it started the Europaclub (later ECI) in 1965; in France, the joint venture France Loisirs with Presses de la Cité in 1970. These Bertelsmann-owned clubs are by far the largest in their respective countries.