A Companion to the History of the Book (68 page)

The Impact of War

World War II disrupted American publishing. Paper was rationed, printing plates were melted down, and many publishing employees enlisted in the war effort. But the end of the war marked the beginning of a period of tremendous expansion in reading and publishing, and of the dominance of American books in the world market.

The longer people stay in school, the more likely they are to read. In the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government began funding education and research, encouraging more Americans to attend high school and college. The GI Bill, passed at the end of the war, accelerated the growth of higher education by providing financial aid to veterans. Between 1940 and 1950, college enrollment in the United States increased by 78 percent. Cold War competition – especially after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 -generated increased funds for school libraries, innovation in science and mathematics education, financial aid to students, and large research grants to universities.

The impact of enrollment growth on publishing was immediate: college students need books. John Wiley, a publishing house that specialized in college and graduate-level textbooks, grew from 99 employees in mid-1945 to 229 in 1948. W. W. Norton expanded its college division, and other houses quickly moved into the business.

But veterans did not devote themselves entirely to school. They also started the families they had postponed for military service. Consequently, publishers expanded or launched children’s divisions. Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, began writing for children before the war, but sales of his work made a quantum leap in 1954 when he began the “Beginner Book” series, designed to help baby-boomers learn to read by providing entertainment in a structured, limited vocabulary. (The idea was Bennett Cerf’s.)
The Cat in the Hat
launched the series, which remains enormously popular. “Golden Books,” a series of inexpensive children’s volumes sold in many non-bookstore outlets, began with twelve titles in 1942 and was selling a hundred million books annually by 1957. Throughout the 1960s, children’s book sales exceeded adult trade book sales.

When baby-boomers started school in the early 1950s, they needed textbooks. Companies that had never published school texts entered the market; those already active expanded their lists. When the boomers graduated from high school, more and more of them attended college. Educational aspirations expanded to those whose parents had attended college under the GI Bill and, especially in the 1960s, to women and members of minority groups. Between 1960 and 1980, direct federal student aid increased from $300 million to $10 billion, and college enrollment went from 3.7 million to 12 million. Even in the baby bust of the 1970s, enrollment increased.

As universities grew, they founded new university presses and expanded existing ones. The oldest American university press in continuous operation, that of Johns Hopkins, published its first book in 1887. The University of Chicago followed suit in 1891. By 1929, there were twenty presses, and by 1949, forty-four. In the 1950s, ten new presses were founded. These presses provided a noncommercial outlet for the growing number of specialized scholarly books produced by the expanding – and increasingly research-oriented – professoriate.

Worldwide demand for American books also grew. Before the war, American book exports were negligible – only 5 percent of total sales. During the war, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin American countries were unable to get the British and German textbooks they had relied on. The US State Department and the Office of War Information organized publishers’ visits to these countries. Publishers opened international sales departments and hired international representatives, beginning in 1946. After the war ended, sales of US publications abroad soared. Some publishers’ export sales increased by as much as 20 percent a year in the 1950s and 1960s, and annual growth rates of more than 10 percent were common until at least 1980. The initial export expansion was mostly in textbooks and scientific materials, as English replaced German as the international language of science. Interest in American popular culture allowed trade houses to participate in the export business, mostly by selling foreign and translation rights rather than through direct export of books. Literary fiction, serious nonfic-tion, genre fiction, cookbooks, inspirational titles, and self-help books all made their way abroad.

The Paperback

Some book historians attribute the postwar success of paperback books to another World War II phenomenon. During the conflict, publishers worked with the armed forces to distribute free paperbound books to US troops: the Armed Services Editions. They bore little resemblance to paperback books: they had no real covers and were produced in a horizontal format. Few of them survive because (like cheap, popular literature of other eras) they were read to death. Whether these paperbound books made readers more receptive to paperback books is an open question, but something certainly did.

Paperbound books had existed since before the Civil War. Dime novels, inexpensive reprints, and “cheap libraries” provided small volumes for a nickel or a dime throughout the nineteenth century. What differentiates the “paperback revolution” beginning in the 1930s is not the paperback format or the low prices of the books. Indeed, the lurid covers of early paperbacks recalled the reputation of their predecessors. The important differences are the quality – or perhaps the respectability – of the titles, the strong ties of the new houses to mainstream publishing, and the broad distribution the new paperbacks achieved.

Robert de Graff founded Pocket Books in 1939, with nearly half the funding provided by the owners of Simon & Schuster. The new company thus acquired instant respectability and access to a large hardcover list that could be mined for reprints. Penguin Books, founded in England in 1935, opened a New York office in 1939 as well. Avon was founded in 1941; its financing came from the American News Company, a magazine distributor. Popular Library and Dell were launched in 1943, Bantam in 1945, and New American Library (NAL) in 1948.

Paperback houses published both original titles and reprints. Genre fiction reminiscent of dime novels and pulp fiction appeared on some of the original lists, but most of the books were reprints of classic and current fiction and nonfiction. Paperback publishers bought rights from hardcover houses rather than from authors, usually for five years. The limited term may have become customary because trade houses were initially leery of paperback publication. They feared that paperback sales would reduce their revenues, and they shared authors’ fears of cheapened reputations. Those fears diminished as the paperback houses issued more quality reprints. New American Library, through its Signet and Mentor imprints, counted William Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and Edith Wharton among its authors, lending new respectability to paperbacks. Soon they were publishing Truman Capote and J. D. Salinger along with Mickey Spillane. Large advances and royalty payments also helped to win over authors and publishers. Early advances ranged from $500 to $2,000, but NAL paid a $35,000 advance for Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
in 1951 and more than $100,000 for James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
in 1953. Mario Puzo’s advance for
The Godfather
in 1968 was $410,000.

Booksellers had little interest in handling books that sold for only a quarter and that featured scantily clad heroines or leering racial stereotypes on their covers. In any case, there were not enough American bookstores at that time to sell the numbers of books needed for the paperback houses to turn a profit. Instead, paperback publishers used the magazine distribution system, selling through drugstores, five-and-dimes, tobacco shops, railroad stations, and other outlets frequented by people who had never entered a bookstore. By 1942, Pocket Books could be found in more than a thousand outlets nationwide; after the war, more than a hundred thousand outlets sold them.

This distribution system was extremely effective, but it left paperbacks open to a new source of censorship. When news distributors objected to a book because of its depictions of race or sexuality or because of its political views, paperback houses had to reconsider publication. In some cases, they simply did not issue the titles. At other times, they deleted offensive words or passages (sometimes without the author’s knowledge). Faulkner, Mailer, John Steinbeck, and James Baldwin were among the authors whose works raised distributors’ hackles.

With their low prices, paperback books had to sell in huge numbers to be profitable. The smallest initial print-runs were typically 150,000 at a time when only the bestsell-ing hardcover books sold 100,000 copies. Some books had first printings of half a million copies, and Erie Stanley Gardner’s mysteries began life in printings of a million. The prices rose gradually, to 35 cents in the mid-1950s and to a dollar by the early 1960s, but the increases did not deter purchasers. In 1947, 95 million paperback books were sold for $14 million. Five years later, 270 million copies were sold for $40 million, and in 1959 nearly 286 million copies sold for $67 million. By 1960, Americans were spending more on paperbacks than on hardcover trade books, even though paperbacks cost roughly one-fifth of what hardcover books cost.

As early as the 1940s, paperback houses began issuing larger-format, more durable, and more expensive trade paperbacks along with their inexpensive mass-market paperback books. Penguin had its Pelican series, which became NAL’s Mentor Books, and in 1953 Doubleday started its Anchor series. The Vintage, Everyman, Touchstone, Galaxy, and Compass imprints soon joined them. These books were priced at 75 cents to a dollar, with print-runs of around 20,000. The books were aimed at the college market, and they changed curricula. College literature classes now replaced or supplemented anthologies with paperback editions of novels (a trend that gradually made its way into high schools); history classes could add paperback document collections and classic monographs. Trade paperbacks also opened the doors of bookstores: by 1960, 85 percent of booksellers sold paperbacks.

By the mid-1970s, paperbacks were fully integrated into the universe of authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers. Although a few houses published only hardcover or only paperback books, most published both. The paperback format was not limited to trade books but had spread to university presses and textbook houses. Paperbacks were sold in nearly every bookstore. Paperbacks were the Model T of publishing – though they came in more colors than black. They made book ownership possible for Americans who did not live near bookstores or did not feel comfortable walking into their often stuffy atmosphere, and for those who could not afford to buy hardback books. Like the expansion of higher education, they democratized learning and book ownership.

Engulf & Devour

In his 1976 film
Silent Movie,
Mel Brooks created Engulf & Devour, a fictional conglomerate that was trying to buy all the Hollywood studios. Beginning in the 1960s, many publishers feared that the same sort of takeover mania was at work in the book business. Engulf & Devour was probably a takeoff on Gulf & Western, which was busy acquiring media properties and was itself eventually acquired by Viacom, which now owns both Paramount Pictures and the Simon & Schuster companies. The book industry experienced a great deal of consolidation beginning in the 1960s, but not because of a megalomaniac plot. The methods of consolidation and the reasons behind it were complex.

The mergers became possible because publishers that had been privately owned, or whose stock was closely held, went public to raise capital. The first of these was Random House, which sold 30 percent of its stock to the public in 1959. John Wiley (which remains independent) made its first public stock offering in 1962, while Houghton, Mifflin and Putnam’s did so in 1967. These and other public offerings created a great deal of interest among magazine and newspaper publishers, which saw book publishers as having related interests; among movie studios, which viewed books as material for their films; and among foreign publishers, who wanted an efficient way to enter the US market.

Much of the consolidation took the form of mergers between publishing houses. Mergers made possible diversification into new areas. For example, several trade houses bought or merged with paperback houses rather than start their own divisions: Random House bought Ballantine; Holt, Rinehart & Winston bought Bantam and Popular Library; and Doubleday bought Dell. Harper’s merged with Row, Peterson in 1967 to re-enter the textbook market. Mergers also allowed companies to raise capital for growth, which was the motivation for the sale of E. P. Dutton to Elsevier and of the later merger of Scribner’s and Atheneum.

Many of the sales took place, not because of the urge of big fish to eat little ones, but because of the desire of the little fish to retire to a nice, quiet pond. The entrepreneurs of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to reduce their activity or retire altogether, and in many cases their children had no desire to take over the business. In 1960, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, approaching retirement, sold their company to Random House. Their son Pat had left the Knopf firm in 1959 to help found Atheneum. The following year, Kurt and Helen Wolff, also nearing retirement, sold Pantheon to Random House. Both Knopf and Pantheon remained independent subsidiaries for some years. The founders of New American Library sold out to Times Mirror in 1963, as did Harry Abrams in 1966.

In some cases, companies far removed from the industry bought publishing houses for the wrong reasons. In the 1960s, when schools and textbook publishing were expanding, some technology companies believed that schools would rely increasingly on technology for teaching and that textbook companies would provide the content that they needed to add to their hardware. Xerox bought two publishing houses in the 1960s, and by 1974 was the nation’s second-largest school textbook publisher. RCA, Bell & Howell, CBS, ITT, Litton Industries, and a joint venture between General Electric and Time also went on buying sprees. Most of these alliances vanished during the 1980s, when it became clear that the anticipated synergy was not going to materialize and that the profit margin in book publishing was not adequate to satisfy the shareholders of technology companies.