PUBLISHING: Field Invades

Like a bookstore browser hunting first editions, Marshall Field has shopped around the book business looking for a first-rate buy (TIME, Oct. 9). Last week he thought he had found it. Dipping lightly into the odd $168,000,000 in his pockets, Tycoon Field (publisher of New York’s PM, Chicago’s Sun, syndicated Sunday weekly Parade, owner of Cincinnati’s radio station WSAI) bought smart Simon and Schuster, one of the top merchandisers in the book business, and Pocket Books, Inc., which was 49% owned by Simon and Schuster officials. Publisher Field kept the purchase price mum.

Messrs. Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, who are among the younger and more aggressive publishers, but not too young to have moneybags under their eyes, will continue to run S. & S. Young President Robert Fair de Graff,* 49, who owned 51% of Pocket Books, will continue to manage the company. Tycoon Field denied that he plans to use his millions to flood the U.S. with $1 books. He merely intends to provide “better and better books for more and more people.”

The Syndicate. Marshall Field should have plenty of competition. By last week smart, suave Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, had lined up a potent phalanx of publishers—Charles Scribner’s Sons, Little Brown & Co., Book-of-the-Month Club and Harper & Bros.—to meet the Field invasion. Along with Random House, they had purchased slipping Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., which specialized in cheap reprints. The syndicate planned to boost Grosset & Dunlap back to the top. As a starting booster, they plucked short, chunky John O’Connor, 52, out of his job as vice president of Chicago’s Quarrie Corp. (World Book Encyclopedia), this week put him in as the new boss of G. & D. An old hand, O’Connor had sold culture in the form of the Harvard Classics, had helped to boost the Book of Knowledge to a place on more than a million U.S. bookshelves. His new bosses will allow him to get out from under the cultural load. Said Cerf bluntly: “We’re in it for the money.”

The paper shortage made these schemes mere schemes. Random House is so pinched for paper that it did not even have enough to publish Bennett Cerf’s own book of anecdotes, Try and Stop Me. So, last week, Competitor S. &. S. printed it for him.

*Publisher de Graff was left the money with which he helped start Pocket Books by his great-uncle, Robert Fair, onetime business partner of Marshall Field’s grandfather.