Mr. Field & the Word Business

Walking through Manhattan’s Grand Central Station several months ago, platinum-haired Publisher Marshall Field paused in a drugstore, riffled through a 25¢ paperbound book. It was love at first sight. The book’s format, price and easy proximity to masses of people pleased Publisher Field, just as it had pleased millions of other Americans. Enamored as he now is of the word business (the Chicago Sun, New York City’s PM, Cincinnati’s radio station WSAI). Publisher Field decided to invade book publishing.

Last week that business was a bedlam of deals, counterdeals and rumors. Over all the excitement hung the invasion threat of Marshall Field’s department-store millions. He had stumbled on what book men have pondered for a decade: that by publishing’s relatively modest standards, there is big money in cheap, mass-distributed books.

Boom in Books. The U.S. book business is booming as never before. In spite of paper rationing, 250 million books were produced last year. Homebound civilians have thumbed books up toward the entertainment class of movies, radio and magazines. The Army & Navy are stimulating a book-reading habit by distributing 3½ million pocket-size books* a month to the armed services.

Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., oldest U.S. reprint firm (1898), has quietly piled up profits for years with 50¢ to $1.98 reprint editions. In 1938 Doubleday, Doran & Co.’s various reprint subsidiaries (Star Dollar, Blue Ribbon, Triangle, etc.), not content with slow distribution through the nation’s 1,000-odd wholesale booksellers, branched out through Woolworth and other chain stores, aiming at some 7,500 distributors. Pocket Books Inc. (25¢) with 70,000 outlets through news dealers, last week sold its 100,000,000th Pocket Book, while paying out its first $1,000,000 in royalties. Simon & Schuster Inc. made publishing history one year ago by printing, simultaneously, two versions of Wendell Willkie’s One World. The $1 “cigar store” version (1,000,000) outsold the $2 version 4-to-1. This year the $1 edition of Bob Hope’s I Never Left Home outsold the $2 book 6-to-1.

Pocket-size books save on paper, composition, binding (many are glued, or “perfect bound” like telephone books, rather than stitched). But the big difference comes in spreading out the production cost. A $2.50 book (normal printing: 10,000) may cost 40¢ to produce, a 25¢ book (normal printing: 100,000) 10¢.

The Battle Begins. As a preliminary move, Marshall Field hired bookwise Freeman Lewis away from Doubleday, Doran as a “consultant.” After long, secret conferences with Pocket Books and with Simon & Schuster (whose officials own 49% of Pocket Books), Publisher Field turned a covetous eye toward Grosset & Dunlap. He was just too late.

Last week Random House’s bouncy President Bennett Cerf, editor of the Modern Library, suddenly announced that Grosset & Dunlap had been acquired by a three-firm combination: Random House, Book-of-the-Month Club (575,000 membership) and staid old Harper & Bros. The reprint house, purred Mr. Cerf, with no bow to Mr. Field, would remain in experienced book-publishing hands, would therefore retain its “high standards and traditions.” Smart Publisher Cerf looked frankly pleased at having beaten Mr. Field to a buy, chatted happily about “enormous postwar markets,” predicted that books would soon be “a flounder business rather than a caviar market.”

The trade continued to buzz; lines were forming for a battle of the Titans. Huge, sales-minded Doubleday, Doran, with its stable of reprint subsidiaries, appeared unruffled by all the excitement; Bennett Cerf’s new combine watched Publisher Field narrowly. Mr. Field, admitting that “it will be entirely new to me [but] very interesting,” continued to confer determinedly with an attentive Simon & Schuster. By week’s end Wall Street money, betting on a first-class postwar fight, was busily calling on all the parties concerned, hoping to invest in a winner.

* Overseas and in U.S. hospitals. In addition, the Navy maintains over 5,000 libraries on ships and shore bases, and the Army 1,500 libraries stocked with 15,000,000 volumes.