Books: Book Fair

In Manhattan during the past fortnight more than 150 writers of varying prominence mounted the stage of a skyscraper auditorium and talked with characteristic author’s abandon about themselves, their books, literature and each other. In Boston for six days nearly 60 authors followed each other on the platform of an improvised exhibition hall on the top floor of the Boston Herald-Traveler Building. Reason for this heavy concentration of literary talent was that the New York Times was sponsoring its second National Book Fair, the Herald-Traveler its first Boston Book Fair. The Manhattan show, held on the 38th and 39th floors of the International Building in Rockefeller Center, could claim such celebrities as Fannie Hurst, Emil Ludwig and Pearl Buck. The Boston Fair had H. G. Wells as lead-off man, with Robert Frost No. 2.

On the program in Manhattan were 27 novelists, 18 critics, ten poets, 19 journalists and political commentators, ten scientific writers, three authors of travel books, two biographers, four preachers, six publishers, four authors of garden books, one artist, 28 assorted authors and illustrators of children’s books, one humorist, one cabinet member, one university chancellor and one ranee.

The ranee was Sylvia, Lady Brooke, whose title is H. H. Ranee of Sarawak—a mountainous little Borneo state which her husband’s family has ruled for three generations. Because she is writing a book about Sarawak, has published her memoirs, the ranee could qualify as an author among such full-time professionals as Stuart Chase and Frederick Lewis Allen, such part-time writers as Secretary of Agriculture Wallace and Astronomer Harlow Shapley, all of whom attended the Fair. Since no fine horizontal line was drawn to distinguish low from high brow, nor a vertical one to set the boundary between Right and Left, listeners at New York’s Book Fair could hear New Masses Editor Joseph Freeman as well as Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, profane, pugnacious Novelist James Farrell as well as amiable, yea-saying Dr. William Lyon Phelps. So many had listened to them at the end of the first week, despite repeated demonstrations that many were far better writers than talkers, that Fair officials guessed the attendance would top last year’s total of 85,000 paid admissions by 50%.

Besides hearing speeches, visitors could watch a noisy, up-to-date two-color press turning out souvenir copies of a 50-page book on printing by Hendrik Willem van Loon, written especially for the occasion. They could see a model home library, a model bookstore, films on bookmaking, a demonstration of papermaking. a collection of manuscripts, in exhibits prepared by no publishers. They could also see a good part of New York’s publishers on hand, shepherding scores of profit-making writers: tall, gloomy Stanley Rinehart; flashily dressed Alfred Knopf; Viking’s nervous Harold Guinzburg; Simon & Schuster’s Richard Simon; many others. Above all they could see scads of books— old, new, cheap, expensive, packed away on shelves in attractive rooms and laid out on tables in long halls, stacked around a Trojan horse in one exhibit and mounted in a rapid-reading device in another, the whole show suggesting at once an exhibition in a public library, a well-run educational bazaar, the display room of a wholesaler’s convention. Exhibits revealed any number of desperate attempts (see cut, col. 2) to make books as exciting outwardly as they sometimes are inside. Though patrons leave automobile shows wanting to buy new cars, visitors to the Book Fair might understandably come away feeling they had seen so many books they never wanted to see another.

Publishing. With the grim evangelical air that characterizes publishers’ official pronouncements, Harper’s poker-faced Cass Canfield, chairman of the publishers’ committee that cooperated with the Times, stated the Fair’s prime purpose: “To spread more widely the habit of reading books.” He also let out of the bag a cat that squalls constantly in the ears of publishers, authors, booksellers: only one-fifth of one per cent of the U. S. population regularly buys books. Of the U. S. consumer’s dollar, 19¢ goes to the automobile industry, more than one cent is spent in jewelry stores, but bookstores get only one-fifth of a cent, or less than florist shops, which get one-third. Since the upper-income group (people earning more than $5,000) numbers around 500,000, there are far fewer regular bookbuyers than there are well-to-do citizens in the U. S. Patrons of bookstores are thus members of a distinctly limited set that might consider itself exclusive if it were not that so many unsuccessful attempts have been made to increase its membership.

Book publishing is an important U. S. industry. But publishing houses like those represented at the Book Fair are not what make it so. Known as regular trade publishers, and bringing out largely works of fiction, biography, travel, history, all of them together account for only 20% of U. S. books. Theirs are the books that are reviewed, sold through bookstores, discussed by the general public, get on bestseller lists when they are successful. What makes publishing Big Business is its textbooks, Bibles, directories which make up 80% of the industry’s product. Several prominent houses publishing fiction are economically little more than appendages of the vast and mysterious textbook business (TIME, Nov. 1) which accounts for half of all U. S. volumes printed each year.

Publishers. Because they exercise an enormous influence on U. S. taste, despite the facts that their branch of the industry is overshadowed by others, and that their business is hazardous, speculative, parochial, regular trade publishers keep the centre of the publishing stage. Although 855 of them scramble for the $70,000,000 annual sales of regular trade publishing, almost half of each year’s output of new titles comes from only 18 firms. As the Book Fair opened, these 18 could look back on the biggest publishing year since 1929. Last year produced 8,584 new titles —not as many as the biggest pre-Depression total, but an increase of 25% over the year before. October, traditionally the big month of the fall publishing season, saw 1,023 new books published. Macmillan, largest U. S. publisher, also a major producer of textbooks, brought out 562 new titles last year, will have published 650 by the end of 1937. Harper published 230 in 1936, has scheduled 265 for 1937; Farrar & Rinehart, 130 compared with 115. Even the contrary house of Simon & Schuster, which believes in publishing few books, ran true to its reverse form, published 40 in 1936, will publish 35 this year.

Said Critic Lewis Gannett, emerging from the Fair: “Not all the keen wits of all the 110 publishers frantically pursuing manuscripts can discover 10,000 books worth printing in one year. . . .” In bringing out books they know they cannot sell profitably, publishers have likened their dilemma to that of a man shoveling on a dying fire coal that he knows contains a lot of slate. If he stops shoveling, the fire will go out; if he keeps on, the slate may smother it. Only one book in ten sells 20,000 copies, only six novels in ten sell 2,500 copies, and publishers lose money on novels that sell less than 2,500. Consequently when publishers’ lists are growing longer, sure-selling writers have almost as many opportunities to change publishers as they have invitations to literary teas. Publishers accept only one per cent of all manuscripts offered them* (including those of authors under contract), which means they are in the odd predicament of needing new books even while many of those they print remain unsold. As one of the few doing business outside New York’s gossipy, interwoven, competitive publishing circle, Philadelphia’s old-line Publisher James Lippincott was not anxious to have his writers speak at the Book Fair. He was afraid that other publishers would steal them.

Public. Why a highly literate nation buys so few books is a problem that has baffled others besides publishers. In their classic studies of Middletown and Middletown in Transition, the Lynds noted that Muncie had no bookstore, no rental library except the new-book shelf at the public library; that while the circulation of library books doubled during the Depression, new books in general encountered ”creeping apathy.” A possible explanation is that Americans love brightly-colored automobiles, flowers, bright clothing, scandals, fast-moving cinema, more than they like books. But the sale of novels like Gone With the Wind, which has now sold one copy for every hundred U. S. citizens, suggests that Americans will buy books under certain conditions. Another answer is the difficulty most people have in finding a bookstore where they can get the books they want when they want them. Although there are 4,000 U. S. bookstores, only 500 carry full stocks and buy directly from publishers. If all regular bookbuyers were organized into a club, it would be high-hat in the Deep South, slightly less in the Middle West, not exclusive in California, downright common in Boston and a mass organization in New York, where booksellers, publishers, authors, reviewers and readers are concentrated. The aggressive price-cutting department of R. H. Macy’s department store does almost five per cent of the U. S. retail book business, ten per cent of New York’s retail business. Boston’s historic Old Corner Bookshop does about one per cent of the nation’s retail book business and most of Boston’s.

Third great reason for small U. S. book sales is the price of books. If a popular magazine is worth five cents, a novel’s reading matter must be markedly superior to justify paying 50 times as much for it. In England the sensationally successful Penguin Books, started two years ago with a capital of $500 and a small order from Woolworth’s, selling paper-covered books for sixpence, has sold nearly 10,000,000 books. In the U. S. attempts to sell new books for less than $1 have come to grief in the past, and the newest and biggest cheap book venture, Modern Age Books, offering well-printed, well-edited new volumes on labor subjects, politics, economics, novels with a social slant and detective stories at 35¢ to 75¢, is now being watched by old-line publishers to see if it can duplicate Penguin’s success.

*ln turning them down, publishers have made historic mistakes. All Quiet on the Western Front was rejected on the grounds that the public was tired of War books. Stokes thought so little of Beau Geste that it did not copyright the book. The first edition of The Story of Philosophy was 1,500 copies, was only printed after a bookseller promised to take 500 copies. The Story of San Michele was first listed as a travel book and only 500 copies imported from England.