Books: Valuable Property

Owing somewhere around $170,000, the ten-year-old publishing house of Covici-Friede last week was taken over by its printers, J. J. Little & Ives, who alone were in for a reported $103,000. Main asset of interest to creditors was Novelist John Steinbeck, ex-laborer and reporter whose tender tale of proletarian brutality, Of Mice and Men, had netted Covici-Friede about $35,000. How much Steinbeck was considered to be worth by publishers was disclosed last week when his contract was sold for $15,000 to Viking Press, which in addition gave Publisher Pascal Covici a job. (Partner Donald Friede withdrew three years ago.)

Simultaneously with closing of the Steinbeck deal came Viking’s rosy announcement that advance orders for Steinbeck’s new volume of short stories, The Long Valley, to be published September 19, had already reached the 8,000 mark. Hard at work on a new novel at his bungalow in Los Gatos, Calif., Novelist Steinbeck meanwhile awaited a check for $6,000 covering back royalties. This will bring his total earnings (Of Mice and Men accounting for the bulk of them) to around $50,000. In another 17 years, when he is 53, he figures he will have saved enough to give him an income of $35 a week. That will be enough, says he.