Asked how he was handling the 1944 buying rush, the manager of Scribner's Manhattan bookshop replied (according to Bennett Cerf in Try and Stop Me): "Oh, at 9 o'clock we just open the doors and jump out of the way."
The wartime book boom which began in 1942 burgeoned to new peaks this year. Almost every published book was sold, and many a title would have sold far more copies if paper had been available to print them. Despite competition of movies, magazines and radio, more U.S. citizens were reading more books than...
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