Publishing: The Glottologist's New Edition

Leon Shimkin, a voluble and supremely confident Brooklyn bookkeeper who rose to become a major force in the publishing business, delights in inventing words. One of his favorites is "bookazine," meaning a soft-cover book marketed like a magazine. Putting that word to work, Shimkin and three other men in 1939 founded his Pocket Books, Inc., the world's most voluminous softback-book producer, with an annual sale of $20 million from its 20% slice of the mass paperback market in the U.S. Another Shimkin word is "biblio-therapeutic," meaning books that help people. With such books, notably Dale Carnegie's How to Win...

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