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 ever before.
Was it the start of a new cultural era in the U.S.? The prognosis was favorable.
Escape. More than ever, in the stress & strain of war, people were reading to be entertained, to escape from their everyday worries. Reprints, marketed at 25¢ by newsstands and drugstores, remained the prime phenomenon of the boom. Mystery stories bulked steadily larger in the reprint publishers' output. And comic books far outsold the mysteries.
There was plenty of trash in this torrent. But in the good mysteries there was good writing—considerably better than that in most current straight novels. The reading of mysteries and comics was no longer necessarily a sign of low literary taste. Turning away from the turgid, plotless "problem" novels of the 19303, both readers and critics were rediscovering the literary values of good storytelling.
Storytelling was at a premium in straight novels as well as mysteries. It was the story (plus plenty of sex) that sent lush young Kathleen Winsor's lush Restoration romance, Forever Amber, rocketing to the top of best-seller lists despite the author's mediocre craftsmanship.
Information. U.S. readers wanted to be informed as well as entertained. War books continued in strong demand, with such human-interest and eyewitness accounts as Ernie Pyle's Here Is Your War and Brave Men, and Robert Sherrod's Tarawa, in the lead.
Postwar books were popular. Nothing but a wide and deep national interest could account for the extraordinary popularity of Sumner Welles's authoritative but ponderously written treatise on world organization, The Time for Decision, which week after week stayed second only to Bob Hope's I Never Left Home (1,250,000 copies) on the nonfiction best-seller lists and finally topped them.
Merit Rewarded. The Time for Decision was only one of a heartening number of books which combined solid intellectual or literary merit and unusual popularity. Some others:
The World of Washington Irving, by Van Wyck Brooks, tells of a period in American history comparable to the present, when Parson Weems hawked books from his spring wagon and the people were avid for learning. Part of its value is that, in a time when there are not enough new books of quality to satisfy the demand, it directs readers to many excellent, forgotten U.S. writers.
Gettysburg to Appomattox, by Douglas Southall Freeman, is the third & final volume of Lee's Lieutenants. Its portraits of the able, good-natured men who contributed to Lee's greatness are masterly. Its clear, detailed battle accounts read like chapters of good novels.