PUBLISHING
(SEE COVER) And now, panel, for the mystery guest. Masks in place? Good. He is salaried. He works for a profit-making organization. He deals in a product. It is smaller than a breadbox. On the side, he is a TV personality, a lecturer, and a writer of sorts. Also a show-biz nut, a pal of stars, a party trooper and a shameless punster. But he cleverly directs all these other activities toward the promotion of his product, the reward for which would fill a large breadbox with something like $375,000 a year.
Actually, there is no mystery here. Bennett Alfred Cerf, 68, is an open book. Board chairman of Random House, he is the nation's best-known book publisher—better known than many of the authors he serves. He is also perpetrator of a syndicated joke column and author of 21 joke and riddle books that have sold more than 5,000,000 copies, and a longtime panelist on that somewhat tiresome but seemingly indestructible TV parlor game, What's My Line? Wherever he goes, autograph hounds bark at his heels. Little ol|i ladies leap out of dark corners to foist "upon him shopping bags stuffed with autobiography. Cerf is the foist man in the world to welcome them (as he would put it). For who knows but that the next dingaling to come along will be the author of a bestseller?
That, after all, is Cerf's line. In all its divisions, Random House, publishes books for adults and books for children, writers living (Capote) and dead (Thu-cydides), textbooks, dictionaries and paperbacks. Its list of authors includes William Faulkner and W. H. Auden,
James Joyce and Richard Condon, John O'Hara and James Michener, Philip Roth, Budd Schulberg, Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren. In 1960, when Cerf acquired the house of Knopf, the names of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Hersey and John Updike joined the parade. Cerf's biggest book of the year is the 2,059-page Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which took a decade and $3,000,000 to put together. Amazingly, for a reference book, it has been on the bestseller list for six weeks, and the first printing of 325,000 has already been sold out. Bigger than a breadbox, too.
The Print Explosion. The success of the Dictionary is indicative of the prosperity—and of the desire for education and information—that has helped transform the relatively fusty little American book business into a major industry. Within Cerf's own professional lifetime, which spans four decades, U.S. book publishing has grown nearly 600%. In just nine years, 1952-61, business increased 150%, and since then has doubled again. This year, alone, Americans will have spent $2.5 billion for 2.2 billion books, from 350 paperback mysteries and $2 third-grade geographies to $200 encyclopaedias.
Part of this print explosion can be accounted for by the country's population growth and the swelling school enrollment. But these factors alone do not explain the phenomenon. Not only are-more people buying books; more people are buying more books. They are stacked in supermarkets, racked in discount houses, packed in drugstores. The market is manic. Retail outlets now number about 120,000, and still they cannot stock the 190,000 titles in hard and soft cover that are currently in print, let alone the 28,000 additional titles that sprout every year.
This tropical growth was