Publishing: A Cerfit of Riches

(2 of 10)

stimulated by the success of mail-order merchandising and the paperback revolution. Even today, perhaps only 2% of the population ever sets foot in a conventional bookstore—and there are only about 1,500 of those. But the U.S. letter-carrier has become the middleman in an enterprise that accounts today for about 15% of the book volume. All told, mail-order houses and book clubs, such as TIME-LIFE Books and the Reader's Digest Book Club, deliver $181 million worth of volumes to the buyers' doors every year. The market has bred a host of specialty clubs for teenagers, preteens, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, teachers, civil engineers, gamblers, photographers, gardeners, and salesmen.

Paperbacks, too, are blitzing the populace. They are spinning off the presses at the rate of a million a day, from Spock (18,000,000 total sales) to Erie Stanley Gardner (over 150,000,000).

As if this were not enough to make publishers blush from what the Random House chairman might call a cerfit of riches, the U.S. Government has stepped in to boost business even higher. Over the next five years, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 will provide $500 million to school libraries for the purchase of printed materials and trade books—the term that differentiates general books from texts and reference works.

Translated into human terms, these statistics testify to Americans' widening interests and expanding consciousness. Despite some prophets who consider the printed volume doomed in this age of instant communication, books are not only being read; in many cases they are more powerful weapons than ever. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring awakened the world to the dangers of the improper uses of insecticides and was a work of high literary quality as well. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any..Speed was the spark plug that started major safety reforms in the automobile industry. Particularly among the young, paperbacks are used in a direct, intimate way—passages underlined, pages torn out according to need. That was unheard of a couple of generations ago, when books were still relatively scarce and semi-sacred objects.

Uncertain Domain. The map of the U.S. publishing world is divided into three unequal sectors. The largest consists of text-and reference books—chiefly encyclopaedias—which account for 50% of book sales and most of the industry's profits. Some firms devote themselves largely to this field. Qrqwell-Collier & Macmillan, one of the giants, does an annual business of $142 million. The second sector, where profits are just as reliable, is religious publishing; the Bible steadily sells 30 million copies a year.

Trade books make up the third and most uncertain domain of the publishing landscape. Still, 250-odd firms are now in this field—perhaps because it offers by far the most intellectual excitement, perhaps because it is so easy to enter. Anyone with a manuscript and a few thousand dollars can do it. In 1951, the Witkower Press, a one-man, one-book publishing house in Hartford, Conn., brought out Arthritis and Common Sense, and has since sold over 250,000 copies.

Most trade publishers are of modest size. Grossman Publishers, for instance, tackled the market last year with only 13 titles, five in paperback. New Directions, another Lilliputian publisher, brought out 16. Even an established firm