Critics may know what readers should read, but it is the booksellers who are sure they know what readers want. Last December, glooming over low fiction sales, Retail Bookseller bluntly expressed a credo of the trade: "The truth is that the public really doesn't want books worth buying so much as books that everybody is talking about ... a book like Forever Amber, a book that the righteous and the literary will deplore . . ."
Four months later, as though in answer to this prayer, came Kathleen Winsor's potboiler about an amoral woman, Star Money. The critics deplored it, all right, but even with that advantage Star Money failed to give the book business a shot in the arm. By July, Bookseller had decided that "perhaps the general public is weary of literature"; and in the August doldrums it came to the irate conclusion that "we [U.S. readers] are too lazy to think for ourselves."
The year 1950 had no old-fashioned runaway bestseller, and Publishers' Row was ready with explanations: television, public apathy, the Korean war, or just one of those off years. But the public was not as book-weary as it looked. It bought close to 200 million paper-backed reprints, paying $50 million for them. In a year when a new regular-priced novel could be a leading bestseller with less than 75,000 copies, many of the reprints were doing five times as well—and with books often considerably more worth reading. Among the popular books in the reprint market were George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Even The Iliad and The Odyssey sold about 100,000 copies apiece this year. Perhaps the weary, lazy public just wanted good books at a low price.
The trade found that, even in a world heaving with troubles, books promising solace for the soul or a cure for the demoralized were not as surefire as they have been in other years. One book, Mr. Jones, Meet the Master, claimed to do neither but pointed a way toward both. Published in 1949, after its author's death, this volume of sincere, plain-spoken sermons and prayers by Senate Chaplain
Peter Marshall became a steady bestseller. Books with such titles as The Art of Real Happiness did well but set no records.
One of last year's solid successes in the know-thyself field, The Mature Mind, picked up steam in 1950 and remained a bestseller all year. It gave way, finally, to Dianetics, a gelatinous porridge of poor man's psychoanalysis which was originally dished out, appropriately enough, in Astounding Science Fiction. Equally astounding, and to many critics equally fictitious, was Immanuel Velikovsky's pseudo-scientific Worlds in Collision, an explanation of mythological and Old Testament miracles that turned academic scientists from coast to coast purple with wrath. It made bestseller lists along with Gayelord Hauser's irresistible promise, Look Younger, Live Longer (by eating vegetables, yogurt, etc.).
FICTION