This year American literature marked time: U.S. authors produced little that will be read with excitement in 1961. But for the general reader, alive to his time and looking for books that reflect it, 1951 was a good year. Even the publishers cast off their long faces, and began to smile. Their break-even point on a new novel stood at around 7,000 to 10,000 copies—anything below that point usually meant red ink. But thanks to the lusty sales of nonfiction, and the royalties from reprints and other sidelines, most publishers did better than in 1950. Most of them also stopped fretting about television, and began to live with it. During the year, they published more than 11,000 titles, about 2,500 of them reprints, an average of more than 30 a day. The output was a shade below the alltime record of 1940 (11,328)—and far less than the 17,500 which the British brought out this year under their lower costs—but it reflected, nonetheless, the most active U.S. publishing year in a decade.
Two of the best books of the year found the large public they deserved. As 1951 drew to a close, Rachel Carson's triumph of popular science, The Sea Around Us, headed the nonfiction bestsellers, and Herman Wouk's clear-eyed novel about the war at sea, The Caine Mutiny, topped the fiction list. But the biggest single phenomenon was the success of the paperbound reprints. With about 100,000 drugstores, newsstands and bookstores displaying them, the paper-bounds sold the staggering total of 231 million copies—or about two for every man, woman & child in the U.S. over the age of ten. Reprints of serious novels did better than ever in this two-bit market; even the Dialogues of Plato sold nearly 150,000"copies. And next year, say the reprint men, they should do considerably better. For one thing, they are dickering for a lot more rack space in the nation's supermarkets.
FICTION
Wherever publishers and editors gathered, the question of the year was: What is going to happen to the novelists? One worried answer was that they would soon stop writing novels and take to better-paid magazine stories, or quit fiction entirely. For the fact was that many a good novel, even when kindly reviewed, was far from being a moneymaker. Apart from book-club distribution, only about three or four novels sold more than 100,000 copies. Many young writers seemed to be aiming for the popular market and making a botch of it, or trying to build novels out of private despairs and ending by being precious bores. For the first time since it was set up in 1922, the Harper Prize ($10,000, richest in the U.S.) was not awarded. Of the 599 manuscripts considered, only two were judged even worth publishing.