It may be a little late in the history of Western civilization to question the meaning of the word book, but the fact is that many publishers are paying their analysts with profits from the sale of goods that are not books at all. They are, in fact, non-books.
Like "fool," "phony" and "reactionary," the term is arbitrary, part of a category that everyone may populate to suit his own bias. But in general, a book is a contrivance of ink, paper and glue, whose purpose is to instruct, amuse, edify, exalt, infuriate or pander. It may be good or bad, but its author intended it to be good. and wrote it by putting word after word. The nonbook is usually not written at all but assembled with the help of scissors or tape recorder or some other mechanical device. The concern of the nonbook manufacturer is not that his product be good, merely that it be sold. The nonbook is merchandise aimed at the same non-people who are the most frequent targets of the film and TV industries. What they read is new, light, dry, smooth, well-filtered, quick, effortless and contains almost no calories.
Non-books come in several types, most of them easily recognizable:
¶Any collection of condensed novels, such as those issued by Reader's Digest, belonging in this class for the same reason that a beef bouillon cube is a non-cow.
¶All ghostwritten autobiographies and all collections of ghostwritten speeches. The ghost may be an ectoplasmic Boswell, but his ghosthood robs him of the independence necessary to prove it.
¶Books by Pete Martin and Gerold Frank. These autobiographers occupy a comfortable limbo between spook status and live authorship, and get prominent bylines for their as-told-to confessions of the tabloid famous. But preconfessed bunko is nevertheless bunko. And even expert spirit writing makes all autobiographies sound alike.
¶Most books thought up by publishers or moviemakers and farmed out to authors. Irving Wallace's The Chapman Report, old publishing hands insist, was hatched by Victor Weybright of the New American Library and reads like the hack job it is. Rona Jaffe's soap-slick The Best of Everything was written to the specifications of Film Producer Jerry Wald. It is possible to write a non-novel without any lightning from Olympus; Henry Morton Robinson accomplished it this year with Water of Life, a book he thought up all by himself as a cynical imitation of Taylor Caldwell. Author Jaffe, on the other hand, has taken a step forward; her new novel, Away from Home (Simon & Schuster; $4.50), is not non. It is merely bad.
¶Self-help and inspirational works. The inspiration trade, which produces some books that give genuine inspiration as well as some of the most enervating and profitable books known to publishing, purveys non-religion in endless series of similarly named volumes, all of them containing at least one poem by Joyce Kilmer. This curious subindustry reached its perihelion a couple of years ago with Presbyterian Minister Franklin Loehr's The Power of Prayer on Plants.
¶All cute picture and incongruous caption pamphlets of the sort whose vogue began with The Baby and The Frenchman. These look like books—they have pages and a little print—but they are really guest gifts and hospital offerings.