In the lobby of Austin's Hotel Driskill fortnight ago, some 75 agents for U. S. textbook publishers sucked at and crushed out innumerable cigarets, talked in strained voices. They were waiting for the Texas State Board of Education to award contracts worth millions of dollars for 29 books for Texas schoolchildren. Of all the agents, none paced the floor more nervously than those of Manhattan's Harcourt, Brace & Co. and Chicago's Row, Peterson Co. Everyone knew that the fiercest schoolbook contest of the year in Texas was between these two, for the adoption of a seventh-grade history of the U. S.
Largest single purchaser of textbooks in the U. S., Texas buys books for all elementary schoolchildren in the State, spends some $2,000,000 a year. Its "adoption" of a book means it will buy that book exclusively for five years. Of seventh-grade histories, it was estimated, Texas would purchase some $234,000 worth all told.
For this particular prize, two publishers began to prepare a year ago. Harcourt printed a revised edition of its best seventh-grade history. Row, Peterson entered the lists with Building Our Nation. For twelve months Harcourt's young agent, P. K. Burney, a former high-school principal, drove furiously night and day over Texas' vast distances, covered 50,000 miles, wore out one car and bought another. Like the two agents of Row, Peterson, Paul Baker and Raymond Franklin, Agent Burney visited teachers, principals, superintendents and members of the State board to win friends for himself and his book.
When the board met fortnight ago, both books had been approved by a State textbook committee of educators. Harcourt's price was lower ($1.06 to $1.17 bid by Row, Peterson), but the board has leeway to judge quality. While the seven board members deliberated behind closed doors, it was reported that Board President Ghent Sanderford, former Governor James Ferguson's man, favored the Harcourt book, that another member was equally strong for an agent of Row, Peterson, a former local school superintendent who had helped nurse him through three years of tuberculosis.
Thrice the board balloted on seventh-grade history. Then into the lobby where waited some 75 agents strode dark, rawboned President Sanderford and blond State School Superintendent L. A. Woods. Superintendent Woods began to make a speech. "Read us the adoptions," grimly cried the bookmen. Slowly the superintendent read them off. For seventh-grade history pupils: Row, Peterson's Building Our Nation.
Last week it was Texas school officials' turn to be nervous. While some agents went home to rest and others moved on to the next big State adoptions in Oklahoma in December, in Austin the Texas House of Representatives voted additional funds to a House committee which, after finishing the first audit ever made of the State education department, will soon begin an investigation of textbook adoptions.