(2 of 3)
Industry. What happened in Texas was a normal incident illustrating the operations of a high-pressure, highly personalized, important but little-known U. S. industry. Whereas it is an unusual fiction book that sells 100,000 copies, textbook publishers do not count a book a smash hit unless it sells a million. The famed Mc-Guffey Readers are estimated to have sold 134,000,000. No modern book approaches this, but the Elson Readers have climbed to some 50,000,000 copies since 1910, are still going strong.
Total sales of textbooks in the U. S. last year were about $50,000,000. Less than a score of the nearly 100 companies publishing textbooks handle most of the business. The big four are Ginn & Co. (Atwood's Geographies, Muzzey's Histories), reputedly the biggest, upon whose world-wide offices the sun never sets; American Book Co. (McGuffey's Readers), said to have controlled 90% of the textbook business in the late igth Century; Scott. Foresman & Co. (the Elson Readers), noted for its scholarly salesmen, and the Macmillan Co., leaders in the college field. Each of these companies is believed to sell between $4,000,000 and $7,000,000 worth of texts a year.
Who Writes Them? Textbook authorship is not an independent profession. Most of the writers are teachers and superintendents, who turn out books in their spare time, get 5 to 8% in royalties, supplement their incomes greatly by this means if they are lucky (one book in four is a hit). Often superintendents and supervisors capitalize their influence by writing textbooks, with the result that their books monopolize the local market. A few cities forbid their educators to collect royalties on books sold in their own school systems.
Who Buys Them? About 65% of U. S. public school children get free textbooks. Twenty-three States require, 22 authorize schools to furnish them free. One-half the States buy them by the Texas State adoption method, but on the basis of school population, three-quarters of the textbook market is "open territory," where school boards offer teachers a choice from an approved list in each subject. This system reduces the opportunities for favoritism or graft, into which a few tepid legislative investigations have been made.* Textbook publishers are suspicious but reticent, refuse even to make public sales figures. But American Book Co.'s blunt, dynamic president. William T. H. Howe, a raconteur and scholar, insists the business is much cleaner today than it once was.
Two States, California and Kansas, print their own textbooks. But in California a political battle over State printing has raged for years. The State printer claims to have saved California taxpayers $360,000 on textbooks in the past two years; publishers declare California textbooks are inferior.