Publishers and booksellers talk like patrons of literature, but the hard facts of life make them behave like ordinary businessmen. Crowded into a corner, they reluctantly admit that 'first-rate creative writing makes for risky publishing ventures, that to remain solvent they must stay off Parnassus and scurry about the market place. The shrewdest ones kowtow to a composite little woman. The best studies and most educated guesses indicate that she is a high-school graduate of about 35, and that one out of three of her class has been to college. Publishers and booksellers regard her with brooding affection because she buys about three-quarters of all' U.S. trade books, i.e., fiction and general nonfiction.
Nobody courts the little woman so consciously and ardently as the big book clubs. Since the nation's 3,200 booksellers feel that the clubs (with the publishers' help) are weaning her away with cut rates, they have sicked the Federal Trade Commission on to the publishers in an effort to stop book-club bargains (TIME, July 23). But if book-club history proves anything, it proves that the little woman is content to let someone guess what she would enjoy reading and deliver it by parcel post to her door.
The Big Push. By now, few bookmen would deny that the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild and some 50 other clubs have stimulated book reading and book buying. Privately, most booksellers admit that the clubs have often helped their business over the past 25 years (BoM started in 1926, the Guild in 1927). A glance at almost any list of bookstore bestsellers shows that most of them got under way to the accompaniment of book-club ballyhoo and the word-of-mouth created by a book-club choice. And it is a pretty good bet that such nonfiction bestsellers as The Mature Mind and The Lincoln Reader, and such marginal novels as The Mudlark and The Story of Mrs. Murphy, would never have been bookstore successes without initial pushes by BoM.
The clubs have also uncovered a whole new layer of U.S. readers, many of them in towns miles from any bookstore. When the clubs started, it was generally conceded that only about 1,000,000 people in the
U.S. bought any books at all. Today the clubs alone have an estimated membership of about 3,000,000. Furthermore, another 5,000,000 have at some time joined and dropped out, and may still have the bookstore habit.
Matter of Taste. Though club membership is now well below the alltime highs of 1946 (BoM down from nearly 1,000,000 to 550,000, the Guild from 1,250,000 to around 700,000), the big clubs are still the richest plums in the book business. B-o-M sent out more than 7,000,000 books last year, showed a net profit (after taxes) of nearly $1,250,000. The Literary Guild, the Dollar Book Club and a group of other clubs, all owned by Doubleday, do so well that Doubleday can afford to shrug off the charge that most of the books on its own huge publishing list are utterly undistinguished.