Nineteen forty-three was the most remarkable in the 150-year-old history of U.S. publishing. It was the year when U.S. readers:
>Bought 80,000,000 novels, biographies, and books about war and politics, 70,000,000 textbooks, 40,000,000 children's books, 45,000,000 technical books, 15,000,000 Bibles and religious books—a total estimated at between 250,000,000 and 350,000,000, and from 20% to 30% more than in 1942.
>Swamped the small, clannish, secretive book industry, with its 274 firms and 4,000 highly organized, well-informed employes. Said Random House's President Bennett Cerf: "It's unbelievable. It's frightening." Pocket Books, which at 25¢ apiece sold 5,000,000 copies in 1940, 10,000,000 in 1941, 20,000,000 in 1942, sold 38,000,000 in 1943. Even the ponderous university presses reported sales up 20-30%; in one month (October), sales of the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia jumped 1,500%.
For 1943 seemed to mark the second year of an epoch that sober, responsible publishers and all the carriers and custodians of U.S. culture had hoped for all their lives: a time when book-reading and book-buying reached outside the narrow quarters of the intellectuals and became the business of the whole vast literate population of the U.S.
Big Best-Sellers. No. 1 publishing success of the year was a political book—Wendell Willkie's One World ($1). The Republican candidate's record of his trip around the world was expected to sell 150,000 copies, actually sold 1,530,000 (total sales of Gone With the Wind 3,000,000).
A runner-up (550,000 copies) was another publishing surprise, Under Cover ($3.50), in which U.S. Journalist John Roy Carlson recounted his experiences through the four years he worked as a one-man, self-appointed secret agent, lived with the thugs, shysters, crackpots and brazenly scheming native U.S. fascists.
The War Books. The year was also pre-eminently the year of war books. Some of the best-sellers were written by soldiers. Sample: God Is My Co-Pilot, by Robert L. Scott Jr. ($2.50). Many were written by newspapermen—e.g., Guadalcanal Diary ($2.50), by Correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who was wounded last month in Italy. Author Tregaskis, a Harvard-educated newspaperman who was 25 at the time of Pearl Harbor, reported the hour-by-hour, day-by-day life in the Pacific Islands and the Battle of the Tenaru River—a life of jungle and Indian warfare, machine guns, snipers, accidents, wounds and Japanese tracer bullets making bright red networks of visible death overhead.
Also outstanding among war books were W. L. White's report on the crew of a doomed Flying Fortress, Queens Die Proudly ($2.50); The Battle Is the Pay-Off ($2), by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, ex-editor of New York City's leftist PM; Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo ($2), Captain Ted Lawson's report (written by Journalist Bob Considine) on the Doolittle raid; Eve Curie's North African Journey Among Warriors ($3.50); Commando Lieut. Colonel Robert Henrique's The Voice of the Trumpet ($2); Ira Wolfert's Torpedo 8 ($2) and Battle for the Solomons ($2); John Hersey's Into the Valley ($2); Jack Belden's Retreat With Stilwell ($3); Ernie Pyle's Here Is Your War ($3); Hilary St. George Saunders' Combined Operations; the Official Story of the Commandos ($2).