It was a big book year—according to the adding machines. The grand total of titles published would come to something like 7,500 in 1946, including about 1,500 works of fiction, 300 histories, 400 biographies. The quality of the books, of course, was another matter.
Critics generally kept their hats on, and their praise well-modulated. In the New York Times "outstanding-books-of-the-year" poll of critics, not a single book got the votes of all reviewers. The best that could be said was that 1946 furnished spectacular cash-register successes. Betty MacDonald's cackling (1945) hen epic, The Egg and I, went to some 1,200,000 copies; Peace of Mind, Joshua Loth Liebman's "blue skies" book (the trade name for a consoling self-help handbook) sold over 250,000 copies, largely on its title. A string of novels (see box), most of them with gaudy jackets and tinny texts, sold extravagantly, some of them over 1,000,000 copies apiece.
No one knew exactly to what degree such sales were due to faith, hope and advertising, and to what degree to U.S. book clubs. The clubs' tremendous sales machines, oiled with the prestigious praise of people like Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Christopher Morley, were built to sell literary goods whether they were silk purses or sows' ears. In the marts of trade, if not of letters, 20 or 30 book clubs were in bustling operation, and the top two—Book-of-the-Month and its tawdrier sister, Literary Guild—together claimed nearly 2,250,000 "members," i.e., consistent buyers of wares. Among 1946's newest sales organizations: the Family Reading Club—"will appeal to the finer instincts . . . the sanctity of the home," and The Executive Book Club—"for every businessman . . . lawyer . . . banker."
If You Can't Print, Reprint. The fat figures in 1946's sales ledgers were still below the wartime, all-time highs. Through the year U.S. publishers and booksellers were plagued by strikes and paper shortages. There was little first-rate writing of any kind; it was no accident that anthologies, reprints and new editions of classics were thick on the counter.
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY
Inevitably, the sound of World War II echoed loud through the year's biography and history, though marketwise publishers insisted that readers were sick & tired of the war. In nonfiction, the Civil War was still the favorite battleground of the antiquarians—and the prospective horrors of World War III was the stock in trade of most special pleaders, who now blatantly showed the name of the only potential enemy in sight, a practice not considered good manners at the start of the year. Only a few of 1946's substantial histories were wholly above the battle, among them Joseph Dorfman's two-volume The Economic Mind in American Civilization (1606-1865); Sylvanus G. Morley's The Ancient Maya. In a class by itself was Yale Professor F. S. C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West, a study of international cultures.