Donald Geddes, a former editor at Pocket Books, made the sales pitch of his life in 1943. Badgering a reluctant pediatrician who felt that he lacked the knowledge to attempt a book on babies, Geddes tried a bit of psychological % judo. At 25 cents a copy, he declared, a baby book was bound to sell briskly no matter what it said. So, he concluded, "the book we want doesn't have to be very good."
"That hit the spot," recalls Benjamin Spock, 42 years and 30 million copies later. "The fact that he didn't say, 'We want the best damned book in the world'--I figured, Why not take a try?"
Spock had some reason for diffidence at the time. He was then groping his way toward an understanding of how to nurture infants and small children. But he re-searched so shrewdly, foraging among psychoanalytic concepts and heeding the advice of embattled mothers, that Baby and Child Care turned out to be an instant hit and an enduring classic.
The paperback book costs a bit more now, $4.95. The 40th-anniversary edition has a new title, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, and a co-author, Michael B. Rothenberg, 58, a Seattle pediatrician and child psychiatrist at the University of Washington who has signed on to update the book periodically until the end of this century. Despite four revisions, the core of the book, the psychosocial recommendations to parents, is basically unchanged. Every now and then a child-development expert grumbles that Spock has not kept up. But the author says, with much justice, that he simply got it right the first time around: "I don't mean to sound smug, but I haven't had to swallow any words so far. The book is sensible and sensitive, and it's not very easy to criticize."
With the help of two consultants, Rothenberg rewrote the entire medical- pediatric section of the book, bringing it up-to-date with new findings since the last revision in 1976. One such change: eggs are no longer recommended for infants under nine months of age because the iron in the yolk is poorly absorbed by babies and may interfere with the absorption of iron from other foods. The co-authors added and expanded sections on the role of fathers in childbirth, breast-feeding for working mothers, and child abuse and neglect. Spock, a ban-the-bomb advocate since 1962, included a personal note sternly urging parents to vote for candidates who favor a nuclear freeze.
Still fit and trim at 81, Spock keeps up the acti vist life, lobbying and demonstrating against nuclear weapons. He accepts dozens of speaking engagements a year, three-quarters of them political, and he says he is willing to visit Nicaragua if it would help ease U.S. hostility to the Sandinista regime. He and his second wife, Mary Morgan, 41, spend the winters aboard their boat Carapace in the British Virgin Islands and most of the rest of the year in Maine and Arkansas.