Cheaper by the Dozen

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.

Where the clubs get touchy is in the matter of quality. Both the Guild and B-o-M started with brave promises. Early in the game, B-o-M Founder Harry Scherman offered readers "the outstanding book published each month"; in practice, this led to the selection of such books as Rol-vaag's Giants in the Earth, Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. The club's sights have come down a bit. A B-o-M choice is now just a book that the club's five judges* happen to "like very much, for any reason at all." Among books so chosen: The Battle h the Payoff, by Ralph Ingersoll; Inside U.S.A., by John Gunther. But the method, or lack of one, has also given B-o-M customers The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

The Literary Guild has gone through a greater shift. "Literature!--Not Just Books" was the cry in the first number of the Guild's booklet Wings, under Editor in Chief Carl Van Doren. For a while, the Guild tried to find books that "will be permanently important." It chose the work of such writers as Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, Novelists Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Historian Claude Bowers. When Publisher Nelson Doubleday took over in 1934, all that changed. Guild Judge Burton Rascoe gave Guild members ten Doubleday books out of 13 in 1935. That vulnerable policy changed too; nowadays, very few Doubleday books get the Guild nod (two in 1950, none in 1951). But the shining literary promise of the founders has been altered in a private definition of great candor: "A literary standard as high as can be maintained in a mass operation." Most comfortably at home within this formula are a whole succession of bosom-and-bustle historical novels, though the Guild now & then extends its hospitality to such surprised strangers as Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Robert Penn Warren (World Enough and Time).

Matter of Merchandise. Says one bookclub editor who makes no bones about the nature of his business: "We're not missionaries, we're merchandisers." So good are the clubs at merchandising that each successful one has developed its own brand and customers, seldom seriously overlaps any other. By far the best merchandise over the years has come from BoM.

After a quick weed-out by a staff of professional readers, B-o-M's five judges ponder from twelve to 20 manuscripts a month (of the 275 or so to be published). Pollster George Gallup is a member of B-o-M's board of directors nowadays, conducts surveys after the books have been sent out to see "how the members liked them." But Founder Scherman sternly warns against the easy assumption that Dr. Gallup ("He knows more about advertising than any man in the U.S.") influences in any way the judges' choice.

On the whole, B-o-M's choices have declined in literary worth since the early days. Poor books by name writers (John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane) have found easy acceptance; pure & simple hammock-reading is as apt to get the judges into a bookish tizzy as a Nobel Prizewinner. But with its "dividends," its alternates and the other cut-rate offerings that turn ordinary booksellers purple with frustration, B-o-M is still a sound bargain and many of its choices are beyond cavil.

The Common Touch. Perhaps no man in literary history has so flatly told people what to read and been so readily obeyed as short, mild John William Richard Beecroft. At 49, a Literary Guild hand since 1929, he is the editor of five Doubleday book clubs, personally makes all the selections for memberships totaling some 1,600,000. Like most club editors, he has a squad of screening readers. Virtually unknown to U.S. book buyers, he is a living, prosperous proof that for book clubs it is the common touch that counts. From even the most modest literary standpoint, his choices have about the same lasting values as the average issue of the average women's magazine, probably do no more harm.

All the remaining book clubs together have about one quarter the membership of the B-o-M and the Doubleday string combined. Their major disadvantage is that they are forced to take what the big ones don't want. The Book Find Club, leaning heavily to left-wing selections, has built a membership of about 75,000 on the unassailable claim that the leavings often include the best books. The Peoples Book Club uses Gallup testings and reader-juries to guide the editor in his choice. Its largely rural, largely female (about 85%) membership is reached solely through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, seems well content with bland, kindly love stories, Taylor Caldwell Gothic and even a Thomas Costain novel, Son of a Hundred Kings, after it had been through the Literary Guild wringer.

On balance, the book clubs have no doubt vastly increased the volume of U.S. reading, but it would be hard to argue that they have raised the quality of the books read. Judging from their commercial success, that shortcoming is not apt to be held against them. Certainly not by the little woman.

* Henry Seidel Canby (chairman), Clifton Fadman, Amy Loveman, John P. Marquand, Christopher Morley.

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