1938: Book Publishing

The year which has just closed will probably go down in the history of American book publishing as the 'Year of the Great Book Club War.' For the knottiest problem that faced both publishing and retail selling branches of the book trade arose early in 1938 from the attempt of certain department stores legitimately to cut book prices.

In August 1937 President Roosevelt signed the Tydings-Miller National Fair Trade Enabling Act. The new law made legal in interstate commerce contracts signed in accordance with the Fair Trade Laws passed by 43 states. These laws permitted the manufacturers of branded merchandise to sign contracts with retailers stipulating minimum resale prices of their products; and all retailers were bound to maintain prices stipulated in any contract.

Price-cutting Wars.

Whatever the merits of price maintenance in other industries, a majority of the book trade considered the Fair Trade laws of great value to publishing and bookselling. Books have normally been sold at uniform prices for the last 35 or 40 years, in America, after unrestricted price-cutting had nearly wrecked the industry at the turn of the century. Other kinds of reading matter, notably newspapers and magazines, are always sold at uniform prices. The experience of European countries, where uniform book prices are the rule, indicates that efficient book distribution is best furthered by the absence of price-cutting. The use of popular books as loss leaders was practiced mainly by a few large department stores in New York. Yet the devastating price wars which flared up occasionally, particularly when 'Gone with the Wind' was widely used as a loss leader by department stores, chain drug stores, and cigar stores, pointed the way to chaos.

In deciding to operate under price maintenance contracts, the publishers made one important exception in favor of book clubs, which were exempt from the price clauses of most contracts. Undoubtedly the publishers intended to protect the two major book clubs, the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club which, with their large number of subscribers, are important book outlets, but which, in effect, sell books at lower prices than bookstores. A book club was loosely defined as an organization whose members agreed in writing to purchase at least 4 monthly selections a year. The definition left a hole wide open for the price-cutting department stores.

The fun started in March 1938, when R. H. Macy & Co. ran large ads inviting the reading public to join 'Macy's Red Star Book Club' and thereby receive a premium of 25 per cent of the retail price of each book 'selected' by each member from a list of some 2,500 titles (including the currently popular, price-protected books). When the member had bought 4 books, he could apply his accumulated premiums toward the purchase of any book in stock. The store thus adhered to the publishers' definition of a book club and violated no contracts, but at the same time cut under competing bookstores. In New York, Bloomingdale's and Gimbel's countered with their own book clubs, raising the premium rate to 30 per cent, which Macy's met the following week. Department stores in Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities followed suit, and there were rumors of new store book clubs every day.

The bookstores raised energetic protests. The publishers were in an uncomfortable position. They wished to cooperate with the two major established clubs, important to them and to their authors, and yet were anxious to protect the equally important retail booksellers. A solution was shortly found in revised contracts which made no exceptions in favor of book clubs. The publishers simply did not protect the prices of books selected for distribution by the established clubs. This method left comparatively few titles unprotected, did not interfere with the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, but made it virtually impossible for department store clubs to operate without violating contracts. In fact, most of the store clubs quietly folded up. But at the end of the year there were rumors throughout the trade which gave rise to the suspicion that the last word has not yet been spoken on Fair Trade contracts.

Low-priced Books.

In other respects 1938 was not a very eventful year in book publishing, though there were interesting attempts to find new markets for inexpensive books. The established reprint lines flourished. Triangle Books was started as a series of fiction reprints at 39 cents. Modern Age Books continued on a reduced scale its efforts to sell new books of social importance bound in paper and priced at less than a dollar. The coming year will see still further experiments in the low priced book field.

Book Output and Sales.

The year's output of books was little changed. As in 1937, American publishers brought out, roughly, 10,000 books. Of these about half were textbooks, technical and other special titles. The rest were 'trade books' (fiction, biography, travel, etc.). Between 250 and 300 publishers issued 5 or more titles; but about 85 firms publishing 25 or more were responsible for most of the new publications.

When it came to selling these new books, the trend of business in publishing followed what appears to have been the tendency of business in general. The spring publishing season, which begins late in January, got off to a good start, with general optimism in the trade. Several titles — in fiction, A. J. Cronin's 'The Citadel,' Kenneth Roberts's 'Northwest Passage,' and Louis Bromfield's 'The Rains Came'; in non-fiction, 'Madame Curie,' 'How to Win Friends,' Van Loon's 'The Arts,' and others — carried over from the preceding season and were to keep cash registers ringing for months. Soon Lin Yutang's 'The Importance of Living' began to sell; and two novels, Sinclair Lewis's 'Prodigal Parents' and Pearl S. Buck's 'This Proud Heart,' were successful despite unenthusiastic reviews by New York critics. (Pearl Buck, it will be remembered, was awarded in November the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.)

Sales of books started falling off in March, however, and continued to drop during April and May; the seriousness of the slump may be gauged from the fact that one of New York's largest bookstores, according to reliable reports, asked the publishers to take back half of all books ordered in January.

The summer months saw some improvement in business, due partially to the success of a number of books published during the late spring and summer, including Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's 'The Yearling'; Howard Spring's 'My Son, My Son!' Laura Krey's 'And Tell of Time'; Margaret Armstrong's 'Fanny Kemble'; Arthur Hertzler's 'The Horse and Buggy Doctor'; and Margaret Halsey's 'With Malice toward Some,' which by December looked like the top best-seller of the year, with over 400,000 copies printed.

By September there was a noticeable upturn, and sales of books rose very considerably during the remainder of the fall. Most of the best-sellers mentioned above continued to do well, and new ones came into the lists. Daphne Du Maurier's 'Rebecca' came from England and immediately was extremely popular. Rachel Field's 'All This and Heaven, Too' got off to a very rapid start, requiring printings of 100,000 copies within one week after publication. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 'Listen! the Wind' also began to sell swiftly, and immediately went near the top of the best-seller lists.

Statistics.

For a number of reasons exact statistics are well-nigh unobtainable for the publishing business as a whole. Nobody knows, for example, how many books were sold during 1938, or any other year; and few would be rash enough to guess. But the sales manager of one of the largest publishing houses in the country reported early in December that his firm was having its best fall season in several years. Sales for November 1938, were 58 per cent ahead of sales for November 1937. Another sales manager estimated that the volume of his firm's business for the first 9 months of 1938 was 30 per cent ahead of the volume for the same period of 1937; and an even higher percentage was expected for the last quarter. The owner of an important bookstore in the Middle West reported that his business for September, October, and November was somewhat better than for the previous year, and December promised a decided gain, with his business for the whole year about 20 per cent ahead of 1937. It must be borne in mind that about one fifth of all books sold during the year are normally sold in December. The figures given above may not be entirely typical (at least one important publisher's picture of the fall business would not look pretty in print), but they probably give a reasonably accurate notion of the state of publishing as a whole.

Best Sellers.

There were no single books published during 1938 which achieved the large sales of 'Gone with the Wind' or 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' but the book trade usually considers the situation more healthy when sales are spread over a number of books. 'Gone with the Wind,' by the way, was issued in an inexpensive edition and within a few weeks had sold in the neighborhood of 400,000 copies; its total sale in all editions has reached more than 1,788,000 copies. In view of the troubled political situation of the world, it is surprising that more books on economics, politics, and international affairs do not sell in large quantities. Some few achieved considerable, though not startling, sales during 1938, among them Edgar Snow's 'Red Star over China,' Ferdinand Lundberg's 'America's 60 Families,' Thurman W. Arnold's 'The Folklore of Capitalism,' and Eugene Lyons's anti-Soviet book, 'Assignment in Utopia.' Social considerations probably contributed, too, to the success of Phyllis Bottome's anti-Nazi novel, 'The Mortal Storm.'