A NEW WORLD OF BOOKS

Selling Books

As the mass market for books continued to grow in the second decade of the twentieth century, old-fashioned publishers lamented that the quality of the writing and the paper on which it was printed were both declining. Literary merit certainly brought some books to light, but salability became the paramount concern for the modernizing publishing business. To fill an established marketing niche, publishers went to established writers with plans and formulas for projected books rather than waiting to choose among completed manuscripts. The biggest problem facing the industry was distribution. Even the biggest houses employed no more than four salesmen, with territories such as all the major cities east of the Mississippi, or the entire South, or, in one busy fellow's case, New England, part of the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. In 1914 there were 3,501 bookstores in the country to call on, statistically one for every twenty-eight thousand people, but these were concentrated in cities and large towns. The rural population was woefully underserved. Before World War I, 90 percent of all books were sold by subscription salesmen, who traveled door to door, with the rest sold by direct mail.

The Next Generation

While in 1911 the older generation of publishers began a Publishers' Lunch Club that met on the first Thursday of each month, a new generation of publishing entrepreneurs was blazing new trails in the business. B. W. Huebsch, Alfred A. Knopf, and Albert and Charles Boni were all learning the trade in other houses or establishing their own firms. With the money that his father sent Albert to pay for Harvard Law School, the Bonis opened Washington Square Bookshop on MacDougal Street in 1912 and were at the center of bohemian life in Greenwich Village. They cut an opening into the Liberal Club next door and made a big impression on the publishing industry with their Little Leather Library, thirty titles with excerpts from the classics bound in imitation leather, which sold by mail order for $2.98 for a complete set of all thirty volumes. Woolworth's sold a million sets in a single year. In the spring of 1917 they incorporated a new firm in partnership with Horace Liveright and introduced the Modern Library of the World's Best Classics, later shortened to the Modern Library. The first eighteen titles were reprints, followed by original works by Leon Trotsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, plays by August Strindberg, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), by Oscar Wilde.

War Books

Boni and Liveright attracted the attention of military intelligence officers during the war for their publication of pacifist and antiwar authors. Several of its titles were suppressed. Other publishers showed restraint or rushed to profit from public interest in the war. In 1913 Scribners published a prescient work, The Last Shoty by Frederick Palmer, which correctly predicted the sudden beginning of the war the following year, the battle lines, the broken treaties, and the importance of big guns in changing the style of warfare. When the war began, it became a runaway best-seller, the only war book to sell well before U.S. entry in 1917. Scribners published war-related books by Richard Harding Davis and the unlikely correspondents Edith Wharton and Mary Roberts Rinehart but preferred to leave the exploitation of the war to others. Houghton Mifflin, the ultraconservative Boston-based house, published more than one hundred war-related books between 1914 and 1919.