BOOKS
Americans in mid-20th century were not big book readers, at least not compared to Europeans. Only about one in four adults at this time in the US were high school graduates but this had risen sharply among the younger generations. New York had more book readers than other places in America, but many New Yorkers seldom if ever read books and few had more than a handful of books in their home. Magazines and newspapers, both of which frequently serialized books, were often the primary source of reading material and libraries had long wait lists for bestsellers while commercial rental libraries like Womrath's also did a sizable business as did the city's many used book stores. By 1946 paperbacks, which only became widely available in 1939, were outselling hardcovers by a long shot.
Like all leisure time activities and diversions, book reading had increased significantly during the war years. People had more disposable income during the war than they had had during the Depression but shortages and rationing left them with few consumer goods on which to spend their money. Gas rationing and travel restrictions kept people close to home. As a result, while much of this excess cash was going into savings accounts and war bonds, New Yorkers also were going to the movies, theater, nightclubs and restaurants and buying books in record numbers. Like all businesses that had profited from this wartime boom, book publishers and sellers in 1946 wondered what the postwar years would bring. Would the boom continue, level off or crash? The optimists hoped the uptick in reading was due largely to the steady growth in education during the last four decades rather than only to the wartime situation. MORE ON WARTIME READING HABITS
Buying new hardcover books was a habit mostly among the relatively affluent. Bookstores were generally located in upscale neighborhoods. In 1946 Fifth Avenue was home to the posh book emporium Brentano’s. Publishers like Scribner, Dutton and Putnam also had retail showcases on Fifth that sold their books as well as those of their competitors. Doubleday had a flagship store on the Avenue as well as several branches elsewhere in the city. Doubleday also ran book clubs including the Literary Guild. Womrath’s had 31 outlets in the city, including some in the outer boroughs, and eight stores in the suburbs. Womrath’s rented books by the day but also sold current titles as well as their discounted used inventory. Most of the large city department stores sold books, including lower priced reprints of former bestsellers as well as the latest titles. Independent bookstores were not a major factor at this time, dealing mostly in backlist titles, used books and more literary new titles. Fourth Avenue near Union Square was lined with used book stores with piles of books outside their doors and many more crammed into narrow aisles in dusty warrens. Their proprietors were notoriously surly, often treating customers like trespassers. MORE ON NEW YORK BOOKSTORES.
Because of paper rationing, book clubs had been unable to exploit the full benefits of the wartime readership boom but in the war’s immediate aftermath Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild had launched aggressive campaigns to sign up new members. Both had surged to the million member mark by the middle of 1946. Meanwhile more than a dozen smaller book clubs started up catering to various reader niches. MORE ON BOOK CLUBS OF 1946.
According to most bestseller lists, the top selling hardcover fiction titles this week were Arch of Triumph, Erich Maria Remarque's melodramatic tale of a doomed love affair between two undocumented refugees in Paris in the days just before the outbreak of the war, and Daphne du Maurier's The King's General, the tale of a doomed love affair between a headstrong young woman confined to a wheelchair and a dashing, cruel cavalier during the English Civil War. The first had been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and the second a Literary Guild selection. Other titles selling well this week were Brideshead Revisited and The Fountainhead. Theodore Dreiser had a posthumous hit with The Bulwark, his first novel in 20 years, doing particularly well in New York City. THE WEEK'S BEST SELLING FICTION HERE.
The two bestselling non-fiction titles of the week were The Egg and I, a humorous memoir of a would-be egg farmer, and The Anatomy of Peace, a plea for world federalism to avoid another world war. Other bestselling nonfiction addressed the dangers of the nuclear age but it was memoirs and biographies that dominated the list. Two Pulitzer Prize winners were bestsellers this week, The Autobiography of William Allen White, a posthumous account of the life of the noted Kansas newspaper editor, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson, which equated Jacksonian democracy with the New Deal. Peace of Mind, a self-help book by a rabbi, was near the beginning of a very long run on the bestseller lists. Community organizer Saul Alinsky, whose tactics for grassroots activism are still widely followed, was represented on the lists as well. MORE ON NON-FICTION BEST SELLERS.
The New York Times Book Review and the Sunday Herald Tribune Book Review were the most comprehensive publications geared to the general public that covered new books. Most of the city’s other newspapers and many periodicals also reviewed books selectively. The Saturday Review of Books specialized in book reviews and literary news. Among the books receiving review attention this week were Eudora Welty's debut novel, Delta Wedding, and Albert Camus' The Stranger, one of the first works to introduce American readers to the existentialist wave that had swept over Paris during the war years. Breaking the Building Blockade, which addressed the severe postwar housing shortage, was one of the most significant non-fiction books being reviewed this week. Two books on the Soviet Union drew attention from The Sunday Times Book Review. Serious readers often turned to Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker for guidance, but this week the lead review was by A.J. Liebling, writing on Ralph Ingersoll's controversial assessment of the war, Top Secret. Orville Prescott reviewed I Chose Freedom, a memoir by a prominent Soviet defector, that laid bare the brutality of Stalin's regime in The Times. The American Far Left vigorously attacked the book and its author. MORE ON THIS WEEK'S BOOK REVIEWS
Critics were disappointed that not only had no new major talents emerged yet but the prewar literary heavyweights such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck had published no new books. But the trade journal Publishers Weekly noted that familiar names like James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell, Damon Runyon, John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, Somerset Maugham, Howard Fast, Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair and William Saroyan had books coming out shortly. UPCOMING BOOKS BY FAMOUS AUTHORS HERE.
When sales of bestsellers tapered off, they would reappear a couple of years later in low-priced, hardcover reprints. At this time publishers kept the reprint rights for these relatively recent titles from the paperback houses who had to settle for older titles, classics and genre works. In later years this policy would change and the hardcover reprint business would fade away. The bestselling titles mostly had movie tie-ins or were by writers with current bestsellers. BEST-SELLING REPRINTS HERE.
Paperback books had only begun populating newsstands, drug stores and chain stores in 1939 but by 1946 were ubiquitous and paperback sales were now several times greater than hardcover sales. During the war special edition paperbacks were distributed free to servicemen, familiarizing millions, many of whom were not regular readers, to this innovation. By 1946, some of the large bookstores also carried paperbacks, usually relegating them to the back of the store or the basement. The pioneer paperback publishers, Penguin and Pocket Books, initially had targeted traditional readers with titles that appealed to middlebrow tastes but the newcomers like Dell, Bantam, Avon and Popular Library, some of which were rooted in the pulp magazine industry, went after a new audience. As a result, genre fiction, particularly crime and mystery, and pulp titles popped up increasingly on the publishing lists along with bestsellers of previous decades. Competition for limited shelf space was intense. Paperback covers became more colorful, even lurid, to attract readers. Even the Little Women acquired heaving bosoms on paperback book covers. MORE ABOUT PAPERBACK PUBLISHERS AND THE TITLES THEY RELEASED IN 1946 HERE.
By the middle of the year it appeared that the postwar boom in book buying had come to an end. Major publishers reported their sales in the first half of 1946 down substantially even as paradoxically major New York bookstores reported increased sales. Book club memberships had leveled off. Paperback publishers reported an increase in returns from vendors. Consumer goods were slowly making their way to the market and less discretionary income was being spent on diversions. Publishers and bookstores hoped that spending on books would level off somewhere between the immediate prewar years and the boom year figures. MORE ON THE POSTWAR PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE HERE.