Publishers advertised heavily in the Book Review. Book contracts often called for a publisher to take out an ad on the week a book was published. If a book garnered critical praise, publishers might follow up with a quote ad. If initial sales were strong, more ads might appear to boost a book to bestseller status.
The following is a selective list of the ads that appeared in this week's issue of the Book Review alongside ads for current bestsellers and books that were reviewed in the issue:
The Book-of-the-Month Club ad took up the back page of the supplement. When they joined, new members would receive a free. three-volume set of KRISTEN LAVRANSDATTER, the historical saga set in 14th-century Norway by Nobel Prize-winner Sigrid Undset. This classic, first published in the 1920s, was considered by many critics then as the best historical fiction ever written. It is still in print.. New members then could start their subscription with their choice among several recent main selections, including Arch of Triumph, Brideshead Revisited, The Autobiography of William Allen White or the April double selection, Man Eaters of Kumaon and The Snake Pit.
FUTURE BEST SELLERS
WAKE OF THE RED WITCH by Garland Roark. This was a first novel for Roark, who became a successful writer of action novels over the next couple of decades. This novel revolved around the search for sunken treasure in the South Seas. As the April selection of the Literary Guild it was virtually a guaranteed bestseller despite a largely negative reception from the critics. John Wayne starred in the film adaptation in 1948. The ad featured quotes from The New York Times calling the book "utterly enjoyable," "larger than life" and "twice as thrilling."
THIS SIDE OF INNOCENCE, also a Literary Guild selection, was the latest potboiler from Taylor Caldwell, a highly popular writer of historical romances for decades. It was about a clever young woman in upstate New York in the decades following the Civil War. It would become one of the biggest sellers of 1946, spending six months on the bestseller list, including nine weeks at number one.
FAMILIAR TITLES
THE FIELDS by Conrad Richter. The ad for this book pointed to the positive reviews of the book from The Book-of-the-Month Club and The Literary Guild newsletters, underlining how important the clubs were to generating sales. This was the second volume of Richter's prize-winning fiction trilogy, Awakening Land, which chronicled an Ohio settlement from pioneer days through the industrial era. Both Orville Prescott and Charles Poore, the two reviewers for The New York Times, included it as one of the top five novels of the year. The film adaptation of Richter’s 1936 novel, Sea of Grass, was about to go before the cameras with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the leads. In print.
THE JOY OF COOKING. This classic from Irma Rombauer had appeared first in 1931 and was already a bestselling staple. It had been through several revisions by 1946. The postwar revision eliminated the section on wartime rationing that had been added in the most recent prior edition.
"They're such charming people. Their letters are friendly and gracious. Their clothes--just right. Their conversation--delightful. Their homes--simple, but perfectly appointed." The secret of their social grace? Why they consult EMILY POST'S ETIQUETTE: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO GOOD MANNERS, of course. Or so said the ad this week. Miss Post's books on etiquette first appeared in 1922 and went through many subsequent revisions. She had a radio show in the 1930s and a syndicated newspaper column. In 1946 she founded the Emily Post Institute for the Study of Gracious Living. A socialite of good pedigree, she began writing after a divorce. Initially her books were intended as a guide for the newly affluent on how to avoid embarrassing faux pas but by 1946 her audience had broadened considerably. (I remember reading the book with awe as child in the Fifties while visiting my grandmother, wondering when she would ever have occasion to address a letter to a bishop or ambassador.)
Brentano's advertised the Memorial Edition of Theodore Dreiser's AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, still considered an American classic. Dreiser had died in December. His posthumously published The Bulwark was on the bestseller list this week.
I CHOSE FREEDOM was by Victor Kravchenko, a former Soviet official in Washington whose defection in 1944 was front page news and earned him the scorn and scathing denunciations of Stalin's loyal knee jerk legion. The Soviet Union had demanded his extradition as a traitor and Stalin's New York minions obediently took to the streets to protest his presence in this country, demanding that he be returned for execution to Father Stalin. Predictably they dismissed all the allegations, since proved largely to be true, that he made against his former masters in this expose. Most non-Communists, particularly on the left, praised the book for documenting the true nature of the Soviet regime. Kravchenko lived in hiding for several years to escape the highly effective Soviet assassination teams that had knocked off previous defectors. Unable to kill him, the Stalinists, those self-proclaimed champions of civil liberties, resorted to character assassination. He died in 1966 of a gunshot wound to his head, officially ruled a suicide, a determination that was questioned by his family and others. A number of defectors died of “suicides,” a favored method of assassination in the world of Communist espionage.
CONFESSIONS OF A EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL was by Franz Schoenberner, who had been the editor of the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus before the Nazi takeover. The book had been released earlier in the month. Schoenberner's magazine, based in Schwabing, the bohemian suburb of Munich, specialized in political cartoons. Schoenberner emigrated to France in 1933 and escaped to the US in 1941, settling in New York. This was the first volume of his three-volume memoirs. The ad played up the literary gossip factor of the book, listing some of the famous names that Schoenberner had known, as well as proclaiming that the book analyzed why the intellectuals of Europe had failed to combat the rise of the Nazis successfully. The Time magazine review indicated that there was actually relatively little gossip in the book but a lot about the chilling effect of the Nazi movement on intellectual life, all told in a witty style. Orville Prescott also took note in The New York Times of the author's conversational, discursive style. Schoenberner, the son of a pastor and a member of Germany’s intellectual elite from birth, wrote that he had seen his own staff grow increasingly hesitant about satirizing the Nazis, whom they initially had gleefully treated with ridicule, as the party's power grew.
THIS HOUSE AGAINST THIS HOUSE was an account of journalist Vincent Sheean's experience covering the rise of Fascism, his wartime stint as an Army officer and his thoughts on the subsequent rise of the US and Russia as the world's two competing superpowers. An installment of a series on foreign relations by Sheean was running this Sunday in This Week, the supplement of the Herald Tribune. His 1935 book, Personal History, had won the first National Book Award for biography and became the basis of the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Foreign Correspondent.” Robert Neville, who reviewed the book for The New York Times Book Review on March 31, wrote that books by foreign correspondents about the war were considered a drug on the market by this point but he hoped this one would be an exception since it was “about the best to come out of this war.” Orville Prescott, on the other hand, reviewing the book for the daily found it “desperately earnest and turgidly muddled.”
Christopher Isherwood's well-regarded movie industry satire PRATER VIOLET was back in print. It was a short. semi-autobiographical novel in which Isherwood is himself a character working with an Austrian director making a movie in pre-war England. Isherwood comes to appreciate the threat of Nazism through the fears of the director. In print. Also at this time, New Directions had reissued Isherwood’s BERLIN STORIES, the basis of the later play “I Am a Camera” and the musical “Cabaret.”
An advance ad for the 911-page MY THREE YEARS WITH EISENHOWER by Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, to be published on April 25, urged the public to place an order now with their favorite book or department store to assure an early copy. Butcher had been a vice president of CBS and the company's point person in D.C. when he went into the Navy. He served as Naval aide to Eisenhower, whom he had known for almost two decades. According to the ad his duties included keeping an official diary.
The ad for IN THE NAME OF SANITY by veteran radio newscaster and commentator Raymond Swing quoted prominent journalist John Gunther who said the book was indispensable reading for any American "interested in his own fate or that of the country and the world." This was one of a number of books in print at the time advocating the need for a world government in light of the danger posed by the atom bomb. Several were on the bestseller list this week. Right Wingers and Isolationists, on the other hand, saw the bomb not as a threat but as America's ace in the hole. Swing would come under attack as an alleged Communist sympathizer in the McCarthy era witch hunts. Although he was cleared, he resigned his position with Voice of America in disgust over the government's treatment of the VOA staff during this period and went to work for Edward R. Murrow. He resumed his work with VOA in 1959.
FRANCO'S BLACK SPAIN was a collection of sketches drawn during the Spanish Civil War by a well-known Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla who had supported the Republicans and then gone into exile in New York and later Paris. Unfortunately the success of the book with its simple line drawings pigeonholed him as a cartoonist, deflating his artistic reputation. Quintanilla's imprisonment by Franco was a cause celebre in the world of the arts in the 1930s. The issue of the continued existence of a Fascist government in Spain was being vehemently argued in the UN Security Council, the press and on the streets of New York this week with the Stalinist Left demanding Franco's immediate forced ouster, the Catholic Right rallying to the dictator's defense and most Americans caught in the middle. This book included commentary by New York Post drama critic Richard Watts Jr. The book's illustrations and text are online at Graphic Witness.
MUST WE FIGHT RUSSIA was a new book by Ely Culbertson, well-known then as a bridge expert who had helped popularize the card game. After the war he devoted his energy to promoting world peace. The ad said he knew both the American and Russian peoples as a native. He had been born in Romania to an American father and Russian mother. He had lived for many years in Russia and had fought in the Russian Revolution, although he fled the country soon after. His chapters included "Why We Are Afraid of Russia" and 'Why Russia is Afraid of Us" as well as a chapter on how to avoid a war between the two superpowers.
CHARLES DICKENS was a well-reviewed new biography by British writer Una Pope-Hennessy.
A FRENCHMAN MUST DIE by Kay Boyle had previously been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. It was a novel about deadly feuds in postwar France affecting the hunt by three Resistance members for a traitor in their midst. Boyle had won a number of awards for her short stories but her literary reputation recently had come under attack by Edmund Wilson, the prominent critic of The New Yorker. This novel was not well received by critics. In 1946 Boyle also published a collection of short stories, Thirty Stories.
Boyle and her husband, the Baron von Franckenstein (yes,that was his real name), would become victims of the ruthless ambition of the amoral Roy Cohn in the fifties. Boyle, who was part of the expatriate bohemian set in Paris before the war, came under attack for having signed several petitions circulated by front organizations. The Austrian-born Franckenstein had spied for the Allies during the war and was working for the U.S. State Department after the war. He was among several employees who had been investigated but cleared of charges of Communist sympathies. Despite the official exoneration, the self-promoting Cohn successfully demanded that Franckenstein and several other State Department employees be fired during one of his headline-grabbing tours of Europe to save the world from Communism. In a ripple effect,The New Yorker dropped Boyle as a foreign correspondent and suddenly all the major magazines turned down her fiction. After years of court cases, Franckenstein eventually was fully exonerated, just before he died. Until her own dying day, Boyle denied ever having been a Communist Party member but she was named as a party member in several testimonies before Congress. In any case, she did not seem to have been a political activist before the war but after falling victim to the witch-hunts she became more outspoken in her support for the anti-war, anti-nuclear and civil rights movement. Cohn went on to become the darling of the New York smart set as a consummate wheeler-dealer who specialized in using his social connections to facilitate the circumvention of the law by his rich and powerful clients. He was charged repeatedly with ethics violations through his career and eventually was disbarred.
AT MRS. LIPPINCOTE'S was the first novel from British author Elizabeth Taylor, who shared her name with the actress who was at this time a promising ingénue. The writer Elizabeth Taylor became a well-respected chronicler of the British middle class. The ad this day promised that "you will find a sensitive, civilized and eager being, subtly and searchingly revealed." The novel, which is still in print, is a wartime story of a woman who joins her husband at an RAF base in a sleepy seaside town and finds it hard to assume the passive role of an officer's wife.
Vardis Fisher 's INTIMATIONS OF EVE takes place in prehistoric times, telling of the rebellion of a young man against the ruling matriarchy. Fisher was an idiosyncratic Idaho-based journalist and novelist. This book was the second in what would become a 12-volume series tracing man from the cave to modern day. He spent two decades on this series but it was not well-received by the public or the critics and he is better known for his popular novels about the West.
WINTER KILL was a well-received hard-boiled thriller from novelist and screenwriter Steve Fisher, one of the major figures of film noir who began his career writing for the pulps. The ad contained testimonials from the Herald Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun. The Sun noted that Fisher was the author of I Wake Up Screaming and Destination Tokyo. This tale of murder revolves around five disparate men who share a small, shabby office on lower Fifth Avenue. Out of print.
RELIGION
It was Palm Sunday and with Easter fast approaching several books with religious themes were advertised.
THE ROBE , a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, was one of the biggest sellers of 1944 and was getting a seasonal push. It was about a Roman centurion who wins Christ's robe in a game of dice at the foot of the cross. Douglas, an ordained minister, was one of the most popular novelists of the day. It had made the Herald Tribune bestseller list this week. The subsequent movie version was also popular and the book is still in print
THE HUMAN LIFE OF JESUS by John Erskine, Professor Emeritus at Columbia, was deemed the perfect gift for Easter giving. The ad billed the author as a distinguished scholar and reverent layman. He had previously published books on Greek mythology, In print
PRAYERS AND POEMS was from Francis Cardinal Spellman, the arch-conservative head of the New York diocese. Out of print.
Thomas Nelson & Sons announced in an ad that THE REVISED STANDARD VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT had sold over 250,000 copies in its first month. It was the first installment of this new Bible translation in modern English and was produced under the auspices of the National Council of Churches. It was also on the Herald Tribune bestseller list.
Lippincott noted that there were over 1,600,000 copies in print of Mary O'Hara's perennials for horse-loving adolescents, MY FRIEND FLICKA and it's sequel. THUNDERHEAD. My Friend Flicka is still in print.
LETTER TO FIVE WIVES by John Klempner, was a novel about married life in a Long Island suburban community; It is better known today as a movie, although Hollywood lost two of the wives in the 1949 film adaptation, "Letter to Three Wives."
OTHER BOOKS OF SIGNIFICANCE
Now that the war was over, new pew editions of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER were available again in abundant quantity from Harper & Brothers, which noted that this was a good time for Episcopalian congregations to replenish their supply. They were 50 cents each.
YOUNG'S ANALYTICAL CONCORDANCE OF THE BIBLE was offered by Funk & Wagnalls. It is still a standard reference.
CHRIST AND MAN’S DILEMMA was by George Arthur Buttrick, senior minister of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, the largest Presbyterian congregation in the city with almost 3,000 members. In 1946 mainline Protestantism was still a vital force in the city. Buttrick also taught at Union Theological Seminary and later took a position at Harvard. He was politically liberal and one of the most influential ministers of mid-century America. Out of print.
"Are the Ten Commandments an infallible code of morals for modern society?" asked the ad for TEN COMMANDMENTS from the Freethought Press Association. From the wordy ad the answer appears to be "no." The book received a respectable review this day in the Herald Tribune Book Review. The book looked at the commandments from a historical context, contending that they do not exactly mean what later theologians said they did. Out of print.
Another ad offered the Indian classic text Patanjali 's RAJA YOGA with extensive commentary by Rishi Singh Grewak (Gerwhal), if the practice of yoga was your preferred route to enlightenment.
INTERESTING EPHEMERA AND ODDITIES
I never dreamed my own child could write," claimed the woman pictured in the ad for IF YOU SHOULD WANT TO WRITE and HOW TO WRITE. They had a mail-in offer.
A RAILROAD FOR TOMORROW by Edward Hungerford was a prediction that great things would come for the U.S. railroad system in the postwar years. Hungerford had a very cloudy crystal ball. Out of print.
The publishers of THE 21ST CENTURY LOOKS BACK by Emanuel R. Posnack , identified as a lawyer and engineer, made extravagant claims for the book. It "will provide a background for your interpretation of the news controversies and problems of the day." By reading it "you will be able intelligently to discuss such timely topics as communism, capitalism and free enterprise--inflation, booms and depressions--the money system--the tariff--taxation--our patent system--the strife between labor and capital--reconversion--the treatment of the Axis people--national sovereignty vs world government--education and the cultural lag--the role of youth in world affairs--the burning question of race hatred--the case of Russia." Posnack analyzed the imperfections of Capitalism and refutes Communism. All for $2.75. Out of print.
The Rosicrucians had a back of the book ad offering "the secret method for the mastery of life." The Rosicrucians are a secret society that combined Christianity, Masonic ritual and the occult. They had splintered into several factions but the group headquartered in San Jose aggressively recruited members through ads such as this one that ran in newspapers and magazines for many years.
FULL PRODUCTION WITHOUT WAR was a scholarly work by Harold Loeb. The author was a scion of both the Loebs of the Kuhn-Loeb investment banking firm and the Guggenheim dynasty. He had lived the bohemian expatriate life in Paris in the twenties, writing a couple of novels, and was unflatteringly portrayed as the character Robert Cohn in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. He returned to the States in the thirties and turned his attention to economics, being an advocate of technocracy. In the book Loeb claims that non-production was the root cause for the rise of Communism and Hitler. The blurb in The Times Book Review said that Loeb demonstrated in this book that the US economic system had become based on "expectant sales at predetermined prices rather than on competition and true demand.” Out of print.
In WOMAN'S PERSONAL HYGIENE, Leona W. Chalmers, identified as a doctor's wife, discussed the "intimate side of a woman's life." If you ordered it, the book would be delivered in an unmarked paper wrapper. Chalmers was also an actress and an entrepreneur credited for creating the first menstrual cup which was unsuccessful in terms of sales despite her fervent promotion. Out of print.
COTTON MAGIC by Mildred Gwin Barnell was a "clear, simple, complete and easily understood description of Cotton Manufacturing," suitable for grown-ups and children, according to the publisher. Assuming, of course, that they were really into cotton. Out of print.
The Palmer Institute of Authorship offered to show you "how to write short stories, mysteries, novels, articles and radio scripts." You could "learn at home in your spare time."
EAT AND GET SLIM provided a ten-day "miracle diet" for those 'lazy people who want to get slim, who don't like to exercise" and "who do like to eat."
Briarcliff Junior College, a fashionable finishing school for debutantes located then in Westchester but now defunct, advertised the Briarcliff Literary Quarterly. The current issue was devoted to a survey of present-day French letters. The Quarterly was also conducting a short story contest. The prize was $100. The judges included Frederick L. Allen , editor of Harper's Magazine; Norman Cousins , editor of The Saturday Review; and Norman Macleod , editor of the Briarcliff Quarterly. The college also was offering a creative writing residence scholarship to a public or private school graduate based on academic record and writing samples. This Briarcliff has nothing to do with the present day for-profit Briarcliffe College on Long Island, one of several such institutions under investigation by the State Attorney General's office.