People Who Read and Write
This was a weekly column of book news by John K. Hutchens, editor of the Book Review. The items this week:
Under "life is fleeting,' Hutchens took note of a book club in Evansville, Ill., that read condensed books in Omnibook magazine, a format also favored by Readers Digest. The April Omnibook condensations included The Great Promise and Peabody's Mermaid, both reviewed in this week's Book Review, as well as Saints and Strangers, a historical account of the Pilgrims by George F. Willison, and Peter Bowman's Beach Red, a prose poem revealing the thoughts of a young officer as he stormed a Pacific island held by the Japanese.
Hutchens ridiculed the fuss made in The Pleasures of Publishing, the frequently snarky weekly bulletin of the Columbia University Press, over the use of the term "dust jacket" in the Book Review by James T. Farrell of Studs Lonigan fame. The bulletin insisted that dust collects on the top not the front and back of a book and that the primary purpose of the book jacket is promotional not as a dust collector. Hutchens wrote "Things are a little quiet on Morningside Heights at this time of year--between-terms, Easter, etc."
Random House had a new home, a former mansion on Madison Avenue with an unused wine cellar. The public had suggested many wines the publisher should stock but for now, according to Hutchens, they planned to use the room to hide out from authors.
When fans asked Mary Jane Ward, whose new novel The Snake Pit had been chosen recently as half of a dual selection of the Book of the Month Club, the secret of her overnight success she told them her method was to write for 18 years. Her previous novels The Tree Has Roots and The Wax Apple earned nice notices and feeble sales. She candidly admitted on her recent book tour stop in New York that much of the novel about a writer's experience at a home for the mentally ill was autobiographical. (The Snake Pit became one of the big sellers of 1946 and was made into an Academy Award-nominated motion picture. Ward would continue writing despite several subsequent stays at mental institutions. Like many writers, she was probably bipolar but at that time this condition often was diagnosed as schizophrenia.)
Oxford was releasing an abridged version of Arnold Toynbee's six-volume A Study of History.
Paperbacks, which had been introduced a few years before the war, were becoming big sellers in 1946. The column noted that Pocket Books was indicating the number of sales on each new volume beginning with Hervey Allen's Action at Aquila (number 144,545,4010, which sounds to me like an unlikely sales figure). The Civil War novel, first published in 1938, is available today as an e-book. Allen was one of the most popular writers of historical fiction of the 1930s and '40s. The second batch of American Pelicans was scheduled for release, including Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History, a study on the rise of civilization, being released in the US for the first time. Childe was a celebrated, London-based archaeologist whose books helped popularize the science.
A $1.00 edition of Glenway Wescott 's novel Apartment in Athens, about a Greek couple forced to share an apartment with a Nazi officer, was being issued by Forum. Low priced, hardcover reprints, usually of recent best sellers, made up an important publishing niche in 1946, serving the purpose now filled largely by trade paperbacks. Apartment in Athens is in print. (Wescott was part of the A-gay set in New York of this time. Hailed as another Fitzgerald early in his career, he never reached that level of critical or popular acclaim and in disappointment stopped writing novels after Apartment in Athens.)
Heritage Press had taken over the distribution of Sumner Welles' Guide to the Peace , dropping the price from $3.50 to $1.98. It is in print. (Welles was a prominent diplomat, FDR confidant and member of the New York social elite who had been forced to resign from his position as Under Secretary of State for the Roosevelt administration in 1943 after being blackmailed by his political rivals over charges that he had propositioned a Pullman porter. He became a commentator and writer on foreign affairs.}
On April 23, Duell, Sloane & Pearce was publishing The Black Book, a record of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
The Dark Wood by Christine Weston was the September selection of the Literary Guild. Weston was a New Yorker contributor but The Dark Wood was a romance previously serialized in Ladies Home Journal. It was set in the days just after the end of the war and concerned a war widow dealing with her loss and a returning vet who finds his wife has not waited for him.
The third and fourth volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, edited by Gordon Ray, were due that fall from Harvard University Press. Ray was expected to then begin work on his biography of Thackeray.
Fine Editions Press was putting out the first collection from the members of the Poetry Society of America.
Eve Merriam was the winner of the 1945 prize of the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her collection Around the House. The 1946 contest closed on March 1 but the 1946 winner had not yet been announced.
Amy Loveman, associate editor of The Saturday Review and a member of the Book-of-the-Month-Club staff, was the 1946 winner of the Constance Lindsay Skinner award for achievement by a woman in the book world.
Major Bruce Marshall, author of Father Malachy's Miracle and The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, was coming to the states after his stint working for the Allied Commission for Austria.
Katharine Gibson Wicks, an educator and writer of children's books, was joining the staff of the Artists and Writers Guild.
When Theodore Dreiser's The Bulwark was mailed as the March selection of the Book Find Club, it had been accompanied by a pamphlet with an account of the late writer at work by his secretary Marguerite Tjader. {Tjader, an attractive Swedish-American heiress, writer and Manhattan socialite, was also Dreiser's mistress. With his help, she founded and edited the publication Direction. She later wrote an account of their time together. She was a convert to Catholicism who provided support for the Catholic Workers movement and in her spare time, had a long affair with Le Corbusier whom she met while married to a fellow member of the Manhattan social elite.}