BANTAM BOOKS IN 1946

When Bantam Books launched, it set itself apart with bright, tasteful covers, which it was hoped would establish it as a quality publisher. But later Ballantine decided that these covers were not doing the trick at retail. An editor at Saturday Evening Post convinced him that paperbacks needed to have covers that looked more like magazines since they targeted the magazine buying public rather than the traditional hardcover book buyers. Ballantine would replace his head of production, who had followed him from Penguin and had come originally from the hardcover publishing trade. By 1948, Bantam Book covers were very different than they were in 1946.

Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi had the distinction of being Bantam Book #1 on the eclectic list of initial titles. Among the titles best-known today that were included in that first batch were:

• • John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It had been adapted that same year into a popular motion picture. This novel was a big success for Bantam as far as sales but its length made it more expensive to produce. It was published as a loss leader at the usual 25 cents sales price to help establish the brand as a publisher of quality fiction.

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) proved less attractive to paperback readers in 1946. Bantam successfully redistributed it in 1949 with a dust jacket tying it in with the movie version of that year which starred Alan Ladd.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, the famed French aviator's 1939 National Book Award Winning memoir. His beloved The Little Prince had been published in 1943, the year before he disappeared during a reconnaissance flight.

• • Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run (1941), the controversial fictional expose of the movie industry. Some in Hollywood accused Schulberg, the son of a Jewish film executive, of having written an anti-Semitic book. Communist Party efforts to bully Schulberg into making changes in the novel (e.g. toning down the Jewishness of the characters and writing more positively of the Writers Guild) led the writer to break with the party. A committed liberal, he later made enemies on the Left by appearing before HUAC as a voluntary witness.

While mysteries did not play the dominant role that they did with other paperback publishers, Bantam did not entirely neglect them. The first set of mystery titles were mostly from lesser known names in the genre. They included:

• • Frank Gruber's The Gift Horse (1942) which had a horse racing background. It was part of a series that had two Runyonesque con men as central characters.

  • Elizabeth Daly's Evidence of Things Seen (1943), one in a series that featured an erudite bibliophile as detective. Although Daly's novels were set in New York, they had the feel of the British writers of the "Golden Age" of mysteries like Agatha Christie.

  • Robert G. Dean's A Murder by Marriage (1940) one of the most popular titles in the first batch. It was one in a series featuring New York detective Tony Hunter. The original Times review said the novel featured "plenty of alcohol and impudence always at flood tide."

  • Geoffrey Homes' Then There Were Three (1938). Homes was a pseudonym for Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote noir novels and films set in California.

  • Leslie Ford's The Town Cried Murder (1938) was set against the restoration of colonial Williamsburg and featured murder in an old Virginia family determined not to allow the Yankee restorers get hold of their manse. Leslie Ford was one of several pen names used by Zenith Jones Brown.

Other fiction titles included:

• • Zane Grey's Nevada (1927). Bantam would become a leading publisher of paperback westerns. Zane Grey novels also appeared in the lists of several competitors.

  • Raphael Sabatini's Scaramouche (1921), a swashbuckling adventure that took place at the time of the French Revolution. Bantam would revive a number of similar titles over the next few years. These were the books that many adult males of the day had read as teenagers.

  • Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939), the action thriller that inspired the Rambo movies. In the novel, a sportsman tracks down a Central European dictator purely for the thrill of the hunt.

  • Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's South Moon Under (1933) . The first novel from the author of The Yearling, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was adapted as a popular motion picture in 1946. It is about a family of moonshiners in the Florida scrub country.

  • Isabel Scott Rorick's Mr & Mrs Cugat (1941), the humorous escapades of a mid-level bank executive and his scatterbrained wife in the booze-swilling country club set. It became a movie and later a radio series, "My Favorite Husband," starring Lucille Ball. The radio series was spun-off into two television series, "I Love Lucy," which had Lucille Ball and several of the radio series' writers, and "My Favorite Husband," starring Joan Caulfield, which kept the original characters, now called the Coopers.

• • Sally Benson's Meet Me in St. Louis (1942), based on her semi-autobiographical New Yorker short stories about her childhood in St. Louis at the time of the World's Fair. The short stories were the basis of the Judy Garland hit movie in 1944. Benson had another bestseller in the 1940s with Junior Miss, also based on New Yorker short stories. It became a hit play on Broadway, a movie and a radio series.

  • Booth Tarkington's Seventeen (1916) the lighthearted account of first love in a Midwestern town by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. Mickey Rooney had starred in a film adaptation of Seventeen in 1940. Tarkington died in 1946.

  • Robert Nathan's One More Spring (1933), a romantic novel about three homeless people living in Central Park during the Depression. Nathan, who came from a prominent New York Jewish family, had also written Portrait of Jennie, The Bishop's Wife and other bestsellers.Alice Tisdale Hobart's Oil for the Lamps of China (1934). Hobart drew upon her own experiences as the wife of an American oil executive in China at the time of the fall of the Manchu dynasty for this novel. Pat O'Brien had starred in the 1935 film adaptation.

    • There was one other non-fiction title among the first batch of Bantam Books:

      • Elliott Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris (1941), a nostalgic look at a Paris neighborhood between the wars from a journalist who had been part of the Lost Generation expatriate scene. It was not the source of the later movie of the same name, which was loosely based on a Fitzgerald short story. New York’s Francophiles had felt an enormous loss when the war separated them from their beloved Paris.

    • On June 9, 1946, Bantam took an ad in The New York Times announcing the recent release of eight new titles, bringing the total to forty. Among the more notable titles released early in 1946 were:

      • Men, Women and Dogs (1943), by The New Yorker’s humorist and cartoonist James Thurber published in hardcover in 1943.

      • Drawn and Quartered (1942) by Charles Addams. described in the Bantam ad as “A fascinating collection of hilariously horrible cartoons by a famous New Yorker artist...with an introduction by Boris Karloff.” It was the first of many anthologies of the cartoons of the creator of the Addams Family.

      • Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis, a satire on middle class life in a small Midwestern city.

      • Night in Bombay (1940) by Louis Bromfield about a love triangle among expatriates in India. Bromfield was one of the most popular novelists of the time.

      • Citizen Tom Paine (1943) was left-wing writer Howard Fast’s fictionalized take on the Revolutionary War firebrand. It was a bestseller, one of several for Fast. He had a new book coming out this year, The American. A best selling author, Fast’s open membership in the Communist Party would make him and his works hot potatoes in the postwar decade.

      • The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by Anthony Hope. This adventure novel was adapted many times for the stage and screen. In the novel, the new king of the fictional country of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation. To prevent the king’s brother from usurping the throne, his identical British cousin impersonates him. The 1937 movie version starred Ronald Colman as the king and the pretender.

      • My Dear Bella (1941) by Arthur Kober, a collection of comic New Yorker short stories about Bella Gross of the Bronx. Kober had been writing the Bella stories since the 1920s. Bella and her family were a lower-middle-class Jewish family not long from their immigrant roots. While Kober's fans admired his skill at capturing the speech patterns of his subjects who were sympathetically, if humorously, portrayed, some assimilated Jews in the postwar period took offense at Kober’s comic stereotypes. Kober was himself from a Jewish immigrant family. In 1937, he had a hit on Broadway with “Having a Wonderful Time,” about a Jewish resort in the Catskills, Hollywood's movie version stripped away the ethnicity. Despite Kober's popularity for decades, he now seems relegated to a footnote in literary history as the husband that Lillian Hellman left for Dashiell Hammett.

      • The Captain from Connecticut (1941) by C. S. Forester who temporarily put aside his popular Horatio Hornblower series for this historical novel about an American naval commander during the War of 1812. At the time, Forester was living in the United States working in the British propaganda effort to get America into the war.

      • Only Yesterday (1931) by Frederick Lewis Allen was subtitled an informal history of the 1920s. That decade would have been the recent past to adult New Yorkers in 1946 and almost literally yesterday when the book was originally published in 1931. Allen was editor of Atlantic Monthly magazine. Popular history by non-academics was a thriving genre in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Allen followed it up in 1940 with Since Yesterday about the 1930s .

      • Long, Long Ago (1943) was an anthology of the writing of Alexander Woollcott, the sharp-tongued theater critic for The New Yorker arguably more famous as a celebrity than as a writer,. He had suffered a fatal heart attack while appearing on the radio panel show The People’s Platform shortly before the books hardcover release. He was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable. Renowned for his acid wit, Woolcott had his own radio show in the 1930s and was the inspiration for the bullying critic in the play and movie The Man Who Came to Dinner, as the Bantam ad pointed out. He even played the role in the play on the road.