POCKET BOOKS IN 1946
Pocket Books was the number one paperback publisher in 1946. According to ads that ran in April, Pocket Books had sold more than 137.5-million paperbacks to date, which The New York Times pointed out in its May 5 piece on the industry was more than the combined total sales of all the books that had been on the best seller list since 1880. Pocket Books generally had the most popular titles from the biggest name writers, although these writers were not exclusive to Pocket Books. With few exceptions, it avoided classics, unless they had been made into popular movies like Wuthering Heights or were considered risque like Madame Bovary or Emile Zola's Nana. They also did not usually publish the more "literary" writers like Faulkner or Hemingway, although these authors were represented in the popular Pocket Book short story anthologies.
Pocket Books was acquired in 1944 along with its major backer, Simon & Schuster, by Marshall Fields Enterprise but its management had been left in place. In 1946, it redesigned its covers. The Pocket Book logo, Gertrude the Kangaroo, was back after a short absence but she had lost her eyeglasses and the little joey who used to sit in her pouch reading a book. The company also launched a more aggressive promotional campaign this year and increased the rate at which it was releasing new titles. In April, beginning with Herve Allen’s Civil War novel Action at Aquila, each new Pocket Book would be identified by the number of Pocket Books that had been sold at the time of its release. In the fall, it would begin a division targeting teen readers, which subsequently was spun off as Scholastic Books.
Pocket Books was not known for exceptional cover art, although a few were above average. The covers of its non-fiction, "made" books and anthologies were usually plain and often heavy with copy. The covers for its mystery and other fiction titles were illustrated, sometimes in a style similar to magazine art of the day. Titles were at the top since the wooden book racks most often used at the time to display paperbacks cut off the lower part of the book.
In January, to publicize its success, Pocket Books threw a party at the Rainbow Room atop the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, where the company's editorial offices were located, to present the Silver Gertrudes to their authors who had sold more than a million books. Some of the honorees had achieved that distinction through the combined sales of multiple titles rather than a single book. The authors being feted included:
Bennett Cerf- Cerf's humor anthologies were big sellers in paperback. As head of Random House, he was involved in the launch of Bantam Books, a Pocket Book competitor, the month before this award ceremonies, but he had previously created several joke books for Pocket Books, which this year was publishing his 1945 bestselling humor anthology, Try and Stop Me, as its first King Edition, priced at $1. Anthologies of all kinds were consistent, if not spectacular, sellers for Pocket Books, including short story, poetry and humor collections, most of them originals created by the publisher. Pocket Books also produced anthologies devoted to specific writers, such as the Maugham and Steinbeck anthologies it was promoting at this time. Paperback buyers also were fond of cartoon, puzzle and game books. Paperbacks often were the time wasters of the day.
Erle Stanley Gardner-- His Perry Mason novels were popular with paperback readers. Pocket Book had several Gardner titles in the market in 1946. In an ad in the April 14 New York Times, Pocket Books claimed to have been responsible for the craze for mystery novels. Like most ads, this was an exaggeration. Mysteries long had a sizable fan base although they seldom sold enough copies to make the bestseller list. With the advent of paperbacks, mystery and crime writers were selling hundreds of thousands of books, several times more than they had in the past. Mysteries made up about forty percent of Pocket Book titles. In 1946, the publisher was offering thrillers and crime novels from big name mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett and Ellery Queen. In terms of genres, the Pocket Book release list in 1946 more closely resembles today's bestseller lists than the hardcover bestseller lists do.
Robert Ripley- The Believe It or Not paperbacks reprinted panels from his syndicated comic strip panel, which also were the basis of a radio show and museums of oddities in several cities.
Damon Runyon-- Pocket Books published several short story collections by this chronicler of New York City’s guys and dolls, the petty gamblers and chorus girls who patronized Lindy's and hung out on Broadway. Runyon died of throat cancer in December.
James Hilton-- His Lost Horizons, about the mythical land of Shangri-La, had launched Pocket Books in 1939. Pocket Books also had published paperback versions of his Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Without Armor. This season the publisher was promoting its release of his 1941 bestseller Random Harvest, which had been made into a hit movie starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in 1942. Other general fiction titles being promoted by Pocket Books at this time were Irving Stone's Lust for Life, Clarence Day's Life With Father, John P. Marquand's Pulitzer Prize-winner The Late George Apley, Faith Baldwin's chick-lit White Collar Girl, Pearl Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth, William Saroyan's The Human Comedy and Mazo de la Roche's Jalna, the first novel in her popular 16-novel Whiteoaks family saga.
Marshal Best- Whoever he might be. I can not find him in a google search. My best guess is that he created some of the Pocket Book "made books," which is what the publisher called original titles like puzzle and game books.
Marion Hargrove-- His See Here, Private Hargrove was the first Pocket Book to exceed 2,000,000 copies sold. It would be the record holder until Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare came along later in the year. Hargrove's book was a humorous account of his experiences as a new recruit in the US Army. It was originally published in hardback in 1942 and made into a movie starring Robert Walker and Donna Reed in 1944. A movie sequel, “What Next, Corporal Hargrove," followed in 1945. In 1946, Hargrove was active in the veterans rights movement. He later wrote for television.
W.J. Pelo - He produced The Pocket Dictionary. Pocket Books had a lot of success with paperback reference books created especially for them.
Dale Carnegie- His self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People was Pocket Books' first million seller.
Pocket Book ran a large ad in this week’s Life magazine. It led off with promotion of the $1 King-Size edition of Bennett Cerf's Try and Stop Me. The hard cover edition had been published in 1944 and was one of the top-selling non-fiction titles of 1945. "Through its pages sparkle and crackle such celebrated wits as Dorothy Parker, Bernard Shaw, Alexander Woolcott, Jimmy (Schnozzola) Durante and the Marx Brothers" according to the ad copy. Copies were available at "your favorite bookstore, newsstand, drug or cigar store or wherever books and magazines are sold." Most Pocket Books sold for 25 cents.
Other Pocket Books touted in the ad were:
BENNET CERF
Boomers might remember Bennett Cerf (1898-1971) as the grinning, bespectacled punster on "What's My Line?" on television in the '50s and '60s. He was in many ways the quintessential New York celebrity of his day. He was born in the city in 1898 to a prosperous Jewish family of German and Alsatian descent. In 1920 he graduated from Columbia University, like many of the city's self-made economic and academic elite of the day. Broadway composer Richard Rodgers was among his childhood friends. He worked on Wall Street and wrote for the New York Herald Tribune before buying Modern Library in 1925. He went on to start Random House in 1927. where he published Ulysses, successfully battling censors. His authors also included Ayn Rand, William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill. He was a founder of the Famous Writers School, which its many critics considered a racket that parted dreamers from their money. He edited a number of short story anthologies for Pocket Books and after the success of Try and Stop Me, put together several similar books of humor. He had been married briefly in the 1930s to actress Sylvia Sidney. In 1940 he married Ginger Roger's cousin, Phyllis Fraser, who married former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. after Cerf's death.
Fightin' Fool was by Max Brand, a pseudonym for Frederick Schiller, a novelist and screenwriter who wrote popular westerns like Destry Rides Again as well as the Dr. Kildare books. He was killed in 1944 while covering the war as a correspondent. Fightin' Fool was a western originally published in 1939.
The D.A. Draws a Circle was by Erle Stanley Gardner, whose mysteries were a Pocket Books mainstay. This was one of his Doug Selby novels. Published originally in 1939, it is about a newly elected D.A. trying to clean up a corrupt California town. Gardner had a number of books out in hardcover in 1946. In The D.A. Breaks a Seal, Selby has returned from the war. Crows Don't Count, published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, had just come out. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette featured his most famous fictional hero, Perry Mason, who was also the central character of a radio series that aired at this time and later of a long-running TV series.
Pastoral by Nevil Shute was originally published in 1944. It was a wartime romance set at a British air base. Shute was a prolific novelist who reached his greatest popularity in the '50s and '60s, most notably with On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.
Disputed Passage by Lloyd C. Douglas, best known for his biblical epic The Robe and Magnificent Obsession. This 1939 novel also was inspirational. It was about a doctor in war-torn China and included the Japanese assault on Nanking. John Howard and Dorothy Lamour had starred in the movie adaptation.
Pocket Book of Short Stories, which included stories by Hemingway, Maugham and Dorothy Parker. The ad said over 1-million copies had been sold.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie was the king of early self-help books. It first appeared in 1936.
The Bishop's Jaegers by Thorne Smith, a writer of comic novels best known for his zany Topper books which had been adapted to the screen. This 1932 book was about a coffee heir, an Episcopalian bishop and a former nude model who wash ashore at a nudist colony. Smith had died in 1934 of a heart attack at 42.
Spirit of the Border was a 1906 historical novel by Zane Grey about an Indian fighter in the Ohio River valley in the late 18th century. It was one of his earliest novels.
The Story of Mankind was a popular survey of world history by Hendrick Willem Van Loon, originally published in 1921, and still being widely read in the '50s when I encountered it as a child. Van Loon had died in 1944.
Claudia by Rose Franken was published in 1938 as the first of her eight Claudia novels about a young married couple. Claudia had first appeared in short stories in women's magazines. Franken wrote a hit Broadway play based on the character in 1941 that launched Dorothy Maguire's career. The movie version appeared in 1943 starring Maguire and Robert Young as the young married couple of the novels. In 1946 Maguire and Young were back in "Claudia and David," which brought the couple to a postwar suburb. Franken, born in Texas and raised in New York, wrote a number of Broadway plays before and after her Claudia novels became widely popular.
Lust For Life by Irving Stone was a 1934 fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh best known today as a 1956 movie that starred Kirk Douglas.
The Pocket Reader edited by Philip Van Doren Stern included stories, poems, puzzles and mysteries.
Shakespeare's Tragedies included "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" "King Lear," and "Julius Caesar," with an introduction by the English Poet Laureate John Masefield.
Nana by Emile Zola was billed as "the greatest courtesan of all times-- her life and loves."
Pocket Dictionary had over 25,00 words with "up to date definitions."
Pocket Book of Modern American Short Stories, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, had 18 stories by Hemingway, Saroyan, Benet, Thurber and others.
Somerset Maugham Pocket Book included the novel Cakes and Ales. the play "The Circle," "Rain" and ten other stories and essays.
White Collar Girl was by Faith Baldwin, one of the reigning queens of light fiction, usually about women trying to balance career and romance. She wrote over 100 in her long career, several of which were adapted to movies. White Collar Girl first appeared in 1933. In 1946 she published two novels, Woman on Her Way and No Private Heaven."
Pocket Books took an ad this week in The New York Times advertising its line of mystery paperbacks, which included works by most of the big American and British names of the genre. Most of the titles were a decade or more old. Crime stories and mysteries generally were of perfect length for the 25 cent format.
This week Pocket Books was promoting two books edited by Columbia University history professor Henry Steele Commager, the Pocket History of the Second World War and A Pocket History of the United States, which he had edited with his Columbia colleague, Alan Nevins. They wrote for the general public rather than their academic peers, presenting history as a compelling story rather than a set of dry statistics. Commager was a leading proponent of the “liberal consensus,” a dominant political philosophy for the two decades following the end of the Second World War. Commager and Nevins were both examples of the public intellectuals who held a major role in 1946 and the following postwar era. Many of them came from Columbia University thanks to its location in the city that served as the headquarters for most national media. MORE ON COMMAGER AND THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS HERE.
Mysteries seldom appeared on the hardcover best seller lists as they do today. According to Time of January 28, 1946, they almost never sold more than 20,000 copies. However, they long had been a mainstay of the city’s many private lending libraries, at the Womrath chain and in neighborhood drug and candy stores. Top mystery titles sold over 1,000,000 copies in paperback at that time, according to Time, but the hardcover publishers kept half the royalties.
Among the writers represented in the Pocket Book ad were the British queens of the genre: Marjorie Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well as New Zealand born Ngaio Marsh. American masters such as Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich (under his own name as well as his pen name William Irish) also are represented. Craig Rice, the penname of Georgiana Ann Randolph Walker Craig, praised as the Dorothy Parker of crime novelists, who was on the cover of the Time magazine January 28 issue, is represented by one of the newer titles, Having a Wonderful Crime, published in hardcover in 1943. British spy writer Eric Ambler, a Philo Vance novel by S.S. Van Dine, a Charlie Chan from Earl Derr Biggers , a wartime mystery from Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr) and a thriller from British writer Philip MacDonald, who was turning out screenplays in Hollywood in 1946, rounded out the list.
You can find all the early Pocket Books covers in sequence at BookScans.