The postwar fate of book publishing was of significant concern in New York City in 1946. The city was not only the largest market for books in the United States, it was also the center of the nation’s publishing industry. Publishing executives and top editors were part of the city’s cultural and business alert.
Like most businesses that provided leisure time activity, book publishing had boomed during the war. With incomes up and rationing and shortages in effect, consumers had money to spend but little to spend it on other than leisure time activities. The major problem facing publishing during the war was keeping up with demand since paper was rationed and restrictions and labor shortages on the production end created backlogs. It was an effort to keep bestsellers in stock. More books reached the the benchmark of financial success with sales of more than 20,000 copies. Nobody expected this boom to continue but just how far it would decline was an open question in 1946.
Non-fiction in particular saw a large uptick during the boom, especially books about the war written by news correspondents and statesmen. The chief victims of the paper shortage and productions bottlenecks were the modestly selling books on the publisher's backlists. Although these titles were profitable, some went out of print to free up paper and production time for the highly profitable bestsellers. Bestsellers usually had short lives and publishers could not afford to let them be unavailable while they were still hot. This meant books by the more literary writers like Faulkner as well as many of the titles in the Modern Library collection of contemporary classics went out of print for the duration. The full Modern Library backlist did not become available again until 1948. It was not just the backlist that suffered. Some new mid-list books with decent sales did not get a second printing after the first printing sold out to make way for the big hits.
The forecast for publishing in the postwar era was murky. Sales had held up in the last half of 1945 but had begun to show signs of softening by April. John K. Hutchens took a look at the situation in a story that ran on July 14, 1946 in The New York Times. The statistics for the first half of 1946, he reported, were contradictory and inconclusive. Unlike most industries, publishing had no clearinghouse for information so Hutchens was pulling together information from a variety of scattered, somewhat random sources. On one hand, he noted, several important bookstore chains reported a significant increase in sales in the first half of 1946. However, some major publishers reported a sharp drop in sales. For the first time in years, publishers faced the possibility of having an overstock rather than a backlog. Hutchens seemed confused about this situation himself. On one hand, he wrote, the fall publishing lists were heavy with new titles with some publishers even reporting a record number of upcoming titles but somehow he also wrote that fewer titles actually were being published. Paper was no longer rationed but in short supply. Binderies and printing facilities were still backlogged. The books most likely to be put on the backburner were the collections of essays or volumes of verse unlikely to sell more than a couple of thousand copies.
A two-part article in The New Republic in August reiterated Hutchen’s figures and cited multiple possible causes for the drop in orders from publishers. One major factor appeared to be that bookstores were being more selective in their ordering. During the war they over-ordered to assure that the latest bestseller was on their shelves. Now that production backlogs was becoming less of an issue, store buyers did not believe they need to keep as large an inventory. They were returning to more normal seasonal purchasing patterns. Before the war sales to bookstores dropped off in the summer. This year, the seasonal drop had started a little earlier than in the prewar days and was somewhat larger than the norm but not to the point to sound an alarm, at least in the opinion of the optimists. Publishers were still selling more books than they had before the war.
While the optimists did not expect wartime levels to be sustained forever, they believed sales would level off somewhere between the prewar lows and the wartime highs. They pointed hopefully to the legion of returning veterans many of whom had become regular readers for the first time thanks to the success of the Armed Services Editions, a program that had distributed about 11-million books to service men and women. The optimists hoped that at least some of the new readers would buy books now that they were home. The end of the war would bring more leisure time to those who had worked double shifts at defense plants. And the women who had taken wartime jobs were giving them up to become homebodies. Another encouraging sign was that The New York Public Library showed an increase in book borrowing in 1946.
The pessimists feared that the market was oversaturated. People were likely to spend more of their income on consumer goods and housing now that the war was over. Incomes might drop now that the defense jobs were going away and a flood of returning vets were entering the job market. Many of the new readers whom the optimists expected would bolster sales were more likely to become customers of paperbacks, which they could pick up at the corner drugstore, than they were to become patrons of the Fifth Avenue bookstores.
The only certainty was that the continued rise in the cost of production meant the price of books most likely would go up. No clear postwar trend in reader taste had yet emerged other than a sharp decline in interest in books about the war, with a few notable exceptions like Top Secret and My Three Years With Eisenhower. Light fiction still dominated the bestseller charts with historical romances of no particular literary merit being especially popular. The serious wartime novels were not expected to appear for a couple more years. A Doubleday editor told Hutchens he expected psychological themes to be as popular in novels as they had become in movies. Photographic books, whose production had been limited in wartime, were showing signs of renewed popularity. The perennials like the Bible and Joy of Cooking were still doing well as were the classics. The New York Public Library reported that the fiction reserve lists at its branches mirrored the bestseller lists. In non-fiction, library users showed an increased interest in books about housing, jobs, economic conditions and international affairs. The perennials like art books, personal psychology, “how to” books and the classics also were still popular while borrower interest in books about the war and geography had declined.
The books that were hardest hit by the postwar decline were the mid-list books. The heavily promoted titles were still selling well but sales of lesser titles that might have been modestly profitable during the war had fallen to prewar, levels of unprofitability. Some authors and critics believed this was at least in part the fault of the publishers themselves. With the growing importance of ancillary rights such as book club deals, movie options and reprint rights, publishers, increasingly backed by big money interests, were focused on finding the next overnight sensation rather than on discovering and nurturing new talent. While the perennial sellers on the publishers' backlists had been the bread and butter business of publishing in the past, now lasting literary value was increasingly irrelevant, according to these critics, many of whom were the mid-list authors who found their advances shrinking, their books receiving little promotion and their contracts terminated.