Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. GELLER'S KING I have long been an admirer of The New Leader's cover...
...One can always shock a cultivated audience by telling it that there are not more than 800 proper bookstores in the whole nation...
...This is true not only of the old paperback lines, but even of new ones...
...But it is an open secret in the trade that their plight is the product of bad management, as proven by the fact that the others are flourishing...
...Chicago, Illinois Robert Turner U.S...
...But it's an expensive procedure, and one's mail is now so clotted with sales material that this method has become relatively ineffectual...
...Best of all, I believe that Dr...
...June 24...
...It is, of course, early to make conjectures of this kind, but I believe that years from now, in a happier time...
...Riding his hobby-horse, Kristol can even manage to say something sad about the paperback revolution: "As far as the average publisher is concerned, paperbacks have ceased being a boon and are fast becoming a bore...
...three, or four, it replaces...
...Perhaps they were merely being kind to me...
...King is concerned with social justice...
...At the latest annual meeting of the American Book Publishers Council, it was reported that the average trade publisher in the United States now gets 60 per cent of his sales volume from libraries and schools, most of it through wholesalers...
...Perhaps it is that, like madames, book publishers feel free to talk only after retirement...
...These words constitute one of those myths that a good many people in publishing perpetuate...
...Another way of saying all this is that printing and selling a hard-cover edition of 5,000 copies of a non-fiction book is, in most cases, profitable business for Basic Books or any similar publisher...
...But the confessions are his...
...Not one word of Kristol's comment applies to these lines...
...I am also close to most of the other quality lines...
...These are ad hoc audiences, reached quite precisely by very able mailing systematically done each season by Basic Books...
...Many members of the publishing fraternity have either written or spoken to me about my article...
...King's letter will rank with those other classical documents of American political life—the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address...
...True, one's initial order from a college bookstore for new titles used to be something like 25 per title six or seven years ago, and now may be as little as 10 or 5 per title...
...In addition, there is the sure knowledge, based on the averages over the years, that a substantial number of the books will go back to press for a second and third edition...
...In actual fact, the "whole business" is not such a mystery, nor, I suspect, is it much of a mystery to Kristol...
...At this writing, I am sales representative for a number of the "quality" paperback lines...
...Notable examples are the Harvard Coop, Yale Coop, Kroch's (Chicago) and Salter's (Columbia...
...Perhaps Kristol is not responsible for the title...
...It is also true, however, that book publishers are selling more books than ever, and increasing sales each year through the book stores that do exist...
...Detroit, Michigan Samuel Fisher BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL Congratulations on printing Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" (NL...
...True, few bookstores exist worth talking about outside college neighborhoods...
...And so he can conclude his article with dispatch, with the sentence: "As I said at the outset, I still find book publishing a very mystifying enterprise...
...but since so large a proportion of the college-age population will go to college, this is no longer so awful as is sounds...
...New York City Leonard Roberts If there are such things as awards for the best magazine illustrations of the year, then surely Barry Geller's cover drawing of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Now, after two years at it, it still is...
...What they do write before retirement is likely to be quite perfunctory, misleading or mythical...
...The older lines do not, naturally, increase at such rates any longer, but they still do well...
...King's letter has great simplicity and great rhetorical power...
...In the second place, these books are reviewed by the professional journals...
...In many cases, one huge bookstore does more business than the two...
...Like the authors of the earlier documents, too...
...What counts, however, is the sales volume of the whole list—and, for that matter, the sales volume of each title—over a period of years...
...If memory serves, Basic Books prints few if any paperbacks...
...I know of one which, without very great effort, doubled its volume in 1962 and is currently 45 per cent ahead for the first five months of 1963...
...one big one is in fact collapsing...
...King's letter definitively answers all those questions that I myself, as an American Negro, have been asked by several white friends...
...Yes—but there is no point in arguing over details...
...But only a minority of titles ever come close to that figure...
...This has long been true...
...Morrow as a sales representative...
...He is able to call distribution of books in America "one unholy mess" by the device of saying, "there has to be a place where one goes to make the purchase," and since there are so few bookstores, God help us all...
...But in Barry Geller's treatment of Martin Luther King Jr...
...GELLER'S KING I have long been an admirer of The New Leader's cover drawings...
...Getting the book into a reader's hand is far more difficult than getting the author to write it, or the editor to rewrite it...
...And in the third place, Basic Books does a very good job of providing endless information to the public and college libraries and to professors and instructors in the various disciplines, all of which produces very remunerative direct mail orders from individuals and institutions...
...behind the American flag (NL...
...Kristol knows very well that nine tenths of the books on his own firm's list do not depend on bookstore distribution...
...They all thought it gave a reasonably fair picture, and some of their remarks were downright complimentary...
...True, side by side with them are a number of paperback lines that are falling back...
...If Kristol behaved like he talks, he would not be senior editor of Basic Books...
...In the first place, they are high-priced books, published mostly for a professional audience of psychiatrists, psychologists, practitioners of the various academic disciplines, and so on...
...Were Kristol not trying to mystify his reader, he would refrain from writing such a phony sentence as: "And there's the rub, and the real dilemma of publishing in this country...
...In addition, the libraries and schools pipe their orders for these books through the handful of wholesalers through whom, for many excellent reasons, they prefer to order...
...Yet, curiously, rare is the piece in The New Leader (or in any other magazine) concerning the economics, mechanics, or strategy of book publishing...
...An example is Irving Kristol's "Confessions of a Publisher" in the May 13 issue of The New Leader...
...New York City Felix Morrow Irving Kristol replies: Yes, it's very nice to sell 5,000 copies of a scholarly book...
...June 24), you have outdone yourselves...
...All this is flourishing as never before, thanks to the growth of the college market...
...Yes, one can sell books by mail as well as through bookstores...
...Or perhaps they shared my acute lack of euphoria about the present state of publishing only because none of us is so fortunate as to have Mr...
...The key to understanding the quality paperbacks is that, in the main, they are replacing or supplementing textbooks: They are, in effect, textbooks with beautiful jackets...
...A false note is immediately struck when Kristol says: "For the only point I want to make is that the whole business of book publishing was for long a mystery to me...
...PUBLISHING The book publishing profession is quite well represented among the contributors to The New Leader, and people in book publishing undoubtedly make up a substantial percentage of those who read the magazine...
...Nothing mysterious here...
...In design, pertinence and originality they seem to me among the best things of their kind now being done in the field of magazine art—and that includes both big and little magazines...
...Like them, Dr...
...The key to selling them is not display in a book shop, useful though this is, but systematic mailings to the academic community which result in the text being adopted, being put on supplementary reading lists, etc...
...will walk off with them all...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 14
