Battle of Booksellers

If one man writes a manuscript and another wants to read it, that should be a simple affair to arrange. Let Tom Writer take his script to Dick Reader, or send it by Harry Carrier. Difficulty will enter only when several thousand writers and several million readers mutually desire contact. Then Harry Carrier may not be the only one whose services are required.

Jack Publisher and scores of his brothers have come into being since patient monks copied manuscripts. Jack sends his wares to men who keep book stores. Jack and these men then put their wits and purses together to help Dick discover the book he wants, or ought to want. Dick is the man who reads the book that the storekeeper bought from the agent who came with news of the writer that sold his work to be printed and bound and distributed by the house that Jack Publisher built.

The process of getting a hen's egg to the breakfast table of an apartment dweller seems scarcely more complex, costly and inevitable. Nevertheless, some businessmen have lately set out to simplify book-buying by having strong, swift Harry Carrier do more work than ever. They have him go almost directly from the house that Jack built to the reader.

There are two groups of these businessmen. In one group are three onetime advertising men. Last spring they started the "Book of the Month Club." They engaged Editors Henry Seidel Canby and Christopher Morley (Saturday Review of Literature) and William Allen White (Emporia, Kans., Gazette), Columnist Heywood Broun (N. Y. World) and Novelist Dorothy Canfield, to be a committee to vote on new books each month. They notified the publishers that here was a fine chance for them. The book voted "book of the month" would gain distinction (publicity). Also it would be bought by the Club by the thousand to send to members of the Club. The members were obtained (there are now 40,000) by assuring people they need no longer worry about what to read; or about remembering to buy. The eminent Selecting Committee decides for them; the efficient business staff buys for them. Harry Carrier brings a new book each month-- and if they dislike it they can send it back, ask for another one.

Jack Publisher likes this idea. His friends the booksellers do not object to it. It stimulates book sales generally. Only the laziest book customers rely upon the Club entirely. And many of the Club members, being either lazy or rural, never went to bookstores anyway.

The best argument able, active book-buyers can give for not joining the Book of the Month Club is this: "Why should we buy books from you when we can buy the same books, at the same price, at the stores? We hear your recommendations. We need no insurance against our supposed lethargy. And as nonmembers, we are freer to disagree with your committee."

To the last part of this argument there is no answer. Strong-minded people resent being told what is best for them, even by able experts. But the first part offered another group of businessmen a loophole. Why should a book-buying club not obtain books for its members at wholesale prices? Why not have a special club edition printed? . . .

On the twelfth floor of the big office building at 55 Fifth Ave., two onetime publishers opened an office and founded the "Literary Guild of America." Last autumn they engaged distinguished Editor Carl Van Doren (formerly of the Nation and Century) and two close friends of his, President Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin (onetime Century chief) and Novelist Zona Gale (University of Wisconsin regent); also Critic Joseph Wood Krutch (Nation), Historian Hendrik Willem van Loon and Poetess Elinor Wylie. They cried, in advertisements: "Down with the wall between writer and reader!" They offered, not only to select books for Guild members, but to publish books for them. They promised only one book per month, with no exchange privilege; twelve books per annum at a figure far below what the publishers and the Book of the Month Club ask in a year. That all twelve would be excellent books was guaranteed by the distinction of the Guild's editors. The Guild would invite the publishers to submit, not books, but manuscripts. "Special representatives in the arts and sciences, here and in Europe" would see to it that the Guild editors obtained the very best manuscripts for perusal. The editors having chosen, the Guild business staff would then issue to Guild members the low-priced Guild edition of the book. To the general public, through bookstores, it would issue, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps long afterward, a trade edition at the usual price.

Publishers appeared to dislike this idea. Many of them refused to submit manuscripts to the Guild. They said the Guild was actually assuming the role of a rival publisher, and wanted to know why they should furnish a rival with their best merchandise; why help build up a competitor who might become formidable? Booksellers were irate. They refused to help the Guild enrol members. They promised to cut their retail prices to meet the Guild's prices to its members. They hinted they would blacklist any author who, for the sake of the large advance royalty the Guild would be able to pay (having an assured advance sale equaling its total membership), would cut them out of the profit of retailing his book, over a longer period, but to a far larger volume of sales.

Undaunted,the Guild replied that the book business was. an artificial and unreal world. It was pointed out that one publisher had already found himself able to cut the price of a $5 book to $3 upon receiving a flat order for 40,000 copies. The Guild offered the public a booklet called "WINGS--The Story of a Gigantic Economy," exciting yet plausible.

Last fortnight the Guild announced its first publication: a life of Reformer Anthony Comstock by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech. Publisher Horace Liveright (Boni & Liveright), who had contracted for this manuscript, was unwilling to publish the trade edition simultaneously with the Guild's edition. But he did not want to hamper his two authors. He therefore released the manuscript entirely to the Guild. If the Broun-Leech life of Reformer Comstock is to be available to any but Guild members a trade edition must be published by someone else. Smoke was added to the battle from the fact that Biographer Broun is one of the big guns of the Book of the Month Club. To see through this observers had to remember that the eminent book judges on each side were holding themselves aloof and impartial. It was not their battle but their employers'. The Book of the Month Club judges regretted no whit having chosen a book by one of the Guild's distinguished editors, Elinor Wylie's Orphan Angel.-- The sarcasm, charges and counter-charges that filled much advertising space and many columns of the Publisher's Weekly reflected a business fight purely--a fight which, if it did not go beyond price-cutting to throat-cutting, promised to benefit book-buyers, temporarily at least, no matter who prevailed.

* Other choices : Lolly Willowes (Sylvia T. Warner), Teeftallow (T. S. Stribling), The Silver Spoon (John Galsworthy), The Saga of Billy the Kid (Walter N. Burns), O Genteel Lady (Esther Forbes), The Heart of Emerson's Journals (Bliss Perry), The Time of Man (Elizabeth Madox Roberts), The Romantic Comedians (Ellen Glasgow), Napoleon (Emil Ludwig).