Refugee Makes Good

Much U.S. book publishing is conducted with all the good fellowship, petty rivalry and corporate inefficiency of a college literary club. To many a youth, publishing offers the pleasantest excuse for smoking a bulldog pipe, wearing tweeds, meeting authors, reading books. Result is an amount of dilettantism that would soon bankrupt any less leisurely form of U.S. business.

When from time to time a professional turns up with a lively interest in books as business, publishers uncross their legs and stare in bewilderment.

Last week many a Manhattan publisher, sucking at his pipe, pondered just such a professional. One of Manhattan's youngest publishing houses continued to tick off sales of America's No. 1 non-fiction best seller. That publishing house is Alliance Book Corp. Its best seller is Jan Valtin's Out of the Night, which has already pushed beyond the 400,000 mark. The man who could tell them how it was done is Alliance's President Henry Gunther Koppell, 46, who in two years has steered Alliance from a resounding flop with its first novel (Hermann Kesten's The Children of Guernica) to resounding success with Out of the Night. His formula: 1) "I don't believe in top-heavy lists just for the turnover"; 2) (wiggling his digits) "I have a finger feeling for the trends." The rest is promotion, publicity, hard work, Kombinations faehigkeit (a head for angles), plus the assistance of tall, gracious Mrs. Koppell, who runs Alliance when her husband is elsewhere.

Henry Koppell, who was born in Berlin, is a businessman whose business happens to be publishing. At 16 he had to make money. With characteristic literalness he got himself a job in the place where he saw the most money being handled--a bank.

In 1914 he went to war, got the Iron Cross and malaria, never was wounded. Back in Berlin, Koppell was hired by a kinsman who owned a printing establishment, A.

Seydel & Co., Ltd., which published twelve magazines and trade papers.

When the inflation hit Berlin, it seemed perfectly obvious to Koppell that the way to make money in an inflation is to print it. So he called on the Government, landed a contract to print paper marks. "We got through the inflation by paying ourselves," says Koppell. Often the printer's bill was more than the value of the printed marks.

Besides money, Koppell was also interested in books--not only their contents but why they cost so much. "Sometimes I have ideas," says Koppell. Seydel set up a firm for him to handle his idea--the Deutsche Buck Gemeinschaft, German Book Club. Soon the German Book Club had almost 500,000 permanent subscribers, became the largest book club in the world.

It published handsomely made, handsomely printed books at about half the regular price. Among the authors: Thomas Mann, John Galsworthy, Theodore Dreiser, Homer, Shakespeare. It was the prototype of the Book-of-the-Month Club here.

By one of his lucky breaks, a belated wanderlust overcame him in 1932 and he traveled in Europe, Asia, Africa. He never went back to Germany. When the Nazis took over, Koppell settled in Palestine, became business manager of the Palestine Post for one and a half years. In 1936 he got into the U.S. on the quota, took out citizenship papers at once. Then he traveled for two years to get to know his new homeland at firsthand.

Alliance (the name is supposed to symbolize a tie between the Old World and the New) began in 1938 as a representative for various German publishing houses in exile. Next year Koppell decided to concentrate on books in English. His fifth book (first was Norbert Muhlen's life of Schacht) was Hermann Rauschning's best-selling Revolution of Nihilism. He also published Boris Souvarine's Stalin, began Alliance's Face of America books about the U.S. Among his latest are Rauschning's The Redemption of Democracy (TIME, March 3), Patten's Mr. Frank Merriwell (see col. 1), Wells's All Aboard for Ararat (see p. 108). Koppell also has high hopes for Dorsha Hayes's The American Primer, a 152-page, vernacular introduction of the U.S. to U.S. citizens, somewhat along the lines of Ilin's New Russia's Primer.

Unlike many refugees, Henry Koppell found the U.S. a land of opportunity; he simply changed the venue of an already successful operation. He has a three-month-old son, Oliver Koppell, U.S. citizen. Says proud Father Koppell: "We named him Oliver for two reasons: 1) Oliver means 'peace after the storm'; 2) Oliver Koppell can sign all his letters O. K."

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