The Corn Salesman

Texans bragged this week about a triumph of commerce--with a touch of culture. Dallas' Cokesbury Book Store staked out a claim as the biggest in the U.S. It made no difference to Cokesbury that Manhattan's Brentano's and Macy's disputed the claim. With hymn and prayer befitting its ownership by the Methodist Church,* and with typical Texasity, the block-long, five-story Cokesbury opened a three-story addition and plugged away at surpassing its sales of $1,635,000, profits of $140,000 during its last fiscal year.

Within its chaste white marble walls, Cokesbury carries 300 different kinds of Bibles plus multidenominational religious supplies ranging from Sunday-school buttons to Torahs for synagogues. But this is a sideline to a fervently commercial trade that sells 70,000 secular titles to some of the country's most avid book buyers. Dallas spends about $6 per capita on books annually (the U.S. average: $2).

General Manager James Floyd Albright, a onetime soda clerk who began at Cokesbury as a shipping clerk in 1925, has a simple explanation for what makes books so popular in Dallas: "It's aggressive salesmanship. That and a large stock. We want to have books people want when they come in here."

Albright bombards 54,000 customers all over the Southwest with as many as 250 leaflets a year, plus an annual 100-page catalogue and two supplements. He has taken a firm hold on the business of supplying Texas schools and institutions. He also buys up publishers' remainders at rock-bottom prices, dolls them up in new dustjackets, sometimes changes the titles a bit, and keeps them moving across the counters and through the mails.

Says Albright: "We don't hit for the literary type of the booklover in spite of all our walnut paneling. There are so few of them we'd starve to death in no time." Albright, known in the trade as the "corn salesman," once heard a bookseller complain to a publisher that nothing was being published for the thinking man. Said Albright: "I told them that the average man . . . couldn't read anything but corn and what we needed was more corn."

* Which owns 13 other bookstores around the U.S., and printing plants in Nashville, Chicago and Cincinnati.

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