The Year in Books

For readers and critics who hoped to find the radioactive stuff of great literature, it was another disappointing year: the literary Geiger counters clicked only feebly. But publishers and booksellers, ready to settle for mere gold in the hills, found 1952 rewarding. Production costs continued to go up (as did book prices), but there were few major disappointments along publishers' row, and quite a few rich strikes. To plain readers, prospecting for good, entertaining reading, the year brought a lot of satisfaction; six novels and six nonfiction books passed the 100,000 mark, creating the kind of bookstore traffic that carried along many more modest titles. In fiction, it was a year not of newcomers but of oldtimers. The big sellers were the big names, the reassuringly familiar quantities--Hemingway, Steinbeck, Du Maurier, Keyes, Costain, Ferber.

It was the paperbacks that continued to make the biggest noise in the publishing world. Well before year's end, 270 million copies had been shipped to more than 100,000 outlets. While a depressing share of these were just penny-dreadfuls at a quarter, there was also plenty of good reading. In this volatile market, The Confessions of Saint Augustine and The Universe and Dr. Einstein became bestsellers --alongside Mickey Spillane (1952 sales: 6,074,135), a kind of poolroom Marquis de Sade. It was plain to the worried hardcover men that the two-bit upstarts had tapped a new market of readers. The paperbacks were even publishing originals and luring away writers with promises of better royalties and wider readership. But the paperbacks were headed for trouble: in Washington, a congressional committee was lambasting the sexy covers--frequently on reprints of eminently respectable works, e.g., a nude model on a Van Gogh biography--which had become eyesores in the nation's drugstores.

Television may have cut into the kids' reading time, but it did not stop their hopeful parents from buying books for them. Juveniles had one of their great years, accounted for at least 10% of all book titles published. Science fiction also went rocketing ahead.

In a class by itself stood the year's most important book, Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. Almost painfully honest, it was more than a brilliant report on the Hiss case, more than a personal document of a rare and troubled spirit; it was the most eloquent warning the American people had yet heard against the Communist conspiracy in their midst, and against the failure of faith which laid the country open to it.

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