DESPITE the growing sway of TV and hifi, despite a bounding passion for sports, despite increasing crime, flourishing liquor consumption, marriages, divorces and other distractions, the U.S. somehow manages to keep on reading--or at least buying--more books. If the number of books published and bought were the only criterion, 1954 was a big year. Publisher's Weekly, the industry's statistician, guessed that 1953's alltime high of 12,050 new titles would be equaled or surpassed by Dec. 31. It seemed likely that 1953's record sale of an estimated 600 million copies (3.7 new books per capita) would be at least matched. The literary record was another story.

It would take a bold reader to proclaim that the year produced a single first-rate novel, but it would take a truly dull type to deny that he found some diverting and even arresting reading. The novelists, for all their technical skill, seemed unable to cope effectively with their time, man's fate or even man's heart. And the reading public was on to the situation: nonfiction outsold fiction by a wide margin.

The nation's growing child population was reflected in the growing sales of juveniles, but good imaginative writing for moppets was as rare as it was for their elders. One intelligent bookseller bluntly put his finger on the truth: "We are publishing to please teachers and librarians, not to delight children and make them lifelong readers."

The year saw a major shake-out in paperbacks. A few houses went out of business and carloads of trash were returned to their sponsors. The effect was salutary: fewer and better titles. At a reasonable price and on fair paper, books such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and De Tocqueville's Democracy in America were finding acceptance among book buyers who not long ago would have scorned paper-bounds. Astute publishing people were predicting that paperback originals at about a dollar--so far tried experimentally with a small number of books --would be the next big development in U.S. publishing.

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