Books: Book Fair

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Besides hearing speeches, visitors could watch a noisy, up-to-date two-color press turning out souvenir copies of a 50-page book on printing by Hendrik Willem van Loon, written especially for the occasion. They could see a model home library, a model bookstore, films on bookmaking, a demonstration of papermaking. a collection of manuscripts, in exhibits prepared by no publishers. They could also see a good part of New York's publishers on hand, shepherding scores of profit-making writers: tall, gloomy Stanley Rinehart; flashily dressed Alfred Knopf; Viking's nervous Harold Guinzburg; Simon & Schuster's Richard Simon; many others. Above all they could see scads of books— old, new, cheap, expensive, packed away on shelves in attractive rooms and laid out on tables in long halls, stacked around a Trojan horse in one exhibit and mounted in a rapid-reading device in another, the whole show suggesting at once an exhibition in a public library, a well-run educational bazaar, the display room of a wholesaler's convention. Exhibits revealed any number of desperate attempts (see cut, col. 2) to make books as exciting outwardly as they sometimes are inside. Though patrons leave automobile shows wanting to buy new cars, visitors to the Book Fair might understandably come away feeling they had seen so many books they never wanted to see another.

Publishing. With the grim evangelical air that characterizes publishers' official pronouncements, Harper's poker-faced Cass Canfield, chairman of the publishers' committee that cooperated with the Times, stated the Fair's prime purpose: "To spread more widely the habit of reading books." He also let out of the bag a cat that squalls constantly in the ears of publishers, authors, booksellers: only one-fifth of one per cent of the U. S. population regularly buys books. Of the U. S. consumer's dollar, 19¢ goes to the automobile industry, more than one cent is spent in jewelry stores, but bookstores get only one-fifth of a cent, or less than florist shops, which get one-third. Since the upper-income group (people earning more than $5,000) numbers around 500,000, there are far fewer regular bookbuyers than there are well-to-do citizens in the U. S. Patrons of bookstores are thus members of a distinctly limited set that might consider itself exclusive if it were not that so many unsuccessful attempts have been made to increase its membership.

Book publishing is an important U. S. industry. But publishing houses like those represented at the Book Fair are not what make it so. Known as regular trade publishers, and bringing out largely works of fiction, biography, travel, history, all of them together account for only 20% of U. S. books. Theirs are the books that are reviewed, sold through bookstores, discussed by the general public, get on bestseller lists when they are successful. What makes publishing Big Business is its textbooks, Bibles, directories which make up 80% of the industry's product. Several prominent houses publishing fiction are economically little more than appendages of the vast and mysterious textbook business (TIME, Nov. 1) which accounts for half of all U. S. volumes printed each year.