Books: The Boom in Busts

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The road to ruin in the publishing business is strewn with unsold copies of good books and the bones of the publishing-house editors who picked them. Nowadays, the most successful editors are often nonliterary chaps with a well-developed knack for betting right on the question: What will the most readers buy? For early 1953, the experts are betting on historical novels.

First-rate historicals are still being published, e.g., Edith Simon's The Golden Hand and Alfred Duggan's The Little Emperors (see below). But that many readers want them that good is doubtful. The big demand is for the kind of historical that neither engages the mind nor disturbs the emotions, at least not the higher ones. The historicals getting the big promotion buildups this winter have the competent and predictable plots, the busty heroines, the mixture of sex and violence that challenges the movies and television.

Promised, or already on hand this season, are books from such old bellringers as Frank Slaughter, F. Van Wyck Mason, James Street and Rosamond Marshall (see below). And in March, famed Violinist Albert Spalding will fiddle his way into the act with, his publishers announce, "an absorbing and richly patterned evocation of a gaudy era of passion and plot, deceit and beauty." Author Spalding's hero: an 18th century Italian violinist who loved dangerously.