Services: Cashing In on Culture

• Share

With more leisure in which to indulge an old itch to improve themselves, many Americans are casting an eye on culture, and catching up on philosophy as never before. No U.S. enterprise has done more to foster this trend—or has cashed in on it more successfully—than Chicago's Great Books of the Western World. This week, as it celebrates the completion of its first decade in business, Great Books can boast that it has sold more than 153,000 of its 54-volume sets, which include works by 74 authors ranging from Homer to Freud. Last year alone, 51,083 Great Books sets were sold for $22 million, a 27% increase over 1960. As a division of Publisher (and ex-Connecticut Senator) William Benton's Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., Great Books keeps mum about its profits, but Britannica executives concede that it earns enough to pay some of its regional sales managers $100,000 a year.

Million-Dollar Index. Great Books is the fruit of an inspired collaboration between an intellectual with a taste for "business romance" and a hard-driving salesman with a rare knack for marketing culture. The intellectual is restless Mortimer J. Adler, 59, a martini-sipping scholastic iconoclast who first imposed himself on the national consciousness as a University of Chicago philosophy of law professor and a protégé of former Chicago Chancellor Robert Hutchins (who still holds the title of editor of the Great Books). In 1943 Adler scraped up a $60,000 grant to begin work on his Syntopticon index for the Great Books. The Syntopticon unabashedly categorizes the "102 Great Ideas of Western Civilization" (from Angel and Animal to Wisdom and the World ) and refers the reader to everything of note that the great authors have said about them.

Eggheads Are Not Enough. Before he was through, it cost Adler nine years and $1,000,000 (mostly wheedled out of Benton) to put the Syntopticon together. With heavy publicity mailings to industrialists—often followed up by whirlwind visits from Adler—Britannica managed to sell 1,863 Great Books sets in 1952. But in 1953 sales plummeted to 138.

The turning point came in 1956, when Benton brought into Great Books the salesman—stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden, a veteran of 37 years of encyclopedia selling. At the time he took over as national sales manager, recalls Harden, Great Books executives "felt there was a 2% cream on top of our society who were Great Books prospects—the eggheads." Countered Harden: "Let's go after the mass market—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker."

Learn Now, Pay Later. To reach the butcher and baker, Harden set about building an indefatigable, door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).