"Wake Up and Read!" Book Promotion and National Library Week, 1958

In the early 1950s publishers and librarians shared an array of intersecting interests. Ranging from copyright and postal rates to intellectual freedom, these challenges grew out of the desire of both professional communities to expand the availability of books and to enlarge the audience of readers. Throughout the early 1950s the American Book Publishers Council and the American Library Association targeted specific legislative goals and responded to immediate threats. But in a communications environment transformed by television, book clubs, and cheap paperbacks, publishers and librarians also sought to proclaim more broadly the central role of books and reading. Spearheaded by the National Book Committee, the observance of National Library Week (NLW), March 16–22, 1958, brought together publishers, librarians, civic leaders, and local volunteers and employed all the tools of mass communication to call upon Americans to "Wake Up and Read!" In the process NLW organizers established a model of private-public partnership and multilayered leadership that was continued with the creation of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress in 1977.

Intersecting Interests

To gain the benefits of joint action, major publishing houses had formed the American Book Publishers Council (ABPC) in 1946. Working in the for-profit sector, publishers in the 1950s felt more threatened by the changing environment than did librarians. Seeing the traditional literary values of old family firms succumb to the pressures of commercialization, publishers like Alfred A. Knopf feared for the future of the "good" book.¹ Editors, Knopf lamented, no longer worked with authors but with manuscripts; book clubs, movie adaptations, and paperback reprints determined what books would reach the most readers. On the other hand, ABPC economist Robert Frase calculated that publishers barely broke even on their core business and depended on book club contracts and reprint rights to make a modest profit.² In an article entitled "Publishing and Social Responsibility" Hiram Haydn, editor-in-chief at Random House, highlighted shortcomings in the book distribution system. As evidence, he noted that the ten thousand new books and twenty-five hundred reprints issued a year reached only 1 percent of the population; smaller communities lacked bookstores, thirty million Americans lacked library service, and many public libraries had book budgets that "permit the purchase of no more than a few dozen titles a year."³

Both publishers and librarians saw the potential for reaching new readers in rural areas. The ABPC, through its Committee on Reading Development, and the American Library Association (ALA) had already collaborated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service in sponsoring a conference on rural reading in 1951. With support from Sears Roebuck, the conference proceedings were transformed into the best-selling anthology The Wonderful World of Books, the culmination of what Theodore Waller of Grolier Publishing Company described as "perhaps the most ambitious promotion program for any book of general interest in recent years."⁴ Librarians had somewhat more reason for optimism as they sought to expand the community of readers. After a sustained legislative campaign lasting more than a decade and with the support of publishers, women's clubs, and national civic and educational organizations, librarians had secured passage of the Library Services Act in 1956. The appropriation of federal funds to states for demonstrations of public library service meant that books would reach previously unserved and underserved areas. To qualify for the new funding, states had to formulate plans for library service, elevating book distribution from a community-based model to larger units of library service. In anticipation, a committee of the ALA Public Libraries Division in 1954 began to revise the association's standards for public library service, which had last been issued in 1943. With funding from the Carnegie Corporation and working with Robert D. Leigh, director of the ALAcommissioned Public Library Inquiry of the late 1940s, the committee in 1956 issued general guidelines and two hundred specific standards for library facilities and services. The new standards stressed a cooperative approach and called on librarians and officials to work jointly, lest readers in their locality suffer.⁵ Publishers, again identifying their common...