“The Tragedy of the Book Industry”?: Bookstores and Book Distribution in the United States to 1950

At this point—usually the binder’s warehouse—the publisher has books; at that point is the book buyer. Between these two points is the tragedy of the book industry.

This statement is taken from O. H. Cheney’s 1931 Economic Survey of the Book Industry. Cheney, a banker who had been commissioned by the National Association of Book Publishers to survey the state of the book industry, continues in the same vein: “Between these points [publisher and book buyer] are so many gaps, so many confusions, so much utter ignorance of what is being done that unless these gaps are filled and unless every branch of the industry learns to know exactly what it is doing, the industry, as it is today, is threatened with destruction.” All in all, he concludes, “mourning becomes the book industry.” ¹

Dire words indeed! But I would echo Cheney by suggesting that it is the study of book distribution that may well be the “tragedy” of American book history—a lively field over the past decades, as literary and historical scholars came to recognize that the dual role of books as both commodities and carriers of culture makes them important to any understanding of our literature, culture, economy, and society. The work of book historians has firmly established the importance of books in shaping American culture and society, but it has almost completely focused on the role of authors, publishers, and readers, while ignoring the fundamental question of just how texts and books found their way from creator to market. Indeed, book historians and literary critics appear to have assumed that the books written by authors and issued by publishers reached their readers seamlessly and without mediation; they have paid next to no attention to the mechanisms of book distribution or to how these mechanisms determined the availability of books and thus the kind of reading that the American public engaged in. As a result, virtually every argument that historians of the American book have made over the past decades—about authorship, publishing, audiences, reader response, and innumerable other topics—must remain provisional. Each of these arguments relies on untested assumptions about the connections between authors, publishers, and readers, for these connections depend upon the mechanisms of distribution.

This failure of book historians is particularly ironic, for the few scholars who have considered the question of book distribution in the United States have often taken the Cheney Report as their source, without (it seems) considering the import that Cheney’s conclusions might hold for their own work. I can only imagine that the Report’s presentation—as a banker, Cheney filled his work with tables, graphs, and charts—has lent it an air of authority, while the implications of its data and the economic moment in which it was prepared have been ignored. Was Cheney correct in his conclusions? Was book distribution truly the “tragedy” of the American book industry? If so, how can we make sense of the fact that book distribution has been so little studied?

These are difficult questions to answer definitively, but unless they are answered our understanding of a central feature of American book history will remain incomplete and inadequate. It is true that the primary source materials for the study of American book distribution are few and widely scattered, and that, where they do survive, their value is often overlooked or misunderstood; but one important source is the many national directories of American bookstores that were published for the use of the book trade. These directories document the extent of the national network of dedicated retail outlets for books, and in many cases contain not only names and addresses, but also an indication of the size of bookstores’ business or their creditworthiness—information that would have been of great use to publishers in filling orders from distant places. The information that they contain also allows us to form a better understanding of the American book distribution system.

Far more of these directories were produced than is generally recognized, in part because their survival is uncommon...