The Divergent Paths of British and American Publishing

Publishing is not ordinary trade. It is gambling. The publisher bets the cost of manufacturing, advertising and circulating a book, plus the overhead of his establishment, against every book he publishes exactly as a turf bookmaker bets against every horse in the race. The author, with his one book, is an owner backing his favorite at the best odds he can get from the competing publishers. Both are gamblers.

—G. B. Shaw (1945)

Commercialism in American book publishing has a long history. It can be traced back at least to the early nineteenth century, a time when American publishers—undercapitalized and struggling with an inefficient distribution system—subsisted on titles pirated from the British market. Because the United States had no international copyright law, American publishers were free to issue British books without paying royalties to authors or permissions fees to originating publishers. The Chace Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1891, established a version of international copyright in this country; but the bill contained a protectionist clause (insisted upon by the printers' unions) that required British books to be typeset, printed, and bound in the United States to qualify for copyright. This clause prevented British publishers from flooding the American market with overruns and remaindered stock. Even after passage of the Chace Act, British publishers remained wary of the U.S. trade. American houses, for their part, bent their energy toward developing their own authors, discovering new readers, and building a more efficient distribution system.

This situation persisted through the 1890s and into the early 1900s. The British model of publishing, with low overhead, limited advertising, efficient distribution, and a deep backlist, was viewed by many people in the U.S. trade as a worthy ideal that might be aspired to by a small house but that would not work for a large operation. The British approach depended too heavily on price control and did not generate a sufficiently rapid cash flow. The American trade took a different course: it became frontlist oriented, with high overhead, large advances, a strong emphasis on advertising, and a pronounced gambling mentality.

The period between the First and Second World Wars was a good time for book publishing in the United States. The Great Depression of the 1930s did little damage to the industry; some firms, in fact, grew and prospered. "During the Depression we were sitting in clover," recalls Bennett Cerf in his memoir At Random (1977). "In fact, every year we went a little bit ahead, and there was never one when we went backward." There was a general movement of population into the cities in the 1920s and 1930s, creating concentrated and homogeneous book markets. By 1935 well over 50 percent of American people had settled in urban areas. Public education had increased, illiteracy had declined, and the demand for books of all kinds had grown. The aims of most U.S. houses during this period were to reach middle-class buyers, to expand the reading population, to publish inexpensive books, and to take advantage of developments in printing technology such as the rotary press and electrotype plating. Also important were newly invented methods of distribution. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, both founded in 1926, used blanket magazine-advertising and home-mail distribution to reach buyers who lived far from bookshops. American publishers viewed book clubs initially with hostility (for their discounts) and sought to throttle them by legal action, but by the late 1930s it was obvious that demographic conditions in the U.S. were ideal for book clubs and that they would flourish no matter what the old-line publishers might do.

During the 1920s and 1930s American reprint operations such as Grosset and Dunlap, A. L. Burt, Garden City Books, and the Modern Library leased the plates of popular books from trade houses and published inexpensive reissues in long print runs. These books were distributed through drugstores, tobacco shops, department stores, and other comparable outlets. Modern paperbacks made their appearance in 1939 when Robert de Graff founded Pocket Books with the financial backing...