A History of the Book in America

Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America

David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson, David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson, David D. Hall

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469621630, 9780807832851
• eBook ISBN: 9781469625836
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: History

The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier.

The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading — in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies — receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures.

Contributors:
David Abrahamson, Northwestern University
James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006)
James Danky, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College
Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Robert W. Frase (d. 2003)
Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University
David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School
John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society
Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology
Dan Lacy (d. 2001)
Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University
Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University
Elizabeth Long, Rice University
Beth Luey, Arizona State University
Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon
Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University
Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C.
David Paul Nord, Indiana University
Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University
David Reinking, Clemson University
Jane Rhodes, Macalester College
John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University
Linda Scott, University of Oxford
Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press
Ilan Stavans, Amherst College
Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University
John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge
Trysh Travis, University of Florida
Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

Chapter 1: General Introduction

The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age

Michael Schudson

Is the Book Disappearing?

Is the book disappearing? No. Even in an age dazzled by the Internet and distracted by hundreds of television channels, the book endures in something very much like the form it acquired centuries ago. Books produced today, as physical objects, would be easily recognizable to Gutenberg. Books as cultural icons retain a great deal of the magical power they have had for hundreds of years. TV entertainers write books, as do radio talk show hosts, ambitious politicians, billionaire businessmen, and enterprising bloggers. Bookstores populate more communities across the country than ever. Printed matter remains a central resource for formal education, a primary medium of exchange and communication in the arts and sciences, and a focal point for public and political life. Newspapers and magazines, bruised by competition from television and other sources of information and entertainment, persist, although the economic underpinning of the daily newspaper is in jeopardy. Both in the changing world of scientific publishing and in religious and inspirational publishing, print carries on.

More books are published than ever. People buy more books, and presumably read them or look at them, than in the past. There has been a rapid growth of what can be termed high-end literacy. In 1940 Harvard’s library held 4.3 million volumes; by 1990 holdings totaled 11.9 million and were 14.4 million in 2000. In the same years, Berkeley’s holdings grew from 1.1 million to 7.5 million to 9.1 million, Illinois from 1.3 to 7.7 to 9.4 million, Columbia from 1.7 to 6.0 to 7.3 million.¹ And, of course, people read much else besides books. They read forms and memos and manuals on the job as the economy has shifted to jobs that require reading skills. Reading is presumed by income tax forms, job application forms, voting, prescription medication inserts, bus schedules, self-service gas stations and bank ATMs, and every use of a personal computer. A measure like the percentage of consumer dollars spent on books systematically underestimates the percentage of time people spend encountering texts because it ignores work, school, and online reading.

Yet, alongside reassuring continuity and growth in the production of books and the practices of reading, there is room for doubt about both. Sven Birkerts, in his perfectly titled Gutenberg Elegies, observes of the era of “electronic post-modernity” that it brings individuals growing global awareness, a growing capacity to accommodate multiple stimuli, increasing tolerance, and a willingness to try out what is new. But the cost of this is a fragmented sense of time, reduced patience for sustained inquiry, a shattered faith in institutions and traditions, estrangement from community and from a sense of place, and the loss of a sense of a collective future. These changes erode the conditions for what Birkerts calls “deep reading,” that close and caring reading that takes a text seriously and gives it a chance to touch us. Reading at its best, as Birkerts understands it, is part of a “vestigial order.”²

Among intellectuals, pessimism about reading is widespread, if rarely as thoughtful as in Birkerts. Optimism is rare, but not absent. Social theorist John Keane is cautiously hopeful about our present-day “communicative abundance,” and Richard Lanham sees great opportunity in “the electronic word.” Lanham, even in the early days of computer-based writing and reading, was eager to explore a world with a technology that “volatilized print.”³ Optimism is more frequently to be found in gee-whiz popular writers who are taken with the new electronic possibilities. Journalist Michael Lewis writes with admiration of how text messaging on cell phones is a form of literacy jointly invented by Finnish schoolboys too nervous to ask girls out on dates face-to-face and the Finnish schoolgirls who wanted to share tales of those dates with one another. “They’d proved that if the need to communicate indirectly is sufficiently urgent, words can be typed into a telephone keypad with amazing speed.”⁴

Though more Americans reported reading at least one book of fiction or poetry in 2002 than in 1982, this is only because the adult population grew by 38 million in those years; the percentage of this population engaged in “literary reading” declined from 57 to 47 percent. The decline was greatest for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, from 60 to 43 percent.⁵ The percentage of college-educated single women who participate in book clubs and literary discussion groups declined from one-third to one-fourth between 1974 and 1994.⁶ The number of people who do not read at all has been rising. There are new concerns about “aliteracy” in the many people who are able to read but have chosen not to.⁷

Is the literary life dispirited, or dying, or dead? At the end of World War II, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux executive editor Jonathan Galassi has said, literature was more at the heart of American life. “A passion for literature was a cultural norm then—now it’s more arcane, eccentric, a specialized passion. Books have been pushed out of the center of the culture. It’s not that they aren’t still important, but they don’t have the same primacy. At a dinner party, people used to ask, ‘What are you reading?’ Now, it’s ‘What have you seen?’”⁸ But there is reason to believe that this is Manhattan provincialism speaking. In the 1940s, Adolph Kroch, owner of three bookstores in Chicago as well as operator of the book department of a Detroit department store, put his capital into real estate “because he could not find locations where new book stores attempting to sell the whole range of trade books might prosper.”⁹ Where were those lively book-centered dinner parties that Galassi recalls but Kroch apparently could not locate?

Could it be that the book endures but reading is endangered—the deep reading Birkerts admires, or the kind of reading David Bell describes as “surrendering to the organizing logic of a book” rather than the “search-driven” scanning encouraged by reading on the computer screen or reading to pass a high school or college exam?¹⁰ Are the least “bitty” forms of “content,” in the language John Thompson uses in his chapter in this volume—those forms of writing that cannot function when chopped into discrete bits—surviving the best in book form or suffering the most? Although the book endures, has the quality of books been reduced or homogenized through the merging of publishers and the shrinking number of independent bookstores? These complaints have been repeated so often through the years as to cast some doubt on their validity or at least on their urgency. In the 1940s, as today, there were “book industry Cassandras” aplenty as a Social Science Research Council inquiry put it at the time.¹¹ James T. Farrell complained in 1945 that the market, newly becoming a “dictator” in publishing, “reduces the significance of the individual consciousnesses of editors and publishers.”¹² The book industry was already highly concentrated before World War II, with retailing dominated by department stores (with 38 percent of bookstore sales in 1930–31).¹³ Recent concerns about mergers in publishing, superstore domination of retail, and anxiety about the demise of the “midlist” book operate with too little historical perspective.

While the authors in this volume do not share a uniform sensibility on these issues, each of their chapters adds to a portrait that finds books enduring in a rapidly changing context in the decades since 1945. About this recent history, each has much to say. On our near future, there is disagreement. Some chapters echo the grave concerns just cited that the consolidation of the book business and the preoccupation of publishers with blockbusters will eliminate many good books from the marketplace. Others share the optimism in more or less guarded form of publisher Jason Epstein’s observation that more valuable books are published than ever and more people read them. He attributes this to the distributional power of the chain bookstores.¹⁴ This is a key factor (see Laura Miller’s chapter) but it is not the only factor. Linda Scott observes in her chapter that the baby boom generation experienced a distinctive book-oriented socialization, reading more than the generations before or after.

The aim of this volume is not to foresee the future but to understand how we arrived at this point—indeed, how to characterize “this point.” One thing is sure: we cannot see the past six decades as nothing but the prefiguring of electronic publishing. Quite apart from personal computers, the Internet, Amazon.com, and the much discussed but so far little used e-book, our age has seen spectacular change. It has been a fabulous era of merger, consolidation, and concentration in the publishing industry (see Beth Luey’s chapter), but there have never been more small specialized publishers.¹⁵ It has been an era of lust for the best seller and troubled concern about serious literature, yet more different titles are published annually than ever, and there is a growing diversity in books and other media. It has been an era of fierce commercial competition in publishing, yet never before have governments, universities, foundations, and sundry interest groups subsidized publishing more lavishly. It has been an era when rival media, most notably television, have pressed increasingly on the book, yet the old-fashioned codex book has expanded its reach and is more integrated into more lives and a larger percentage of the population than it was in 1945—even if best sellers are sometimes precisely those written by or about television or movies, sports, or political celebrities.

Change, in short, even before the personal computer and the Internet, has been rapid, complex, and wide-ranging. Michael Korda, whose career at Simon & Schuster spans most of the period covered here, looks back to his first days, in the late 1950s, and can scarcely picture that world as continuous with the present. “One’s own photograph from that time now seems to be one of a complete stranger. It is hard to summon up a world so different in so many ways from the present and yet so close, a world where manual typewriters were still in use, in which the orders were counted by a couple of gray-haired ladies, the accountants still used ledgers, and there was a real, live telephone operator with a switchboard on the premises. In the age before the photocopy machine, carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner’s blackened skin.”¹⁶

It is tempting to see the period this volume covers as a single unit, but of course more than a half century of rapid change has its own internal periodization. We do not presume that 1945 was a special moment of equilibrium for print; it is simply the moment where this volume picks up a five-volume narrative. Nor can we presume that the first decade of the twenty-first century is a natural end point or turning point; it is simply the moment when we bring this project to a close.

Approaches to the History of Print

How can we grasp the complex and contradictory developments that affected the creation, impact, and meanings of the printed word during the past sixty years? One strategy would be to chronicle particular exemplars of print—books, magazines, or newspaper stories—that left their mark. In the past six decades, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), for instance, looms large. Kinsey’s pathbreaking best seller has been described as the work that “made human sexuality a legitimate topic for public discussion.”¹⁷ The initial print run of 10,000 was quickly exhausted and the book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-seven weeks in a row; more than 300,000 copies sold in the book’s first five years. The stir it caused reached the cultural heights as well as the popular press. For Columbia literary star Lionel Trilling, the book’s publication and reception, as much as the text itself, was cause for contemplation. It seemed an instance of both the strengths and weaknesses of a democratic culture, one in which social facts have unquestioned authority, in which “science” supersedes or precludes moral judgment—“that all social facts—with the exception of exclusion and economic hardship—must be accepted … that is, that no judgment must be passed on them, that any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and consequences will turn out to be ‘undemocratic.’”¹⁸

We do not often know what seeds a book or article may plant with what consequences, but in the case of the Kinsey report we do know that the idea for the first organization to represent the interests of homosexuals came from Harry Hay, a Hollywood actor and radical activist whose reading of it persuaded him that there was a constituency for such an organization. Hay was the sparkplug among the five Los Angeles men who founded the Mattachine Society in 1951, the first formal association of homosexuals. For Hay and for many others at the time, Kinsey provided the scientific confirmation for what many homosexuals were beginning to feel—“the sense of belonging to a group.” It provided “an added push at a crucial time to the emergence of an urban gay subculture.”¹⁹

Other cases in which specific titles helped to inspire powerful social movements of the postwar years come from the political arena. Lee Edwards, a founder of the pioneering right-wing political group, Young Americans for Freedom, recalled, “For us, the ’60s began not with a bang but with a book, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater.” The book was printed (published would be too strong a word) by a small Shepherdsville, Kentucky, printing company—and it made the best-seller lists by the summer of 1960.²⁰ At the same time, Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, saw the left-wing student rebellion also rooted in print; his generation could not “avoid reading criticism of itself and its fathers; indeed, the media have flooded the market with inexpensive paperbacks such as The Lonely Crowd, The Hidden Persuaders, The Organization Man.”²¹

In this volume, we focus on a different, dramatic example of the way a single title can foster a demand for social change: Priscilla Coit Murphy’s chapter is exclusively devoted to the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on the environmental movement. But an alternative approach to the history of print examines multiple titles—genres of writing—in light of the relationships among publishers, authors, editors, and audiences. We consider science publishing (Bruce Lewenstein’s chapter), textbooks (Jonathan Zimmerman’s), religious publishing (Paul Gutjahr’s), and Spanish-language publications (Ilan Stavans’s), each of which operates by different business practices, different concepts of authorship, different paths and patterns of distribution, and different uses and gratifications for readers. Furthermore, while most of this volume investigates books, chapters by James Baughman, James Danky, and Jane Rhodes attend to newspapers, David Abrahamson and Carol Polsgrove to magazines.

The history of print can also be written as a story of the social trends that ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A History of the Book in America
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Editors’ and Authors’ Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age
• Part I. Technological, Business, and Government Foundations
• Part II. Forms and Institutions of Mediation and Subsidy
• Part III. Reading, Identity, and Community
• Reading the Data on Books, Newspapers, and Magazines: A Statistical Appendix
• Notes
• Index