'Good Reading for the Million: The ‘Paperback Revolution’ And the Co-Production of Academic Knowledge in Mid Twentieth-Century Britain and America' by Peter Mandler in (2019) 244(1)
Past & Present 235–269 comments
The serious non-fiction paperback was one of the principal vehicles for the distribution of expert knowledge in the mid 20th century. This paper examines the market for serious non-fiction in both the US and the UK between the 1930s and the 1960s, by looking at the market leaders in the two countries, Pelican and Mentor Books, published by Penguin and New American Library respectively. It argues that novel modes of distribution and acts of selection by authors, publishers and readers constituted a process of the co-production of knowledge that problematizes views of mid-century expertise as expressions of governmentality. Different patterns of distribution and market demand in the two countries shed further light on who read, what they read and for what purpose.
Mandler argues
In 1952, at a time when his own future best-seller The Lonely Crowd was not yet in paperback, the American sociologist David Riesman reported to the readers of the Antioch Review on a new cultural phenomenon that might have previously escaped their notice. A friend of his in the publishing industry had told him that in an Ohio Valley steel town, population 75,000, which lacked a single bookstore and about which the department store buyer insisted ‘[p]eople here don’t read; they just look at television or go to the taverns’, nevertheless 750,000 paperback books a year were sold in restaurants, newsstands and drugstores, ‘many of them in the Mentor line of modern classics’. ‘I wish we had some knowledge and understanding of what these citizens made out of all they read’, Riesman continued, ‘the Faulkner novels, the Conant On Understanding Science, the Ruth Benedict Patterns of Culture, along with the Mickey Spillane and other mixtures of sadism with sex. But studies of this kind in the field of leisure have not yet been made, as far as I know’.
As far as I know, they still have not been made. Of the paperback revolution in general, which brought books to new readerships around the world from the mid 1930s when Penguin pioneered the mass-market paperback in Britain, we know a fair amount, and literary scholars have demonstrated amply how a taste for classic and modernist fiction such as the Faulkner novels was aroused ‘along with the Mickey Spillane’. But Riesman’s curiosity about the even more incongruous taste for the serious non-fiction purveyed by the Mentor line — as we will see, a direct spin-off of Penguin’s Pelican imprint — has not been satisfied, although a rising tide of single-issue or single-title studies suggests that we are if anything now more curious about it.
In this article I seek to provide a basic knowledge and understanding of the mass audiences for serious non-fiction paperbacks built up in the mid twentieth century. Apart from satisfying Riesman’s (and our) curiosity, such an enquiry can help to address broader questions about the diffusion of expert knowledge to democratic citizenries that have become staples in the dissection of what the Foucauldians call ‘governmentality’ — the ways in which ‘the values and ethics of democratic society’ become aligned with ‘the rationales and techniques of power’, as Nikolas Rose has put it. In the Foucauldian view of modernity, knowledge and power are completely interpenetrated; thus the mere transmission of knowledge, especially if yoked to internalized acknowledgement of the hegemony of expertise, is constitutive of (and not merely supportive of) power relations. A milder, post-Foucauldian revision of this view, popular amongst historians of science for some time now, takes a more benign or at least agnostic view of power, and considers knowledge to be not so much transmitted as ‘co-produced’ with its consumers. So far, however, this view has appeared easier to propound in theory than to demonstrate in practice. While it is sensible to hold that knowledge production rarely follows a straightforward diffusionist model, in which expert knowledge is disseminated downwards intact, it is harder to show how knowledge is received, reprocessed and fed back such that knowledge can be shown to have been co-produced in multiple nodes. A close study of the non-fiction paperback may shed some light on this complex process by specifying more closely the conditions of production and distribution, and the degree of co-production, of a prime vehicle for knowledge, at its peak in a period which even advocates of co-production tend to see as the heyday of the downward diffusion of expertise.
The paperback book offers special opportunities and challenges for the study of expertise and its publics. With its depth of content, demands upon attention and relative permanence, it packed a punch that more ephemeral (though persistent) mass media such as radio, cinema and television lacked. While less ubiquitous in modern life than law and national symbolism, its direct address to subjectivity made it one of the more effective ‘technologies of the self’9 in an age when those technologies were manifestly multiplying. It entrained many actors and operated on many levels. Both production and consumption chains were highly ramified — authors, publishers, censors, wholesalers, retailers, educators, critics and, pre-eminently, readers could all use the paperback to get a grip on the ‘selves’ in construction around them. The product was also highly ramified. Pulp fiction was at first the predominant form, much decried then by moralists and educators, and subsequently by critics of the capitalist marketplace. As already noted, literary critics have threshed out of the mass of pulp a burgeoning taste for classic and contemporary fiction. Moving closer to expertise proper, paperbacks were the principal vehicle (alongside magazines) for expert management of daily life through self-help and advice manuals on topics ranging from ‘winning friends and influencing people’ to baby care, sexuality, marriage, career, health and nutrition. The best-selling non-fiction paperbacks in post-war America were Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, well ahead of the pack with 18.5 million copies sold between 1940 and 1965, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a distant second at five million.
But as Riesman understood already in 1952, not far behind such advice manuals was a much more sophisticated body of expertise, drawing largely on academic writing and research and spanning the full range of modern academic subjects, from the traditional humanities (classics, history and philosophy) to the rising social sciences (psychology, sociology and anthropology) and the natural sciences (physics, physiology and mathematics). Unlikely as it sounds, best-sellers in these categories also reached a mass audience in the post-war decades — both Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, which Riesman noticed, and his own book The Lonely Crowd, which came out in paperback in 1953, had sold over a million copies by 1970. This kind of book — more abstract and conceptual, less directly targeted at the individual’s subjectivity and also less aggressively marketed — represented, I will argue, a different use of expertise. While its producers had missionary aspirations of their own, consumers had more say in choosing the type of expertise that suited them and more latitude in the uses they made of it. An anatomy of the academic mass-market paperback can therefore tell us something new about ‘technologies of the self’ that takes us well beyond the usual band of experts and bureaucrats and ideologies of social control.
The mass-market paperback was a global phenomenon, but its impact was earliest and most intense in the Anglophone world. I will focus therefore on the pioneer, Pelican Books, published by Penguin in the United Kingdom (though also exported all over the world, notably to the Commonwealth), and Mentor Books, published by New American Library (hereafter NAL) in the United States, the two acknowledged market leaders in this field at least until the early 1960s. In what follows I will narrate the rise of Pelicans and Mentors, consider who were their readers, assess what they read, and finally attempt some answers to Riesman’s query about what they made of what they read — obviously the hardest part of all — and how their choices fed back into the process of knowledge production by inflecting what was on offer.
The origin of Penguin is reasonably well known. The founder was Allen Lane, a distant connection of the John Lane publishing family. By his own admission, he did not start Penguin with a burning social or political mission; he was principally concerned to tilt against the snobberies of the book trade and at the same time make some money, by selling cheap, well-designed paperback editions of middlebrow novels and biographies to an underserved provincial and suburban audience. There had been such experiments before — notably in Germany, where Tauschnitz publishers and Albatross Books had aimed at British travellers on the Continent — but Lane caught the zeitgeist as no-one else had. His books were handsome, convenient, affordable and, as they proved popular, quickly became ubiquitous, breaking out of the bookshops into Woolworth’s chain stores, railway bookstalls, newsagents and tobacconists. Partly under this impetus, by 1940, 50 per cent more working-class readers were in the habit of buying books than borrowed them from libraries.
By then Allen Lane was seeking something more than mere commercial success. In the depths of the 1930s Slump, Lane like many sensitive, comfortably-off young men of the time did have a mild social conscience and he was quickly swept up into a giddy whirl of earnest social reformers and adult-educators — old Fabians such as G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, whose titles proved instant hits for Penguin, the Indian nationalist Krishna Menon, the social historian Lance Beales, and most importantly Billy Williams, son of a Welsh carpenter, and a pillar of the adult-education movement. Lane, who like most middle-class boys had left school at 16, came to see something of what he had missed, and to view the paperback as a portable evening-class and not only as an entertainment. In the spirit of the 1930s — of the Workers’ Educational Association, the Left Book Club and the Popular Front — he married this educational impulse to a leftish stance, going so far as to contribute an article entitled ‘Books for the Million’ to the magazine Left Review in May 1938, which portrayed the Penguin paperback as a contribution to the people’s control of their own destiny.
Lane’s principal vehicle for this educational and political mission was Pelican Books, the serious non-fiction line added to Penguin in 1937. Pelican only ever accounted for a minority of Penguin sales — 10 per cent in wartime, though a growing proportion thereafter; this amounted to nearly two million copies a year in wartime for a population of fifty million, and similar or higher levels thereafter. It was Pelican to which Lane was referring in Left Review when he attributed political significance to his enterprise — it was Pelican that gave ‘access to contemporary thought and to a reasonable body of scientific knowledge’ to put ever-growing numbers of people ‘in a position to control our future in the light of our knowledge of the past’.16 Billy Williams helped Lane move beyond his middle-class base to wider strata of self-improving working men, and to scout out the kinds of serious non-fiction that might appeal to and empower this audience — in the first instance, history, sociology, politics and economics, but increasingly also science, art, and later an ever-widening set of academic disciplines. Lane and Williams had their own educational and political motives and naturally gravitated at first to Fabian socialism, to the historical, literary and economic interests of the adult-education movement and to the political issues of the day (featured also in the famous series of Penguin Specials from 1938). But both their commercial interests and their open-mindedness about their audience (really an ignorance that they shared with everyone who had discounted even the possibility of a mass market for such fare) favoured an experimental approach. Any topic, so long as it met their minimum standards of decency and seriousness, was grist to their mill. Titles were selected informally and on the basis both of past sales and new enthusiasms, the enthusiasms not only of Lane and Williams, but also of two loose cannons Lane had recruited early on — Alan Glover, an eccentric auto-didact, known for the tattoo-removal scars that covered his face and his encyclopedic range of interests from Freud to Buddhism, and Eunice Frost, the talent scout sent out to ‘[keep] the house policy abreast with contemporary thought’.
Even at the start, commentators were astonished by the range and altitude of the titles that could (it turned out) be sold in print-runs of fifty thousand or more — not just Shaw and Wells, or current affairs, but the likes of R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Elie Halevy’s History of the English People (sold in seven parts), or Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. ‘These are all books which … have helped to make the intellectual history of this century’, marvelled the Spectator, and their availability for ‘the price of a cheap cinema seat or a packet of cigarettes’ was ‘a fact of enormous importance in the struggle to overcome economic restrictions to knowledge … one more indication of the hunger for information, for fact, for explanation, which exists unsatisfied at the present time’. ‘When the corner tobacconist is selling’ such books, the Times concluded, ‘it is a fair assumption that very large strata of purchasers are being tapped’.
Even wider strata of potential purchasers beckoned temptingly across the Atlantic, where in the US, with three times the population but half the number of bookstores, there appeared to be a huge unexploited mass market. Starting with Pocket Books in 1939, a few paperback houses had opened in New York and during the war began to build a mass market mostly for pulp fiction by distributing through magazine wholesalers to a bewildering variety of retail newsstands, drugstores, smoke shops and variety stores. Lane felt certain that there were opportunities here for his quality lines as well. After a few abortive attempts to start up an American operation — Lane’s first representatives in New York insisted that they could only sell pulp through the retail outlets — he finally found two true believers like himself and Williams: Kurt Enoch, a founder of the original German Albatross Books, now providentially marooned in the States as an underemployed refugee, and Victor Weybright, a progressive publisher who had run the US propaganda office in London during the war. Weybright, who took editorial charge, and Enoch, who handled the business, set up an operation that was very much a mirror-image of Penguin, with its own Billy Williams-figure in E. C. Lindeman, a Columbia philosopher and adult-educator,19 and its own equivalent of the talent-spotting Eunice Frost, Arabel Porter. The first American Pelicans appeared in January 1946.
For a time, the US and UK operations appeared to run in tandem. In both countries Pelicans formed a substantial and surprising proportion of total sales. They were a mix of reprints of classics, recent academic works that had only appeared in hardcover, and specially commissioned works — increasingly the last as Lane, Williams and Weybright learned what sold and could guide authors to providing suitable copy on subjects they wanted to try out. US Pelican borrowed titles from UK Pelican — Shaw, Wells, Tawney, Julian Huxley, the physicist James Jeans and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead all sold well in both countries — and bought rights for equivalent titles tailored to the US market, such as Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and, as an equivalent to Jeans, works by the physicist George Gamow. As Williams wrote to Weybright, they shared a ‘common belief’ in publishing as ‘a vocation as well as a trade’, the peculiar synergy between ‘commerce’ and ‘conscience’ being responsible for their exceptional success in both:
The great advantage which a man like you has over other crusaders is that he works in plain clothes and is not always parading his Holy Cross. No one, to look at Allen and you and me would suspect us of having good intentions, and that is the real reason why our intentions work out!
Despite this common cause, two differences quickly intervened that led to a parting of the ways. Both derived from the special challenges of selling books in America. While Americans had much higher levels of formal education than the British, they did not read many books, even when in college, and once out of college poor distribution meant that they had few opportunities to buy books even if they wished. There were only something like 1,200 bookshops in the entire country, heavily concentrated in major metropolitan areas — a half of all bookshops were located in five states (New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois and California), and 85 per cent of counties across the country had no recognized outlet for books at all. Mail-order book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, had done something to rectify this, but had only succeeded in doubling the volume of book sales, mostly to highly educated people, buying the same kind of books as were bought in shops. Pocket Books’ solution, as we have seen, was to peddle books through wholesalers to magazine and newspaper outlets, of which there were up to a hundred thousand nationwide, reaching even the smallest communities. Weybright readily adopted this solution, but to make it work he felt he had to adopt two practices that were unacceptable to Lane.
First, he needed some massive sellers to get the wholesalers to take his books in the first place, books that were guaranteed to sell anywhere in sufficient quantities to make it worth their while. So Weybright was prepared to lead his line with pulps and near-pulps — in addition to Dr. Spock, Pocket Books had used Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason detective stories for this purpose, and Weybright bought the rights to Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled private eye stories and Erskine Caldwell’s sexed-up Southern Gothic tales. The pulp fiction did not affect the selection and sale of the more serious lines — nor did they cross-subsidize, because all of Weybright’s books aimed to make a profit — but they were needed to get access to the wholesalers, something which Lane could not and did not accept. He would rather not publish at all in the United States if it meant selling what he considered pornography.
Second, in order to sell his serious lines through the retail outlets, Weybright went in for rather more aggressive marketing than Lane would tolerate, including colour covers (not as lurid as his pulp covers, but able to sit comfortably alongside them) and salesmanship on the jacket copy to entice reluctant or unsophisticated readers to crack the spine. Again, this packaging hardly affected the content of the books, as Weybright continued to print the same kind of material as Penguin (indeed often the same titles), but Lane forbade it; neither colour nor even illustration became common on Penguins until the 1960s and the jacket copy remained austere and descriptive. These irreconcilable differences were recognized quickly on both sides and by 1948 Lane had agreed to sell his interest to Enoch and Weybright. The US operation was relaunched in that year as NAL, with its Penguin lines rebranded as Signet Books and its Pelicans as Mentor Books.
Despite these differences, Pelican and Mentor remained embarked on similar missions through the early 1960s at least, and remained the dominant purveyors in their respective markets of serious non-fiction in mass-market paperback form. Weybright even adopted for NAL a slogan he borrowed from Lane (slightly Americanized in diction), ‘Good Reading for the Millions’. They had no real rivals until Doubleday launched Anchor Books in the United States in 1953, followed by Knopf’s Vintage Books and a wave of similar quality-paperback imprints from other hardback houses. Even these so-called ‘egghead paperbacks’ were not quite in the Pelican and Mentor mould, being higher-priced and more clearly targeted at college and graduate markets. Although the egghead imprints had some impressive successes much like Mentor’s — conspicuously, one of Anchor’s first titles, Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, and one of Vintage’s, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, eventually reached the million-sales mark attained by Benedict — Mentor remained the market leader until the early 1960s. Pelican had fewer competitors until the 1960s, although it was then challenged and finally capitulated to colour covers. Both imprints benefitted also from their early start, in that they had impressive backlists which formed an ever-larger proportion of sales as paperbacks moved in both countries into the bookshops in a big way in the late 1950s. Although by then the hardcover publishers were increasingly retaining the paperback rights for their own egghead imprints, Pelican and Mentor continued to thrive by commissioning their own books and selling on the rights to an initial hardcover edition. Their early start also meant that these two imprints were in the best position to benefit from a general shift from fiction to non-fiction reading in both countries that came about as a result of rising educational opportunity
