■ This article originally appeared in Logos 7/1, 1996, 58–64.

The conquest of America

Betty Ballantine

The genesis of what has come to be known as the paperback revolution in the United States can be traced to 1939, when, impervious to the immi- nence of war, two men, one in the US and the other in the UK, were preparing an assault on what they believed was an untapped market in the US for low-cost books. The US initiative, headed by Robert de Graff, resulted in the launch of a major paperbound book imprint called Pocket Books, under the aegis of Simon & Schuster. The British initiative was in the mind of Ian Ballantine, who had written—only the year before—his graduate thesis on low-cost book publishing and was in line for the job of bringing the famous British , , into the US. The American Penguin venture was a modest operation compared with Pocket Books. Still, Penguins were internationally known and prestigious, and Allen Lane, who had founded the house in the UK in 1936, was eager to breach the US market. In the face of what was about to happen over the next six years, both projects were a form of business insanity. Yet the visions were both right in the long term. America in 1939 was a wilderness so far as distribution of popular books was concerned, with literate readers crying out to be fed. Americans read magazines and for books relied on small local lend- ing libraries. Ian and were married the day before they sailed for the US in June 1939. The entire staff of Penguin Books America consisted of them and one stock boy. The concept was simple. Spot the demand and import as many, or as few, copies of each title as it seemed to warrant. Within two months of the launch, war broke out in Europe and shipments of up to 50,000 books at a time were being lost to German submarines.

At the time of writing, Betty Ballantine was affiliated with and and had worked with a galaxy of authors, across lists from Westerns to serious nonfiction.

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Moreover, the 1,500 odd bookstores in the US which were regarded as good credit risks did not all rush to buy the new British product. Many believed that paperbacks would compete with the more lucrative sales of domestic hardcover books. Still, there was a sufficient welcome to keep the business afloat, especially in college and university towns, where there was much enthusiasm for titles like Susan Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose. People with special interests discovered titles like Arnold Haskell’s Ballet and others that were mainstays of the Penguin non-fiction list. As the war progressed, there was strong US interest in works like Harold Nicolson’s Why Britain Is at War. Penguin’s political Specials pro- vided information unobtainable otherwise. However, the physical qual- ity of the books began to deteriorate, due to wartime shortages in the UK. Eventually, it would become impossible to sell British-made books in the US. Pocket Books, uninhibited by material or financial restrictions, within two years established a well-deserved reputation for varied editorial con- tent, albeit on the light side. A wide range of well-tested titles was read- ily available from hardcover publishers willing to release reprint rights in titles that had long since ceased to sell at the normal hardbound price (then $2.00 to $2.50). More importantly, Pocket Books was reaching an ever-increasing mar- ket through drugstores, chains and other non-book outlets. The deter- mined readership that had been sustained by a network of small lending libraries housed in candy and tobacco stores grasped eagerly at the new format, priced at a handy 25¢ apiece. It was not long before Penguin and Pocket Books stimulated competi- tive start-ups, notably Pyramid and Avon, the latter of whom named their new line ‘pocket size’ books, an imitation from which they were eventu- ally dissuaded. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US book trade, like the rest of business and industry, was changed virtually overnight. Paper quotas were almost immediately imposed. All book publishers were confined to the parameters of their pre-war production. Pocket Books, which had expanded considerably before war broke out, was assigned a reasonable quota, although later it would feel the wartime pinch in fairly drastic terms. Penguin, forced into US production by the exigencies of wartime shipping and paper shortages in the UK, had only a small quota. But their entire American output up to that point had been dedicated to war books, and the Ballantines had formed close relationships with the military. Forming an official alliance with the Infantry Journal, they now published