Masscult and Midcult by Dwight MacDonald

Author:Dwight MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590174685
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-12-16T06:49:32+00:00

Appendix:

THE HARD SELL

In their first year, 1952, Adler & Hutchins (and Benton, of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which put up the original $2,000,000) sold 1,863 sets of their densely printed, poorly edited, over-priced and over-syntopiconized collection. In 1953, they made some kind of record by selling just 138, no zeros omitted, sets. (I like to think the above review was partly responsible.) Three years later, they got in a new sales manager who went to work on what might humorously be called the reading public. The results were sensational. By 1960 sales had risen to over 35,000 sets a year and last year 51,083 sets were sold for a gross return of $22,000,000. The Great Books of the Western World are at this writing most definitely in business.

The story is told in an article entitled “Cashing in on Culture” that appeared in Time of April 20th last. It runs, in part:

The turning point came in 1956 when Benton brought into Great Books the salesman—stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden, a veteran of thirty-seven years of encyclopedia selling. [The accompanying photograph shows Mr. Harden and Mr. Adler smiling behind three stacks of Great Books; The Salesman looks about like the Savant except he is several inches higher; stocky is as stocky does, after all.] At the time he took over as national sales manager, recalls Harden, Great Books executives “felt there was a 2% cream on top of our society who were Great Books prospects—the eggheads.” Countered Harden: “Let’s go after the mass market—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.”

Harden set about building an indefatigable door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon [sic throughout the Time report; it seems impossible to get that word right] and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).

In the field, Harden’s salesmen offered the Great Books (sold in sets costing from $298 to $1,175 depending on binding) for as little as $10 down and $10 a month, and threw in a bookcase and a Bible or dictionary to boot. In chart-studded sales broadsides, they talked earnestly of the importance of a liberal education for children, and displayed Great Books reading lists for youngsters. To help spread the Great Books idea, more than 50,000 adults were signed up in Great Books discussion groups (run by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation).

With this kind of hard sell, Harden increased Great Books sales 400%...in the first three years of his regime. Today his salesmen average an annual salary of $9,000, make as much as $30,000, and managers take home much more. Harden insists: “They are not just making money. They are carrying the banner.”

Some of Mr. Harden’s regional sales managers make $100,000 a year, which is a very pleasant banner to carry. They may not “just” be making money but they are certainly doing so. And one wonders what golden effulgence radiates from the banner Mr. Harden himself bears aloft? Who

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