In the Company of Writers by Charles Scribner

Author:Charles Scribner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published: 1990-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Publishers and Publishing

Toward the end of World War II, the reprint house of Grosset & Dunlap was put up for sale by its family owners. A number of people bid for it, and a group of publishers bought it jointly. The group included Harry Scherman of the Book-of-the-Month Club; Arthur Thornhill of Little, Brown; Bennett Cerf of Random House; Cass Canfield of Harper’s; the Curtis Publishing Company, which published the Saturday Evening Post; and my father. Grosset & Dunlap reissued fiction in cheap editions, as well as children’s books. The purchasers thought it desirable to keep it in existence. I succeeded my father on the board and the chairmanship rotated among the new owners. In the course of time, Grosset & Dunlap created Bantam Books as a paperback imprint, which brought us all into that busy world of the “mass market” in a more immediate way.

I had mixed emotions about the move. I was not keen about paperback books as they were then, and I could not see what special advantage there was for us in the investment that we might not have had from investing in any other company. But I derived an indirect benefit. The first president of Bantam Books was Walter Pitkin, who was soon succeeded by an amazingly brilliant man, Oscar Dystel, who had worked for a little magazine called Coronet. He was a spectacularly effective person in paperback publishing and built Bantam Books into one of the strongest houses of its kind in the country. He and I became very good friends and I learned a lot from him during our friendship of many years.

Though in principle none of the owners of Grosset & Dunlap should have profited more than the rest, I think Random House did, from overseeing the publishing of low-priced children’s books and receiving compensation for the service. For my part, I felt rather that I was part-owner of a competing publishing house. Even so, I contributed one business idea to the combine. The firm had difficulty in getting its share of paperback Westerns and other popular genres and decided to offer authors higher royalties, covering the cost by raising the price on these books from twenty-five to thirty cents. My contribution was to suggest that if the price could be raised on one class of books, why not raise it across the board? My plea for logic resulted in increasing the price of paperback books.

On other points I proved wrong—for instance, when Grosset & Dunlap wanted to turn The Hardy Boys series into paperbacks. In my conservative spirit, I thought it a poor idea, believing that the youngsters would miss the feel and appearance of the old edition. Grosset & Dunlap went ahead and was proved right.

Some awkward situations arose. When Scribners had a strong best-seller, Bantam thought it should have the inside track in the form of a first refusal on the paperback. For us that would have been counterproductive: we might get a better offer from one of the other paperback houses.

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