Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [17]
Similar arguments had been made against book clubs, Herb pointed out, until Harry Scherman had founded the Book-of-the-Month Club and proved them wrong, but at least the book clubs still sold the ur-product, albeit in a slightly schlockier form sometimes. In any event, Leon Shimkin—a former part-time bookkeeper at Simon and Schuster who had risen to wealth and power as the protégé of the late Marshall Field III—somehow managed to wrest De Graff’s idea away from him, founded Pocket Books, and proceeded to prove that there was indeed a huge, untapped market for books at a quarter.
The key to Shimkin’s success lay in his experience as business manager for P.M., the liberal New York City afternoon daily into which Field had poured a fortune in a forlorn attempt to prove that a left-wing newspaper could survive in a big city. Shimkin had no sympathy with Field’s political ideas, Herb pointed out quickly—this was still America of the fifties—but he very quickly learned everything there was to know about newspaper and magazine distribution.
That bookstores wouldn’t carry mass-market books turned out to be true, but Shimkin hadn’t been dismayed. The price of a paperback book meant that it could be treated like a magazine and displayed in racks in the same places where magazines were sold—newsstands, candy stores, drugstores, railway stations, and bus depots—thus reaching a whole new readership. The idea of linking books to the newspaper and magazine distribution business launched a whole new industry, which came of age suddenly in World War Two, when troops read paperbacks by the millions.
The clear outlines of a massive inferiority complex, combined with an outsize chip on his shoulder, were beginning to appear in Herb’s lecture. Hardcover publishers, he went on, had accepted the mass-market paperback book grudgingly but still looked down their noses at those who worked in that end of the business. This was bound to change, he believed, and soon. Paperback people were just as cultured and well educated as hardcover people but had their feet planted more firmly on the ground. There was a lot more to publishing than bringing out a whole lot of unreadable first novels or new translations of the complete works of Gide or Proust.
I should not misunderstand him, he added hastily—there was a place for Gide, for Proust, even for the kind of snot-nosed little first novels your typically effete hardcover editor bought and that nobody else ever read, but mass-market publishing was attuned first and foremost to the needs of the marketplace, to what people really wanted to read. Pocket Books gave them what they wanted, even if that was Harold Robbins. What was so fucking bad about reading a Harold Robbins novel, anyway, he wanted to know? If they wanted to read Shakespeare, well, by Christ, Pocket Books did Shakespeare; if they wanted to read Pearl S. Buck, well, God damn it, Pocket Books did Pearl S. Buck too—in fact The Good Earth was Pocket Books’ all-time, number-one best-seller. What did I think of them apples?
I wasn’t sure what I thought of them apples, since I had never read Pearl S. Buck, nor, for that matter, Harold Robbins, but I kept my mouth zipped on the subject, rightly guessing that the question was rhetorical. Herb had me typed, I realized, as an effete snob, but before I could find a polite way to tell him that I wasn’t the Gide/Proust type, he was off and running with a long list, recited from memory, of all the distinguished books and classics that Pocket Books had published over the years.
He seemed to be under the mistaken impression, thanks to Morris Helprin I felt sure, that I was a person of a scholarly nature, prodigious learning, and refined taste. He paused frequently to roll his head sideways so he could see me and say, about whatever arcane point he had reached in his narrative, “Of course, being an Oxford man, you already know all that,” or, “Being an Oxford man, you’ve already guessed what I’m getting at.”
It seemed best to nod wisely rather than argue,