The plain fact is, the kind of business I wanted to immerse myself in does not exist. One of the reasons it does not exist is because the publishing industry does not—and quite possibly cannot—support it, even to the extent of supplying its reason for being: good books. The business of publishing and the profession of letters have become worlds apart. The arts are being bereft of their purpose through a horrifying operation known as “the communications industry,” an industry geared for junk eaters.
Publishing is “bigger” and more profitable today than ever before, largely because of the mushrooming of educational institutions and the consequent demand for textbooks. Wall Street has gone into publishing; there is money in it. But the money is in mass distribution—through the schools, through the book clubs. It is little wonder that the individual, personal bookseller is an anachronism, lost sight of by the publishers themselves. The bookseller may feel outraged, as I did, when a publisher sells him books, then sends out a mailing piece to the bookseller’s customers offering the same books at a much lower price. The practice is certainly unfair, but the bookseller has become a completely vestigial distributing organ. What the publisher is really looking forward to is the possibility that one of the book clubs will take some of his publications, further slashing the price beyond the possibility of retail competition.
And what of the writer? If he can turn out bestsellers, he can live like a potentate. But the sure-fire formula in this field is to pander to a sex-starved culture and a dirty, vulgar one to boot. A book written by this or any other formula can’t be worth anything. A true book must be part of the individual’s life and spirit.
It is commonplace to blame the public for what the public gets. And no doubt the public must take the blame. But I am not interested in giving the public what it wants if this means corrupting man’s spirit even through as ineffectual a medium as the printed word.
As a matter of fact, I have never had what people wanted to read (“Your competitor just bought fifty copies of this title,” the publisher’s representative would tell me, shaking his head hopelessly), and I lost out because of it. But my personal satisfaction derived from recommending some book, possibly an old one, that I thought would bring the reader something fresh and real.
Anything that touches the heart or stirs the mind has become a matter for apology. I think of Mary Martin coming out on the stage in South Pacific and begging the audience’s indulgence and forgiveness for having to admit to them that she was in love with a wonderful guy!
Is it any wonder that modern men and women are so threatened, frightened, and weak when they have lost the capacity for love, tenderness and awe—capacities which should be nourished by what we read? And especially the men. “Where are the men?” the women ask. Once a man has joined “the organization,” the love of a real woman offers a basic threat. The organization man doesn’t want to be challenged by a relationship any more than by an idea.
It was to these deficiencies in people’s lives that I had hoped to minister. Reading remains a positive leverage to keep us from becoming dehumanized. But easy reading won’t do it, or phony Great Book courses that foster smugness and an assumed superiority (read the ads purveying this kind of intellectual snobbery).
We can’t go on devaluating the human spirit and expect some miracle to save us. Even Moses couldn’t get the Red Sea to divide until a stranger acted upon absolute faith and jumped in. I felt my job was to get people to jump—to read something, old or new, that could engage them in some real vision of human possibilities: to read Albert Camus or Graham Greene or Rollo May or Erich Fromm. To read again (or for the first time) Ibsen’s Peer Gynt or Kafka’s The Trial, Bruno Bettleheim’s The Informed Heart, F. S. C. Northrop’s Philosophical Anthropology, or Father duChardin’s The Phenomena of Man.
I decided I could sell a good book just as easily as a bad book. In the days following the visit of Katharine Hepburn, I placed Modern Woman: The Lost Sex into the hands of many women, and the responses were gratifying and illuminating. Finally I wrote a letter to Ferdinand Lundberg, co-author of the book, telling him of one of the most interesting of these incidents. He sent the letter along to Mary Griffiths, then advertising manager for Harper and Brothers, who asked permission to reprint it in its entirety as an ad in the Chicago Tribune book section. A phenomenal sale resulted. I sold hundreds of copies and so did other Chicago booksellers.