This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply. I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.
After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show, the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational judgments can scarcely be questioned.
When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless. She was simply delighted.
During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Stranger, Galsworthy’s short story, Quality, Northrop’s Philosophical Anthropology, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Hamlet, Job, Faust, and Peer Gynt, Fromm’s The Art of Loving, Erickson’s Childhood and Society, Huxley’s Brave New World, Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment; Four Modern American Writers, and Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. It was a pretty wild course in Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores throughout the city and the suburbs.
Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s The Phenomena of Man, also included in this series. A check of bookstores in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported: “We had 375 copies of Phenomena of Man on hand before Brent’s review. By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during the previous five months.
When I reviewed The Red and the Black, we had only ten copies in stock at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No, we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”
“Was there a run on the book?” I said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”
“Can you tell me the reason?”
“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”