Bantam first commissioned from Clarence Petersen a not quite (but somewhat) potted history of their corporate adventure in 1970, and then had him do another edition five years later...I haven't seen the earlier edition, but the second volume is engaging enough and only in part a more literary Annual Report to the stockholders. Some of it is almost candid, in describing various missteps, and Petersen, at the time of the first version still reviewing paperbacks for the Chicago Tribune, rather happy to be able to note the successes and victories of other paperback houses from time to time in his narrative.
Breezy is perhaps the term that comes to mind most readily, as the book is comparable to the kind of business profile one finds in Forbes or the WSJ, only with a bit more personal reminiscence thrown in. A nice touch is the brief history of paperbound, and unbound, books in first century and a half of the United States' existence, with a notable attempt at an end run around the Post Office's rate on mailing books in the 1870s, by various newspapers and "literary papers" sending unbound book texts wrapped in the periodicals themselves to their subscribers...the P.O. eventually stops this practice, dooming most of the periodicals that had been thriving with this scam. But not a few hardy publishers simply turn to dime novels and the like, and by the early 1930s, we are told, a few descendants of those early paperback-esque products were being produced in a more professional manner by such publishers as Hillman Novels (Alex Hillman would notably publish fiction magazines he would capriciously quickly shut down in later years, alongside such notable paperback originals as The Dying Earth by Jack Vance) and Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press (not yet the publisher of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, starting 1941, nor The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, from 1949). But the US paperback industry really took off again with the advent of Pocket Books, basically an offshoot of Simon and Schuster, and the early interest in US expansion by the new and thriving UK firm Penguin, which had gotten its first big leg up by selling through Woolworth's stores in Britain, and how it led them to employ Ian Ballantine, an American newly graduated from the London School of Economics and fascinated by publishing, to launch their US office. Then World War II made remote control from London less practical, and Ballantine and his local staff started packaging and otherwise running US Penguin in their own manner...which didn't sit so well with Allen Lane, Penguin's founder, when the war was over (the latter wanted no illustrations on paperback covers, for example). Ballantine soon found himself, with some other senior staffers, in search of their own shop, and they turned to Grosset and Dunlap, already producing inexpensive hardcover reprint editions and of late owned by a partnership of "main-line" hardcover publishers (in part to keep it out of the hands of Marshall Field, then creating an early multimedia conglomerate) for support in founding what would become Bantam Books.
Ballantine, of course, wouldn't stay with Bantam all that long, either (and would found Ballantine Books, though by 1975 Betty and Ian Ballantine had sold Ballantine Books and IB was back at Bantam in a boutique partnership imprint with Betty, Peacock Press, devoted to lavish art books and, soon, the periodical Ariel: The Book of Fantasy). But before leaving initially, Ballantine had put Bantam on good footing, in part by interesting Curtis Circulation Company, the distribution offshoot of The Saturday Evening Post and the next biggest thing after American News Co. in that arena, in the upstart rooster of a publisher.
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| the 1st, 1970 edition |
Bantam managed to weather the recession in the paperback industry in the early 1950s, in part we are told by some very pragmatic moves by post-Ballantine primary publishing director Oscar Dystel, and the rest of the book addresses the various innovations and consolidations Dystel and company were able to achieve with the house, and how paperbacks generally had fared in the years up through '75. Touching on such matters as how deals were struck with hardcover houses and writers, both together and separately; how Bantam would occasionally take on a book as an original (William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist being among the more notable examples), and usually try to find a hardcover house willing to do an edition in boards along with them (Petersen notes that unlike Dell's Delacorte Press, or the less hardy programs at New American Library and other paperback houses--no mention at all of Ace's A. A. Wyn's brief revival of Story Magazine as a periodical hardcover--Bantam up through '75 had never tried a hardcover imprint on its own...perhaps discreetly not mentioning the relative failure of Ballantine Books' attempt at their own line of hardcovers in the '50s). Also covered: the introduction of the Bantam Extra line of "instant" paperback originals, keyed to current events or release of government documents that the Government Printing Office was less well-equipped to produce in mass quantities, and the stresses such books put on the production staff; and the innovations in packaging and publicity Bantam either introduced or helped refine...along with a few odd bits of description of some of the great successes, and less cheering failures, the paperback house had enjoyed (or not) over the years. Petersen is very careful not to dismiss such garbage as Erich von Däniken's books, or Jean Dixon's, while very much more enthusiastic in describing such projects as Bantam's taking on New American Review after it had been dropped by Signet/New American Library and then briefly continued by Simon and Schuster in mass-market paperback format (not published as a Pocket Book), and publishing it as American Review (why continue to advertise the competition?) as a mild, and apparently approaching break-even status by '75, loss-leader, and prestige and author-goodwill project. It is also interesting (to me, anyway) to note that the Atkins Diet and aerobic exercise regimens were already emerging and controversial matters in the early '70s; meanwhile, brief rundowns on how paperback books (and magazines and catalogs) are designed, printed, bound and shipped are offered, along with accounts of how things went for such important Bantam writers as Jackie Susann, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Hailey, Louis L'Amour, Alvin Toffler and others...including the packaging upgrades for, for example, "Ross Macdonald" as he was taken more seriously by the likes of the New York Times Book Review. And also the nurturing of such "sleepers," eventually to be consistent sellers not only on the racks but to and through schools, as Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I certainly hadn't realized till reading this that Corgi was Bantam's UK imprint.
The hopeful noises about how the then-recent megacorporate purchases and sales of Bantam wouldn't effect the way they did business are a bit of a sad coda here...though the inflationary pressures of the '70s, including the rights bidding wars between the paperback houses, already sometimes self-damaging by the 1960s, are also discussed.
Worth the look, I think, for most FFB fans, if rarely as in-depth as one might want...and reasonably-priced copies are available from the Usual Suspects.
For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
A considerable augmentation to a contents list at Goodreads; all the previously published work (with uniformly fiddled-with titles) had been published in one of Fawcett's men's sweat magazines (probably mostly if not all in True, one of the industry leaders), but it's significant that rather than a Fawcett original, this was published by Regency, the paperback arm of the same publishing folks who had started with sf/fantasy magazines (notably Imagination and Imaginative Tales) and eventually gave them up in favor of concentrating on Rogue, one of the better Playboy imitators of the '50s and '60s...and in the '60s made their way from Chicago to Los Angeles and started the Greenleaf line of porn novels and nonfiction work that raised the ire of the Nixon Admin, leading among other things to editor Earl Kemp's imprisonment on ridiculous charges...an obscenity, though not on the part of Earl. It probably didn't help, for the purposes of taking the manuscript from one office at Fawcett to another, that Davidson once had burnt a hole in Fawcett Books editor Knox Burger's suit with careless cigaret handling; this during a conference in which Davidson and Harlan Ellison nonetheless did manage to sell Burger on a proposed crime-fiction novel, still unfinished and much loathed by Ellison, with a working title of Speak Not of Rope (this data from the memoirs around the Davidson/Ellison collaboration "Up Christopher to Madness" in the collection of Ellison collaborations, Partners in Wonder); Ellison was editing Regency Books at the time this was put together (hence, in part, the slogan on their titles "Regency Books Mean Controversy"); among the projects hanging fire when Ellison was replaced by publisher William Hamling (Ellison's friend Algis Budrys was brought in, and the upshot of the hassle alienated Ellison from Budrys and Kemp for decades) was an anthology of new fiction with Controversial themes, to be edited by Judith Merril...this of course was the seed of Ellison's 1967 Doubleday anthology Dangerous Visions, and perhaps also partially sparked Merril (and certainly to interest publisher Doubleday in encouraging her) to eventually supplement her adventurous Year's Best SF annuals (for Dell/Delacorte) with England Swings SF (1968; reprints, but most of the contents not previously published in the US).
7 - A Rain of Burning Girls (originally published as "The Day It Rained Burning Girls") 1961 (about the Triangle Shirt-Waist Co. fire--the PBS American Experience documentary about this horror will be repeated in February)
23 - The Furniture Fellow ("The King of the U.S.A.") 1959 (Al Capone)
49 - Midwife to Murder ("The Riddle of Jack the Ripper") 1960 (guess who?)
64 - The Forgotten Soldier ("Greatest Soldier in the AEF") 1960 (Samuel Woodfill)
77 - The Death of the Henry Clay ("Death Duel of the River Kings") 1959 (steamboat racing accident)
90 - Beer like Water (Yonkers' Prohibition sewer mystery) --no previous publication information cited
106 - The Men who Killed the Brigade ("The Day the Light Brigade Died") 1961 (Charge of the Light Brigade)
124 - Little René ("The Man Who Killed Devil's Island") 1959 (A decade before Papillon, which was not about René Belbenoit)
141 - The Last Excursion (the sinking of the General Slocum) --no previous publication information cited
Davidson, as Algis Budrys noted in his review of AD's Masters of the Maze for Galaxy magazine (see the Budrys collection Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf) was famous among his puzzled colleagues for taking the initiative to rather extensively and sometime relatively expensively research his historical articles for the likes of True, which often didn't worry about how true a contribution was if it was sufficiently hairy-chested (albeit True was less prone to this than almost all its competitors, they celebrated considerably of late...the Fawcett magazine not actually averse to, and editors such as Ken Purdy were apparently appreciative of, Davidson's efforts). The essays as presented in this book have been revised for collection, though perhaps that mostly means the editorial cuts and rewrites to make them more like the typical run of the magazines' contents have been excised, the cut material re-added. Davidson didn't write as personally, for obvious reasons, in this work as he would in much if not most of his fiction, or the later Borgesian essay/fictions of Adventures in Unhistory. But these works are elegantly and compellingly told, and pain can be felt, the humor where appropriate or needed in place; I've been meaning to read this book for decades, and finally got around to buying it online, and picked it up at the end of a very long day and made the mistake of starting the Triangle essay...there was no stopping till I finished it in the very small hours. Davidson's sorrow and rage are still very alive as he recounted the incident (even if the endless use of "girls" to refer to women does sound strange to me now...though I wonder how many of the younger women were actually girls, it seems as if not too many), and the quiet stress (in both senses) in noting that the NYU building next to the still-extant building which had housed Triangle, to that turn of the 1960s day, continued to have insufficient fire-emergency egress. It remains insane that this is the only non-chapbook of Davidson nonfiction published either during his life or since...and this one never, as far as I know, reprinted after the death of Regency (the end of the romance...).
Mike Ashley, for his part, has been editing anthologies and researching the histories of fiction magazines (even if he does here try to lump in fantasy magazines under the rubric of sf) to a greater extent than nearly anyone, for the last four decades and more...his multivolume enlarged and upgraded account of the development of fantastic-fiction magazines over the last century has managed to recomplicate and grow ever larger (even as he attempts to throw in only the most important and pertinent of related developments, which leads to a few slight but understandable distortions at the edges...for example, he assumes that the Warren magazines (notably Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, but also Help!, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Spacemen, etc.) were the first to publish horror comics again after the Comics Code was created in the mid 1950s...that honor actually goes to Dell, of all publishers, which never joined the Code Authority because their comics were so obviously wholesome (and perhaps because George Delacorte didn't enjoy being bullied by the Archie Comics folks), but who saw an empty market niche when it was glaring and began publishing relatively clever horror comics in 1962--though Dell wouldn't become too terribly relevant to Ashley's subject matter at hand till after the sale of the Davis Publications fiction titles to their old paperback partners at Dell in 1992...Dell had been publishing Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine best-of anthologies for decades, and now published the magazine Davis had bought in the mid '70s, after a disastrous gamble on a Sylvia Porter consumer-affairs title nearly bankrupted Davis, leading to the liquidation of his firm. Though before finally beginning to read my copy of this fourth volume in what is currently projected to be a five-volume series (for now!), I didn't know all of what put Universal Publishing and Distributing in such a tailspin in the mid 1970s...a mixture of selling, too hastily, their real moneymakers Ski and Golf magazines and taking on the sinking ship of an upscale lifestyle magazine of which they had only had partial ownership before...this led, in large part, to the shuttering of If magazine and the subsequent slow slide into folding for Galaxy magazine, despite editor James Baen managing to pump new life into the magazines, and gaining contributors ranging from Joanna Russ to Isaac Asimov to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for the magazines, again or for the first time. The '70s, as this blog repeatedly demonstrates, was the decade in which I grew passionate about fiction magazines, so you know I'm the audience for this book...and if you have to wonder what might actually interest someone less invested than myself, be aware that the cover painting used by Ashley here was originally painted by Frank Kelly Freas (who also painted the Astounding cover used, in slightly altered form, by the rock band Queen for their News of the World album cover, the one most folks remember) for a story by George R. R. Martin, who's gained some readership in the last few. Ashley finds himself dealing with OMNI and the other pop-science and non-pop magazines adding some fiction into their mixes, gaming magazines, Heavy Metal and to some extent other comics magazines, and the efflorescence of anthologies of first-publication fiction...and writes in a breezy and enthusiastic style that incorporates his footnotes well, and has only occasionally been typo'd by his university press compositors. Worth the look for anyone even casually interested in best single source we have on this corner of the culture, and the extensions outward...hell, Ben Bova and Ted White, after spending the decade doing mostly good and better things at, respectively, Analog, and Fantastic and Amazing, walked away at decade's end...only to find themselves editing at OMNI and Heavy Metal, respectively, shortly thereafter, at hefty raises in pay and level of support...and reaching, if less immediately in a sense, much larger audiences...
For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
