Little, Brown's Big Year

At the close of each year U.S. publishers, politest of businessmen, review the successes of competing firms with the outward suavity and smoldering wrath of tigers in a jungle. Usually the triumphs of lively newcomers are most dreaded. But this year the talk and envy of the trade is a centenarian--Boston's house of Little, Brown & Co.

Of eleven novels published in 1941 and reported among the top five books on the New York Herald Tribune's best-seller charts throughout the year, six were published by Little, Brown. Biggest-selling novel of the year was Little, Brown's Keys of the Kingdom, by A. J. Cronin (TIME, July 21), which has been at or near the top of the list ever since the week it came out. Runners-up were James Hilton's Random Harvest and John P. Marquand's H. M. Pulham, Esquire, both Little, Brown books. Other Little, Brown hits: Nordhoff and Hall's Botany Bay, C. S. Forester's The Captain from Connecticut, Erich Maria Remarque's Flotsam, Helen Maclnnes' Above Suspicion.

High on non-fiction best-seller lists was Douglas Miller's You Can't Do Business with Hitler. Little, Brown snatched that away from publishers who were offering more money for it by sending worried Author Miller (not a professional writer) a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of the book they hoped he would write.

Many people think of Little, Brown as the last haunt of the publishing pterodactyls, a place where the grey-bearded staff, when awakened too suddenly, shout: "The Redcoats are coming!" before dropping off to sleep again.

Little, Brownians are indeed the heirs of some hoary publishing traditions, but they manage to blend them with the latest thing in reading taste. The blend is embodied in the person of Little, Brown's President Alfred R. Mclntyre (whose father was also a president), and in a list that combines new best-sellers with old.

Some of the old: Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women and Little Men; the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim; Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's studies on the influence of sea power in history; John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations; and above all the masterwork of "the mother of level measurements," Fannie Farmer. Her Boston Cooking-School Book has sold over 2,000,000 copies, is rapidly creeping up on Gone With the Wind, which has sold over 3,000,000 copies. Such perennials ("back list") can be the most dependably profitable part of any publishing business that is lucky enough to own them.

Two other profitable landmarks in Little, Brown's long history were the purchase, in 1898, of the list of Boston's now defunct Roberts Brothers, and a joint publishing agreement in 1925 with the Atlantic Monthly Co. The Roberts list brought Little, Brown properties like Poet Emily Dickinson, Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson (whose Ramona was the dernier cri of the '80s), Edward Everett Hale (The Man Without a Country), Louisa M. Alcott.* Under the arrangement with the Atlantic Monthly Press, the Atlantic Monthly acts as a kind of Little, Brown scout. This has brought Little, Brown books like Mazo de la Roche's Jama novels (a practically interminable property), Walter D. Edmonds' Drums Along the Mohawk, etc., Nordhoff and Hall's Bounty trilogy. Last week this agreement was amplified and extended for 50 years--a gauge, the contractors observed, of their faith in the stability of the American future.

For Little, Brownians, a publishing house is something more than a business.

At its best it is the agency whereby a nation's minds are able to communicate with its people. Little, Brown's conservatism does not mean editorial stuffiness, but a high sense of a permanent intellectual function. Says the firm's centennial booklet, with no trace of self-consciousness: "Democracy will survive in America and with it Little, Brown & Co."

* In Little, Brown's staid conference room is a framed scrawl: "Please pay my Pa $100 on account and oblige, Yours truly, L. M. Alcott.''

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.