Mail-Order House

The backs and bunions of U.S. postmen ached more than usual last week. The Book-of-the-Month Club was sending out its March selections: William Saroyan's warmhearted The Human Comedy (TIME, March 1), Berry Fleming's ladylike Colonel Effingham's Raid. Mail carriers have long been used to the load dumped on them by the U.S. Post Office's fourth largest customer,* but last week's was the greatest fardel of them all--342,000 copies of The Human Comedy alone. Crowed The Book-of-the-Month Club: "The largest advance printing of any . . . selection in the history of the organization." In the bizarre collection of persons and places that makes up the world of U.S. letters, Book-of-the-Month is definitely preponderant. Of an estimated $100,000,000 worth of trade books sold in 1942, Book-of-the-Month distributed $23,000,000 worth.

President of Book-of-the-Month and (for all practical purposes) sole owner is dark, nervous, crinkly-eyed Harry Scherman, 56, onetime advertising man. The little venture in selling books by mail, which he helped launch in 1926, has grown in membership to 575,000. Scherman has moved into an apartment in Manhattan's swank Sutton Place district, also has a country house in horsy Bernardsville, N.J. Booksellers and publishers often call him "the most powerful man in publishing."

Scherman's power has not always brought him esteem. In 1929 the American Booksellers' Association drew up an indictment of book clubs and guilds which is sometimes echoed today:

-- "There is no 'best' book of the month. . . . The attempt to choos a 'best' book . . . is an absurdity . . . an intellectual sham."

-- "The self-styled 'clubs' . . . are commercial organizations . . . run for profit. . . . The judgments of their paid committees . . . are expected to produce a commercial result."

--"Books that are sold by these 'clubs' . . . receive an amount of concentrated advertising . . . detrimental to . . . other books . . . of an equal or superior order of merit."

--"The influence of these 'clubs' . . . prevents the discovery of the fact that the limit of intellectual effort is greater than six minds* can compass."

To this, President Scherman replies that his organization is a tremendous help to publishers, authors and booksellers; that it does not presume to choose twelve books for a subscriber that he must read; that it tries to pick not the "best" books but those the judges most enjoyed; that it widens the book market.

Book-of-the-Month is the biggest jackpot an author and his publisher can hit (an average of $75,000 to split between them, plus larger sales in bookstores). Book-of-the-Month Club authors include Pearl Buck, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Gather.

Printers' Ink has thus described the Book-of-the-Month Club: "An interesting advertising success story. . . . The selection committee, or Editorial Board, . . . in a way is a consumer jury that passes on the quality of [the] merchandise. . . . Circulation has to be constantly maintained. . . . This situation calls for a continual stream of advertising, which has now reached the cumulative total of $8,500,000. . . . Advertising is thus solely responsible for building and maintaining this business in a field in which it was deemed impossible to carry on a mailorder operation."

-Book-of-the-Month judges now number four: Critic Henry Seidel Canby, Novelists Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Christopher Morley, Editor William Allen White. President Scherman has no say in selections, but chooses the "dividend" books.

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