Paper Wait

As 1944's last days ran out, the supply of new books dwindled to a trickle. Paper-starved publishers, awaiting their 1945 quotas, resorted to some extraordinary expedients to keep their books in print:

P: Simon & Schuster ran out of paper after Bob Hope's I Never Left Home had sold almost 1,500,000 copies. They sold reprint rights to the Home Guide Publishing Co., will collect royalties on future printings.

P: With no more paper available for Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (500,000 copies), Reynal & Hitchcock are now issuing red and green certificates, at $2.75 each, entitling the holder to a copy early in 1945. In the first three weeks, bookstores ordered 6,000 certificates.

P: E. P. Button & Co. last June set aside enough paper for 40,000 copies of Van Wyck Brooks's The World of Washington Irving, figuring that it would see them through this year. But the Book-of-the-Month Club took the book, and sales rocketed. Button ran out of paper. (Most publishers of best-sellers exhausted their paper stocks in August or September.) To keep the book in print, and give Author Brooks the benefit of Christmas sales. Button turned over their publishing rights to the 100-year-old Philadelphia publishing house of Blakiston.

Blakiston, bought last June by Doubleday, Boran, was an exceptional buy. It has been official publisher for the American Red Cross for almost 40 years. After Pearl Harbor it printed the Red Cross textbook at the rate of 1,000,000 a month, consuming 700,000 Ibs. of paper a month for them in 1942. And 1942 became the base year for current paper quotas.

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