Upstart Printer

Like most U.S. towns its size (pop. 4,825), Napoleon, Ohio had no bookstore. Townspeople had to buy their books at Schaaf's Pharmacy. This year they bought some 2,500 volumes (mostly 49-c- and $1 reprints of popular sellers), published by Cleveland's World Publishing Co. The sales were big enough to convince World that it would be worthwhile to sell cheap books where they had not been sold before. Last week International Circulation Co. (a Hearst subsidiary) began to sell World's 49-c- Tower books on 20,000 newsstands in railroad stations, supermarkets, cigar stores.

The Atlas who hopes to push World to a top place in the reprint business is small, owlish, President Benjamin D. Zevin, 44. A New Yorker and ex-advertising man, Ben Zevin got into the book business by marriage, into mass distribution of reprints by pondering on old jokes.

After his own ad agency folded in 1925, Zevin became business manager of Daily Food News. When that folded too, Zevin joined World Publishing, then headed by his father-in-law, Alfred Cahen. World was mass-producing cheap Bibles, dictionaries and one-volume Shakespeares as retailers' premiums. Zevin felt that people would buy cheap books even when they did not come with coffee and hair dye. But he felt, with the late Al Smith, that there was a catch in it: "Who the hell ever goes into a bookstore?"

So Ben Zevin brought out 49-c- clothbound reprints (Tower Books) for sale in 5-&-10-c- stores. They sold so well that he tried a $1 line (Forum Books) for sale in chain stores and bookstores, which also caught on.

Picnics & Productivity. To make money on cheap books, Zevin cut production costs by virtually eliminating all hand labor in printing, binding and packing. He stepped up productivity of his 500 employes, 125 of them Negroes (including several foremen, one executive) by high wages mixed with paternalism, i.e., picnics, parties, and Sunday morning baseball games on his twelve-acre estate.

But Ben Zevin's real break was paper rationing. His paper quota was high (10,-500,000 lbs. a year) and his big premium business had melted away. This left him enough paper to expand. While most publishers were curtailing their output of titles, Ben Zevin expanded, picking up best-sellers as other publishers were forced to drop them. One bit of trade gossip: World published Gypsy Rose Lee's G-String Murder on paper alloted for Bibles. This year World sold 13,000,000 volumes, grossed $6,350,000 to become one of the nation's biggest reprint houses.

Forward to Originals. Now in the reprint business "to stay," Ben Zevin plans a full-scale invasion of the "original" field next year (sample: a life of Bing Crosby, by his brother Ted; F.D.R. Speaks, edited by Ben Zevin). Most ambitious project, scheduled for 1947: a 25-lb. folio Bible designed by Bruce Rogers, No. 1 U.S. book designer, to sell for about $150.

But long-established publishers were unimpressed, still looked on Ben Zevin as an upstart Bible and dictionary printer with more ambition than literary know-how. The war for the cheap book market is just beginning.

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