The Professors Step Out

Publishing houses, like men, can have "dangerous years." Manhattan's Prentice-Hall, Inc., staid publisher of textbooks, was behaving last week like a middleaged family man on a fling. Its light-o'-love: Duchess Hotspur,/- a bedroomy historical novel. Less than a fortnight after publication it had sold 70,000 copies (at $2.75).

Spurred by its first successful invasion of the fiction field, Prentice-Hall kicked over the traces of promotional conservatism. It spent some $12,000 on corny ads, handouts (see cut), and a crosscountry autographing jaunt for Author Rosamond Marshall.

Ros Marshall, 44, a onetime pulp-fictionist whose earlier bedroom gambol, Kitty, was turned into a bland costume piece by Hollywood, wrote her first novel (30 pages) at seven. Its conclusion: "He gazed into her eyes and said, 'Will you marry me?' Only the stars heard the answer as they crept under the bushes." No such childish restraint mars Duchess Hotspur.

Out of the Classroom. For two former college professors, this was gamy stuff. Prentice-Hall's board chairman, Charles W. Gerstenberg, 63, and President Richard P. Ettinger, 52, were both teaching economics at New York University when they founded the company in 1913 to publish Materials of Corporation Finance, a case textbook they had prepared. Aware that Gerstenberg & Ettinger might prove too big a mouthful, they gave the firm the maiden names of their mothers.

The first book did so well that they stayed in publishing. They nearly went on the rocks with their third book, an explanation of 1918's new tax regulations; it was hardly out when the regulations were changed. The professors then hit upon the idea which now accounts for more than half their annual business: supplying businessmen with up-to-the-minute information on taxation, labor laws, etc., in looseleaf form. This also increased sale of their textbooks, until they began to sell more books direct to businessmen and colleges than any other U.S. publisher.

Into the Money. It was not until 1937 that the company started selling books through bookstores; and not until 1945 did Gerstenberg and Ettinger venture out of the nonfiction fold.

The company's first novel, September Remember, had a good sale (14,000 copies). But, contrasted with Prentice-Hall's 1945 total net profit of $556,761, this was peanuts. Then Pres. Ettinger met Ros Marshall in Hollywood, liked her, quickly signed her up to write three books for Prentice-Hall. Since then he has signed up other authors, plans to put out ten more novels this year. Said President Ettinger, dazzled by the dollar-decked Duchess: "It will have a $1,000,000 sale before the year is up. And there'll be more like it. The absent-minded professors are doing all right."

/- No kin to Lady Percy, wife of Hotspur in Shakespeare's Henry IV.

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