Monday, Nov. 17, 1947
Alltlme Best-Sellers
GOLDEN MULTITUDES (357 pp.)--Frank Luther Moft--Macmillan ($5).
Golden Multitudes is a history of American pipe dreams : a record of nearly three centuries of U.S. bestsellers. It is doubtful if there has ever been assembled any where such a comprehensive list of such complete irrationality, so many ridiculous scenes and characters, so much solemn nonsense and so much moralizing, posturing and ham acting, as in Frank Luther Mott's account of the books which the U.S. public has purchased by the millions.
Here are the orphan boys who stopped runaway horses and saved the lives of bankers' daughters; the parsons' wives who were captured by Indians (and 200 years later, the English lady who was kidnaped by a sheik) ; the soldiers of fortune, the prisoners of Zenda, the daughters of the regiment, the little shepherds of Kingdom Come; here are the ministers who gave up their pulpits and went into the slums or who, out in the great west, or in the north woods, found peace and pipe-smoking contentment far from the falsities of society. The book has something of the fascination that might be found in a catalogue of paste gems.
Author Mott, dean of the University of Missouri's famed journalism school, is not unduly critical of this rubbish. Caught up in the details of exaggerated advertising claims, dubious publishing records and the secretiveness of publishing houses about their sales figures, Dean Mott spends most of his book in an overly conscientious attempt to get at the exact facts about the 324 books he classes as bestsellers* (he excepts Bibles, textbooks, cookbooks). His book's great value is that it is the first thorough exploration into a field which seems much more mysterious the more it is looked into.
Amber Over Tokyo. Mott asks, but cannot answer, why the field of popular fiction has been so narrow. There have been no lastingly popular American novels on industry, the clipper ships, the rail roads, the Oregon Trail, immigration, the discovery of gold or oil, the movies, radio, or the New Deal. Readers could get good, solidly based historical novels on the fall of Rome or the battle of Waterloo, but not of the Lewis & Clark expedition.
In the days of the railroad builders, U.S. readers got St. Elmo and Under Two Flags. When the clipper ships were sailing to China, one of the popular novels was The Scarlet Letter. When the wagon trains were going over South Pass, it was Swiss Family Robinson. The year before Japan fell, it was Forever Amber.
Trainload of Tears. Uncle Tom's Cabin, one best-seller which did speak to its day, began originally as a magazine serial. A prospective book publisher, reading it then, became alarmed at its length, and warned Harriet Beecher Stowe that he could not afford to publish a two-volume work. She offered to end it then & there. The magazine polled its readers, who insisted that it continue. One of the first readers was Congressman Philip Greeley. Reading it on the train to Washington, he realized that his tears were attracting the attention of the other passengers. At last he left the train, rented a hotel room in Springfield, Mass., where he could read and weep to his heart's content.
Five thousand copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in one week. For the next year, eight presses ran day & night to keep up with the demand for what indignant Southerners called a manual for runaways.
Who were the authors of these best sellers? Many were clergymen who had left their pulpits (15% of all U.S. best sellers are the work of clergymen), some were newspapermen, or dentists like Zane Grey (over 15,000,000 copies). Inspiration was often vagrant : Elinor Glyn wrote Three Weeks after a visit to Venice, when "my head was a little turned, perhaps, by the amount of attention which almost all men except my husband gave me at that time." They often had to publish their first books themselves.
Classics Too. The quality of what the U.S. public reads has progressively declined, while the vast amount of tenth-rate fiction it devours has steadily increased. However, U.S. readers can be reasonably proud of their ancestors' critical judgment. Shakespeare's Plays, Bacon's Essays, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, Paradise Lost, The Federalist, and most of the English classics were American best-sellers as soon as they were published in the U.S. In many cases the U.S. sale (because of cheap pirated editions) was greater than the sale in England.
After the terrific U.S. success of Pickwick Papers, Dickens made his American tour, and went through four months of adulation. Balls, dinners and crowds of beautiful women attended his progress. Few books have been as eagerly awaited as his American Notes for General Circulation. The advance sheets reached the U.S. early Monday morning, Nov. 6, 1842. Between 50,000 and 60,000 people were waiting to buy it in the first week that it appeared.
It was the most brazen slap in the face ever administered to a doting public. Dickens was fed up with the lionizing, the tobacco-chewing, spitting, and the piracy of his books, and said so. The effect may have been salutary for U.S. manners. But it ended for some time to come the enthusiasm for popular authors as public heroes.
-Books whose sale was 1% of the population of the time. Thus the 150,000 copies of Tom Paine's Common Sense, printed in 1776, was equivalent to 8,000,000 copies in 1946. Twenty-one best-sellers have sold over 2,000,000 copies. Among them: Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur, A Christmas Carol, Tom Sawyer, In His Steps, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Gone With the Wind, One World, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
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