Respectable Paperbacks

The most interesting fact in U.S. publishing today is that the paperbacks have become respectable. Cheap paperback reprints and originals have been published in the U.S. for more than a century without becoming a stable factor in the book business. But today, some of the smartest U.S. publishers privately concede that hard-cover books cost too much. They also know that there are far more potential readers than there are customers willing to pay current hard-cover prices. Result: alongside the diminishing flood of glossy-covered quarter dreadfuls is an increasing stream of serious paperbacks, including the finest books ever written, more handsomely designed and produced than many hard-cover volumes.

Although a few distinguished books appeared in the mass of low-grade paperbacks, the new trend began $% years ago, when the famed British firm of Penguin set up a U.S. branch in Baltimore. Today Penguins are selling at the rate of 1,500,000 a year, and among the bestsellers are such titles as The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales and Dante's Inferno. In 1953 Doubleday followed, with Anchor books. They were good to look at, with clean, modern covers, and offered (at 65-c- to $1.25 a volume) such fine old fare as Trevelyan's History of England, such first-rate modern fiction as Henry Green's Loving. Total sales of Anchor's 48 titles: 1,250,000. Other publishers watched nervously for a while, then hopped onto the bandwagon. Among them:

P: Vintage Books (Knopf), whose 14 titles have sold 300,000 copies and include among the bestsellers De Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Freud's Moses and Monotheism (price: 95-c-)

-c- Meridian Books (Noonday Press), only a month old and already past the 80,000 mark for such titles as Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry by Jacques Maritain and Force and Freedom by Jacob Burckhardt ($1.25 to $1.95)

P:Image Books (Doubleday), devoted entirely to Roman Catholic works, with total sales to date of 500,000. Bestseller of its 16 titles: Philip Hughes's Popular History of the Catholic Church (50-c- to $1.25).

P:Anvil Books (Van Nostrand), all originals, with such no-nonsense titles as Making of the Modern French Mind by Hans Kohn and The Age of Reason by Louis L. Snyder ($1.25).

P:The Viking Paperbound Portables, offering generous and well-chosen selections from such writers as Mark Twain, Gibbon, Voltaire, D. H. Lawrence ($1.25).

P:Harvest Books (Harcourt, Brace), to get under way in August with such chewy fare as Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia and C. G. Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (95-c- to $1.45).

On the whole, the publishers shy away from drugstores and newsstands, sell the respectable paperbacks through bookstores and give them dignified advertising. Only apparent limit to the trend: the number of good books available.

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