How Not to Make Book

"You can't lose," spieled a full-page ad by Doubleday & Co. in the New York Times Book Review. "We are so convinced of the appeal these important books will have for you that we are willing to bet that five of them will be best sellers by the first week in May." The terms: if more than one of the six failed to make the Times bestseller list by then, Doubleday promised to send a copy of any one of them "absolutely free" to anybody asking for it.

Last week demands for free copies were still flooding into Doubleday. Only four of the books had qualified as bestsellers by the appointed time: Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Edna Ferber's Ice Palace, Paul I. Wellman's Ride the Red Earth, and Robert Lewis Taylor's The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. By also entering two less-likelies, Kenneth Roberts' The Battle of Cowpens and Saunders Redding's The Lonesome Road. Doubleday had thought to give its parlay some sporting zest. It succeeded too well. In flowed letters at the rate of 500 a day; out flowed free books. By the time the mails had poured in some 3,000 claims from winning bettors, the publishers nervously stuck a finger in the dike: they took a small ad in one morning's Times cautiously announcing that their "offer" (identified only by its date and page in the Book Review) would expire that afternoon, then started getting up a form letter that all bets were off.

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