ON A CLEAR DAY IN 1928, a plane flew over Manhattan leaving a trail of smoke reading, “MURDER?” It was the Roaring Twenties, the “Era of Wonderful Opportunity,” and advertising was as drunk as the rest of us, Prohibition be damned. Exhibit A: The publisher Covici-Friede decides it’s a good idea to emblazon a vaguely threatening but mostly confusing message across the sky as a promotion for the release of Murder, a book by Evelyn Johnson and Gretta Palmer. The Twenties blossomed in the form of movie tie-ins, gaudy dust jackets, barbershop quartet competitions, and “sandwich men” who functioned as walking billboards—all in the service of selling books.
Yet there was an imminent end to this literary carnival, where the excesses of exuberance flirted with disaster. Dragged into the Great Depression along with the rest of the world, by 1930 book publishers in America were facing an economic crisis—one that potentially spelled the end of the publishing industry as they knew it. Publishers needed someone to stand against the chaos and hold everything together. They needed Eddie Bernays, known to the advertising world as the Father of Spin.
IN ADVANCE of the carefree 1920s, the printing industry had taken giant leaps in mechanization. Innovations such as the Linotype machine and high-speed rotary presses enabled publishers to churn out books and periodicals at many times the rate of hand presses. The Industrial Age brought the world a flood of books. Yay! But that wasn’t actually a good thing. No! At least not yet. Um . . . ambivalence? As print historian Ted Striphas has observed, “Today accumulating printed books and shelving them in one’s home may seem like mundane facts of life. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, those activities couldn’t be assumed and needed to be learned.”
Learned? Why would someone need to learn to buy books? That’s just what you do whenever you go into town, or get birthday money, or fill the swear jar all the way. But this consumerist mind-set that we take for granted owes a great deal to folks like Eddie Bernays. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans simply didn’t buy books. One in three homes owned no books whatsoever. Those that did usually limited them to a Bible, an almanac, and perhaps a few spellers for their children. What other books did a person really need? In 1921 only 4 percent of Americans visited a bookstore, and almost all of them lived in metropolitan areas.
In the nineteenth century, most books were either a luxury beyond the average American’s financial reach or “like furniture . . . hand-me-downs or the rare gift for a special occasion . . . there was little need to buy another [book] until the old [one] wore out.” No wonder people didn’t buy books. If we had to read The Da Vinci Code until it literally fell apart before we could buy the next Song of Ice and Fire we’d just stop reading altogether. Rabid nineteenth-century readers were more likely to simply subscribe to their local circulating libraries.
The printing industry in America had reached an unprecedented level of efficiency, but our buying habits had not. Manufacturers such as Henry Ford had learned how to run their businesses as profitably as possible with the help of the assembly line, and the book world followed suit. Publishing, however, had become almost too efficient. According to Striphas, “The book industry had, in a sense, become a victim of its own success. Its capacity to produce books had grown so rapidly and to such a degree in the early twentieth century that it had lost touch with supply and demand—if it ever had it to begin with.”
That we haven’t always been the responsible Black Friday consumers we are today may be a concept difficult for most Americans. It’s only recently that we’ve been convinced we have to buy things on a regular basis in order to be contributing members of a growing economy and people with individual worth. How can those around us possibly understand that we have a personality or basic taste unless we own things to prove it? Americans needed to undergo a fundamental reeducation. We needed to learn that what we buy is every bit as important as what we say or what we do.
Consumptionism is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is admitted today to be the greatest idea that America has given the world; the idea that workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers.
—CHRISTINE FREDERICK, SELLING MRS. CONSUMER, 1929
The greatest thing our country has given the world is consumption? That . . . that doesn’t sound right. Yet, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, consumerism in America became one of our defining traits.
As the trend toward consumerism grew in the early years of the twentieth century, publishers were poised to take advantage of a number of cultural changes that spurred interest in private reading. For one, we stopped reading together. Picture a cozy Victorian scene, where a family gathers around the fireplace and reads aloud from the Good Book. While Dad or Mom dutifully droned on, the kids would be trying to find anything (please, God, anything at all) to focus on that was more interesting than scripture. But about the turn of the twentieth century, solitary reading gained more and more popularity. Most appealing were the kinds of books that you don’t really want to read together with your dear old dad, aka novels.
The landscape of American life was also changing, and literary life changed along with it. Illiteracy had declined dramatically in the early decades of the twentieth century, and urbanization had ballooned. As any New Yorker will tell you, cities are particularly great for providing bookish resources: libraries, bookstores, schools, and universities. So as Americans moved into the cities, they read more books.
When Americans went to war, they also read more books. Down in the trenches of the First World War, books served as cheap, quiet entertainment amid the hurry-up-and-wait practicalities of the average soldier’s life. Publishers of the early twentieth century agreed that the most successful American ad campaign in recent memory had been the government’s push for donations of books to send to World War I soldiers. “[The] sign ‘Books Wanted’ appeared in the newspapers, on millions of posters, on cards, on streamers and banners, in street cars, on billboards, on the backs of books—wherever there were eyes to behold.” The success of this unprecedented national campaign led publisher Alexander Grosset to boast in 1919, “At last the book business has come into its own.”
Now all publishers had to do was take advantage of all those potential readers—which wasn’t as easy as it might seem. “I hold very strongly to the opinion,” said one New Jersey librarian, “that book publishers are a very stupid lot as far as the art of salesmanship is concerned.” In fact, advertisers were doing ten times better with Abba-Zaba bars and Bit-O-Honey than they were Tales of the Jazz Age. “The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences . . . estimated that the average American [in the 1920s] spent $1.10 for books annually, compared with . . . $11.00 for candy.”
Helen Woodward, one of the best-known advertisers in the trade, argued in 1920 that it was time “publishers invest in an author with the same foresight which a soap manufacturer might invest in soap.” It was in this decade that advertising agencies started offering services tailored specifically to the book industry. Print ads devoted to the author himself, rather than the work alone, began to appear. Author portraits became more common on dust jackets. Blurbs, a term invented only in 1907, began their hyperbolic ascent. Where there used to be blank pages at the end of a book, now Doubleday, as a teaser, printed the first chapter of the next book in the series.
Today many people associate the earliest dust jackets with famous books from the 1920s. Though this is far from accurate (you can find dust jackets on some mid-nineteenth-century books), the Jazz Age is the time when jackets came into their own as reliable tools for promotion. Just think of that iconic jacket for The Great Gatsby—the saturated blue, the piercing green eyes, the yellow spark above the author’s name. This jacket, issued in 1925, now spells the difference between a $4,000 first edition and a $150,000 first edition. Dust jackets were that blast of color appearing in every store window—flashy ads for the books that publishers wanted consumers to buy. They were so successful, in fact, that some critics worried jackets might be mistaken for real art: “[W]e predict that you will live to see Bibles with a jacket, by Billy Sunday.” (This prediction did come true—you can find Bibles with dust jackets today—though as far as we can tell, that had little to do with the efforts of evangelical preacher Billy Sunday.)
Not everyone fell for the hype. In 1919, Yale professor William Lyon Phelps grumbled: “I wish the publishers would quit putting jackets on their books. The first thing I do when I get a book is to throw the jacket away without reading it. It has no business there . . . To find laudation and praise on a slip-cover often antagonizes intelligent readers. The slip-cover should have the name of the book and author, and a sober statement of the purpose of the book.”
Happily for everyone, Phelps wasn’t taken seriously. And now, because original dust jackets are so valuable to collectors, Phelps’s stripped-down twentieth-century collection would be worth next to nothing. With the exception of books from the earliest years of the century, most of these first editions aren’t considered collectible at all if they are missing their dust jackets.
Publishers were beginning to figure out the concept of publicity. One infamous printer of paperbacks, E. Haldeman-Julius, realized that his reprint of de Maupassant’s Tallow Ball wasn’t selling so well. Tallow and ball are not particularly interesting words. But do you know what is? Prostitute. Haldeman-Julius reissued the book under the title A Prostitute’s Sacrifice, and sales went from fifteen thousand to fifty-five thousand copies.
The aforementioned jacket-stripping Phelps entered the fray when he released a list of the “100 best novels.” Because it’s a list, and it’s opinionated, and it’s about books, you know it’s going to be hella controversial. Soon everyone was talking about it. Thus Phelps participated in what might be called the inaugurating event of BuzzFeed (a website he surely would have despised). Literary discussions were becoming publicity stunts, and bestseller lists were becoming news.
One of the most natural advertising tools for a book was the perception of status, prestige, and power bestowed upon its owner. To do that most efficiently, we needed a way to physically show people around us that we were better than they because we’d read Ulysses. (Or at least had purchased Ulysses and read the first thirty pages, then skipped to Molly’s soliloquy at the end.) Enter the bookshelf.
“Introduce a little touch of modernism,” announces one article from the March 1929 edition of American Home. “A moderately worn appearance lends flavor to a book . . . If you want your books around you, you must have proper receptacles for them. While the covers of the books may be ever so worn, if they are attractively housed, the effect will be pleasing.”
The bookshelf! Where American consumerism and neurotically obsessing over your social status can be displayed in one convenient location. The article goes on to declare in Stepford Wife–speak, “Certainly you, yourself, will be far better satisfied when surrounded by your old favorites than if you had a most harmonious array chosen solely . . . to please the eye but quite devoid of anything within.” A bunch of glass grapes on a doily may be pretty, but like you, they’d be culturally dead inside.
Publishers loved this development. Let’s face it, nothing is sadder than an empty bookshelf. According to Janice Radway, “Potentially every book sale could generate two forms of profit. On one hand it could generate cash for its publisher. On the other hand it could also produce perceived changes in the status of the individual who bought it.” This is known as the “fetishism of commodities,” that is, investing objects (in this case, books) with “certain naturally occurring, inherent properties.” For example, consider the self-confidence one might achieve from owning a set of Emerson essays, as this ad recommended: “To fully recognize what magnetism there is in your own personality read CULTURE, WEALTH, BEHAVIOR, POWER.”
With Americans building and filling their bookshelves to keep up with the Joneses, the future of the printing industry should have looked bright—and indeed it did, at least until the fateful year 1929. You know what American economic disaster we’re talking about here, so say it with us: the Great Book of the Month Club.
The Book of the Month Club actually launched three years earlier, as the brainchild of New York adman Harry Scherman, but 1929 was the turning point. It had taken him years to perfect a subscription-based service that sold books using methods similar to those employed by companies selling canned goods, tobacco, and soap. It’s also how meth is sold today (sort of): “[Scherman] realized that he could not make money unless, following their first purchase, buyers were hooked into returning for additional ones. After some false starts, he devised a plan that combined the use of the mails with a subscription feature that insured the necessary ‘repeat business.’”
By 1929, with a monthly cycle of guaranteed sales numbering in the tens of thousands, the Book of the Month Club had accumulated real weight to throw around with publishers. In the wake of its success, other book clubs soon sprang up, and many of them didn’t play well with others. In particular, a subscription service known as the Literary Guild attempted to sell copies of new hardcover fiction at dramatically slashed prices. The Literary Guild was a bit like the Incredible Hulk to the Book of the Month’s Bruce Banner: a good idea gone way, way out of control. While the Book of the Month Club relied on the taste and celebrity of its well-respected literary judges, in 1929 the Literary Guild began emphasizing cheap prices as its main selling point. Book club editions flooded the market, and even today they are the bane of collectors, who have all had the experience of finding an apparent first edition of The Grapes of Wrath—in dust jacket!—only to learn that it’s a book club edition worth ten dollars, not ten thousand.
Publishers had experimented with price cutting in the past, but it was a bit like poking a sleeping bear. Despite browbeatings from the New York Times and other venues that wanted to see a universal drop in prices, new books were rarely considered a practical sell at only a dollar a piece. Publishers argued, on the contrary, that price increases were justified. According to their numbers, the cost of making a book—the cloth, paper, wages, etc.—had increased 75–80 percent over the past few decades, while book prices had gone up only 50–60 percent. Now the Literary Guild comes along and undercuts the whole trade. To make matters worse, major department stores started selling price-slashed books as loss leaders in order to increase customer traffic. In 1929 the American publishing industry was threatening to buckle in on itself as thoroughly as the national economy around it.
The success of monthly book clubs was one of the major factors leading to a small miracle: publishers coming together to cooperate. Those who choose to make their living by creating and selling books naturally tend to be a bit rebellious. This much cooperation among publishers during the price wars of the 1930s was almost unheard of.
Of course, there wasn’t full agreement across the trade. Eddie Bernays wasn’t called upon by a unified front of publishers to undermine book clubs. He was called upon by a group of established publishers to undermine a different group of publishers: young upstarts who had begun price cutting on their own in order to compete with the clubs. Simon and Schuster, Coward-McCann, and Farrar and Rinehart (all three energetic and ambitious publishing houses founded in the 1920s) announced that they were reducing new fiction hardcovers to only one dollar. Doubleday, Doran, made up of two older publishers that had merged in 1927, broke ranks and followed suit. This posed a potential disaster for the book industry.
You could find books for a dollar (or less) before May 1930, but the new price-cutting strategy wasn’t focused on reprints, or remainders left over in warehouses. They weren’t cheap paperback Westerns or mysteries that you could buy at your local cigar or drugstore, either. These were first-run hardcovers—for a dollar. That would be like AMC, Regal, and Cinemark getting together to fight Netflix by offering day-one new releases at 75 percent off.
In an industry facing slumping sales since 1928, a subscription service hijacker (or three) since 1926, and an extreme new counterstrategy that might sink American publishing, someone needed to act. Someone needed to fundamentally rearrange the public’s buying habits. People had to be convinced to read more, and then further convinced that paying full price for books was the most moral, the most patriotic, the most copacetic thing a citizen could do. Get Eddie Bernays on the horn.
EDWARD BERNAYS was the son of Jewish-Austrian immigrants who brought him to New York when he was just a year old. He had two sisters, both of whom stayed behind in the Czech Republic for a time in the care of his internationally famous uncle Sigmund Freud. Edward’s father envisioned his son carving out a career for himself in the field of agriculture, “because he believed that America’s future rested on the development of its rural areas.” But even as a young man, Edward was more like his uncle. He wanted to get into people’s heads and change their behavior. He wanted to “pull the wires which control the public mind.”
With those life goals, the Father of Spin could easily have been a psychoanalyst himself, or a politician, or a supervillain. (A supervillain called the Father of Sin. You don’t want to pay full price for The Story of Doctor Dolittle? KAPOW! Now you do! Mwa-ha-ha-ha . . .) But none of those professions would have been as financially lucrative as convincing Americans to buy things. At the height of the Great Depression, Bernays was raking in more than $98,000 a year, which equates to over $1.5 million today.
Before 1914, Eddie referred to himself as a press agent. Just after opening his new firm in 1919, he began using the title “public relations counselor.” What was a public relations counselor? Well, it was part psychoanalyst . . . and part politician . . . and part supervillain. In 1928, he was brought onto the “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” campaign, which tried to convince women to smoke cigarettes instead of eating dessert. As it turned out, preying on women’s physical insecurities worked. (Someone should really let today’s advertisers know about this little trick.) Bernays later admitted, “I didn’t like the taste [of cigarettes]. I prefer chocolate.” Convincing people that, against all reason or logic, they should prefer the taste of tobacco to that of chocolate is pretty much the definition of a supervillain.
“It is his capacity for crystallizing the obscure tendencies of the public mind before they have reached definite expression which makes [the public relations counselor] so valuable,” Bernays asserted. More valuable to a company and their products than lawyers, even. “[I] decided that public relations advice is more important than legal advice, because legal advice is based on precedent, but public relations advice might actually establish precedent.”
In 1923, Bernays authored Crystallizing Public Opinion, the foundational work on public relations that is still being used in classrooms and boardrooms today. It showcased the power of a corporation’s or government’s ability to employ mass psychology to manufacture public opinion. Could this also be termed propaganda? Propaganda, schmopaganda. “The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’” he wrote, “is in the point of view.” Call it whatever you want, Bernays was good at his job. With his three-piece suit and impressive track record, he looked and acted the part of the slick New York PR man.
When American Tobacco asked Bernays to counter the taboo of women smoking outside (because, “damn it,” he was told, “if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market”), Bernays suggested consulting American psychoanalyst Dr. A. A. Brill. “He might give me the psychological basis for a woman’s desire to smoke, and maybe this will help me.”
“Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom,” Dr. Brill told Bernays.
Okay, sure, breaking down taboos and all that.
“Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone.”
Right. Psychoanalysts and their phalluses.
“Further, the first woman who smoked probably had an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act.”
In other words, liking freedom (and cancer and fellatio) in 1928 was apparently a “masculine component.” Bernays’s solution was to “break the taboo against women smoking in public” by turning it into a feminist act. He even set up a march touting cigarettes as “torches of freedom.”
And it worked. The parade garnered national attention, and the taboo of women smoking in public did begin to shift. “Age-old customs,” Bernays wrote, “could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media.”
This was the most recent body of Bernays’s work that publishers looked to when, in the summer of 1930, they went searching for someone to save their industry. After all, if Bernays could change the public perception of smoking, if he could convince people that tobacco was better than chocolate, then maybe he could work his same magic on books.
THE COALITION that hired Eddie Bernays was headed by such giants as Alfred A. Knopf and Henry Hoyns of Harper and Brothers. They pooled their resources and enlisted Bernays for a three-month PR blitz. After doing some preliminary research, Eddie formulated a two-pronged strategy: “The first was to convince the public and the price-cutting publishers that dollar books were not in the public interest. The second was aimed at increasing the market for good books . . . [O]nly in this way could book publishing become a stabilized, profitable business.”
Amid these challenges thrived a parasite that many publishers agreed was pure “evil,” rotting the industry from the inside out. This consummate embodiment of villainy was none other than “the book borrower, the wretch who raised hell with book sales and deprived authors of earned royalties.”
At least with dollar books, folks were making a dollar. But if you were the kind of no-good flimflammer who borrowed books, you were considered a swindler consciously burgling American printers and publishers and authors and booksellers out of their rightful dues. Bernays thought these literary clouts were enough of a plague that he initiated a campaign to shame them into buying books like decent Americans.
Because “events usually gain more attention than a statement,” Bernays and his firm “launched a nation-wide search for a lethal epithet” that would make people think twice about ever borrowing or lending books. This campaign for a bookish scarlet letter took the form of a national contest, with entries pouring in from all over the country. Some of the finalists were Book Weevil, Culture Vulture, Bookbum, Libracide, and goddamn it, Bookaneer (truly an inevitability wherever books and theft are concerned).
The winner of the contest was Paul Stoddard, a high school English teacher from Hartford, Connecticut, who came up with the shame moniker Book Sneak. As a reward, he was presented with fifty books. Oh, good, Mr. Stoddard must have thought. Who needs a cash prize during the Great Depression, anyway?
Now that he had found an appropriate bibliocurse, next on Bernays’s list was convincing the public that dollar books would bring about the total ruination of American publishing. To accomplish this, he formed the Book Publishers Research Institute. This sounds all fancy and official, which was exactly what Bernays was counting on. According to the quasi-scientific findings of the BPRI, “The profits of book publishing were so small that the dollar book would cause the economic death of six thousand book retailers.” If we, as a nation, continued down the poisonous road of cheap books, publishers would be forced to resort to unsavory discounting, thereby dropping the quality of printing, demoralizing authors, and bringing the fifty-million-dollar book industry to its knees. Blifter! That was another entry, which is presumably the combination of book and lifter. Blifter!
In addition to the BPRI, Bernays publicized studies done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce showing that 76 percent of all books being read were fiction. Women read books solidly year ’round, while men spiked during the winter. According to internal findings, Americans in 1930 read, on average, one book per year. This was a “sad figure,” according to Bernays, and one that desperately needed to change.
Bernays launched initiatives to convince the public that reading was a worthwhile activity, especially if you were male. The BPRI conducted studies of highly successful “industrialists” and claimed that, on average, these influential men read two hours per day (even in the summertime *gasp*), devoting themselves mostly to nonfiction topics such as politics, history, and economics. Journalists at the time questioned the BPRI’s findings, but it didn’t matter. The statistics being published implied that you could also become an accomplished, affluent industrialist if you just read more. (For two authors who have managed to make a living largely based on how much we read, we do have a hard time disagreeing with this.)
And hey, habitual reading could even make you president of the United States (or at least more like him). “We did not limit our research of reading habits to the living; we also explored the past . . . Benjamin Franklin was mightily influenced by [Cotton] Mather’s essay ‘To Do Good.’ Thomas Jefferson favored a wide range of reading; John Quincy Adams spent much time studying books . . . [and] John Adams advised his daughter Abigail to spend her solitary hours in reading so that she might better be able to attend to the education of her children. Even the career woman, a relatively new phenomenon at that time, was studied . . . [B]ooks played a potent role in her life.”
As early as 1856, Walt Whitman had pulled a similar stunt, stamping onto the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass an excerpt from his personal correspondence with the much more famous literary figure Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” This was essentially a blurb. Some have even called it the first instance of modern American book advertising.
While nonfiction titles made a respectable showing during the 1920s, in line with Bernays’s marketing push, they truly outdistanced fiction in popularity in the 1930s, ending the long-established dominance of novels. It’s no surprise that the Great Depression sent people running toward books about business, leadership, religion, self-help, and even frivolous entertainment such as bridge or crossword puzzles. The heyday of F. Scott Fitzgerald was over. (Someone probably should have mentioned this to Fitzgerald, since he considered his 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night, his masterpiece. It also has a killer dust jacket design, by the way.)
According to Bernays’s BPRI, if you want to be successful, read a book. If you want to be more successful, read more books. If you want to be successful and also not a bibliofelon fink bastard, pay full price for the books you read. To hammer this point home, Bernays laid bare to the public the profit margins of the publishing industry. From the two dollars that came from selling first-run novels, thirty cents went to the author. Printing ate up another thirty-seven cents. Overhead, advertising, and promotion accounted for a further forty-five cents. Add in retailer discounts, and the grand total profit on a newly released book was around a nickel. Unless three thousand copies of the book sold, there were virtually no profits at all.
Then Bernays publicly crunched the numbers for dollar books, showing that it was impossible for the industry to survive much longer. “We kept hammering away at this book-keeping on books, and our efforts evoked favorable comment in many media. It was obvious that the book business could not run successfully on this price structure.”
Greader! That was another entry. Greedy reader, maybe? Or grifting reader?
From the summer of 1930 to the following December, Eddie Bernays mustered all his psychoanalytic tricks to help change the way Americans perceived books. Publishers marketed books as physical talismans capable of bestowing wealth, prestige, and power upon their owners. Bookshelves swung into fashion in order to display those talismans and leave us wanting more. America marched gleefully down the road of consumerism. In this grand new utopia, where anyone could become president (if you were white and male) just by reading books, the worst thing you could be was a Viperous Volume Vulture, or a Greeper, or a Borrocle (good luck unpacking that one). If we all worked together, we could save our publishing industry. And maybe, just maybe, save ourselves in the process. By paying full retail price for The Maltese Falcon. (A book whose poor sales, incidentally, were blamed on readers not knowing how to pronounce the word “falcon,” and thus afraid to ask for it at the bookstore.)
“Our campaign registered full success,” Bernays boasted in his memoir, “On December 19 . . . the New York World carried a front-page double column headline: DOLLAR BOOK IDEA IS ABANDONED . . . The article said, ‘That bright child of literature—the $1 book—has been left shivering on the doorstep.’”
Well, not exactly. Like many admen, Bernays was most skilled at selling himself. The price war was perhaps the single biggest controversy of the following decade. One side would claim a victory (like Bernays) and within months find itself retreating. It was the publishing world’s Stalingrad, only one fought with ads instead of bullets and mortars. In 1934 the American book trade accepted a code from the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that limited the types of price cutting a publisher could do (whew, sigh of relief)—until 1935, when the NRA codes were declared unconstitutional. Damn you, the NRA!
As with the Depression, the biggest turning point for the publishing price wars was not clever writing or flashy campaigns; it was America’s entry into the Second World War. And as you might recall, war is good for books. Nope, nope, we’ll rephrase that. War is good for increasing reader statistics within soldierly demographics.
In the end, Bernays’s focus on the health of the book industry contributed to another major turning point in American publishing: the Cheney Report. Working together yet again, publishers hired O. H. Cheney as the director behind a landmark economic survey of the industry meant to diagnose the problems obstructing their profits. In this case, even more publishers and booksellers cooperated to pay for the survey.
Cheney was an outsider. A very qualified outsider, but a publishing outsider nonetheless. When his 150,000-word report was issued in 1932, it didn’t spare any feelings. (One historian describes it succinctly as a “bomb.”) The practices of publishers were raked over by a neutral third party, and everyone came away with egg on their faces. “Cheney blasted publishers and booksellers for relying on intuition . . . rather than operating on a scientifically sound, statistically driven ‘fact basis.’ He disparaged publishers and editors for their lack of creativity in developing the talents of first-time authors and scolded them for ‘murdering’ potentially successful titles by releasing them into a field already so overcrowded that they simply ‘cannibalized’ one another.” Many were so offended by the tone of the report—murder? cannibalism?—that they refused to discuss it further. Thankfully, some wiped the egg from their faces and got to work—decades later. Emphasized by Cheney’s Report in the 1930s, the idea of using industry-wide standardization to increase efficiency finally achieved widespread acceptance around the late 1960s, when the revolutionary ISBN system was introduced. Now all merchandise could be coded using a universal standard that would communicate information about a book across publishers, bookstores, and libraries, making it easier than ever to regulate, buy, and consume books.
As bibliophiles in the 1920s and ’30s already knew, books were more than the paper, ink, cloth, and leather that made up their parts. They were the physical expressions of our true potential. If we wanted to be romantic or witty, we needed to buy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. If we wanted to feel masculine angst, we needed to buy Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. If we wanted to see glamour and scandal in the world around us, we bought Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
In the 1920s, booksellers realized they were selling culture just as much as physical books. “[Individual b]ooks cannot be advertised, but reading can be,” announced one adman. Looking at our own bookshelves today, we’re going to say they succeeded.
With the twenties roaring recklessly toward the Great Depression, consumerism must have seemed an inevitability. This waking giant would define us as Americans and, in 1929, undo us as Americans (also 1973, 1982, and 2008). Surely, publishers thought, there had to be a way to make this behemoth serve the interests of the printing industry. Entrepreneurs such as adman Harry Scherman knew it could be done. Start a club, a monthly club, where folks can have their books selected and then mailed right to their door. Then create a customer-retention strategy that combined a pyramid scheme with strategies for selling heroin, and—voilà!—a whole country chasing the literary dragon.
In the case of Eddie Bernays, sometimes the crystallizing power of advertising could help save America’s printing industry. Other times, it convinced people that getting lung cancer was liberating and tasted better than chocolate. Sometimes it made us believe that life would be better if we bought and read Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other times, it convinced us that something such as the McRib, the Hot Dog Bites pizza, or a jar of Baconnaise was an actual food that human beings should put in their mouths. But that’s the price of American consumerism. You can’t have As I Lay Dying without Baconnaise. (In fact, one pretty accurately describes the other.)
Even the Father of Spin realized the potential for advertising running amok. This was demonstrated by one memorable event at a dinner party in 1933. Bernays and other dinner guests were seated under a large elm tree discussing the issues of the day, which in 1933 were Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Party. This was a time when opinions were split on the rising German leader. Some guests “wrote him off as a crank who wouldn’t amount to much.” Karl von Wiegand, a foreign correspondent who had just returned from interviewing Joseph Goebbels, was also in attendance. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his “propaganda library,” as Bernays wrote, which was the “best Wiegand had ever seen.” Sitting there in the library of the master propagandist of the Nazi Party had been none other than Crystallizing Public Opinion, by Austrian American Jew Edward L. Bernays.
“This shocked me,” Bernays wrote, “but . . . obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis. [It was] a deliberate, planned campaign.”
I guess we’re lucky that American PR men in the 1930s were more focused on selling full-priced copies of Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold and less focused on selling international crimes against humanity. In hindsight, it made that sticker price of $2.50 just a little easier to swallow.