Rebel Publisher

by Loren Glass

  The mainstream press took little notice when Grove brought out The Wretched of the Earth, with the New York Times restricting its coverage to a one-paragraph announcement headlined “Handbook for Revolutionaries.”11 Grove also placed ads in the Times, billing the book as “the handbook for a Negro Revolution that is changing the shape of the white world” and affirming that “its startling advocacy of violence as an instrument for historical change has influenced events everywhere from Angola to Algeria, from the Congo to Vietnam—and is finding a growing audience amongst America’s civil rights workers.”12 But it was the iconic Black Cat massmarket paperback, issued in 1968 and eventually selling more than 250,000 copies, that came to typify this quintessentially Sixties genre. Its design both invokes and obscures Sartre’s advice. The bottom half of Kuhlman’s famous cover features an uncredited photograph of a riotous crowd, partially transformed into an abstract ink blot by its reduction to high-contrast orange and black. The title above is glaring white, with the author’s name and the Black Cat colophon in green and the tagline “THE HANDBOOK FOR THE BLACK REVOLUTION THAT IS CHANGING THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD” in orange, linking it to the photo below (Figure 28). The back cover features Sartre’s exhortation from the preface—“Have the courage to read this book”—without including the audience qualification that follows. The back cover also features a blurb Grove solicited from Alex Quaison-Sackey, the first black African to serve as president of the UN General Assembly, affirming that the book “must be read by all who wish to understand what it means to fight for freedom, equality and dignity.” Grove’s paratextual packaging, then, helped establish a generic category—the revolutionary handbook—that it exploited over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it also generated a contradictory discourse about the practical use of such handbooks, especially regarding the racial identities of their readerships.

  For the white readers who made up the bulk of its constituency, Grove offed Fanon as a source of insight into subaltern psychology, a tactic that was particularly, and somewhat embarrassingly, evident in its marketing of Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1967. The front cover of the Black Cat edition, issued the following year, invokes the imagery promulgated by the popular New York run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks: a photograph of an expressionless black man wearing a white mask over the upper half of his face, his eyes exposed but not visible, with only the right side of his face illuminated, leaving the left side in deep shadow. The background is brown and the title black, with the author’s name a lighter brown. Together, image and typography reflect the tension between abstract dualism and concrete multiplicity that tends to shadow discourses of skin-color-based identity (Figure 29). Grove used this cover imagery to imply that, for white readers, the book would expose the psychological mechanisms hidden behind the white mask. Indeed, the ad for Black Skin, White Masks on the back cover of the June 1967 Evergreen Review features a photograph of Fanon himself with a white mask, underneath which are the questions: “Why the white mask? What is he hiding? What does he fear?” The copy underneath then promises that “BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS by Frantz Fanon, available at last in English, gives the answers.” However, this ad, as well as the back cover of the book itself, features a quote from Floyd McKissick, former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, asserting, “This book should be read by every black man with a desire to understand himself and the forces that conspire against him.” Even though the primary audience for Grove’s books in the late 1960s was the predominantly white counterculture, Rosset and his colleagues were nevertheless aware of a growing African American market for revolutionary literature, and they strove to address this audience as well.

  Figure 28. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Black Cat edition of

  The Wretched of the Earth (1968).

  Figure 29. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Black Cat edition of

  Black Skin, White Masks (1968).

  In this effort, Grove was part of a growing mainstream awareness of and interest in the relationship between reading and racial demographics that accompanied the rise of the Black Power movement. In April 1967, the New York Times article “What the Negro Reads” reported on a survey of the reading preferences of African Americans. It concluded that they were reading “books on civil rights, the Negro’s place in history, works on the Muslim and Nationalist movements and, being practical, self-help books.”13 Two years later the Times featured an article more pointedly entitled “Black Is Marketable,” asserting that “last year the greatest paperback sales upsurge in any given cultural category occurred with those books dealing with aspects of Afro-American experience.” To support this claim, the article cites Morrie Goldfischer, Grove’s director of publicity, avowing that “only those books with revolutionary themes have shown comparative increases.”14 Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Grove endeavored to exploit this heightened interest, publishing, in addition to Fanon, Herbert Aptheker’s Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion; Turner Brown Jr.’s Black Is; Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo; Paul Carter Harrison’s The Drama of Nommo and Kuntu Drama; plays, poetry, and fiction by LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka; and a variety of other titles promoted in full-page ads as “the black experience in Grove Press paperbacks.”

  Grove’s most successful and significant title in this category was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Doubleday was originally to have published. The book was already in galleys when he was assassinated, but the subsequent threats and violence gave Doubleday cold feet. Rosset was quick to step in, issuing the hardcover in an initial printing of ten thousand copies in the fall of 1965 and the Black Cat paperback in the fall of 1966. Grove put its full promotional efforts behind the book, which was widely reviewed, discussed, advertised, and read over the course of the late 1960s, despite Malcolm X’s overwhelmingly negative image in the mainstream white press. Truman Nelson, writing for the Nation, hailed it as “a great book”; and Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing for the New York Times, called it “a brilliant, painful, important book.” Both these phrases were prominently featured in Grove’s advertisements, many of which were full page, in both the black and the white press, as well as on the book’s back cover. Harry Braverman, along with Jules Geller and Grove’s house counsel Dick Gallen, was instrumental in both the design and the aggressive marketing of this profoundly significant Sixties text.

  In the 1993 article “Merchandising Malcolm X,” Gail Baker Woods claims that “after his death, the media basically ignored Malcolm X,” but Grove’s campaign, and the remarkable success of the book itself, contradicts her.15 According to Grove’s sales records, the paperback had gone into a ninth printing for a total of 775,000 copies by August 1968. By 1970, Grove had sold more than one million copies, making Malcolm X’s image and story familiar to millions of Americans, both white and black. It was an image and a story of revolutionary conversion, as the tagline that runs across the front cover, in white type against a black background, confirms: “He rose from hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, pimp … to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution. He said he would be murdered before this book appeared.” Below these lines, which were used in all advertising for the book, the title appears in red. The bottom third of the cover features the now-iconic UPI photograph of Malcolm X, his lower lip held tensely beneath his teeth, his forefinger pointing forward and up. The gesture’s authoritative power is enhanced by the photo’s position at the bottom of the cover, which makes it look as though he is pointing to the title, as well as the prophecy above it (Figure 30). In the same year, Grove brought out the Evergreen paperback edition of Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, and the two authors appeared alongside each other in much of Grove’s promotion of the newly renamed genre of black writing in the late 1960s.

  The Black Cat edition’s back cover features a single quotation from the final chapter, in yellow type, which predicts, “I do not expect to live long enough to read my book.” The poignancy of this prophecy is deepened by the fact that reading is
so central to the autobiography itself, as Malcolm X famously begins his conversion in the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library, and he remained a voracious and omnivorous reader over the rest of his short and highly eventful life. As reviewers and critics have noted ever since, this conversion through literacy placed the autobiography in a tradition of African American writing running back to the slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as well as in a longer tradition of religious-conversion narratives running back through Saint Augustine), while its heavy emphasis on education and discipline placed its subject in the lineage of American self-made men epitomized by Ben Franklin. Thus, Grove could promote Malcolm X both as a radical revolutionary and as a more conventional proponent of self-reliance. His image fused the opposed strands of African American leadership most starkly represented in an earlier generation by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; thus, his autobiography could be marketed both as a revolutionary handbook and a self-help guide.

  Figure 30. Cover of Black Cat edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1966). (Photograph by UPI)

  The promotional power of this image is illustrated by the Los Angeles Public Library’s pamphlet “The Bibliography of Malcolm X,” a list of books Malcolm X read in prison.16 The pamphlet sports the same photo as the Grove edition, over which is the quote, “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.” Inside is a selection of the titles he read in prison, including a dictionary, Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gregor Mendel’s Findings in Genetics, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Paradise Lost. It then emphasizes that “anyone who lives, works, or goes to school in Los Angeles has free access to library materials … some of which might change and improve your life. Let the power of books work for you!” The library’s reliance on the Grove design for its “bibliography” confirms the degree to which Grove’s marketing succeeded in representing Malcolm X’s autobiography as a testimony to the power of the printed word.

  During his lifetime, Malcolm X had been an enormously popular speaker on college campuses, and his autobiography’s emphasis on education and self-determination enhanced its popularity in universities, colleges, and high schools across the country. Its educational sales were further boosted when it was adopted by the Scholastic Book Club. To capitalize on and enhance this popularity, Grove’s education department, which under Jules Geller had recently established a separate black studies program, issued a discussion guide for the text “as an aid to a meaningful exploration of the reality of life in America.”17 Mirroring the combination of revolutionary philosophy and pragmatic self-discipline promulgated by the text itself, the guide ranges from questions about vocabulary and plot to far more radical challenges such as whether ghettoes can be eliminated “by legislation and/or revolution,” or whether African Americans should appeal to the United Nations in order to “internationalize the struggle.” The guide also includes a list of courses in which the book has been adopted, ranging from high school English and social studies to college courses in history, sociology, philosophy, American studies, and even business administration. It concludes with a list of recommended reading, including Grove Press titles Malcolm X Speaks, Black Skin, White Masks, Wretched of the Earth, and Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! Brought out in the watershed year of 1968, when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was its most widely adopted book for course use, Grove’s study guide confirms the degree to which it was in the vanguard of the curricular revisions that transformed American education in the coming decades.

  Not only did Grove publish and promote many texts that were instrumental in the transition from civil rights to Black Power but it also tracked and encouraged this transition in the pages of the Evergreen Review, which became increasingly associated with the New Left and the radicalization of the Movement over the course of the late 1960s. Initially, the principal writer responsible for reporting on African American issues (and Movement politics more generally) was the prolific journalist Nat Hentoff, a regular contributor to the magazine. In November 1965, in his article “Uninventing the Negro,” Hentoff reported on the three-day conference “The Negro Writer’s Vision of America,” held at the New School and cosponsored by the Harlem Writer’s Guild, which featured James Baldwin as keynote speaker, along with panelists LeRoi Jones, Sterling Brown, Abbey Lincoln, and others. According to Hentoff, “The main, if tangled, theme of the conference [was] the need to discard the very word, ‘Negro.’”18 He organizes his article around the recurring discussion of the term, including an endorsement of its abandonment by Richard Moore of the Frederick Douglass Book Center and a summation speech by John Killens concluding that “Afro-American is a more exact and scientific description of the black American.”19

  In the following year, Hentoff contributed “A Speculative Essay,” more practically entitled “Applying Black Power.” Noting the need for the nascent Black Power movement to shift “from rhetoric to programmatic action,” Hentoff details a variety of community programs, from neighborhood patrols to black para-unions to economic boycotts, which could effect this translation.20 He particularly emphasizes the importance of “black students and intellectuals,” reporting favorably on the formation in New York of the Afro-American Students for Community Improvement and Development. He concludes optimistically that, with effective organization, “men like Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick have an opportunity to make black power so meaningful that the main question asked a decade or two from now will be why it took so long in coming.”21 Together, Hentoff’s articles effectively illustrate the linked objectives of the revolutionary handbooks Grove published in the 1960s: the radical transformation of consciousness and the practical attainment of political power.

  Not until 1969 did the Evergreen Review hire an African American as contributing editor, and for the next few years civil rights veteran Julius Lester was a regular contributor to the magazine during its final turbulent period, providing additional credibility to its reporting on African American issues. Lester was aware of the aura of tokenism that would accompany his association with a magazine owned and run by whites, and he addressed the issue in a 1970 article, “The Black Writer and the New Censorship.” Opening with the sentence, “In the latter half of the sixties more books by black writers were published than in any other decade of American history, which isn’t saying much,” Lester affirms the degree to which the explosion of interest in books by and about African Americans was being managed and mediated by an industry dominated by whites whose identity and experience rendered them incapable of fully understanding or evaluating the literature they were publishing.22 Without naming names, Lester proclaims that “white editors are not equipped, by education or psychology, to evaluate a manuscript by a black writer.” Nevertheless, he also concedes Grove’s vanguard efforts in this emergent market, noting that “the publication of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and The Autobiography of Malcolm X preceded the black power explosion and … ran interference for the books which were to come.”23

  Though most of the books Lester mentions were handled by white editors and publishers, many of them were sold in black-owned bookstores that, according to an August 20, 1969, article in the New York Times, were springing up all over the country in the late 1960s. Frequently modeled on Harlem’s legendary National Memorial African Bookstore, where Malcolm X himself used to spend time, these stores, owned and operated by African Americans and located in African American communities, were the principal outlet in those communities for the titles discussed here. Thus, even if the publishing industry in the 1960s remained dominated by whites, the retail and reception end of the communications circuit for black writing was becoming more autonomous. Such bookstores stocked a wide variety of titles issued by both black and white publishers, but the articl
e notes that “if one book stands out, it is ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ Every shop ranks it a best seller.”24 Other popular titles included Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, H. Rap Brown’s Die, Nigger Die, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

  Lester’s contribution to this emergent canon was the wonderfully titled Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!, issued as a Black Cat paperback in 1969. The front cover illustrates Kuhlman’s creative use of typography in his design of Grove’s revolutionary texts. Clearly derived from the layout of the hardcover dust jackets for Fanon, the cover of Look Out, Whitey! features simply title and author in crude block caps against a white background, with “Look Out, Whitey” and Lester’s name in black, “Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama” in gray, and both exclamation points in red. As on the cover of Black Skin, White Masks, the color scheme comments on the racially divided audience addressed by the text, with “Whitey” in black and “Black Power” in gray, simultaneously affirming and complicating the dualistic presumptions of “white” and “black” identity (Figure 31).

  The back cover elaborates on the rhetorical complexities of this design, with promotional commentary by white writers in black type divided by red ruled lines with the writers’ names in gray: Truman Nelson, reviewing the book for the New York Times, calls it “a magnificent example of the new black revolutionary writing”; Hentoff, reviewing it for the Nation, calls it “a book that ought to be the basis for a whole year’s work in every high school in the country”; and Publishers Weekly recommends it as “part of the survival kit America needs to remain a viable society.” In typographically playing on the rhetoric of racial identity, and in categorizing the text itself as a pedagogically structured “survival kit,” these paratexts illustrate the degree to which Grove’s publication of Fanon laid the groundwork for the marketing of Lester’s text, which subsequently appeared alongside those of Fanon, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, and others in Grove’s promotion of black writing. It eventually sold more than one hundred thousand copies.