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by Rebecca Romney

  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 le
ast 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 industr
y 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.