Word: max
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...short, swarthy, 47-year-old immigrant with curly black hair, smoky eyes, a terrific Bronx-Jewish accent, and a terrific publicity phobia, he is married, the father of two children, Jeanette and Mildred, lives in The Bronx. Legends about Max Salop in the book business are matched only by Sam Goldwyn legends in the movies...
What makes Salop a legend is his genius for selling books-any book. When a publisher has done all he knows how and still has copies on hand, he sends for Max Salop to come and get the remainders. Within the next few months Max Salop has sold not only the publisher's dead stocks, but has reprinted maybe 5,000, 10.000, 20,000 copies besides...
Twenty years ago Max Salop and two brothers, Morris and Abraham, were in the retail shoe business. Then Max went into second-hand books, started the Harlem Book Co. as a retail bookstore on Manhattan's 125th Street. When Depression hit, he waved ready cash under publishers' long faces, cornered the market in publishing's distress merchandise. Today he owns several bargain bookshops, a reprint house which publishes under half-a-dozen aliases. Not even Salop himself knows how many books he sells a year...
...Max Salop's success does not depend merely on price-cutting. Even more spectacular is what he does to a book's appearance. A collection of Ibsen plays (his first big success) was made from Modern Library plates, but reprinted on larger, thicker paper, with the imprint: Norwegian Publications, Oslo, Norway. Another Salop success was a 1,136-page volume titled Five Sinners and a Saint priced at $1.69. Inside this new literary package readers discovered six time-worn staples-the autobiographies of Madame P'ompadour, Benvenuto Cellini, De Quincey, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, St. Augustine. Another time...
With all his genius for selling literary junk, Max Salop has an almost wistful ambition to become a "legitimate" publisher. In 1933 he bought the highbrow Dial Press from Ambassador to Greece Lincoln MacVeagh and took a beating for art's sake. He lost money-probably the only time in his career. But he hung on proudly till...