Word: paperback
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...industry. Within Cerf's own professional lifetime, which spans four decades, U.S. book publishing has grown nearly 600%. In just nine years, 1952-61, business increased 150%, and since then has doubled again. This year, alone, Americans will have spent $2.5 billion for 2.2 billion books, from 350 paperback mysteries and $2 third-grade geographies to $200 encyclopaedias...
...stimulated by the success of mail-order merchandising and the paperback revolution. Even today, perhaps only 2% of the population ever sets foot in a conventional bookstore-and there are only about 1,500 of those. But the U.S. letter-carrier has become the middleman in an enterprise that accounts today for about 15% of the book volume. All told, mail-order houses and book clubs, such as TIME-LIFE Books and the Reader's Digest Book Club, deliver $181 million worth of volumes to the buyers' doors every year. The market has bred a host of specialty...
Most trade publishers are of modest size. Grossman Publishers, for instance, tackled the market last year with only 13 titles, five in paperback. New Directions, another Lilliputian publisher, brought out 16. Even an established firm
...read their books. McGraw-Hill turned out 662 last year, Doubleday & Co. 650, Harper & Row 633, Prentice-Hall 449, Holt, Rinehart & Winston 345 and Random House 421. They all print text-and reference books, as well as children's books, which are dependable moneymakers. Their profitable textbook and paperback operations enable them to gamble on adult trade books-which as a rule lose money. Random House President Robert Bernstein estimates that 60% of adult trade books end up in the red, another 36% break even, and only 4% turn a decent profit...
...said. It began in his childhood in Portland, Ore. "I was on all fours," he recalls. "I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all." He has been an omnivorous eater ever since. Author of 14 cookbooks, including the bestselling paperback James Beard Cookbook (over 500,000 copies), he has probably done more to get men into the kitchen than anybody before Julia Child, whom he considers to be "one of the greats in cooking-she will be a household word for a long, long time." Julia returns the compliment...