Word: paperbound
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Last fortnight in Manhattan observers looked sharp at a promising cheap-book experiment. It was called "Pocket Books," consisted of ten former bestsellers, printed in full-size type on good paper, with washable paper binding. Priced at 25?, Pocket Books were the best-looking, most readable paperbound books so far. Promising also was the publisher. tall, dynamic, 44-year-old Robert Fair de Graff...
...cheap books in Europe. We feel we ought to give it a chance-to show that it won't work here. If we thought it would really go, we would hesitate much longer about letting him have our plates." Said another: "The price is still too high for paperbound books-they have to sell at 10? or 15?, compete with magazines." A third publisher said the initial success in New York was no guide, was due to novelty appeal and Pocket Books' $2,000 full-page ad in the New York Times. Pocket Books will hit quicksand...
...further proof of their inability to lower prices until huge new audiences are found, publishers point to Modern Age Books, which two years ago set out to publish paperbound original editions at 35? to 50?. Backed by the Richard Storrs Childs fortune, Modern Age advertised heavily, cut costs by using the Rumford Press between printings of Reader's Digest, set up elaborate distribution machinery. Its losses the first year (attributed in part to inexperience) were reported at around $500,000. Since then Modern Age prices have risen nearer the $1 level...
English publishers used to say the same thing-until 1935. That year, in London, a handsome young man named Allen Lane, 33-year-old son of an architect, quit his job in his uncle's publishing house (the famed Bodley Head) and started publishing pocket-size, paperbound Penguin books. His original capital: ?100. His publishing office: a crypt beneath a Soho church. Tables were tomb tops; storage space was empty tombs. The first six months he sold over a million copies, including such titles as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, André Maurois' Ariel, Mowrer...
British Publisher Allen Lane, whose sixpenny paperbound Penguin and Pelican have flooded British newsstands and brought him a fortune, left London for India, Burma and Siam. Purpose: to investigate the possibilities of publishing paper-covered books in Basic English (850 words which "do all the work of 20,000") for use East of Suez...