Word: scherman
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President of Book-of-the-Month and (for all practical purposes) sole owner is dark, nervous, crinkly-eyed Harry Scherman, 56, onetime advertising man. The little venture in selling books by mail, which he helped launch in 1926, has grown in membership to 575,000. Scherman has moved into an apartment in Manhattan's swank Sutton Place district, also has a country house in horsy Bernardsville, N.J. Booksellers and publishers often call him "the most powerful man in publishing...
...Scherman's power has not always brought him esteem. In 1929 the American Booksellers' Association drew up an indictment of book clubs and guilds which is sometimes echoed today...
...this, President Scherman replies that his organization is a tremendous help to publishers, authors and booksellers; that it does not presume to choose twelve books for a subscriber that he must read; that it tries to pick not the "best" books but those the judges most enjoyed; that it widens the book market...
...Book-of-the-Month judges now number four: Critic Henry Seidel Canby, Novelists Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Christopher Morley, Editor William Allen White. President Scherman has no say in selections, but chooses the "dividend" books...
Some people found it bad enough to be frightening. In New York City a committee called Citizens For Victory (most prominent officers: Poet Stephen Vincent Benét, Fiscal Expert Harry Scherman, Editor Walter Millis) wrote an advertisement this week under the glaring banner: WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THIS COUNTRY? The ad went over the same barren, dreary ground as the daily headlines: Our own young boys are dying bravely for us; so are Russians, British, Chinese; but in Washington the spectacle of pork-barrel politics is as unblushing as ever. The ad denounced the farm bloc...