The Book Revolution

The Book Revolution

ROBERT ESCARPIT
Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences
the University of Bordeaux

GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. LTD

London Toronto Wellington Sydney
AND
UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC
AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION
Paris
 First published in Great Britain 1966
by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd
182 High Holborn, London, W.C.i and
the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization
Place de Fontenoy Paris-j6, France

Composed in Monotype Ehrhardt type and

printed by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
Made in Great Britain

NOTE
T h e original edition of this work was p u b -
lished by U N E S C O in 1965 with the title
La Révolution du Livre. This edition con-
tains several minor modifications prepared
by the author

© Unesco 1966
Copyright. All rights reserved
This book is affectionately dedicated to m y colleagues and former
colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie des Faits littéraires de Bor-
deaux, and especially to
MISS NICOLE ROBINE
M R JEAN BOUSSINESQ.
M R HENRI MARQUIER
without whose assistance and support it could never have been
planned or produced.
 Foreword

T H E important changes which have occurred in the publishing

world over the last few decades have, as the title of this book indicates,
assumed the proportions of a revolution. This revolution, like any
other, has complex and varied origins, including the explosive growth
of population, the spread of education and the increase in spare time
which encourages the habit of reading. But, in this connection, m e n -
tion should likewise be m a d e of the astonishing advance in produc-
tion and distribution techniques which have m a d e possible the huge
printings necessitated by the very increase in the number of readers.
Books are undergoing a transformation and tending to become one
of the main information media of our time, along with newspapers,
films, radio and television.
This phenomenon was bound to engage the attention of an
Organization which is required by its Constitution to promote "the
free flow of ideas by word and image" and to "give the people of all
countries access to the printed and published materials produced by
any of them". T h u s , at the end of 1964, the Unesco General C o n -
ference emphasized the importance of publications for mutual under-
standing and economic and social development. It likewise recog-
nized the need to strengthen international co-operation in regard to
the publishing and distribution of books, and to encourage the
publication of cheap editions. Finally, it recommended that a n e w
programme be initiated to promote the production and distribution
of books in developing countries.
This study is a sequel to that by M r R . E . Barker, Secretary of the
British Publishers Association, which was published by Unesco in
1956 under the title of Booksfor All. It has been written by M . Robert
Escarpit, Professor at the Faculty of Arts and H u m a n Sciences,
Bordeaux,Directorof the "Centre deSociologiedesFaits littéraires",
and author of several works on this subject. M . Escarpit here dis-
cusses today's publishing problems on the basis of his o w n , very
wide, experience; the views he expresses are therefore not neces-
sarily those of Unesco.
8 THE BOOK REVOLUTION
It is to be hoped that M . Escarpit's study, by drawing attention to
the revolution in publishing, will help to ensure that the n e w
prospects it is opening up will be turned to advantage for the greater
good of mankind.
 Preface

T H E author would like, at the outset, to acknowledge his indebted-

ness to R . E . Barker, Secretary of the Publishers Association of Great
Britain, w h o had the distinction of writing a basic handbook at a
time w h e n no serious attempt had yet been m a d e to produce a c o m -
prehensive study of the subject. Books for All, published by Unesco
in 1956, remains an invaluable work of reference.
Things change swiftly, however, in the world of books. Over the
last decade everything has been transformed—books, readers and
literature. T h e most revolutionary ideas have become commonplace,
and in every country, no matter what its political system, m e n —
individual researchers or scientific teams—are applying themselves
to vital problems which were previously not even recognized as such.
T h e mass circulation book—known as paperback or livre de poche,
depending on the country—constitutes one of these problems, and
perhaps the most urgent of all.
Indeed, things have changed even within the few months since
the French-language edition was published. Although the study has
been brought up to date as far as possible, it has been thought best
not to introduce fresh but as yet unchecked statistics. T h e trends
remain the same, and the shape of things to come can be seen as
easily—or as uneasily—in the 1962 data as in the still provisional
1964 figures. If there is anything to be added with reference to the
English-speaking countries, it would be to note the efforts being
m a d e by the publishing trade in the United K i n g d o m and in the
United States to keep pace with the remarkable success achieved in
creating a mass market for books.
M u c h of the information which appears here was assembled by
the "Centre de Sociologie des Faits littéraires", which I have headed
for the pastfiveyears at the Faculty of Arts and H u m a n Sciences of
the University of Bordeaux. M u c h has also been drawn from Unesco's
documentation services, from national and international publishing
and bookselling organizations and, above all, from numerous works
published during recent years.
In an effort to give coherence to the various elements contained
in this study, I have put forward certain provisional conclusions, and
10 THE BOOK REVOLUTION
for these I assume sole responsibility. Even if they somewhat shake
prevailing habits of thought, they m a y at least be accepted as work-
ing hypotheses. T h e study does not make any pretensions to be
definitive; it is simply a stage in a continuing process of investiga-
tion. In any event, within a few years a fresh look at the subject
will be necessary. This very transience is in itself evidence of m y
main thesis that the book in our era is recovering its true function
as a dynamic means of communication.
R.E.
 Contents

PART I: Books and the World Today

C H A P T E R I: Historical Survey page 17

What is a book?
The mutations of the book
From the printed book to the bestseller
Mass communication

C H A P T E R II: T h e Functions of the Book 31

A composite art
The book as a thing
The functional book
The literary book

PART H : The New Look in Publishing

C H A P T E R I: World Production 53
Interpretation of statistical data
Gross statistics by titles
Statistics by number of copies
Literary books

C H A P T E R II: T h e M a i n Exchange Patterns 80

High- and lorn-pressure zones
International barriers
The international book trade
Translations
12 THE BOOK REVOLUTION

P A R T HI: Future Prospects

C H A P T E R I: The Publishing Dilemma page 115
Immediate popular successes and steady-sellers
Programmed publication and non-programmed
publication
Mass-circulation books

C H A P T E R II: Bookshops and M a s s Circulation 137

The cultivated circuit and the popular circuit
The traditional image of bookshops
Bookshops and social environment

C H A P T E R III : Towards a New Form of Communication 151

The writer's position
Criticism and literary opinion
Active readers and passive readers

TABLES A N D D I A G R A M S
TABLES
I. Evolution of the Percentage of Functional Books: 1938,
1952, 1962 page 37
II. T h e School-book in France and in the United States 38
III. School-books in U S A : Evolution, 1958-1963 39
IV. World Production by Titles: Evolution from 1952 to 1962 56
V . T h e Language Groups 61
VI. Variations in Paper Consumption and Book Production:
1955 in relation to 1938 66
VII. Relation between Paper Consumption and N u m b e r of
Copies published 67
VIII. Consumption of Printing- and Writing-paper in Various
Regions of the World: Evolution between 1950 and i960 69
IX. World Production (by Titles) of Works in Class 8 (Litera-
ture) : Evolution from 1952 to 1962 71
X . Production (by Titles) of Paperback Novels in the United
States 77
X I . Production (by Titles) per Million of Population 83
 CONTENTS 13
TABLES
XII. Reading Public classified by Language page 86
XIII. Main Exporters of Books (1961) 92
X I V . Translations throughout the World (Gross i960 Figures
for 44 Countries) 96
X V . The Proportion of Translations 99
X V I . Dominant Translation Trends—Dominant Languages in
i960 100
XVII. Dominant Translation Trends—Types of Works domina-
ting in i960 104
XVIII. Reissues in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1950
and 1958 120
DIAGRAMS
i. Percentage of Literary Production in the Total Production (by
Titles) for 55 Countries in 1952 and 67 Countries in 1962 74
2. Restocking Curves 117
3. W i n d o w Contents and Shop Contents 139
 PART ONE

Books and the World Today

e

t CHAPTER
1«
I
h
s
t Historical Survey
t:
r
t:
t: What is a book?
L I K E anything that lives, the book is not to be defined. At least, no
v
one has yet been able to provide a complete andfinaldefinition of it,
t because a book is not a thing like other things. W h e n w e hold it in
e
our hands, all w e hold is the paper : the book is elsewhere. A n d yet it
11
is in the pages as well, and the thought alone without the support of
*' the printed words could not make a book. A book is a reading-
11
machine, but it can never be used mechanically. A book is sold,
•v bought, passed from hand to hand, but it cannot be treated like an
ordinary commercial commodity, because it is, at once, multiple and
unique, in ample supply yet precious.
' It is the product of certain techniques, serving certain intentions,
s
which m a y be put to certain uses. A s m u c h could be said of most of
a
the products of h u m a n industry, but the peculiarity of the book is
* that the intentions, the uses and the techniques which combine to
( define it, far from being crystallized in the phenomenon, go well
F beyond it, preserving, as it were, their independence, evolving with
the circumstances of history, and reacting on one another so that
a
they mutually modify their content and lead to infinite variation not
s
only in the book itself but in its position and its role in the life of
r
every m a n and of society.
v
At several points in the course of this development the book has
a
crossed dividing lines beyond which the definitions previously accep-
h table no longer applied, because actual mutations had taken place.
O n e such mutation is n o w coming about, in this second half of the
11
twentieth century.
v
T h e book as such seems to have appeared in itsfirstform at the
F beginning of thefirstmillennium B.c. Its appearance was probably
11
associated with the use of various types of light, pliant supports for
r
writing : bark, plantfibresor cloth. Biblos in Greek means the inner
20 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
(code, incidentally, is derived from codex), for sacred texts and for
scholarly writings. It is suited to a civilization less interested in
literature than in political security, theology and the preservation of
ancient learning. F r o m the fourth century of our era, for more than
a thousand years, the manuscript of bound sheets of vellum, in the
hands of the clerks, was to be the universal means of preserving,
communicating and disseminating thought, not only throughout the
Christian world but throughout the Arab and Jewish worlds as
well.
S o vitally important was the book that during the Middle Ages
there was no more meritorious labour than to copy or illuminate a
manuscript. T h e transport of books from monastery to monastery,
from town to town, sometimes over very great distances, was organ-
ized with care (3).
Because their artistic merits ensured their survival, w e are most
familiar with the beautiful illuminated manuscripts of the late
Middle Ages, but there were also less costly books, especially books
of hours, for daily use. A s soon as they came into being, the universi-
ties organized the copying of classical texts for their students, so that
a thirteenth-century scholar's textbook budget was not m u c h greater,
in proportion, than that of his successors in the twentieth century (4).
N o matter h o w ingeniously it was organized, however, hand copy-
ing had its limits. F r o m the fourteenth century onwards, n e w strata
of society took up reading, which until then had been the clerks'
preserve. These new readers—nobles and bourgeois, merchants and
magistrates—had little use for latinizing in everyday life: they
wanted technical works, it is true, but also books to entertain them,
works of imagination, written in the vulgar tongue. T h u s in the
R o m a n c e dialects was born the "romance", the ancestor of the novel,
whose popularity hastened the next, decisive mutation of the book:
printing.

From the printed book to the best-seller

Printing had an immediate and spectacular effect, but it appeared
only w h e n the time was ripe—which shows that a technical innova-
tion can prosper only if it meets a social need. Paper, which was as
indispensable to the development of printing as the tyre and macadam
were, later, to the development of the motor-car, had been known in
China for more than a thousand years w h e n it reached Europe in the
middle of the twelfth century—and even then it was coldly received
 HISTORICAL SURVEY 21
by the authorities, w h o were worried about its frailty (5). Printing
from movable type took m u c h less time—two or three years—to
cover the same ground. T h e times had changed, and the new condi-
tions required that printing be discovered, invented or imported.
True, printing prospered because in Europe it encountered lan-
guages employing alphabetical script with twenty-six characters, the
form best suited for its use, but it prospered even more because it
encountered civilizations in the midst of rapid economic and cultural
development, where the diffusion of the written word was beginning
to create insuperable problems.
W h a t was perhaps the most decisive discovery in history appeared,
prosaically enough, to thefirstprinters simply as a convenient way
of speeding up the copying of books, improving their appearance and
reducing their cost. Everything about the typography, manufacture
and publishing of books at this time shows that the printers were
mainly concerned with commercial returns. T h e same concern can
be seen in the choice of thefirsttexts printed, all of which were
likely to sell well; religious works, novels, collections of anecdotes,
technical manuals and recipe-books formed the backbone of the
catalogues of these practical businessmen (6).
T h e success of the operation exceeded their best hopes. S o m e au-
thorities estimate the number of incunabula—books printed before
A.D. 1500—at 20,000,000 in a Europe whose population numbered
less than 100,000,000, most of w h o m were illiterate (7).
This gave the book a n e w dimension, and no time was lost in
exploring its possibilities. Only a few hundred copies of the first
incunabula were printed; the average printing of a book did not go
beyond 1,000 copies until the middle of the sixteenth century. In the
seventeenth century it was between 2,000 and 3,000 copies, and con-
tinued at that level until the end of the eighteenth century. It was
usually difficult to do better with hand presses, and, what is more,
the printers, w h o by n o w were distinct from the booksellers w h o
handled distribution, would have been afraid of cheapening their
wares by making them too c o m m o n . Guild ordinances restricted
both the number of printing-presses and the size of printings. A s a
result, despite a steady downward trend, book prices in Western
Europe remained at a level which m a d e the book available to the
well-to-do burgesses, but not to the middle classes in general, let
alone to the workers. T h e latter, if not illiterate, had to satisfy their
needs for reading material from the more ephemeral publications to
22 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
be found in the pedlar's pack: broadsheets, ballads and almanacs (8).
It can therefore be said that the printed book, which was the sup-
port and vehicle of the great European literature of the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, took it only to a very small
circle of society.
In the eighteenth century, England was the least illiterate country
in Europe, and the country in which publishing was the most
prosperous, but even the most popular books—Pamela or Joseph
Andrews—never had a sale of more than a few thousand copies (9).
In France, printings were decidedly smaller, and though Voltaire's
witticism—fifty readers for a serious book andfivehundred for an
entertaining one—was surely an exaggeration, the fact remains that
the readers of books represented a small aristocracy of written cul-
ture, or of "literature", as it was then called.
It was an international aristocracy. T h e absence of any kind of
copyright agreement gave a stimulus to piracy in publishing which
was morally questionable but culturally beneficial. American p u b -
lishing, for instance, developed magnificently, after the United States
became independent, by establishing itself as a parasite upon the
British publishing trade. O w i n g to their mercantile traditions or
their political situation, such cities as Amsterdam and Lyons were,
for centuries, international centres of diffusion for the reading public.
T h e Divine Comedy took more than four centuries to make its w a y
throughout Europe; twenty years were enough for Don Quixote, and
five for Werther. Five or six major languages shared the literary
universe ; never has the sense of a world community of the literati
been keener than during the eighteenth century.
But this aristocratic cosmopolitanism was directly threatened ; the
book had long been working up to a fourth mutation, mechanization,
which was to destroy it. T h e premonitory signs were visible from
the days of the Encyclopaedists on. A s in thefifteenthcentury, n e w
social strata, including the lower middle classes, took u p reading and
demanded books of a system which had not been designed for them,
which by definition excluded them. This n e w need for reading m a t -
ter was one of the causes of the development of the press, whose
circulationfigureswere still, however, very small.
Faced with a developing market, printing and bookselling under-
went a major change, as nascent capitalist industry took charge of
the book. T h e publisher appeared as the responsible entrepreneur
relegating the printer and bookseller to a minor role. A s a side effect,
 HISTORICAL SURVEY 23
the literary profession began to organize : until then literature had
been left to the rich amateur or relied on the support of the art
patron, but n o w the writer began to claim a livelihood from his
works. F r o m D r Johnson to Diderot, m e n of letters raised the ques-
tion of copyright and literary property.
In the last third of the eighteenth century, trends of thought
which, though at variance with one another, all converged in the
direction of spreading books among what was then called "the
people"—Methodism in England, Encyclopaedism and later the
revolutionary spirit in France, and, to a lesser extent, Aufklärung in
Germany—suddenly m a d e the need for reading matter an urgent
problem.
T h e n , in a few years—between 1800 and 1820—a series of inven-
tions revolutionized printing techniques : the metal press, the foot-
operated cylinder press, the mechanical steam-press. Before the end
of Napoleon's reign, more sheets could be printed in an hour than
had been possible in a dayfifteenyears earlier. T h e period of large
printings could begin.
It began in Britain, for most of the improvements in printing were
of British origin. Walter Scott's novels heralded this development,
but it really opened with Byron's well-known experience in 1814,
w h e n 10,000 copies of The Corsair were sold on the day of publica-
tion. T h e wave reached France about 1830 (10), together with the
heavy-duty press, and by 1848 it had swept over the rest of Europe
and America.
This change in scale produced far-reaching effects. First of all, the
writer lost contact with the vast majority of his readers : only the
"cultured" stratum of the population continued to participate,
either directly or through the critics, in the formation of influential
literary opinion, while the anonymous multitude of other readers
n o w figured in the mythology of letters only as a boundless sea into
whose waves the poet tossed at random the bottle bearing his
message (11).
But it was no longer possible to ignore the existence of the mass of
readers w h o thenceforth were to support the book and m a k e it an
economic proposition. Just as the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
bourgeois had m a d e the clerkly Latin book give place to the use of
the vulgar tongue, so the n e w readers of the nineteenth century m a d e
the cosmopolitan book of the literati give place to the use of national
languages. Large printings thus both required and facilitated the
24 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
splintering of literary languages, leading to independent national
literatures. A s nationalism awakened, the book kept step with the
times.
A n d it kept step with the times in the awakening of class con-
sciousness as well. O n e after another, the circulating library, the
serial novel and the public library spread the book ever more widely
a m o n g the social strata which the progress of education had opened
to reading. In the revolutionary thinking of 1848, the book became
a basic symbol. It was realized that the way to freedom lies through
cultural conquest. A s was to be expected in Britain and in the
United States the popular book had a strong puritanical bias, and the
stress lay more on its moral role than on its revolutionary value. Its
efficiency as a social determinant was nevertheless very great, especi-
ally in the United States where, as Richard D . Altick phrases it, "the
American author had learned more quickly than his English cousin
h o w to write for a democratic audience" (12). T h e pirate-market
having reversed its pre-Dickensian East-West trend, the American
book was read all through the English-speaking world, including
Britain and its colonies. B y mid-century Uncle Tom's Cabin sold a
million and a half copies in one year and played a part in the building
of a progressive opinion in Anglo-Saxon countries comparable to
that of Les Misérables ten years later in France.
But thefirstsigns of a n e w ,fifth,mutation of the book were appear-
ing in Britain, where the inevitable consequences of capitalist in-
dustrialization developed earlier than elsewhere. While the newly-
published book was already being sold at the price of ten shillings
and sixpence (half a guinea, the luxury trade's status symbol), which
was to remain current u p to World W a r II, from 1885 onwards
popular reprints of good books began to appear, selling at about six-
pence and in printings of tens of thousands of copies. B y the end of
the century, abridged novels and poems were being sold for a penny,
and from 1896 on, one publisher was even to offer penny editions
of unabridged texts by Goldsmith, Poe, Scott, Dickens, D u m a s ,
Eugène Sue and Mérimée (13).
But it was still too early for such undertakings. In a society where
there was no internal mobility, the "masses" interested in this kind
of reading matter were still only a privileged minority. Although
Britain was rather ahead of the rest of the world in this respect, be-
cause of the rapid growth of its urban centures, the majority of the
population of the other civilized countries still depended for their
 HISTORICAL SURVEY 2$
reading material on the bookstall and the pedlar : mutilated editions
of old classics, sentimental novels, folk-tales, joke-books, ballads,
almanacs, etc. (14). In some parts of the world this situation was to
last until after the Great W a r , and even until the second half of the
twentieth century.

Mass communication
But even before the turn of the century, thefirstof the mass-com-
munication media had appeared, to some extent replacing the pedlar
in m a n y places throughout the world. B y 1900, the popular news-
paper, born of the cheap press of the 1830's, had passed thefigureof
a million copies. Haifa century later, the British press was breaking
all circulation records with the never-equalledfigureof 600 copies a
day per thousand inhabitants. Behind the United Kingdom, in the
400-copies category, came the Scandinavian countries, Australia and
Luxembourg; N e w Zealand, the United States and Belgium were
in the 300-copies category, while in the 100-copies and 200-copies
categories came the main body of the twenty or so economically and
technically developed nations which, to all intents and purposes,
shared among them the rest of the newsprint consumed throughout
the world.
T h e peak w a s reached about 1955. Since that time, while the
newspaper has continued to develop (although at a slower rate) in
those countries which had a cultural lag to make good, elsewhere it
is dropping back in the face of keen competition from films, radio
and television (15).
These new mass-communication media have possibilities which
the newspaper cannot share. T h e y are suitable not only for the
circulation of information, but also for artistic expression. True, the
nineteenth-century newspaper attempted to second the book in
respect of its literary function, but the serial novel has never had a
good press a m o n g the "cultured class". Even w h e n it is of good
quality, it is incomparably less efficacious than afilm,a radio broad-
cast or a television programme.
F r o m the end of the Great W a r , and with no interruption other
than thefiveyears of World W a r II, the audio-visual mass-communi-
cation media have distributed ever-increasing quantities of informa-
tion and artistic material (both, it is true, varying greatly in quality)
to sectors of society which had previously been totally neglected
culturally. In the extreme case, television can bring the highest
 26 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
manifestations of art right into homes in which illiteracy, ignorance
and poverty have barred the door to the book.
Besides their virtuosity and their omnipresence, these mass-com-
munication media have two advantages over the book : their cost is
relatively low and their "consumption" is agreeable. Afinebook,
on the other hand, is expensive, and a cheap one, with its dull cover,
greyish paper and cramped printing, is horribly ugly and depressing.
For this reason the cinema, radio and television exercise both an
economic and an aesthetic pressure upon the book. W h e n , for the
price of one hour's work, it is possible to go to any neighbourhood
cinema and spend two hours watching a pleasant story in elegant,
comfortable surroundings, w h y should anyone spend three or four
hours' wages, or even more, to read the same story in a book which
becomes steadily less prepossessing as its cost decreases ?
O f all these considerations, that of beauty is perhaps the most im-
portant. Since World W a r II, the use of synthetic plastics and the
development of industrial design have, generally speaking, freed the
outward everyday life of the c o m m o n m a n from ugliness. In the
commercialfield,this evolution had begun before the W a r , with the
one-price store, a beautified version of the Anglo-American W o o l -
worth's. Suddenlyfindinghimself served by shop-girls with well-
kept hands and hair, in a brightly-lit shop, perhaps to the strains of
soft music, gave the average consumer a strange sense of unreality.
In m a n y countries, 1935 was the year of the "chain store", during
which a certain kind of beauty came into community life as a sort of
public service. It m a y perhaps b e of interest that the M o s c o w
"metro", whose gilt and rococo, in a different social structure, ful-
filled the same function of beautifying daily life, also dates from
1935. At about the same time in the mid-thirties R a y m o n d Loewy
began popularizing the theories on industrial design which he e m -
bodied in his 1937 book, The Locomotive, Its Aesthetics, and de-
veloped later in his famous work Never Let Well Enough Alone.
A n d 1935 was also the year in which, in England, Sir Allen Lane
founded Penguin Books. T h e early Penguins m a y not have been
objects of great beauty, but the red-and-white jackets of these six-
penny paperbacks were unusually cheerful-looking for books ofthat
class. In Germany, the old Tauchnitz (16) editions were soon ob-
liged to modernize themselves to keep u p with their young competi-
tor, and to exchange their grim typographical covers for softly-tinted
jackets, with a different colour for each type of work.
 HISTORICAL SURVEY 27

T h e Penguin did not set out to be a book for the masses. Somewhat
snobbishly, those in charge of it persisted for a long while in dis-
claiming this role; perhaps in fact they did not intend to play it (17).
But m a n proposes and history disposes. O n c e again, a mutation had
occurred at exactly the right time, the appearance of the Penguins
coinciding with a concatenation of circumstances favourable to the
book for the masses. A few years earlier, in France, experiments such
as those of Fayard or Ferenczi, carried out in a similar spirit and
probably under better financial conditions, had not yielded the
hoped-for results. J. Ferenczi's Livre Moderne Illustré series, which
reprinted the best-sellers of Colette, Mauriac and Giono, was already
selling at 3.50 francs—about a shilling—when the Penguins ap-
peared; it managed to survive somehow, but only at the price of
abandoning its ideas of popularization.
T h e Penguin series, o n the contrary, prospered, and developed in
a direction which the founder had perhaps not foreseen. In any case,
whether deliberately or not, by launching his venture at the precise
m o m e n t w h e n the times were ripe for it, Sir Allen Lane opened the
door to the mass-circulation book.
So true is this that Penguin Books are n o w partly financing at the
University of Birmingham the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, which is working under the supervision of Professor Hoggart
on the problems of the ordinary man's reading. Throughout the
world—in France, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Japan and
the socialist countries—these problems are of the greatest interest
not only to publishers and booksellers (which is not surprising), but
also to sociologists studying questions of culture and the use of
leisure and, even more important, to specialists in literary history
and criticism. Therein, in the second half of the twentieth century,
lies the n e w significance of the book.
T h e mutation occurred rapidly, under the pressure of powerful
acceleration factors, of which the W a r , the establishment of socialist
régimes in m a n y book-producing nations, and decolonization and
its cultural consequences, were the most important.
T h e need to furnish abundant cheap reading matter for millions
of American soldiers scattered throughout the world was probably
what caused the American publisher to become seriously interested
in the paperback. Whatever the ideological orientation of a country,
the desire to m a k e its national views k n o w n abroad stimulated large
printings and low prices. Overseas cultural centres of the major
28 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
powers distributed their books in hundreds of thousands of copies.
A n d in the countries where educational advancement was outstrip-
ping economic development, only the book for the masses could
meet the demand created by the n e w reading public.
T h u s was born the n e w book which, since 1950, has practically
conquered the world—even France, for years set in the firm convic-
tion that, so far as the paper-bound book was concerned, she had
nothing to learn from anyone.
T h e paperback is printed on ordinary, but agreeable, paper,
strongly bound in a coloured jacket which is very often illustrated.
It is never printed in less than some tens of thousands of copies, and
it is seldom sold at more than the equivalent of an hour's wages per
volume. It is wide-ranging in its choice of titles : it reprints best-
sellers but also publishes original work; it includes the classics, n e w
novels, technical handbooks, scientific works and even reference
books, dictionaries and guides. Its intellectual mobility is enormous :
while in 1961 it accounted for 14% of the total output of books in
the United States, in 1962 it accounted for 31 %, and the ratio keeps
increasing. It accounts for 2 5 % of books on biography, history, reli-
gion, science and technology, for 30% of books on art, business,
education, general works, sociology and economics, language, law,
medicine and philosophy, and for 46% of allfictiontitles (18) (see
also Table I X ) . In 1964 there were 30,700 titles available in paper-
backs in the United States out of an estimated total of 120,000.
A s early as i960, an exhibition sponsored by the National Book
League in London showed 1,000 paperbacks in thirty languages,
coming from countries as diverse as Canada, France, the Federal
Republic of Germany, Eastern Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, the
Netherlands, Pakistan, Sweden, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, the United K i n g d o m and the United States of America
(19). But this was only a sample, and a few months later it was out-
dated. A revolution was in progress.

NOTES
(1) One important exception, however, is that of the Semitic languages,
in which the root ktb, meaning book, seems quite unrelated to the
material of which the book is made.
 HISTORICAL SURVEY 29
(2) For books in ancient times, see the nineteenth-century study by
T h . Birt, Das antike Buchwesen, 1882, or the standard manual by
S. Dahl, Histoire du livre de V antiquité à nos jours, 1933.
(3) The Mélanges d'histoire économique et sociale offered as a tribute to
Professor Antony Babel, Geneva, 1963, contain (pp. 96-127) an
interesting article by M . Stelling Michaud on the international
transport of Bolognese legal manuscripts from 1265 to 1320.
(4) T h e machinery for the publication of university texts is described in
the Introduction (pp. 9-13) to the book by L . Febvre and Henri-
Jean Martin, L'Apparition du livre, Paris, 1958. Authentic, reliable
manuscripts were hired out, under University guarantee, by the
'stationarii' or sworn university booksellers, to students desiring
to copy them, or to professional copyists under contract.
(5) Italy began to import paper brought from the Orient by the Arabs in
the twelfth century. Paper manufacture in Italy began early in the
fourteenth century, but even in the thirteenth century, despite its
prohibition by certain chancelleries, paper was already currently
used in France and Switzerland.
(6) O n the whole of this period of the history of the book, see A . Flocon,
U Univers des livres, Paris, 1961, especially Part III: Les livres
imprimés anciens.
(7) T h e perhaps somewhat optimistic estimate of L . Febvre and H . - J .
Martin, op. cit., p. 377.
(8) O n this question, see David T . Pottinger, The French Book-trade in
the Ancien Régime, 1500-1JQI, Harvard, 1958.
(9) According to Richard D . Altick, The English Common Reader,
Chicago, 1957, pp. 49-50, the printings of these 'best-sellers'
never exceeded 4,000 copies, and the average printing was 500 or
1,000. If it was successful, a book had between three and five
printings.
(10) T o be precise, in 1836, with Emile de Girardin's La Presse. In one
year, subscriptions to Paris newspapers rose from 70,000 to
200,000 (E. Boivin, Histoire du journalisme, Paris, 1949). In the
literaryfield,the effects of large printings were not felt until a
little later, between 1840 and 1848.
(11) This is certainly one of the origins of the romantic myth represented
by Alfred de Vigny's La Bouteille à la mer.
(12) Richard D . Altick, op. cit., p. 301.
30 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
(13) George Newnes' Penny Library of F a m o u s Books. See R . D . Altick,
op. cit., pp. 314-15.
(14) O n the position in France in the mid-nineteenth century, see the
invaluable, because unique, work of Charles Nisard, Histoire des
¡ivres populaires ou de la littérature de colportage, Paris, 1964.

(15) In 1962, printings of British newspapers dropped to 506 per 1,000

inhabitants, Norway and Denmark were at about 350, while
Sweden held firm at 462 and Luxembourg at 445. A m o n g the in-
creases, Japan reached 416 (as against 224 in 1952), and N e w
Zealand climbed slightly, from 365 to 406.

(16) Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz, the nephew of a Leipzig publisher,

founded his famous 'Collection of British and American Authors'
in 1841 ; in 100 years, the collection published nearly 6,000 titles.
For this story and the history of paperbacks in general, see Part I
of Frank L . Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, N e w York,
1958.

(17) A 1964 Penguin Books prospectus states, with characteristic smug-

ness, "They are not a product for the masses. Eleven million
Penguins sold in the United K i n g d o m in one year represent only
one Penguin bought by one Englishman out offive.T h e Penguins
are made for a (relatively large) minority, a select minority."

(18) Publishers' Weekly (Philadelphia), vol. 183, N o . 3, 21 January 1963,

pp. 42-43.
(19) See the article by D e s m o n d Flower, A Revolution in Publishing, in
The Times Supplement on Paperbacks, 19 M a y i960, and the
article by J. E . Morpurgo, Paperbacks Across Frontiers, in The
Library Journal (New York), 15 January 1961.
 CHAPTER
2

The Functions of the Book

A composite art
L I T E R A T U R E is a composite art. T h e letter, which is its specific
means of expression, and which has given it its n a m e , is both an
object and a sign. A s an object, it has a form perceived, interpreted
and appreciated according to a system of plastic values; as a sign, it
has a content perceived, interpreted and appreciated according to a
system of semantic values which does not coincide with the system
of plastic values.
In fact, the situation is still more complex. T h e letter as an object
is never found in isolation: it forms part of the letterpress, which
itself is only one element of the artistic whole, comprising page
design, printing, illustration, binding—in short, the objective beauty
of the book. A n d if the book is to be taken as an object of art whose
text (considered as a material thing) is only one of its elements, it
must be seen in the context of the network of social conditions
governing the distribution of art objects : trade, investment, fetish-
ism, conspicuous consumption, pursuit of the status symbol, etc.
O n the other hand, the content of the letter as a sign is ambiguous
and manifold. Combined with other letters to form words, which
themselves are combined with other words to form sentences, it
finally contributes to the transmission, at various levels, of messages
which m a y be rational, practical or emotional as the case m a y be,
but which are always intellectual. A s an element of thought which
is, as it were, "frozen" in writing, but which can be reactivated by
the act of reading at any time, in any place, the letter is an "informa-
tion tool". But at the same time, taken alone or in its context, it is
the visible representation of a sound. In the last analysis, to write a
word is to pronounce it by delayed action and by proxy. Reading
reactivates the sound content as well as the intellectual content, but
the two reactivations d o not necessarily coincide or coexist. T h e letter
32 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
as a "delayed speech tool" can very well be separated from the letter
as an "information tool".
It follows that the book, besides being an art object, is both a means
of acoustic expression (since the sounds can be combined without
meaning, like music) and a means of intellectual communication
(since the meaning can be perceived independently of the original
sound scheme, as occurs w h e n a translation is read).
M a n y other ambiguities could be pointed out, but these three
independent, if not always divergent, lines of significance suffice to
show w h y it is impossible to apply to literature the same categories
and aesthetic concepts as are applied to the other arts. T o the extent
that the literary act is an act of communication by means of the
book, literature in the broad sense of the term both assumes the
existence of the book and supplies the reason for its existence. It
therefore shares the book's indefiniteness and its ambiguities. In this
domain, definitions are elusive and criteria imprecise.
T h e literary art can recover its coherence and aesthetic rigour and
be "purified", if it is set the object of seeking and maintaining a
difficult balance between graphic form, melody of language and in-
tellectual meaning. It is precisely in this that the traditional literary
art of China consists and, in general, the literary art of the Far East,
so far as it uses Chinese ideograms. These ideograms e m b o d y at one
and the same time, form, music and thought. T h e whole art of the
poet consists in reconciling their different natures, so that, in this
sense, the ancient Chinese book m a y be said to be the model for all
literature. T h e Middle Ages in Europe, with their illuminated
manuscripts and their love of plays on words, riddles and verbal
symbolism, had the same aesthetic idea, but it was m u c h more
difficult to achieve it with tools as abstract as syllabic or alphabetical
scripts and as pitilessly rational as the analytical languages.
O n the other hand, the trouble with any balance is that it is in-
compatible with movement. A n d , as w e have seen, the book has
never stopped moving since it first appeared. T h e balance attained
at a given m o m e n t between its various scales of values is gradually
destroyed by the pressure of ever-changing social, economic and
technical conditions. Once petrified by success in the mould of one
style, one idiom, one form of presentation, price or means of distribu-
tion, the book can no longer, without deteriorating and decaying,
serve as a means of communication between rising generations of
writers w h o call upon it to express what it cannot say, and n e w classes
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 33
of readers whose intellectual aspirations and material requirements
it cannot satisfy. At that point, as degeneration sets in, a mutation
takes place and the balance is restored. At the turn of the century,
as w e have seen, having failed to adapt itself to the needs of mass
culture, the book was ugly or expensive, but never both cheap and
pleasant to look at. Similarly, with very few—though honourable—
exceptions, the books available to the reader of limited means were
hardly ever both well-written and interesting. T h e paperback muta-
tion, which began in 1935, enabled the modern book to take its place
in a mass civilization, while securing a n e w balance between concern
for a certain graphic beauty suited to prevailing economic conditions,
for a wider significance and a more accessible idiom.
But this balance is far from being entirely and universally estab-
lished. Despite the spectacular success of the mutation in some
countries, in m a n y more it has hardly even begun. N o one knows
whether it will succeed in the years between n o w and the end of the
twentieth century.
In twentieth-century societies, whether highly developed or not,
the book's vulnerability is increased as it is called upon to perform
a variety of specialized functions which throw it off balance and
change its nature. T h e book as a thing and the functional book are
the most characteristic of these specializations.

The book as a thing

Take a young couple in a middle-level social and professional cate-
gory, such as that of skilled craftsmen, small businessmen or junior
executive grades. Suppose that each of them is a regular reader,
getting through, in addition to newspapers and magazines, one book
a week (1). Taking into account differences in taste, it could be
assumed that sixty to seventy books c o m e into the h o m e every year.
Such readers will probably belong to a lending library, but will spend
considerably more on books than the £13 a year which is the average
for their category. It can be assumed that they will buy at least
twenty to twenty-five books a year, perhaps more if in cheap
editions. Allowing for losses, at the end often years they will have a
library of about 200 volumes, a figure compatible with the small
modern house orflat,since it represents roughly what four three-
foot shelves will hold (2). If our young couple keep u p their reading
rate—and after a slight drop at about the age of thirty, the likelihood
is that the rate will increase—their library will continue to expand,
34 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
as furniture-movers well k n o w ! It is then easy to calculate that, if all
the books in this collection have an equal probability of being re-
read, each of them can be re-read by its owners, at best, only once
every twenty years. In point of fact, there are some books which are
re-read—at varying intervals, of course—fairly regularly, and they
reduce the chances of the others to that extent. Historical selection,
which causes 8 0 % of literary production to be forgotten within a year
and 99 % in twenty years (3), while it operates less harshly in a private
library than in a bookshop, because the purchase of a book "to keep"
is an act of selection in itself, still comes into play.
All this goes to prove that, of the enormous quantity of books
standing on private bookshelves, scarcely any are being used, or will
ever be used, for reading again. T h e question then arises, what are
they being used for ? If they are no longer "reading-machines", what
usefulness have they, and what motives induce their owners to buy
them?
Generally speaking, the book as a thing can have three uses, which
are never found in isolation but which for ever overlap and c o m -
bine. It m a y be an investment, a decorative item or what is n o w
called a status symbol—the sign that its owner belongs to a certain
social category. Even the functional library of the college professor
or professional m a n is influenced by these extra-literary considera-
tions.
T h e book as an investment is disappearing, at least from the c o m -
mercial publishing and bookselling circuits. T h e bibliophile is most
often a collector of old books. Special, non-commercial editions on
de luxe papers are becoming more and more rare : literary production
has become m u c h too abundant, and historical selection m u c h too
harsh, to support this kind of activity. Afineedition of a forgotten
book is a dead weight.
T h e book as a decorative item still survives to a certain extent : it
has indeed become an essential accessory for the interior decorator
w h o wants to create a "cosy" atmosphere for the living-room. But
this use, too, is declining as reading becomes more c o m m o n . T h e
book capacity of the modern apartment is limited. Taking into
account the rest of the furniture and a reasonable amount of decora-
tion, an ordinary two-roomflat(living-room, bedroom, kitchen and
bath) can hardly hold more than two or three hundred volumes. If
the mobility of this meagre stock must be sacrificed to the require-
ments of the decorator (for nothing is less beautiful or more untidy
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 35
than a library in use), reading stands little chance. M o r e and more
often the book is regarded as an "expendable" item, and the aesthetic
need that the paperback seeks to satisfy is b y its very nature
ephemeral.
T h e status symbol is still very m u c h alive in some countries,
either because the general run of their populations have only recently
become literate (when the book recovers the almost religious signifi-
cance that it had a m o n g the c o m m o n people of Western Europe
during the nineteenth century), or, on the contrary, because their
social structure includes groups with stereotyped reactions, such
as the middle-classes in the United States. In this latter case, inci-
dentally, it is no longer a question of expensive books with artistic
bindings and typography, really symbolizing something, but of mass-
produced volumes with a spurious appearance of luxury, like those
with which certain international book clubs (in fact, American in
origin) are n o wfloodingthe world's markets.
This, of course, is only one aspect of the 'club' book which, while
it has had only slight success in such countries as France, relatively
uninfluenced by the status symbol idea, has represented u p to one
fifth of the total sales of the book trade in the United States and the
Federal Republic of G e r m a n y (4). A s a French article on this type
of publishing stated as early as 1956, " T h e interest aroused by the
birth of the club book reflects the survival of the desire for well-
produced, bound books a m o n g cultivated readers w h o appreciated
beautiful books but w h o , because of successive currency devalua-
tions and the constant decrease in their purchasing power, combined
with the high cost of hand binding, have not always been able to
build up a personally chosen library." (5)
This is, in fact, in our levelled society, one of the ultimate fates of
the book as a thing. But it would be unfair to regard it only as a
debasement. Technical progress in paper manufacture, colour repro-
duction and the use of plastics, a m o n g other things, has m a d e it
possible to add considerably to the book's merits as an object, with-
out thereby reducing its value in use.
A particularly interesting example is that of books of the type of
the Pléiade series in France or the Aguilar series in Spain. Using
high-quality Bible paper and leather binding, these publishers pro-
duce books which have an investment value and are decorative, but
which at the same time provide, in a pleasant form functionally
suited for daily use, reading matter whose price, considering the
36 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
content of the volumes, is no higher than that of the matter supplied
in ordinary editions.
It m a y be added that the very beauty of the modern book s o m e -
times gives it a quasi-literary aesthetic value even w h e n it is deliber-
ately functional. This applies particularly to school-books in coun-
tries where the high standard of the teaching methods in general
use more or less rules out any competition as regards the functional
value of the book and publishers can compete only as regards the
book's merits as an object. T h e French school-book in the second
half of the twentieth century is often a true art object, but it is main-
taining and even increasing its functional efficiency as a teaching aid.
A n d above and beyond that efficiency, it is becoming once more a
literary reading instrument since, as m a n y booksellers testify, certain
adult readers buy it for just that purpose.
This, however, is an extreme case from which no generalization
can be drawn. T h e school-book remains, in any case, the perfect
example of the book as a tool, the functional book.

The functional book

T h e idea of the functional book is more easily apprehended than that
of the book as a thing. S o m e books claim to be functional and their
utilitarian purpose is unequivocal. O f the ten classes recognized by
the D e w e y decimal classification, four are entirely functional (Social
Sciences, Language, Pure Science and Technology) and five are
partly so (General W o r k s , Philosophy, Religion, T h e Arts, and
History-Geography).
Quantitatively speaking, the functional book holdsfirstplace in
the world book trade : about 75 % of the titles published annually,
and about the same percentage of the total number of copies printed,
are functional books.
This statement, however, should be taken with some caution, as
the criteria of the decimal classification system are extremely i m -
precise. If all books other than those in Class 8 (Literature) are taken
to be m o r e or less functional, it is possible to gain an approximate
idea of the situation in each country, but it must be remembered
that Class 8 sometimes includes functional books as well. In France
and the Netherlands, for example, not only criticism and books on
literary history, including school and university textbooks, but even
works from Class 4 (Language) are usually placed in Class 8 !
T h e table opposite shows very approximately the movement in the
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 37
actual production of functional books (by n u m b e r of titles) as a per-
centage of total production, for the years 1938 (the last complete
year before W o r l d W a r II), 1952 and 1962.

TABLE I
Evolution of the Percentage of Functional Books : 1Q38,1952,1962
COUNTRY 1938 1952 1962
United Kingdom 55 65 65
United States 60 55 50
France 70 65 60
U.S.S.R. 75 70 85
Federal Republic of Germany 75 70 75
Eastern Germany 75 80
Italy 80 70 65
Japan ? 75 75
Netherlands ? 50 70

Despite its lack of precision, this table furnishes some useful

information :
1. Over a period of twenty-five years, the situation has changed
less than might have been expected.
2. Industrially "young" countries in the process of active econo-
mic development ( U . S . S . R . and Japan certainly) are increasing their
output of functional books; it can easily be ascertained, incidentally,
that emphasis has been on the social and applied sciences.
3. T h e long-industrialized Western countries are relatively stable,
but with s o m e tendency to reduce their production of functional
books.
4. T h e case of the Netherlands should be considered apart, be-
cause during the last few years this country has resumed its tradi-
tional role as a producer of scholarly works for the world market.
A m o n g all the functional books, w e have most information about
school-books. This category is also the most important, since with
the progress of public education throughout the world, the school-
book has b e c o m e an essential commodity in every country.
In France it accounts for about 25 % of the titles published each
year, 3 0 % of the printings and 2 0 % of the volume of publishing
business (6). These figures m a y be taken as representing a world
average, as France has a highly centralized educational system off-
setting a highly decentralized book industry. In the United States
38 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
the concentration ofthat same industry m o r e than makes u p for the
educational decentralization which is characteristic of a federal State
and the figures are somewhat different, as can b e observed in
Table II:
TABLE II
The School-book in France and in the United States
France United States
ig6i ig6i IÇ02
Volume of trade
Total 740,000,000 F — $I,6o8,000,000
School-books 173,000,000 F — $409,700,000
Percentage 23-5 25-4
Title production
Total 11,878 18,060 21,904
School-books 3,025 998 1,421
Percentage 25-5 5-5 6-5
New books
Total 5,58o 14,238 16,448
School-books 650 751 1,032
Percentage no 5-3 6-3
Reprints
Total 6,298 3,822 5,456
School-books 2,375 247 389
Percentage 37-7 6-5 7-1

T h e percentage of the volume of trade represented by school-

books is almost the same in the United States and in France—i.e.,
20 to 2 5 % . T o o m u c h importance should not be given to the fact
that the American title production of school-books seems to repre-
sent a m u c h lower percentage of the total title production than the
French. Statistical criteria are entirely different in the two coun-
tries, and the Americanfiguresrefer to hardbound textbooks exclu-
sive of supplementary educational material printed or recorded. It is
interesting to note, however, that although school-book publishing
in both countries reflects the general trend of the industry, it retains
its o w n specific features. While in the United States n e w books out-
n u m b e r reprints by three or four to one and in France reprints are
slightly m o r e numerous than n e w books, percentages show that in
both countries school-books give a clear advantage to reprints over
n e w books. This means that the creative element in the school-book
is less than in the other types of books.
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 39
It is more particularly so in countries endowed with a strongly
traditional system of education like Great Britain or France. In such
countries, although improvements in the presentation of the school-
book may give rise to a sort of communication between its users and
producers (7), there are fewfieldsin which stereotypes are so power-
ful and lasting. Everybody knows the famous book by Sellar and
Yeatman, 1066 and All That, published in 1930, which surveyed
with m u c h humour, but also with m u c h truth, the myths which suc-
cessive editions of history school-books fed five generations of
British schoolchildren for over a century. In 1964, another amusing
book, by Gaston Bonheur, Qui a cassé le vase de Soissons ?, did the
same for France.
In the United States traditions are less powerful, a fact which
accounts for the differences infigures.O n the other hand, American
school editions are developing at a tremendous rate. A s can be seen
in Table II, all percentages concerning the school-book have increased
by one point in one year, which represents a considerable increase.
Table III shows the increase of the volume of the school-book
trade in relation with other factors. T h e data were drawn from a
remarkable article by M . J. M a m e , President of the French Centre
de Productivité du Livre, published in the Bibliographie de la France
(No. 21, 25 M a y 1965, pp. 153 et seq.).

T A B L E III
School-books in USA : Evolution, IÇ^8-IÇ6J
N u m b e r of Sales Average Volume
Grade students per student price of trade
Elementary +H'9% + 6-I% +21-4% +47'4%
High school +31-9% +13-9% +13-0% +73-6%
College +37-8% +25"°% + 5-3% +84-4%

In fact, the situation is m u c h m o r efluidin the United States than

in any other country. A s Edward E . Booher, an American textbook
publisher, pointed out in 1961, the textbook—that is, a manual con-
taining texts on which the teacher bases his oral lessons—is disap-
pearing (8). A framework both too rigid and too narrow, it is no
longer adaptable to the four major characteristics of modern teach-
ing:
1. T h e expansion of, and rapid changes in, basic knowledge.
40 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
2. T h e necessary but uncontrollable increase in the number of
pupils and students.
3. T h e need to substitute for the schooling of an élite a system of
life-long education permitting all aptitudes to develop fully.
4 . T h e systematic use of audio-visual media as teaching aids.
In short, the same specialization which, during the last few cen-
turies, divorced the functional book from the literary book is n o w
engendering a n e w , but contrary metamorphosis. A s audio-visual
media take over the educational role of the scholarly book, the latter
is losing m u c h of its functional nature and is ceasing to be merely a
teaching machine. Instead of diffusing information according to a
preconceived programme within a pre-established network, it can
once again publish it—that is, make it freely available to an anonymous
public.
In 1962, the annual American Publishers' Convention took note
of the fact that during the three preceding years an increasing
n u m b e r of schools and universities had adopted paperbacks as books
for study (9). This tendency is steadily becoming more pronounced,
not only in the United States but throughout the world.
A long time before, Penguin Books had added a functional series,
the Pelican Books, to their literary series, and Pelicans have p u b -
lished a large number of high-quality scientific works. It m a y be
added that, for the most part, they have been studies in the sciences
of man—archaeology, history, sociology, economics, etc.—prob-
ably because these sciences (which were among the last to branch
off from literature) are more suitable than others for despecialization.
A similar practice has n o w become c o m m o n in most of the Western
countries, and, in the United States in particular, m a n y scientific
texts are published in paperback after having been printed in more
expensive bound editions. This, incidentally, is leading university
libraries to modify their buying policies accordingly: the working
tool thus m a d e available to students and teaching staff ceases to be
a fixed and unique reference work, costing all the more because it
will soon be outdated, to become part of a constant flow of units of
information of all kinds, which are easily replaced and brought up to
date as they are used. This continuing give-and-take between
scholarly production and consumption already existed in certain
series of large-printing semi-popular works which preceded the
scientific paperback, such as the famous Que sais-je ? series in France.
N o w , especially in the United States, the same publishing technique
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 41
is currently applied to the major basic textbooks and fundamental
scientific works (10).
O n e result of this change in attitude has been to give the modern
paperback edition a certain resemblance to the incunabula in the early
days of the printed book. It is n o w possible to find, in the same price
range and in similar form, scientific works, joke and crossword-puzzle
books, guidebooks, how-to-do-it books, sewing books, cookery books,
detective novels, dictionaries, religious books (such as, in France,
the Livre de poche chrétien), almanacs and reprints of the world's
great classics.
T h e latter are on the border-line between the functional book and
the literary book. W h e n , for example, in France, the two publishing
houses of Flammarion and Gamier join together to publish the great
texts of French and foreign literatures in a paperback series, they are
satisfying two different needs : on the one hand, the functional need
of schoolchildren and students w h o find in this series, at the same
price but in a m u c h m o r e pleasant form, the set books that they used
to obtain in the "classic" editions and, on the other, the literary need
of a large number of readers w h o are discovering a cultural heritage
which the high cost and scarcity of the classic editions had previously
placed beyond their means.

The literary book

Before proceeding further, w e need at least a provisional definition
of the literary book. I have been justly criticized because, in m y
Sociology of Literature, published originally in French, in 1958, I
gave only a negative definition: " O n e should understand that
literature cannot be defined through any qualitative criterion. M y
criterion is what I call the search for knowledge for its o w n sake.
A n y work which is not functional, but an end in itself is literature.
Each act of reading which is not a means to an end, one which satis-
fies a cultural non-utilitarian need is literature." (11)
Without disavowing that definition, I must concede that it is
insufficient. It is one thing to say that the literary book is neither a
book-tool nor a book-object, but quite another to say that that is all.
A s a matter of fact, as I emphasized elsewhere, the literary book can
be defined only in terms of a literary use : "Real literary motivations
respect the 'gratuitousness' of the work and do not use the work as a
means but rather as an end. T h u s conceived, reading implies solitude
even as it excludes solitude. In fact, to read a book as an original
42 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
creation and not as a tool intended to satisfy a need presupposes
that we go to another person, that we have recourse to someone else, and
thus that w e get away from ourselves for a time. In this sense, the
companion-book is opposed to the utensil-book, which is completely
subordinated to the demands of the individual." (12) I had there
the elements of a definition which did not limit the literary book to
not serving a practical purpose, but which on the contrary gave it a
higher, or at least richer, significance than that of the book-tool. T h e
literary book, I said, presupposes going to another, and therefore an
exchange. In this exchange lies the criterion which distinguishes the
literary from the non-literary. As a matter of fact, I also wrote in the
same book, without realizing all that it implied : " W e cannot rely on
formal classifications or systematic materials to obtain a clear idea
of the relation between literature and reading. It is rather the nature
of the author-public exchange which m a y help us to say what litera-
ture is—and what it is not. A large number of writings are functional
in intention but are generally used in a non-functional and literary
way. These occur in newspapers and periodicals as well as in books,
oftenin reporting and in book reviews."(i3) As an example of this,
I quoted G . K . Chesterton w h o , in The Man Who Was Thursday,
shows that a railway timetable can have a literary use.
In point of fact, there is no such thing as a literary work : there are
literary phenomena—that is, dialogues between a writer and various
publics. A book may have literary intentions and pretensions—that
is, it may call for a dialogue—but it is by no means certain that it
will obtain it. O n the other hand, a book m a y have been cast into
the void, like the bottle into the sea, and m a y find the dialogue
denied to other books. For this reason, w e m a y say that the charac-
teristic of the literary phenomenon is the existence of a conscious
aesthetic judgment on the part of the reader. In the most favourable
circumstances, this judgment is m a d e k n o w n to the author either
through the critics, through his publisher or, in certain cases, through
personal contacts between the author and his public. W e k n o w ,
however, that, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, litera-
ture has been marked by a break in contact between the author and
the public. F r o m a common-sense point of view, the literary act is
the very type of the act of communication : an author transmits to a
public, through language, the images and ideas which have arisen
in his mind, and in return he receives the praise or the criticism, the
indifference or the sympathy of that public. W e know already that
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 43
this pattern, which was valid for the oral teller of tales, no longer
applies to the writer and still less to the writer whose works are
published and sold in large printings. In our day, communication in
literature is primarily a matter of diffusion, one-way diffusion. F r o m
the m o m e n t his message is sent out—that is to say, from the m o m e n t
his work is published—the author can no longer change its content,
nor control the path it takes, nor decide w h o is to receive it, nor
check that it has been received, nor say h o w it is to be read and inter-
preted. It is a journey from which there is no return. O n the other
hand, w h e n he receives the message thus sent out to him, the anony-
m o u s reader can be certain that, unless by an extremely improbable
coincidence, the message was not intended specifically and personally
for him. H e cannot ask for an explanation, an elaboration, a c o m -
mentary, nor can he imagine the mass of other recipients, and
consequently he cannot compare his reactions with theirs (14).
T h u s , at both ends of the chain, there is a dual solitude, and it is
this solitude which makes the literary act apparently devoid of prac-
tical purpose. T h e absence of a direct, person-to-person link, or at
least a mutual awareness of the sending individual and the receiving
individual, renders any utilitarian use of the message extremely
difficult. It is, of course, not impossible, but it is most problematical
and can yield little. T h e case differs, it should be noted, for the
functional book, the school-book for example, whose author and
public are very clearly defined in relation one to the other, and
whose distribution channels are exactly known. T h e school-book, as
w e have seen, has a literary use and significance only w h e n it partakes
of the anonymity and unpracticality of the literary book: w h e n an
adult browses through a particularly well-illustrated textbook, or
w h e n someone interested in old books dwells appreciatively o n the
artless comments and archaic turns of phrase in a school-book of
days gone by.
T h e solitude of the author and the reader, their mutual unaware-
ness, seem therefore to be inseparable from the literary phenomenon
as w e k n o w it today. This is the situation which the worn old meta-
phor of the bottle in the sea seeks to express. T h e metaphor is, in
fact, very imperfect, for it is based on a dangerously romantic inter-
pretation of the shipwrecked sailor's gesture. T h e sailor makes use of
the bottle and the currents of the sea to communicate with rescuers
w h o m a y c o m e to his aid, because he has no other more perfect,
more precise means of communication available to h i m ; but his
44 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
S O S is strictly utilitarian and is addressed to a definite person. T h e
most that can be said is that, for the purposes of the image, the
gesture m a y be romanticized and acquire a literary content if, in an
adventure story, the message reaches people w h o can do nothing
about it.
Moreover, the bottle has the weakness of being a single thing: the
metaphor takes no account of the diffusion, the multiplication of the
work which is, whether w e will or no, one of the basic features of
literature. A better image would be that of the radio signal sent out
at random on the air, picked up weakly here and there by a few
" h a m s " and relayed by them all over the planet. It must be admitted
that modern techniques have done m u c h to lessen the isolation of
those w h o cry in the wilderness.
T h e y have been without effect upon the solitude of the writer.
For him, another metaphor is needed—that, for example, of the
trapped pot-holer w h o poursfluorineinto an underground stream,
and of the passers-by, the fishermen and watermen, hundreds of
miles away, w h o see the greenish glow of the water and, without
suspecting its true origin, wonder uneasily what has caused it. They
m a y admire it or even see it as a supernatural phenomenon.
M u s t w e conclude that no contact is possible between the author
and his public? Not at all. There is contact, but the channel by
which it is m a d e is not that of the literary work. T h e dual solitude
which w e have described above has only a literary existence; it is
significant only within the context of literary interchange. T h e
author and the anonymous reader do not exist only as actors therein :
both are embedded in a social reality of which they form part, and
the contact can be established through that social reality, just as
w h e n two conductors of electricity, insulated throughout their
length, are short-circuited through the ground.
This brings us back to the underlying significance of such ideas
as "humanism" and "commitment". These are often interpreted as
moral values destined to replace aesthetic values or, at least, to unite
with them in the creation of a work. T h e result is an irreconcilable
conflict between the demands of the "message" and the demands of
art. In point of fact, to say that a writer is a "humanist" does not
m e a n that he gives any special philosophical touch to his work or
that he puts into it the wisdom drawn from m u c h reading; and to
say that a writer is "committed" does not m e a n that he uses his
work for ideological purposes, that he intends it, feels and thinks of
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 45
it as an instrument, a means of action. Both terms merely seek to
express the fact that the writer in question is deeply rooted in a col-
lective reality, whatever that reality m a y be. T h e y seek to express
the idea that in him the social m a n is completely identified with the
poetic creator. In defining literature, Jean-Paul Sartre was right in
asking for w h o m the writer writes (15). T h e exteriorization which is
the essence of the composition of a literary work is meaningful only
if it is done for or before someone. Even if w e personify an inanimate
object (such as Midas's barber's hole in the ground or the micro-
phone of a tape-recorder), or speak to an animal, some hypothetical
listener is necessary. T h e listener acts as a sound-box; his function
is twofold, for he plays a part,firstly,as the determinant in the crea-
tion of the work which is formulated with him in mind, and secondly,
as the intermediary between the work and the anonymous public,
since it is his presence and the writer's imagination which give a
literary significance to the confidence or the confession. O n him,
then, depends the social richness of the work—that is, the number,
intensity and quality of the "earth" connections between the
author and his readers.
It is obvious that the more intense the author's "humanism" or
"committedness" or any other quality implying a multiplicity of
social ties, the more "vibrant" will be the listener to w h o m he ad-
dresses himself and whose language he speaks. H e will therefore be
more likely to speak the language, fulfil the expectations, and satisfy
the need of an ordinary reader. Moreover, this ordinary reader, to
the extent that he partakes of the social nature of the hypothetical
listener (and the richer that nature is, the more likely will he be to
partake of it), also plays a part in determining the work: w e m a y say
that he makes himself heard by the author in advance.
Therefore, even if there is no visible contact between the author
and his public, exchange and communication nevertheless take place
between them, provided that the hypothetical public for which the
work is intended represents a sufficient richness of social life on the
part of the author.
But this is not all. T h e organization of literary life, as it tends to
be established in highly-developed societies, promotes or hampers
communication between the writer and the public. T h e literary
phenomenon, to be complete, requires not only that the writer
deliver to the reader a message which is intelligible, or at least usable,
but also that the reasoned judgment of the reader be, in one way or
46 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
another, reflected back to the writer, either directly or through the
publisher w h o indirectly governs what he produces. In other words,
the key to the literary phenomenon lies in whether or not there is a
literary public opinion—that is, in the public's awareness of its
tastes, preferences, needs and attitudes. It lies in the expression of
that opinion, in the way it is transmitted at the level of the literary
producers and entrepreneurs—that is to say, the writers and p u b -
lishers. Its expression must be clear enough to be understood, but
discreet enough not to be coercive and not to inhibit the necessary
freedom of literary creation.
T h e entire critical apparatus, the entire "literary life" of most
countries in our day, tends to restrict literary public opinion to that
of a single social level, and usually of a single class. This is nothing
new. A s w e have seen, indeed, the history of the book is the history
of the participation of ever m o r e numerous strata of the population
in the literary exchange. There has always been a "lettered" litera-
ture, involving conscious exchanges between certain publics and
certain writers, alongside a literature "bestowed" or "imposed",
which is merely the anonymous consumption of reading matter by
masses whose numbers and composition have varied from one cen-
tury to another.
W e are only just beginning to suspect the importance of this
"sub-literature" existing alongside "good literature". Yet there are
m a n y ties between them. Certain literary forms which originated in
one have been transferred to the other as societies have evolved and,
most important, as the organization of the cultural life of these
societies has permitted this to happen. T h u s , comedies, novels and
songs were all, at certain times in their history, regarded as being
sub-literary, and were promoted to a higher status only with the
promotion of their readers. M o r e recently, the detective novel has
undergone a similar mutation. It is not unreasonable to suppose that,
one day, even the despised and disparaged strip-cartoon will be
accepted as a literary genre w h e n its habitual readers have acquired
the intellectual and material means,firstto formulate an aesthetic
judgment o n the comic strip and thereafter to m a k e that judgment
heard and to take part in the operation of the literary process (16).
Alongside literature, therefore, w e must also consider the i m -
mense field of what is sometimes called sub-literature, or infra-
literature or marginal literature. O n the edge of thisfieldis the place
of the literary book visibly determined not only by aesthetic, but also
 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BOOK 47
—and mainly—by social factors. It is understandable, for instance,
that a book's "literariness" m a y depend on the public for which it is
intended, and the recent phenomenon of the paperback brings
sharply to our attention the problem of the semi-literary on the
fringe of the literary. N o w , suddenly, books which had been born
within a certain social group, which had been judged and approved,
have been brought to n e w and unsuspected readers as a result of
large printings. Until this happened, the literature "bestowed" was
a sub-literature, a secondary or industrial product, as it were, in-
tended for consumption by anonymous masses. But, suddenly, the
literature which a certain social group had recognized as being
"good" has been m a d e available to other social groups which did
not call it into being and which have no means of making k n o w n
their opinion of it. Steinbeck is sold in drugstores, and C a m u s in
"chain-stores", but the customers of the drugstore and the "chain-
store" have n o way of participating in the exchange which can give
rise to n e w Steinbecks and a n e w C a m u s . S o far as the future of
written culture is concerned, this is probably the most disquieting
and the most difficult problem created by the modern publishing
revolution.

NOTES
(i) A survey carried out from January to April, i960, under the sponsor-
ship of the National Association of French Publishers showed that
9% of the persons interviewed had read n or more books between
1 December 1959 and 1 March i960. A similar survey conducted
in Derby in 1953 by T . Cauter and J. S. D o w n h a m {The Communi-
cation of Ideas, London, 1954, pp. 190-3) showed that 10% of the
persons interviewed had read more than 4 books during the
preceding month. Since in both cases no previous definition of a
'book' was agreed upon, thefigurescannot be relied on too heavily.
Yet they allow us to consider a book a week as an 'average' con-
sumption, for the group concerned.
(2) In a survey conducted at the Army Induction Centre at Limoges in
December 1962 and January 1963, by the Centre de Sociologie des
Faits littéraires de Bordeaux, it was found that 20% of the young
recruits stated that they had more than 50 books in their homes.
J. Dumazedier's well-known Annecy survey showed that 20% of
Annecy homes had libraries of over 150 books. In Derby, T . Cauter
and J. S. D o w n h a m {op. cit., pp. 194-5) found that 20% of the
48 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Books and the World Today
persons interviewed had 100 or more books in their h o m e s , while
a similar study m a d e in the United States in 1947 found that 2 9 %
of the persons interviewed gave the same answer. O n the other
hand, Peter M e y e r - D o h m , in Der Westdeutsche Büchermarkt (Stutt-
gart, 1957, p. 123), quotes a 1955 survey conducted in the Federal
Republic of Germany and West Berlin by the Allesbascher Institut
für Demoskopie, according to which only 1 0 % of the persons
interviewed had 100 or more books in their homes. These differ-
ences, however, are not significant since the wording of the question
was in each case different and no previous definition of a 'book'
was given. Roughly speaking, w e m a y suggest that people reading
a book a week and owning 100 books or more represent about the
same proportion of the reading public.

(3) See m y article, R . Escarpit, Le problème de Vâge dans la productivité

littéraire, in Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, 5e année, N o
M a y i960, pp. 105-11, and the paper I presented at the S y m -
posium on the Sociology of Literature, Brussels, 22 M a y 1964, on
L'image historique de la littérature chez les jeunes.
(4) Data provided by J. Dumazedier and J. Hassenforder, Eléments pour
une sociologie comparée de la production, de la diffusion et de Vutilis
tion du livre, Paris, 1962, p. 40. See also Etudes sur la distribution
du livre en France by the Centre d'Etudes d u C o m m e r c e , Paris,
i960.

(5) P . Riberette, Les clubs du livre, Bulletin des bibliothèques de Franc

1ère année, N o . 6, June 1956, p . 425.

(6) Techniques graphiques (Paris), N o . 3 4 , December i960, Le livre

scolaire en France, p. 31, and Monographie de VEdition, Paris,
Cercle de la Librairie, 1963, pp. 58 et seq.
(7) R . Escarpit, Sociologie du livre scolaire, in Techniques graphique
(Paris), N o . 34, December i960, p p . 74-75.
(8) Edward E . Booher, Books and Their Market Twenty-five Years from
Now, in Publishers' Weekly (Philadelphia), vol. 179, N o . 10,
6 M a r c h 1961, pp. 20 et seq.
(9) Current Comments on Paperbacks, in Library Journal (Philadelphia),
vol. 87, N o . 16, 15 September 1963, p . 2981.

(10) See Frank L . Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, N e w York,

1958, passim. Chapter 13 includes a study of paperbacks published
by universities. Certain series are very well k n o w n : Great Seal
Books (Cornell University Press), Midland Books (Indiana U n i -
 T H E FUNCTIONS OF T H E B O O K 49
versity Press), Phoenix Books (University of Chicago Press), A n n
Arbor Paperbacks (University of Michigan Press), etc.
(11) R . Escarpit, Sociology of Literature, Painesville, Ohio, 1965, p. 14.
(12) Ibid., pp. 90-91.
(13) Ibid., p. 15.
(14) This topic is discussed in greater detail in m y article, L'acte littéraire
est-il un acte de communication? in Filoloski Pregled, Belgrade,
1963, 1-2, pp. 17-21.

(15) J.-P. Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Paris, 1947.

(16) This problem is referred to in m y paper, Y a-t-il des degrés dans la
littérature ? in Actes du Ve Congrès national de littérature comparée,
Paris, 1965.
 PART TWO

The New Look in Publishing

 CHAPTER
I

World Production

Interpretation of statistical data

T H E difficulty of classifying books and the impossibility of defining
them precisely makes the task of preparing and interpreting publish-
ing statistics an extremely hazardous one. Back in 1956, R . E . Barker
drew attention to the very wide range of criteria adopted in various
countries for defining a book ( 1 ). In Italy, for example, a volume must
consist of at least 100 pages if it is to be regarded as a book, whereas
no such stipulation exists in India. Most countries based their de-
finition of a book on the n u m b e r of pages, while the United King-
dom's criterion was a m i n i m u m price.
Fortunately, agreement has recently been reached on an interna-
tional definition of a book. A "Recommendation concerning the in-
ternational standardization of statistics relating to book production
and periodicals" was adopted b y the General Conference of Unesco
on 19 N o v e m b e r 1964. Prepared over a long period, this R e c o m -
mendation should—if it is observed by all States—solve the problem
for the future by the adoption of uniform definitions. A book is "a
non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, exclusive of
the cover pages". A pamphlet is "a non-periodical printed publica-
tion of at least 5 but not more than 48 pages, exclusive of the cover
pages". T h e Recommendation also defines afirstedition, a re-edition,
a reprint, a translation, and a title, and contains detailed suggestions
regarding classification, methods of enumeration and the different
sorts of statistics that should be drawn u p annually at the national
level. It provides that the following categories should be excluded
from the statistics: 1, publications issued for advertising purposes,
2, publications of a transitory character, and 3, publications in
which the text is not the most important part.
It is, therefore, very m u c h to be hoped that in the fairly near future
54 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
this Recommendation will eliminate the shortcomings of the statis-
tics at present available. For the time being, w e can only feel our way
and try to discover trends and tendencies. T h e main thing is that
w e should have a clear idea of what w e can learn from the various
data n o w at our disposal (2).
T h e most easily established and commonest statistics concern
titles published. Most countries have a system of "duty copies"
whereby all publishers are obliged to provide the authorities with
one or more copies of each book produced.
It is therefore simple to obtain some idea of publishers' activities
by referring to the list of books which they have deposited during
the year. It should, however, be noted that statistics of this kind
based on titles merely give us the n u m b e r of publishing ventures
without supplying any information on the economic magnitude of
such ventures or, above all, on their cultural content. N o t every
publishing venture implies a "venture" by a writer, a n e w intellec-
tual or artistic achievement. This "real" production can be arrived
at only b y deducting re-issues and translations from the gross
figure. A certain number of countries d o one or the other in their
statistics but rarely both, and this, needless to say, makes compari-
sons n o easier. Until the Unesco Recommendation is generally
adopted, w e remain ill-informed about the number of "first editions".
It is beginning to be possible to evaluate the number of translations,
thanks to the details given in the Index Translationum published by
Unesco. Only by combining the two sets offigurescould w e obtain
a relatively close interpretation of the overall statistics based on
titles. A n d even then, for this operation to be really valid, w e should
have to be able to carry it out in respect of each class of publication,
and m o r e especially, in respect of Class 8, comprising books classi-
fied as literature. A s things stand, however, this is an unattainable
dream. At best we can m a k e a few evaluations which are as conjec-
tural as they are unreliable.
F r o m the economic standpoint, evaluations are even less reliable,
since words have different meanings in the socialist countries and in
the capitalist countries. T h e latter accord an overriding importance
to business and include only commercial publications in their figures.
T h e United States, for example, does not include Government p u b -
lications which are distributed free, this criterion, incidentally, being
unsatisfactory, since volumes purchased by the State from private
publishers and distributed free for purposes of aid or propaganda are
 WORLD PRODUCTION 55
included in the statistics. Should the same discrimination be m a d e in
respect of production in the U S S R where commercial channels do
not have the same meaning as in the United States? Soviet production
m a y vary by more than 2 0 % , depending on whether or not this is
done.
T h e most exact means of evaluation would be to combine statis-
tics based on titles and statistics based on editions—i.e., on the
number of copies printed. These are comparable physical data pro-
viding information both about the economic importance of publish-
ing activity and the place which this holds in the life of the country.
Unfortunately, the position as regards editions is scarcely any
better than in respect of titles. It is true that some progress has been
m a d e since the days w h e n publishers regarded such information as a
trade secret. Nowadays it is possible to gain at least an approximate
idea of the number of copies printed in the main producer countries.
T h e socialist countries have never m a d e any great secret of this.
Elsewhere, the veil is beginning to be lifted, and it is n o w possible
to make evaluations which are something more than mere hypotheses.
T o guide us in making such evaluations, to confirm them and even,
in certain cases, to go further, w e can refer to the data published by
the international organizations concerning the consumption of print-
ing- and writing-paper. There is, of course, nofixedrelation between
book production and the consumption of such paper, but, as in the
case of statistics based on titles, comparison of thefiguresfrom year
to year gives some idea of the main trends, which can be compared
with those detected or identified in other fields.
T h e picture thus obtained of the publishing situation would be
incomplete if left in the form of a juxtaposition of national statistics.
Here, a third series of data must be taken into account—i.e., those
concerning the "dynamics" of publishing, in other words figures
relating to translations, exports and imports, joint editions and,
generally speaking, cultural exchanges. A s w e have already seen,
books represent the most convenient and effective method for the
dissemination of thought and art. T h e y are above all characterized
by mobility, movement and circulation. Static information concern-
ing titles and editions must therefore be combined with dynamic
information on the great movements which are n o w transforming the
book market from a national into a world-wide affair.
56 T H EBOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing

Gross statistics by titles

T h e following table shows global production by titles in the various
countries for 1962 or for the year closest to 1962 for which such
information has been published. In these cases, the reference year
is shown in brackets.
In order to facilitate comparison and to bring out some of the main
trends in world publishing, figures are also given for 1952 or the
nearest possible year. This ten-year interval is sufficient for the pur-
poses of a comparative study.

TABLE IV
World Production by Titles
Evolution from 1952 to 1962

COUNTRY 1952 1962

Afghanistan 60(63)
Albania 98 571
Argentina 4,257 3,323
Australia 627 1,793
Austria 3,179 3,557
Belgium 4,610 3,465
Brazil 3,208 1,911(61)
Bulgaria 2,031 3,716(61)01 3,767(63)
Burma 82(51)
Cambodia 392(53) 159
Cameroons 18
Canada 684 3,600
Ceylon 268 1,969
Chile 1,040
China (Taiwan) 427 2,625
China (Mainland) 2,507 26,414(58)
Costa Rica 164
Cuba 6i5(53) 736
Czechoslovakia 5,837 8,703
Denmark 2,186 4,157
Dominican Republic "5(49) 71(63)
El Salvador 139
Ethiopia 178(61)
Finland i,748 2,646
 WORLD PRODUCTION 57
COUNTRY 1952 IÇ02

France* 11.954 13,282

Germany (Federal Republic) i3,9i3 21,481
Germany (Eastern) 4,3io(53) 6,54°
Ghana — 269(63)
Greece 1,016 1,277
Guatemala 70(53) 500
Guinea — 4(63)
Honduras 70(53) 189
Hungary 3,i95 5,256
Iceland 420 665(59)
India 18,252 11,086
Indonesia 778 869(61)
Iran 391(54) 569(61)
Iraq 248(53) 143 (59)
Ireland 149 217
Israel 822 (50) 2,532(61)
Italy 8,949 7,401 (61)
Japan 17,306 22,010
Jordan — 162(63)
Kenya — 98
Korea (Republic of) 1,393 3,720
Kuwait — 161 (63)
Lebanon 396(50) 402
Liberia — 4(60)
Libya — 5(6o)
Luxembourg 420 i34(6i)
Malaysia — 338
Mexico — 3.760
Monaco 104 38
Morocco 100 161 (60)
Netherlands 6,728 9,674
N e w Zealand 327 1,212
Nicaragua 122(47) —
Nigeria — 262(63)
Norway 2,704 3,"9
Pakistan — 1,787
Panama 22
Peru 702 791
* T h e figures for 1952 and 1962 include the total production of books
(locally produced works, translations, publications in foreign languages)
represented by the 'duty copies' deposited and listed in the Bibliographie de
¡a France and the Annuaire Statistique de la France. (Source: Unesco.)
58 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
COUNTRY 1952 ICÓ2

Philippines 195 (53) 595(63)

Poland 6,632 7,162
Portugal 4.153 4,461
Rhodesia — 369
Rumania 5,38i(53) 7,359
Rwanda — 23
Saudi Arabia — 321
Senegal — 67
Sierra Leone — 48
Singapore — 237
South Africa 834 1,289(63)
Spain 3.445 9,556
Sudan — 83(63)
Sweden 3,286 5,472
Switzerland 3,245 5,633
Thailand 3.953 i,397(6i)
Tunisia 56(53) —
Turkey 2,447 4,842
Uganda — 46(63)
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' 43,135 79,140
United Arab Republic 654(53) 3,294
United K i n g d o m of Great Britain 18,741 25,079
United States 11,840 21,904
Uruguay — 217
Venezuela — 338(6i).
Viet-Nam (Republic of) 936 i,5i5
Yugoslavia 5,i84 5,637
Zanzibar — 75

The first point emerging from this table is that there are certain
publishing "giants". Six countries produce more than 20,000 titles
a year : the U S S R , mainland China, the United Kingdom, Germany
(whether w e take the Federal Republic separately or in conjunction
with Eastern Germany), Japan and the United States. Six other
countries come near to 10,000 titles: France, India, Spain, Italy, the
Netherlands and Czechoslovakia. These twelve countries alone ac-
count for three-quarters of the world production, which Unesco
estimated at 400,000 titles in 1963.
Obviously certain adjustments must be m a d e to this list. T h e
almost 80,000 books published in the U S S R are not all books in the
 WORLD PRODUCTION 59
Western sense of the word. Moreover, m a n y Soviet titles are counted
several times, since the figure does not relate solely to Russian-
language books but to cumulated production in ninety-three lan-
guages, sixty-one of them being the languages of peoples within the
Soviet Union and thirty-two foreign languages (3). T h e fact remains,
however, that even if only works published in Russian and intended
for distribution through normal commercial channels were to be
counted, Soviet production would still exceed 30,000 titles, making
it the highest in the world.
W e have already indicated h o w it happens that India is a m o n g the
main producers : the Indian definition of a book means that even the
smallest pamphlet can be considered as belonging to that category.
In actual fact, India should be placed in a very m u c h lower bracket.
So far as Spain is concerned, itfirstw o n a leading place in 1962,
with an output of 9,556 titles. Figures for earlier years, although
showing a steady increase, were lower: 5,761 in 1959, 6,085 m i960,
6,819 in 1961. A sudden rise of 40% seems, atfirstsight, abnormal.
It is difficult to say whether it is a question of a transitory p h e n o m e -
non or a basic trend.
Italy once more suffers from its o w n unduly rigorous definition of
books and should in fact be placed on an equal footing with France,
and the same probably applies to Czechoslovakia. A s far as mainland
China is concerned, w e have no precise information about the
criteria used for classification.
If w e compare thefiguresfor 1952 and 1962, it is apparent that,
while world production as a whole increased by some 40%, produc-
tion in several countries declined over the same period. Except for
India (and, once again,figureson Indian production are perhaps not
entirely comparable because of divergent definitions), none of these
countries is a m o n g the big producers. A m o n g medium-sized pro-
ducers, however, mention m a y be m a d e of Belgium, where produc-
tion dropped by 25%, and Italy, where there was a decline of 16%.
Countries which remained stable—i.e., where production either did
not vary or increased in roughly the same proportion as world pro-
duction—include France with 5-3%, Austria with 11%, Japan with
27 % and the United K i n g d o m with 35 %. But it is where the increase
in production exceeds 40% that w e find the most spectacular ad-
vances. In mainland China, for example, production increased more
than tenfold in six years. T h e United States, with an increase of 85 %,
is n o w directly rivalling Japan for fourth place, whereas, ten years
6o THE BOOK REVOLUTION : The New Look in Publishing
earlier, it came sixth, or approximately at the same level as France.
This n e w importance acquired by English-speaking America, which
will be discussed later, is confirmed by the increase of Canadian
production which, in ten years, rose from 684 to 3,600 titles—i.e., an
increase of 426-2%. A general regrouping is visibly taking place,
even though the former centre of balance has not yet been dis-
placed.
Examination of the above table likewise reveals the existence of
blocs or groups which should be considered as a whole. T h e most
immediately apparent are the language groups. So far as a c o m m o n
language creates intellectual exchanges, it m a y be considered that
the publishing industries in those countries which use the same
language as a literary or, at any rate, intellectual m e d i u m of expres-
sion, are interdependent. W e shall have to come back to this idea of
language groups when w e discuss reading, at which point w e shall
need to evaluate the absorptive capacity of each of those groups.
At this stage, w e are concerned only with establishing the respec-
tive importance of the various languages in world production.
There are twelve literary languages commonly used by more than
50,000,000 people. In order of importance these are Chinese, E n g -
lish, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, G e r m a n , Japanese, Bengali, Arabic,
French, Portuguese and Italian. Japanese, Italian and Portuguese
m a y be left aside for the m o m e n t since they are used for literary
production which is strictly limited to certain territories (the Japan-
ese Archipelago, the Italian peninsula, Portugal and Brazil). W e
shall also set aside the case of Chinese, since information on this is
still very sparse and since, notwithstanding its physical and h u m a n
range, it is, so to speak, sui generis. A s regards the Indian languages
and Arabic, although the countries concerned are steadily advancing
in the culturalfield,their publishing industries are still too small and
too dispersed for us to be able to speak of genuine groups. Finally,
so far as there is a "Soviet" nationality, Russian is an infra-national
rather than a supra-national language. This case will be discussed at
a later stage.
W e are therefore left with the four great Western supra-national
languages: English, G e r m a n , Spanish and French. Around these,
linguistic groups have come into being which vary in size and
nature. T h e English group comprises two great economic powers,
the United States and the United K i n g d o m , and takes in all the
countries belonging to the British Commonwealth. T h e Spanish
 WORLD PRODUCTION 6l
group resembles the English in that it is widely spread (since it
involves two continents), but the component nations are economi-
cally weaker and culturally less developed than those of the English
group. T h e French group likewise has overseas ramifications
(Canada, Haiti, West Indies and Africa), but its real strength comes
from Europe and mainly from France. O f the other French-speaking
countries, Belgium contributes roughly two-fifths of its book pro-
duction and Switzerland between one-sixth and one-fifth. Lastly,
the G e r m a n group, which is the most homogeneous, covers only
Central Europe, where it is based on the two Germanys, Austria,
German-speaking Switzerland and a certain number of G e r m a n -
speaking minorities in various other countries. T h e following table
shows (in roundfigures)the gross production, by titles, for the four
groups in 1952 and 1962. A separate column for each of the two
years shows the percentage in relation to world production.

TABLE V
TheLanguage Groups
1952 ICÓ2

°/
/o °/
/o
World production 250,,000 IOO 350,,000* IOO
English group 32,,000 12-8 55,,000 157
German group 25,,000 IOO 35,,000 io-o
Spanish group 14,,000 5-6 20,000 57
French group 14,000 5-6 15,,000 4'3
Total 85,,000 34-° 125,,000 357
* T h efigureof 350,000 for 1962, like that of the 370,000 estimated for 1964,
is based only on data verified and reproduced in the tables of this volume.
T h e Unesco estimates for the total number of titles produced throughout
the world are: 360,000 for i960, 375,000 for 1961, 385,000 for 1962 and
400,000 for 1963.

It will be noted that the total production of the four groups

occupies approximately the same place in world production in 1952
and in 1962. It seems to show a slight rising trend, but this cannot
be considered significant in view of the narrow change involved and
the fact that thefiguresused are not absolutely exact. Broadly speak-
ing, if w e take world production in 1952 as amounting to 250,000
titles, and in 1962 to 350,000 titles, then the four groups together
62 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
accounted for 34% of this production in 1952 and approximately
36% in 1962.
But while the overall situation m a y not have changed greatly, the
same cannot be said of the balance a m o n g the groups. Although the
production of no individual group has declined in absolute terms,
the gaps between the groups have widened noticeably. T h e English
group accounted for some 13 % of production in 1952 and about 16%
in 1962, which is quite a marked increase, since the group thus
registered an advance of nearly 70%, representing a rate of growth
double that of the world rate. Conversely, at the other extreme, the
French group, with a rate of growth of about 7%, declined relatively,
even if only to a slight extent. T h e G e r m a n and Spanish groups, for
their part, maintained their positions.
These shifts within the scale, however, m e a n nothing unless w e
look at what is actually taking place within the groups. Table IV
tends to indicate a sort of concentration within the French-, Ger-
m a n - , and Spanish-language groups on what might be called the
"focal language" countries. Thus production is rising faster in
G e r m a n y than in Austria; in France than in Belgium or M o n a c o ;
in Spain than in Spanish-speaking America. This magnetic attrac-
tion phenomenon will cause no surprise to literary historians. It
has been noted that literary life in our day is tending to undergo
regrouping across national frontiers. Although a Belgian literature
is not thereby ceasing to exist, it is certain that Belgian authors
writing in French are thinking of themselves more and more as
belonging to French literature or, at any rate, as taking part in
French literary life. A similar movement towards the Netherlands
m a y be seen in the small Dutch-Flemish linguistic group.
A n entirely different process is taking place within the English
group. Here, there are two centres—the United K i n g d o m and the
United States—and a phenomenon is n o w occurring of which English
publishers have stood in fear ever since the heroic period when
Dickens went to the United States to defend the rights of British
authors. T h e United States is gradually taking the United Kingdom's
place at the head of the language group. In 1952 the United King-
d o m , with some 18,700 titles, still accounted for considerably more
than half of the group's total production. In 1962, with some 25,000
titles, it accounted for a little less than half, and the United States
came close behind with approximately 22,000 titles. Lastly, and per-
haps even more important, the Commonwealth was insignificant in
1952 as far as publishing was concerned, whereas ten years later it
 WORLD PRODUCTION 63
produced more than 6,500 titles, a far from negligiblefigure,so that
it is n o w beginning to weigh heavily in the balance. It m a y be worth
pointing out that the sharp rise in United States production is
largely due to the mass publication of paperbacks.
Let us look n o w at the other main group, with the Russian lan-
guage as its nucleus. Here it is n o longer a question of a linguistic
group, but of the group m a d e up of socialist countries among which
there are frequent and systematic exchanges so that their publishing
activities are, to a certain extent, interdependent. It is interesting
that in 1962 the production of these countries—not including main-
land China—almost exactly equalled that of the four Western lan-
guage groups discussed above. It amounted to approximately
125,000 titles—i.e., 36% of world production. But the rise in pro-
duction within the socialist countries had been quicker, since ten
years earlier it amounted to only 75,000 titles—i.e., 30%. T h e
advance is sufficiently marked to merit recording.
It demonstrates, in any case, that the share left to the developing
countries decreased considerably over ten years—from 36%
to 28%. This trend, however, will probably change in the years
ahead. Once again, Table IV shows that nearly twenty new nations
entered the lists over the ten years and it m a y be assumed that
their numbers will increase and that their output will also rise.
O f the forty nations mentioned in Table IV which do not belong to
any of the groups so far considered, thirty-one are Afro-Asian
nations, most of them having only recently emerged, and nine are
European nations with an ancient culture and a publishing industry
firmly rooted in tradition. T h e rate of growth in the production of
the nine European nations between 1952 and 1962, however, was
barely 25%, and hence lower than the world rate, whereas in the
case of the thirty-one Afro-Asian nations it was 33 %. N o definite
conclusions can as yet be drawn from these figures, but it is very
probable that the phase of concentration into linguistic and ideo-
logical blocs will shortly be followed by a phase of expansion out-
wards to the young nations, which will profoundly change the face
of publishing throughout the world.

Statistics by number of copies

In 1954, R . E . Barker estimated the number of books printed an-
nually throughout the world atfivethousand million. This figure
seems somewhat too high. W e estimate the n u m b e r of titles
64 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
published in 1952 at 250,000. T h e figure for 1954 should be in the
region of 270,000. Barker's estimate could be accepted only if w e
assumed that the average number of copies of each title published
was 20,000. It is true that editions exceeding 20,000 are not unusual,
but there are very few countries where thisfigurecould be regarded
as an average, and, in any case, it could not be taken as a world
average.
T h e U S S R , for example, with a population of over 220,000,000
and an illiteracy rate of only 2%, with an economic structure which
enables its publishing industry to ignore considerations of c o m -
mercial profit, officially recorded 1,248,800,000 copies for 79,140
titles published in 1962. This represents an average edition of 15,748
copies per title. T h e highest average number of copies ever reported
by the U S S R was that of 1954: 997,000,000 copies for 50,100 titles
—i.e., 19,900 copies per title. In the interests of strict accuracy,
however, it should be noted that if the figures for the Russian Soviet
Federal Socialist Republic are taken alone, the average number of
copies printed is slightly more than 20,000.
T h e French Publishers Association gave thefigureof 178,667,000
copies, representing 11,878 titles, for 1959 (4)—i.e., an average per
title of 15,041, which is of the same order as that of the U S S R .
Moreover, in drawing up the table of book production by number
of copies in each country, R . E . Barker himself used figures c o m -
parable with those given above (5). His estimates for the main pro-
ducer countries for 1952 were as follows:

USSR 17)300 copies per title

United Kingdom 15,200 copies per title
I
United States 3>900 copies per title
France 9,700 copies per title
Federal Republic of Germany 7,700 copies per title

T h e other countries he lists are shown as having editions of be-

tween 3,000 and 6,000 copies per title.
It m a y reasonably be assumed, therefore, that the average printing
per title on a world basis is in the region of 10,000 copies, which
would reduce the number of copies printed throughout the world in
1952 to 2,500 million. T h e world average has undoubtedly risen
since then: not only is the greater number of writers and the in-
creased importance of the publishing industry reflected in a larger
 WORLD PRODUCTION 65
number of titles, but, by the same token, therisein readership due
to population growth and the decline in illiteracy has led to bigger
printings. It would seem, moreover, that the increase in both sectors
is about equal—i.e., some 30%. If w e consider the rise in the con-
sumption of printing- and writing-paper throughout the world over
the ten years, it m a y be supposed that the average printing in
1962 was in fact about 13,000 copies, which would give a total pro-
duction for 1962 of 4,500 million copies—not m u c h less than the
5,000 million copies announced somewhat prematurely by R . E .
Barker.
T h e data provided by thefigureso n printing- and writing-paper
consumption enable us to m a k e certain somewhat daring extrapola-
tions.
W e shall take it, as a hypothesis, that the paper consumption in a
given country depends both upon the number of works published
and upon the average printing of each of those works, and that
variations in consumption are related in part to the variations of
these two factors. In a few cases w e canfindout the variations in
production by titles. If these are of the same order as the variations
in paper consumption and show a similar trend, it m a y be concluded
that the average edition is remaining stationary. If consumption of
paper is seen to be increasing more rapidly than production by
numbers of titles, it m a y be assumed that the size of the editions is
increasing. Conversely, if consumption is increasing less rapidly, it
m a y be assumed that the size of editions is declining. Table V I
(overleaf) shows printing- and writing-paper consumption in various
countries in 1955 side by side with production by titles in the same
countries for the same year. In order to highlight the variation, the
figures have been related to a c o m m o n basis of 100, representing
the last pre-war year for which data are available.
It should be borne in mind that what w e are after here is not an
exact evaluation but merely an indication of a general trend. In most
countries the difference between the variations is striking and reflects
a very distinct increase in the size of average editions, bearing out
what w e have already learnt. O n the other hand, the United King-
d o m remains completely stable : the number of titles produced in-
creases on the same scale as paper consumption.
It must be pointed out forthwith that the trends m a y well have
changed since 1955. It is only since then that the impact of paper-
backs has m a d e itself really felt in respect of American editions,
66 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
whereas this type of publication already existed in Great Britain
before the W a r .
It is difficult to carry the interpretation of these data any further,
and it goes without saying that n o constant relation applying to all
countries can be found between book production and the consump-
tion of printing- and writing-paper for the excellent reason that such
paper, always reckoned separately from newsprint, is not used solely

TABLE VI
Variations in Paper Consumption and Book Production
X
9SS *n relation to 1938
(1938=100)

Consumption of printing- Book

Country paper (other than newsprint) Production
and writing-paper (by titles)
Netherlands 240 119
United States 189 113
France 179 128
Italy 151 101
Switzerland 362 177
Japan 122 70
United Kingdom 118 123
Spain 10S 389
(Source: Unesco.)

for the manufacture of books. Besides consumption in the form of

exercise-books and writing-paper, it is also used for the production
of periodicals and magazines. T h e proportion used for books there-
fore depends on the place held by periodicals in the country con-
cerned. Table VII provides a striking illustration of this fact. T h e
figures for numbers of copies printed, as calculated by Barker for
1952, have simply been multiplied by 0-4 to obtain the weight (W)
of paper consumed in book production within each country, the
average weight of a book being in fact about 400 grammes. Addi-
tionally, the total consumption (C) of printing- and writing-paper in
the same countries has been estimated, and,finally,C has been
divided by Wto determine whether there is a constant coefficient by
which W can be derived from C .
In the case of the European countries with a cultural life of the
same kind—i.e., Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of G e r m a n y
 WORLD PRODUCTION 67
and the United Kingdom—there is definitely a c o m m o n coefficient
which would seem to be in the region of 7 or 8. A s far as the United
States is concerned, however, the coefficient is entirely different,
amounting to 66—i.e., almost ten times that of the European coun-
tries. There is nothing surprising in this. Commenting on figures
obtained elsewhere and b y other methods, in m y Sociology of
Literature I pointed out that the readership of magazines in the
United States was ten times greater than in Europe, where the co-
efficient was in fact the one established here: "In France in 1955,

T A B L E VII
Relation betmeer,
1 Paper Consumph
ion and Number of Copies published

Number of copies Weight of Total

Country published (in copies (fV) consumption C
millions) in thousands (C) in thou- W
of tons sands of tons
France 100 40 340 8'5
Federal Republic
of Germany 108 43 340 7-9
United Kingdom 286 114 750 6-6
Belgium 26 10 80 8-0
United States 165 66 4,400 66-0

out of io*6 kilograms of paper for writing and printing consumed

per capita, the book industry's consumption was roughly 1-4 kilo-
grams." (6)
H a s this situation changed to any great extent since 1951 or 1952 ?
A s far as France is concerned, certainly not. According to figures
provided b y the French Publishers Association (7), French publish-
ers' consumption of paper in 1958 amounted to approximately i-i
kilo per head of population and in 1962 to 1-3, corresponding to the
increase in the overall consumption of printing- and writing-paper.
T h e situation in the United States is quite different. In ten years,
the consumption of paper has increased by 50%, but the proportion
going to books has increased to a m u c h greater extent. After more
than a century of dominance, magazines have had to m a k e w a y for
books, and such major companies as Life and Reader's Digest have
launched out on book production by the large-scale methods to
which they already owed their success. Since 1955, big business has
broken into American publishing and has transformed the scale of
68 T H E BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
the industry. A modern paperback publisher takes the view that an
edition of less than 100,000 is not worth while. In i960 it was esti-
mated that 1,000,000 paperbacks were sold each day in the United
States. T h efiguresgiven in 1957 by Chandler B . Grannis (8) are
significant, especially if w e bear in mind the 164,000,000 copies of
1952:
Ordinary books for adults 115,000,000 copies
Children's books 120,000,000 copies
School-books 130,000,000 copies
Paperbacks 200,000,000 copies
Such is the extent of the paperback revolution in the United
States. These mass-production methods would seem destined to
spread to other countries, including the European countries. Is it,
then, to be feared that in thisfield,too, American industrial power
is imposing its methods on the rest of the world and, in the case of
book publishing, combining economic conquest with cultural con-
quest and thus helping to stifle the voice of countries which are not
yet fully developed ? A s w e have already seen, the share of such
countries in production by titles has declined relatively in recent
years. If w e examine the consumption of printing- and writing-
paper in those parts of the world where publishing is still too little
developed for the printingfiguresto be genuinely significant, w e
shall perhaps be able to make a cautious guess at some of the future
trends of publishing there.
Table VIII, opposite, recapitulates printing- and writing-paper
consumption in the various regions of the world between 1950 and
i960. T h e trends seem to be clear and confirm our previous observa-
tions. T h e most striking feature is the decline of English-speaking
America which in 1950 accounted for more than half of world con-
sumption but, in i960, for only 43-2%. Europe and Latin America
remained at the same level, whereas Oceania—basically Australia
and N e w Zealand—showed a slight advance. T h e most spectacular
progress, however, was that of the Afro-Asian countries—an increase
of 242-5% for Africa and 512-3% for Asia. It should be noted,
moreover, that this advance was not restricted to such economically
strong countries as Japan and China, but also extended over the
whole of this vast region where, in ten years, the per capita consump-
tion of printing- and writing-paper in such countries as B u r m a ,
Cambodia, Iraq and Israel increased tenfold, the extreme case being
probably that of Syria, where per capita consumption rose from
 W O R L D PRODUCTION 69
001 kilo per year in 1950 to 0-3 in i960—an increase of 3,000%!
T h e same applies to Africa, where consumption in a country with a
large European population—South Africa—rose from 34,000 tons
to only 47,000 tons in ten years, while for the rest of Africa—i.e., the
recently independent countries—it rose from 6,000 tons in 1950 to
90,000 in i960.
T A B L E VIII
Consumption of Printing- and Writing-paper
in Various Regions of the World
Evolution between IÇ50 and ig6o
iç50 ig6o
Consumption Percentage Consumption Percentage Variation
Region in 1,000 of of world in 1,000 of of world in con-
tons consumption tons consumption sumption
Europe 2,591 34-5 5,145 361 + 986%
English-
speaking
America 4.245 56-5 6,150 432 + 44-9%
Latin
America 220 29 435 30 + 977%
Africa 40 0-5 137 ro +242-5%
Asia 365 48 2,235 157 +512-3%
Oceania 60 08 141 ro + i35-o%
Total 7.521 100 14,243 100 +89-4%
(Source: The Place of Paper in Development and Foreign Aid, International
Institute for Economic Studies, University of Stockholm, 1963.)

These 90,000 tons do not represent m u c h in the world economy,

just as African literature does not yet count for m u c h in world
culture, but they show that African books, which prior to decoloni-
zation represented 1 in 20 in their o w n region, rose in ten years to
the point where the ratio became 2 to 1 in their favour.

Literary books
All the foregoing observations apply to books in general, in other
words to books considered as manufactured products, consumer
goods, trade items, without reference either to their content or to
the use m a d e o f them. Obviously, however, the problems differ
greatly as between functional books and literary books. T h e very
nature of the functional book m e a n s that its evolution and develop-
ment are linked with economic, technical and scientific activities
70 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
concerning which w e are generally fairly well informed. School-
books, for example, reflect the trends in the educational system for
which they are designed, technical books reflect the concern of a
developing or expanding economy, social science books directly ex-
press the directions taken by a given political system.
Literary books are linked with literature as such, in other words
with the most elusive and indefinable of all realities. N o n e the less, it
is this reality which w e must try to pin d o w n , it is thisfieldwhich
w e must try to explore, if w e are to learn anything of the most original
and creative aspect of books. For this purpose, w e must make do
with the information supplied by statisticians who, unfortunately,
have never achieved a very clear awareness of the literary phenome-
non and w h o , even if they had appreciated it, would probably have
been unable to reduce it tofigures.T h e following pages are therefore
based on a study of statistics concerning Class 8 of the D e w e y
decimal classification. W e know already that many works which are
not included in this category—history books, travel books, philoso-
phical essays—should be considered as literary books because of the
use m a d e of them. W e also know that such countries as France,
Austria and the Netherlands include in Class 8 works which should
normally come in Class 4 (Language) or even in other categories,
provided they have some distant connection with literature. It
should also be noted that, judging from their statistics, other coun-
tries such as Argentina, Greece and Pakistan apply extremely elastic
criteria in regard to literature. A n d lastly, for a large number of
countries, w e do not know and probably never shall k n o w the break-
d o w n by categories of the books published.
In spite of all this, w e can attempt to make an evaluation if w e
accept the hypothesis that errors cancel each other out and that,
while the availablefiguresmay not be accurate, the relations between
them remain significant.
Table I X shows world production, by title, of works in Class 8
for the years 1952 and 1962. For each of these years, a special column
shows the percentage of the total production of the country con-
cerned for the same year which these books represent.
T h e first observation suggested by this table is that literary pro-
duction is stable. T h e total number of works in Class 8 produced
throughout the world in 1952 m a y be estimated at 57,000 and the
n u m b e r of similar works produced throughout the world in 1962 at
80,000. These two figures represent precisely the same percentage—
 WORLD PRODUCTION 71

TABLE IX
World Production {by Titles) of Works in Class 8 {Literature)
Evolutionfromig¡2 to igÓ2

Percentage Percentage
Production of Total Production of Total
Afghanistan — — 0 0
Albania — — 137 24
Argentina 3,258 76 1,891 57
Australia 159 25 211 12
Austria 733 23 741 21
Belgium 1,126 24 1,294 37
Brazil 870 27 716 18
Bulgaria 324 16 608 (61) or 16 (61) or
790(63) 21(63)
Burma 16 20 32 (60) 10
Cambodia 97(53) 25 21 13
Cameroons — — l
3 7
Canada 200 29 654 18
Ceylon r 522
38 4 28
Chile — — 203 20
China (Taiwan) — — i,438 55
China (Mainland) 511 20 2,851 20
Costa Rica — — 16 10
Cuba 70(53) 11 156 21
Czechoslovakia 1,014 17 1,617 19
Denmark 588 27 767 18
Dominican Republic 38(49) 33 17(63) 24
El Salvador — — 20 H
Ethiopia — — 2 1
Finland 501 29 841 32
France 4,063 36 4,44° 33
Germany (Federal
Republic) 3,535 25 4,957 23
Germany (Eastern) 899(53) 21 i,737 25
Ghana — — 1 0
Greece 468 31 443 35
Guatemala 25 (53) 36 37 7
Guinea — — 0 0
Honduras 4(53) 6 7 4
Hungary 415(53) 14 1,031 20
72 THE B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
1952 1962
Percentage Percentage
Production of Total Production of Total
Iceland 133 32 194(59) 29
India 2,467 3,534 32
Indonesia 100 13 97(61) 11
Iran 202(54) 52 211(61) 37
Iraq 23(53) 9 30(59) 21
Ireland 49 33 49 23
Israel 287(50) 35 75i(6i) 30
Italy 2,979 33 2,574(6i) 35
Japan 5,650 33 5,o63 23
Jordan 10(63) 6
Kenya 4(63) 4
Korea (Republic of) 537 39 540 15
Kuwait 6(63) 4
Lebanon 95 (50) 24 158 39
Liberia 2(60) 50
Libya 2(60) 40
Luxembourg 34 8 13(61) 10
Malaysia 9 3
Mexico 690 18
Monaco 72 70 20 53
Morocco 18 18 13 (60) 8
Netherlands i,557 23 2,721 28
N e w Zealand 29 9 71 6
Nicaragua 35(47) 29
Nigeria 12(63) 5
Norway 752 28 898 29
Pakistan 483(63) 21
Panama 2 9
Peru 54(50) 7 57 7
Philippines 43 (53) 22 103 (63) 17
Poland 1,280(55) 18 i,332 19
Portugal 314 8 913 20
Rumania 561 (53) 10 988 13
Rwanda 0 0
Saudi Arabia 55 17
Senegal 0 0
Sierra Leone 2 4
Singapore n(55) 23 43 18
South Africa 209 25 340(63) 26
Spain i,547 45 3,738 39
 W O R L D PRODUCTION 73
1952 joi
b2
Percentage Percentage
Production of Total Production of Total
Sudan — — 10(63) 12
Sweden i,i79 36 i,772 32
Switzerland 753 23 1,263 22
Thailand 571 H 405 (61) 29
Tunisia 9(53) 16 — —
Turkey 409 17 805 17
Uganda — — 2(63) 3
Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics 5,858(54) 12 8,083 10
United Arab Republic 122 (53) 19 465 14
United Kingdom 6,533 35 8,077 32
United States 4,423 37 7,259 33
Uruguay i6(55) 25 68(61) or 26 (61) or
50(63) 36(63)
Venezuela 106(55) 20 51(61) or 15 (61) or
107(63) 14(63)
Viet-Nam
(Republic of) 213 23 171 11
Yugoslavia 1,209 23 1,659 29
Zanzibar — — 0 0

(Sources: United Nations Statistical Yearbook; R . E . Barker, Books for All,

Unesco.)

i.e., 22-8% of world production, estimated at 250,000 in 1952 and

350,000 in 1962. A rapid glance at the above table shows that such
large-scale producers of literature as the U S S R , mainland China and
the Federal Republic of G e r m a n y have remained reasonable stable.
Others, such as the United States and the United K i n g d o m , have
developed within relatively narrow limits. T h e position, however, is
altogether different in the case of Japan, where the percentage of
literary books dropped from 33% in 1952 to 23% in 1962, and of
France, where it dropped from 36% to 33%. In the Netherlands it
rose from 23% to 28%, and in Italy from 33% to 35%.
Despite the apparent stability just noted, the production of literary
books over these ten consecutive years none the less displays a ten-
dency to decline. This is shown in Diagram 1 where, on the basis of
the data contained in Table I X , total production and the percentage
of it represented by literary production are given side b y side for
aboutfiftycountries.
74 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing

DIAGRAM
Percentage ofLiterary Production in the Total Production {by
Titles) for 55 Countries in i%2 and 67 Countries in 1962

l952(55countr¡Gs!

l962(67countr¡es)

wW
m
0-4
w
4Ê, m m w,m
5 - 9 10 - 14 15 - 19 20 -
Percentage
il WW,,
24 25 - 29 30 - 34 35 - 39 40 - 44 45 - 50

It is immediately apparent that the countries concerned form a

bell-shaped curve for both 1962 and 1952; but whereas, in 1952, the
m o d e of the curve came between twenty-five and thirty, in 1962 it
came betweenfifteenand twenty. In other words, half the countries
concerned devoted less than 2 0 % of their production in 1962 to
literary works, whereas in 1952 half of them devoted more than 25 %
to this type of publication. Since w e have already seen that this shift
does not affect the number of literary works published throughout
 WORLD PRODUCTION 75
the world, w e m a y conclude that the proportion of such works is
declining in a growing number of small-producer countries but that
this decline is offset in some degree by an increase in the number of
literary works in big-producer countries.
T h e fact is that, both as regards literary books and books in
general, there are "giants" whose production exceeds 2,500 works a
year. Setting aside India, for the reasons already mentioned, these
countries are nine in number. In order of importance, they are the
U S S R , the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland China,
Japan, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
These nine alone account for more than 56% of world production.
In 1952, however, thefigurewas in the region of 60%. T h e decline
is small but undeniable. It is due mainly to the drop, in relative
terms, of Soviet production and, in absolute terms, of Japanese
production. Literary production in the other countries listed is
increasing.
Mention was m a d e earlier of the influence that a given country's
economic situation has on its production of functional books. Here
w e have, so to speak, the reverse aspect of this fact. It is obvious,
for instance, that literary production in almost all the economically
developing countries is relatively small. Another observation m a y be
added to the foregoing and serves to confirm it. If, in Table I X ,
w e take an output of 20% of literary books in 1962 as a dividing
line, it will be seen that production in most Western European
countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Federal Republic of
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain,
Switzerland and the United Kingdom) exceeds this percentage. O n
the other hand, production in most of the socialist countries of
Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, U S S R ) is
less than 20%. Apart from Albania, which is not significant in
view of its small output, the outstanding exceptions are Yugoslavia
and Eastern Germany. T h e proportion of literary works in both
countries was already above 20% in 1952 (Eastern Germany, 2 1 % ;
Yugoslavia, 23%) and this trend became still more marked in
1962, where the advance was reminiscent of that in the Western
countries (Eastern Germany, 25%; Yugoslavia, 29%). In the case
of Yugoslavia, this was probably a consequence of the particular
policy which that country has followed since 1948. T h e case of
Eastern G e r m a n y , however, is more complex. Here it would seem
that national historical factors have counted for more than political
76 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
factors. In this respect, as in m a n y others, the pattern in Eastern
G e r m a n y is comparable to that in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is all the more noteworthy in that the framework of literary life
is the State far more than the nation—i.e., all the institutional struc-
tures which surround and govern the country's intellectual life and
which set administrative limits to the book market (9). A n d what is
striking in the case of the two Germanys is precisely the continuance
of the machinery established by the unified G e r m a n State prior to
World W a r II. There will be a real divergence of pattern only if
Germany's division into two States continues beyond the present
literary generation.
T h e production and consumption of literary books are all the
m o r e closely bound u p with the political structure in that these are
voluntary activities reflecting a need in certain people, whether
writers or readers, for communication of a certain type. This need
m a y be restricted from outside by institutional factors—political
propaganda, police, religion, etc.—or by factors acting directly,
whether favourably or unfavourably, on the individual's desire and
capacity for communication (illiteracy or education, poverty or high
living standards). Ultimately, however, there can b e no original
literary production in a country unless there is a large enough
n u m b e r of writers to keep that production going, and a large enough
n u m b e r of readers to keep consumption at a level justifying that
production either on doctrinal or on economic considerations. In the
last resort, the popularity of literary books in the various countries
thus depends, on the one hand, on a given country's political and
social institutions and its inhabitants' educational level and free
time and, on the other, on its demographic situation—i.e., the
existence of a population capable of providing simultaneously an
adequate number of writers and an adequate n u m b e r of readers.
Neither condition is sufficient without the other. It is too often for-
gotten that the writer isfirstof all a reader, that he is a by-product
of the literary environment and is supported by it not only morally
but also economically. If there are not enough readers in a country
to provide a livelihood for writers, then there will be fewer writers,
since the only people w h o will be in a position to write will be those
with sufficient private resources to enable them to work unpaid or,
in a controlled economy, those whose livelihood is furnished by the
State or some other body.
W e thus come to the problem of the size of editions of literary
 W O R L D PRODUCTION 77
books and, more especially, of novels, which are the most vital and
characteristic examples of such works. Here, it is even more difficult
than elsewhere to m a k e evaluations. Very few countries, in their
statistics, distinguish novels from other forms of literature or belles
lettres. It is not even certain that the concept of "fiction" used in the
English-speaking countries exactly corresponds with the idea of the
roman or "novel" as used in France. For the few countries for which
some information is available, the n u m b e r (by titles) of novels p u b -
lished annually is roughly as follows :
United Kingdom 4,000 to 4,500
Federal Republic of Germany 3,000 to 3,500
United States 2,500 to 3,000
France 2,500 to 3,000
Italy 1,000 to 1,500
Spain 1,500 to 2,000

T h e United States m a y seem to occupy a modest place but in this

matter as in others an upward trend is to be noted in the production
of fiction which used, for preference, to take the form of magazine
stories rather than novels published as books, tendencies having been
radically changed b y the emergence of paperbacks. Table X below
clearly reveals the effect which paperbacks have had o n the output
of American fiction.

TABLE X
Production {by Titles) of Paperback Novels in the United States
1961 1962 Variations
Total production of books in the
United States 18,060 21,904 +21%
Total production of novels 2,630 2,942 + 12%
Total production of paperback novels 1,044 1.239 + 19%
Classic novels in paperbacks 603 737 +22%
Thrillers in paperbacks 248 248 0
Westerns in paperbacks 136 130 - 4%
Sciencefictionin paperbacks 57 124 + 100%
(Source: Publishers' Weekly, 21 January 1963.)

Let us n o w consider the question of the size of literary printings—

an element which is extremely difficult to pin d o w n . In 1954, Barker
boldly enough estimated the n u m b e r of copies printed for each title
78 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
in a few of the main categories of publications. In the case of fiction,
the estimated averages were as follows :
United Kingdom 10,000
United States 8,500
Federal Republic of Germany 9,500 to 12,000
France 3,000 to 5,000
Italy 5,000 to 7,000

If w e consider ordinary editions only, thesefiguresare acceptable,

and it would seem that, due allowance being m a d e , the situation has
scarcely changed since that time. This would m e a n that approxi-
mately 150,000,000 copies of novels are distributed annually a m o n g
a readership of some 300,000,000. T h e ratio is not a priori absurd,
but it must be admitted that the figures do not m e a n very m u c h . It
is difficult to speak of an average printing for a novel. Whereas for
the functional book, serving a precise purpose, there can b e a
guaranteed m i n i m u m number of copies to be published and sold,
the literary book represents a pure "adventure". Salesfigureshave
very little to do with printing figures. Several million copies of a
best-seller m a y be sold in a single year but in the great majority of
cases, a young author'sfirstnovel, rarely published in an edition of
more than 3,000, will be lucky to find a few hundred readers. It
would be paradoxical to equate the tenth reprinting of a best-seller
which has become a classic, or thefiftiethbook by a detective-story
writer whose works have enjoyed a steady success for years past, with
thefirstbook by an u n k n o w n writer or thefirstedition of a novel on
which a well-known author has once again staked his reputation.
T h e most w e can do is to point out that there has been a change
of scale. This varies from country to country. In France, publishers
are gradually making a practice of producingfirsteditions of pocket
books which run to 30,000 copies, but they seldom publish a novel
on the same scale, at any rate not without having tried it out in a
financially less hazardous form. In the United States, on the other
hand, the risks have been affected by the progress of efficiency. Prior
to the Great W a r , the average novel sold some 4,000 copies. After
the war such best-sellers as James Cain's The Postman Always Rings
Twice or Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises sold 25,000 and
30,000 respectively, while Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind
was regarded as an astonishing exception, which could never be
repeated. It is none the less a fact that the ordinary edition of Gone
 WORLD PRODUCTION 79
With The Wind sold a total of 5,000,000, whereas, in the United
States at present, several paperback novels reach and exceed this
figure every year.
A t this point, w e find ourselves once again confronted—but even
m o r e emphatically—with the problems that arose w h e n w e con-
sidered h o w mass production has taken over the publishing industry.
T h e sudden increase in printings in the United States should not sur-
prise or disturb us unduly. T h e country had leeway to m a k e u p . But
w e k n o w from experience that expansion of this sort can never b e
confined to a single country. W h e n an industry based on as large a
population and as powerful a n e c o n o m y as those of the United
States is set in motion, the whole balance of production and con-
sumption throughout the world is affected. A n d in the case in point,
what is produced and c o n s u m e d is the very stuff of our culture.

NOTES
(1) R . E . Barker, Books for All, Unesco, 1956, p. 17.
(2) In this connection, see the admirable account published in the Unesco
document, Book Production 1937-1954 and Translations 1950-1954,
Statistical Reports and Studies, pp. 3-10.
(3) Figures provided by N . Krivenko's Newspapers, Books, Radio and
Television in the USSR, M o s c o w , 1963.
(4) See above, p. 56.
(5) Op. cit., p. 23. In Table 5, Barker shows the number of titles p u b -
lished and his o w n estimate of the total printing. It is therefore easy
to identify the basis of his calculation.
(6) Op. cit., p. 13.
(7) Monographie de VEdition, 1963 edition, p. 48. T h e figures given for
the French publishing trade's paper consumption are 48,810 tons
in 1958 and 63,150 tons in 1962.
(8) Chandler B . Grannis, What Happens in Book Publishing, Columbia
University Press, 1957, p. 8.
(9) See the author's paper presented at the IVth Congress of the Interna-
tional Comparative Literature Association (Freiburg, 1964): Le
cadre politique de Vhistoire littéraire : peuple, classe, état ou nation.
 CHAPTER
2

The Main Exchange Patterns

High- and low-pressure zones

L E T us go back to the young couple of average readers discussed in
thefirstpart of this book. Allowing for differing tastes, w e said,
sixty or seventy books, either purchased or borrowed, enter such a
household each year. These include a certain number of n e w works
and a certain number of reprints. T h e proportion between the two
varies considerably, depending on the countries and types of litera-
ture involved. In the case of ordinary editions of novels in France,
the proportion of new works is 5 to 1, whereas, in the case of A m e r i -
can non-fiction paperbacks, the proportion is sometimes the same in
favour of reprints. Let us assume that our average couple acquires
twenty n e w works in the course of a year—an extremely modest
estimate. This means that twenty writers have worked in that year
in order to meet the couple's reading requirements. A few writers
produce several books a year—for instance, certain detective-story
writers—but most produce at a slower rate and a substantial n u m b e r
produce only one book in the whole of their career. It has been
estimated that the average career of an author lasts from ten to
twelve years, during which he produces four to six books (1). T o
return to our young couple, assuming that they read twenty n e w
books a year over a period of ten years, this implies that thirty or
forty active authors are permanently working on their behalf.
It goes without saying, however, that these thirty or forty authors
would die of starvation, along with their publishers, if they were to
write solely for our hypothetical couple. In socialist and capitalist
countries alike, all literary activity implies a m i n i m u m element of
profit. It is not easy to say at what figure the number of readers
becomes "economic"; this varies according to the type of book and
the type of publishing involved. It m a y , however, be said that, on
the average, a novelist in most countries would scarcely be considered
to have a career unless his publisher could hope to sell at least 3,000
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 8l
copies of each of his books. It m a y be assumed that a sale of 3,000
represents 10,000 acts of reading (2). Our thirty or forty writers must
therefore have 5,000 or 6,000 couples similar to the couple described
as readers of their works.
T h e foregoingfiguresare theoretical but they do highlight the fact
that there is in all countries a necessary numerical relation between
the book-producing and the book-consuming population. Both cate-
gories, however, form part of the total population of the country
concerned and the balance between them depends on the size, the
composition and the behaviour ofthat population.
As far as books are concerned, the number of acts of reading which
take place annually in France m a y be estimated at 400 or 450 million.
This represents a sale of 130 or 140 million copies in a reading
population of 30 or 35 million. Let us assume for the time being that
these 30 or 35 million people have exactly the same tastes and pat-
terns of behaviour as those of our imaginary couple. T h e same thirty
or forty writers will suffice to satisfy their demand, provided that the
French publishing industry prints and distributes 9 or 10 million
copies of each of their works. T h e authors to be found in the Princi-
pality of M o n a c o could supply the French market by themselves.
If, on the other hand, each group of 10,000 French readers (since
w e have agreed to accept this figure as representing the level at
which writing becomes economic) were to have different tastes and
behaviour patterns from all the others, then this excessive diversity
could be satisfied only if France possessed 150,000 active writers—
in other words, more writers than there are boot- and shoe-sellers,
ministers of religion and Treasury officials. With the possible excep-
tion of the United States, the U S S R and China, no country in the
world would n u m b e r as m a n y writers in its population. In point of
fact, French literary production is the work of some 10,000 authors,
of w h o m roughly 6,000 produce a book each year. Most of them are
part-time authors of books and some 3,000 of them—i.e., approxi-
mately the n u m b e r belonging to the Authors' Society—are profes-
sional or semi-professional writers.
T h e two component elements conditioning the publication of
books are therefore as follows :

1. The existence or absence of a substantial proportion of the popula-

tion which is literate, economically well off and politically influential.
This group forms the bulk of the reading public whose demand
82 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
governs literary production and, at the same time, the breeding-
ground for writers. Countries where a large literate group of this
type exists—e.g., Great Britain, G e r m a n y , France, Russia and, more
recently and to a lesser extent, the United States—constitute, as it
were, literary "high-pressure zones", since the reading population
is more demanding because it is cultured and more influential be-
cause it is large. It keeps up an intense intellectual life which is
reflected in scientific, technical and political activity and in literary
or artistic creation. Meeting the needs of these groups, emerging
from this intellectual life, stimulated b y the competition which it
engenders and partaking of its prestige, writers belonging to these
countries cross frontiers more easily than others.

2. The variety or uniformity of the reading public's tastes and, pa

terns of behaviour, regardless of the numerical importance of that
public. This m a y depend on m a n y factors : the degree of intellectual
development or education, the type of political system prevailing, or
the social organization. W e can obtain a very approximate, but none
the less sufficient idea of this variety by carrying out a simple calcula-
tion, m a d e by R . E . Barker for 1952, which consists in dividing a
country's total production by titles by the number of its inhabi-
tants (3). If the quotient is low, it means that a large number of
people are making do with a few titles and hence that there is a trend
towards uniformity. If, on the other hand, the quotient is high, it
suggests that the inhabitants of the country, even if few in number,
have a wide range of requirements. Table X I opposite compares
Barker's 1952figureswith those established by the present author in
1962 for a certain n u m b e r of countries which are large or m e d i u m
producers of books.
Countries are listed in descending order of the quotients for 1962.
A trend towards standardization will be noted in the United States
and Canada, a trend which the enormous paperback printings natur-
ally reinforced over the ten years. N o n e the less, the pattern in both
countries (and especially Canada) has come closer to that of the
major European nations. T h e latter (including the U S S R and various
socialist countries) lie in an intermediate zone between Italy's 162
(Italian printings being fairly large) and Portugal's 500.
It is especially noteworthy that those European countries where
the population is comparatively small but the intellectual level very
high (Switzerland, D e n m a r k , Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden,
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 83

TABLE XI
Production {by Titles) per Million of Population
COUNTRY 1952 1962
Israel 750(50) 1,150
Switzerland 645 995
Denmark 504 893
Norway 812 857
Netherlands 673 820
Sweden 469 724
Czechoslovakia 455 628
Finland 427 587
Portugal 461 500
Austria 558 499
Hungary 341 (50) 495
United K i n g d o m 375 469
Rumania 158 394
Federal Republic of Germany 290 392
Belgium 512 376
Spain 119 310
Yugoslavia 305 299
France 242 270
Poland 265 237
Japan 199 231
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics* 188 195
Canada 47 193
Turkey m 166
Italy 206 162
Argentina 237 155
United States 74 117
Mexico 114 101
China (Mainland) 5(approx.)38(
India 47 25
(Sources: R . E . Barker, Books For All. United Nations Statistical Yearbook.
Unesco statistics.)
* Commercially distributed books only.

Czechoslovakia, Finland etc.) have high coefficients reflecting the

d e m a n d s of a public which cannot be satisfied by the national output
since the reservoir from which it is drawn is too small. Perhaps the
most striking case is that of Israel, which has the highest quotient
84 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
in the world—1,150—as might be expected in a new country which
has scarcely had the time to produce writers of its o w n , but which
has a reading public drawn from all over the world and as hetero-
geneous as it is intellectually active.
These countries form literary "cyclones", so to speak, attracting
the production of the great anticyclones. Between these countries
and the high-pressure zones described above there is an intensive
exchange process, in the form of either book imports or of transla-
tions.
At the same time, there are other literary low-pressure zones
which cannot be detected by means of indexfiguressince the reading
public is still too small for its d e m a n d to be reflected in local pro-
duction. Such is the case of the young countries in Latin America,
Africa and Asia where the birth-rate is high and where a rapid
cultural development is taking place. For the present, their main
need is for school-books and technical books (4), but this is only a
stage. If the schools are what they should be, today's pupils will be
tomorrow's individual readers. B y eliminating illiteracy, by provid-
ing its people with the necessary material facilities, by subjecting
them to the essential intellectual disciplines, India, for example,
could create a n e w reading public of 300 million within the next
thirty years.
H o w m a n y writers would emerge from such a public ? Undoubt-
edly, a very great number. Experience proves that there is no one-
way literature and that, where reading is concerned, consumption
engenders production. Countries where literary activity is most in-
tensive—the Netherlands, for instance—are simultaneously high-
pressure and low-pressure zones, cyclones and anticyclones, trans-
mitters and receivers. W h e r e they are concerned, literary exchanges
are exchanges in the literal sense of the word. In respect of written
culture, the same social conditions create both the supply and the
demand and reading is one of those goods which are sought only
w h e n they have already been found.

International barriers
N o matter what the disparities and differences between book-
producing and book-consuming countries, a certain balance would
eventually be established were it not that various obstacles interfere
with the great exchange circuits. S o m e of these are natural obstacles
—that is to say, they constitute part of an overall historical situation in
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 85
which books are only one element—others are institutional and have
been deliberately created in order to hinder the distribution of books.
T h e two most obvious natural obstacles are illiteracy and the
diversity of languages. It would be absurd to consider these inde-
pendently of each other. Since w e are concerned with reading, the
existence of a given language is significant only to the extent that
it is read and, since w e are concerned also with intercommunication,
the ability to read a text in a certain language is all the m o r e impor-
tant w h e n the language concerned is read by a large n u m b e r of
people.
It is generally recognized that twelve main languages are spoken
by m o r e than three-quarters of the h u m a n race. These are as follows,
listed according to the percentage of the world's population which
speaks them :
Chinese 25%
English "%
Russian 8-30%
Hindi 6-25%
Spanish 6-25%
German 375%
Japanese 375%
Bengali 3-00%
Arabic 270%
French 270%
Portuguese 2-50%
Italian 2-10%

If, however, w e try to determine the actual reading public in

respect of each language—that is to say, the population capable of
independent reading—the result will be somewhat different. A n
effort has been m a d e in Table X I I overleaf to determine the volume
of the reading population by continent in respect of each language.
For this purpose, three elements have been combined :
1. T h e national language or languages of each country (since
two or even three national languages m a y coexist within one State).
N o allowance has been m a d e for knowledge of foreign languages,
since this factor is difficult to establish and is, in any case, of negli-
gible importance with regard to the whole public concerned, but, on
the other hand, an effort has been m a d e to estimate the size of the
peoples using a non-national language of communication—e.g.,
French or English in the former French or British colonies, or
86 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
TABLE XII
Reading Public classified by Language {Units ofi,ood)
First figure: number of readers in the national language
Figure in brackets : n u m b e r of readers in a second officially
recognized language of communication

LANGUAGE AFRICA AMERICA ASIA EUROPE OCEANIA TOTALS

English 7>5°o i37>3°° 100 40,500 9,100 194,500
(2,800) (3,300) (24,200) — — (30,300)
Chinese — — 205,500 — — 205,500
— (3°o) (4,100) — (IOO) (4,500)
Russian — — 2,000 117,600 — 119,600
— — (20,000) (40,000) — (60,000)
Spanish 100 53,100 — 18,400 — 71,600
— (2,300) (3,000) — — (5,300)
German — — — 62,000 — 62,000
— (300) (iOO) (IOO) — (500)
Japanese — — S9,7°o — — 59,700
— — (2,000) — — (2,000)
French 2,500 3,800 — 36,800 IOO 43,200
(3,000) — (500) — — (3,500)
Italian — — — 30,300 — 30,300
(100) — — — — (100)
Portuguese 200 21,000 — 3,500 — 24,700
— — (100) — — (100)
Dutch* 3,800 — — I2,6oo — 16,400
— (100) (100) — — (200)
Arabic 6,300 — 1,900 — — 8,200
(300) — (500) — — (800)
Indian — — 84,000 — — 84,000
Languages (300) — — — (100) (400)
Other Asian — — 77,500 — — 77,500
Languages — — — — — —
Non-Russian Slav — — — 65,800 — 65,800
Languages — — — (2,000) — (2,000)
Scandinavian — — — I2,8oo — 12,800
Languages — — — — — —
Other European — — — 36,300 — 36,300
Languages — (500) — — — (500)
African 4,200 — — — — 4,200
Languages — — — — — —
Oceanian — — — — 200 200
Languages — — — — — —
Total 24,600 215,200 430,700 436,000 9,400 1,115,900
(6,500) (6,800) (56,400) 1(42,000) (200) (110,200)
Actual Population
(1961) 204,000 422,000 1,721,000 648,000 17,000 3,012,000

* Including Afrikaans and Flemish.

 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 87
G e r m a n in areas with a high proportion of German-speaking i m m i -
grants (Israel or the American Middle West).
2. T h e illiteracy rate as estimated in the latest documents p u b -
lished by Unesco.
3. T h e volume of the population overfifteenyears of age, this
being regarded as the m i n i m u m age at which an individual is capable
of independent cultural activity.
This table m a y be compared with that in the Unesco publication,
Basic Facts and Figures—International Statistics Relating to Educa-
tion, Culture and Mass Communication (Paris, 1958), p. 11. This
latter table shows the situation in 1950. Allowance will be m a d e for
the fact that, in eleven years, the world's population increased by 20%.
Another table in the same publication (pp. 12-14) shows h o w
various are the criteria used to evaluate illiteracy. A n effort has been
m a d e to eliminate this factor in the following calculations. It seems,
however, that a certain decline in illiteracy throughout the world is
to be detected: in 1950, the reading population represented 36% of
the world population, while in 1961 it amounted to 40%.
This table shows a language classification very different from that
obtained for the spoken languages. Eight languages are sufficient for
communication with three-quarters of the population of the globe,
these languages being, in order of the percentages they represent, as
follows :
English 18-10%
Chinese 16-9%
Russian i5'9%
Spanish 6-2%
German 5-o%
Japanese S-0%
French 3-8%
Italian 2-4%
T h e reading population of the world—i.e., the population not of
actual readers but of individuals capable of reading independently—
is estimated at 1,200 million—i.e., 40% of the world population and
certainly more than half of the population old enough to read.
These data might seem encouraging. If only eight main language
divisions are required to cover a reading population representing
two-fifths of all those overfifteenyears of age and able to read
anywhere in the world, the problem of communication would not
seem to be insurmountable.
88 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
Unfortunately, the situation is less reassuring w h e n w e look at it
more closely. T o begin with, some of the most important languages
of communication—Chinese, Russian, G e r m a n , Japanese, Italian—
are restricted to one particular part of the world. Others which, like
English, Spanish or French, have spread to several continents and
could be of world-wide use, are not always the most important. This
applies particularly to Portuguese, Dutch and, to a lesser extent,
Arabic.
T h e situation, moreover, varies very greatly from one continent
to another. In America, for example, there is no problem. Four
languages are used by a little more than 200 million people, repre-
senting half the population. These languages are virtually unchal-
lenged, since the native American languages were not written lan-
guages in the sense which w e attach to the word. T h e only major
changes to be foreseen concern the balance between English and
Spanish, as the former is at present nearing saturation point as far
as the reading population is concerned while effective use of the
latter, as a result of population growth and economic and social
progress in Latin America, m a y well increasefivefoldbefore the end
of the twentieth century.
Nor is there any problem in Oceania, where the English spoken in
Australia and N e w Zealand is unlikely to be directly challenged un-
less extensive political upheavals take place. T h e case of Africa is
more complex. It is quite clear that the great colonial powers have
been ratherflatteringthemselves about their cultural achievements.
T h e reading population using the languages of those powers repre-
sent scarcely 10% of the population of Africa, and this figure in-
cludes the whites of South Africa. Sometimes, and with some reason,
French is put forward as the future language of communication in
Africa. It is used either as their national language or as a secondary
language by 5 or 6 million potential readers. English has more than
10 million such readers, but they are grouped in sharply defined
areas and are mostly of non-African origin. Arabic, for its part, has
a reading public of 7 million, but, notwithstanding the cultural sup-
port of Islam, they are limited to North Africa. French is thus, in
fact, the literary language read by the largest number of native
Africans over the widest area. Even if literatures should one day
emerge in the indigenous African languages, it seems probable that
the progress of publishing and reading in Africa will be linked to the
progress m a d e in the ability to read and write French.
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 89
There remain Asia and Europe—the two largest blocs. Three out
of every eight readers in the world are Asians, three are Europeans.
This equality in itself is an element of imbalance, since there are
three times as m a n y Asians as Europeans. Additionally, two-thirds
of literary production throughout the world is in European lan-
guages, whereas Asian languages account for less than one-quarter.
There are more than thirty written languages in Europe; in Asia
there are far more, and over thirty of these are used by at least
5 million people. O n the one hand, therefore, w e have a very large
literary production which is, however, divided a m o n g a number of
languages and, on the other, w e have a vast mass of potential readers,
w h o could easily increase threefold in the decades ahead, but w h o
are also infinitely split up by the diversity of their languages.
This would, even so, not be so very serious were it not for the fact
that the linguistic division is accompanied by administrative and
political division. Publication of a text in a given language does not
m e a n that it is available to all those able to read that language. If it
has the slightest ideological content, a book is unlikely to be simul-
taneously distributed in all the countries belonging to its o w n lan-
guage bloc. Except in wartime, political censorship of books has been
officially abolished in most countries. In actual fact, there are in-
numerable ways of negating this freedom from censorship. T h e
reasons advanced for measures which prevent the distribution of a
book without openly banning it are not necessarily political.
This sort of masked censorship, moreover, is not always exercised
by the authorities : it m a y be attributable to the economic or social
circles which dominate publishing in a given country.
This is a situation which will not change overnight. It is linked
to the tensions and contradictions from which the modern world is
suffering. Books are only a pawn in a struggle which goes far beyond
literature.
This is not true, however, of the economic obstacles which con-
front them (5). Such obstacles are of four types:
1. Currency regulations and restrictions—an obstacle which
affects both the import of books and the grant of translation rights;
2. Postal rates, an obstacle which affects all types of cultural
material, newspapers, films, works of art, etc;
3. Customs regulations, involving either import licences or ad
valorem duties;
4. Miscellaneous taxes.
90 THE B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
A Unesco publication, Trade Barriers to Knowledge (Paris, 1956),
reviews the very varied legal provisions existing in 92 countries. A n
effort had been m a d e by the Universal Postal Union ( U . P . U . ) to get
m e m b e r countries to make systematic reductions in the postal rates
applied to books and to simplify customs and administrative formali-
ties generally. Considerable advances have been m a d e in this direc-
tion since 1952, and some 50 States have acted on the U . P . U .
recommendations. Similarly,since 1953, the International Air Trans-
port Association has persuaded its aviation networks to extend the
rate for periodicals and catalogues to books. T h e fact remains, none
the less, that the transport of books is expensive. Even in those
countries where printed-paper rates apply to books, the cost of
sending a volume of average size abroad amounts to some 15 French
centimes or 3 American cents. This amount may seem trifling for an
individual expensive book, bul it none the less has a marked effect
on the price when bulk distribution of cheaper books is involved.
A n y direct action in respect of currency regulations is more diffi-
cult, since each set of regulations is governed by local conditions
which have nothing to do with the cultural policy followed by a given
country. Unesco has done what it can to facilitate exchanges in this
field by introducing international book-coupons. This system en-
ables a M e m b e r State with a "soft" currency to obtain coupons
from Unesco with which to pay for its purchases of cultural materials,
these coupons being subsequently redeemed by Unesco in the cur-
rency of the supplying country. T h e scheme was instituted as early
as 1954 and proved immediately successful among the economically
developing countries.
Unesco has been trying to reduce the ill-effects of customs and
financial regulations ever since its Beirut Conference in 1948, by
encouraging M e m b e r States to sign agreements aimed at abolishing
or lowering customs tariffs and tax charges. T h e basic text was
adopted in 1950 by the Unesco General Conference in Florence.
Under the terms of this agreement, the contracting States undertook
not to apply customs duties or other charges in connection with the
importation of certain items used for cultural purposes, the list
being headed by printed books.
A large number of countries have signed and are applying this
agreement, and w e may take it that books are n o w circulating more
or less freely among the main producer countries, more especially
within the European C o m m o n Market, where the last customs
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 91
duties are being removed. There is undoubtedly a general trend
towards the removal of economic obstacles to the international cir-
culation of books.
But it is precisely because of this free interchange that n e w prob-
lems m a y arise in a world where cultural inequalities and linguistic
divisions are as w e have outlined above. While the readership de-
m a n d is developing rapidly among the peoples of Asia, Africa and
Latin America, it is all too likely that this demand can be met only
by the few great economic powers which have a universal language of
communication or a publishing industry equipped for mass produc-
tion. So far as functional books or school-books are concerned, this
is not unduly serious and m a y even be just as well but, sooner or
later, literary works rather than functional books must be considered.
If they are thus to receive books "bestowed" from outside and,
moreover, as far as European production is concerned, without the
contribution of the minority languages, then the emerging reading
public will be doomed to passivity and excluded from that active
participation which distinguishes real literary life. A mediocre litera-
ture in touch with its o w n people is better than a good literature
which is deaf to the voices of those to w h o m it is addressed and whose
feelings and thoughts it should express.
It is precisely towards such a concentration that international ex-
changes are at present tending. T h e appearance of cheap books on
the literary scene has merely accentuated this trend and facilitated
the invasion of n e w readership areas by the output of the great
powers, since cheap production is not something which can be
achieved by everybody.

The international book trade

T h e book trade is by no means one of the major items in interna-
tional economic dealings. Table XIII shows the book exports
(in millions of dollars) of the main producer countries of the
Western world together with the percentage of their total exports
that thesefiguresrepresent.
It will be seen that book exports do not account for as m u c h as
1 % of total exports in the case of any of the countries listed. Never-
theless, the volume of trade is continually increasing. If w e consider
book exports in terms of tonnage rather than in terms of price—an
essentially variable factor—wefindthat they have doubled in volume
in most countries over a period often years (6).
92 T H E BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
TABLE XIII
Main Exporters of Books (IÇ6I)

Book exports Percentage

COUNTRY (in millions) of
of dollars) exports
United Kingdom 8? o-8i%
Netherlands 33 071%
United States 108 0-50%
France 32 o-43%
Switzerland 9 0-40%
Federal Republic of Germany 32 0-24%

T h e case of the Netherlands is particularly interesting. This coun-

try has a very long publishing and bookselling tradition. A t a time
w h e n absolute monarchies were interfering with the flow of ideas in
Europe, Dutch books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
provided the channel for the expression of all free thought. A n intelli-
gent policy has n o w m a d e D u t c h publishing one of the crossroads of
scientific thought. T h e Netherlands receives a great deal—16% of
its production consists of translations—but also gives a great deal.
Between 1946 and 1961, the total value of book exports rose from
i*3 to 33 million dollars.* Even more significant is the fact that out
of 7,893 titles published in i960, 1,140 were in foreign languages
and hence intended for export. This proportion of 1 in 7 is the
highest of any country in the world. It m e a n s that the Netherlands,
even though its national language is not, comparatively speaking,
widespread, exports more books—at any rate, in value—than either
France or the Federal Republic of G e r m a n y . It also m e a n s that the
country has a world book market which is unique in its extent and
balance :
Benelux 34'6%
2I
Sterling area '5%
Federal Germany i3"5%
Dollar area 8%
France _ 3-9%
Netherlands possessions 3'3%
Other countries i5'2%
* Certain of these sums have been left as they appeared in the French edition
—in dollars. T o convert them approximately to pounds at the present rate one
should, of course, divide them by 2-8.
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 93
Setting aside the special case of the Netherlands, three types of
book markets are found in Western Europe :
i. The local market, like that of Germany, which is restricted to
the Austro-Swiss bloc and a fringe of German-speaking minorities
in various countries, including Poland and the United States of
America.
2. The intercontinental market, such as that of the United King-
d o m . Europe represents only a relatively small part of this. T h e bulk
of its custom comes from the Commonwealth, its colonies, and the
United States, which was itself once a colony and which, from the
literary point of view at any rate, suffered from a "colonial" complex
until very recently.
3. The mixed market, such as that of France. This combines the
custom of the language bloc and that of the former colonies. French-
speaking Europe (Switzerland-Benelux) almost exactly balances
French possessions which have become independent, the oldest
being Canada and the most recent Algeria.
Table XIII showed the United States leading the market-economy
countries in the export of books. This is largely due to the policy of
cultural information abroad which this country has adopted. T h e
same obviously applies to the U S S R which is not, however, included
in Table XIII because of the great difficulties involved in comparing
the currencies. Soviet book exports rose from 4,817,000 roubles in
1957 to 12,810,000 roubles in 1961. This latterfigurerepresents an
annual exportation of about 35 million copies (7). T h e United States
Book Translation Programme, launched in 1950 for the purpose of
distributing translations of American books to influential individuals
and institutions throughout the world, and to the libraries of the
American Information Services, distributed 6,593,350 volumes in
i960 (8). In comparing this with the Soviet figure, allowance must
be made for the fact that such prestige exports are in addition to the
trade exports which also include "programmes" sponsored by the
American Federal authorities. In the years following the W a r , one
such programme enabled "soft-currency" countries to obtain books
sold in dollars. Another provides very cheap editions (between 10
and 15 cents per copy) intended for the Near East, the Far East and
Africa.
A n interesting coincidence which is worth noting is that the works
distributed by the Book Translation Programme in i960 were p u b -
lished in thirty-three different languages, while the books exported
94 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
by the U S S R in the same year were published in thirty-two lan-
guages other than those spoken in the Soviet Union. T h e similarity
of thefiguresindicates a similarity of geographical distribution.
Nine-tenths of the books exported by the U S S R are absorbed by
the socialist countries. A little less than half the United States exports
go to other English-speaking countries, where they have to face
British competition.
For the rest, the percentage breakdown by region gives a fair idea
of the areas on which the two major powers are concentrating the
bulk of their erTorts. Excluding other socialist countries, exports of
Soviet books may be broken d o w n as follows :

Western Europe 41%

English-speaking America 21%
Far East 16%
Latin America 6%
Near East 4%
Africa 3%
Miscellaneous 7%

T h e main emphasis is thus on Europe and English-speaking

America. It is not surprising that, on the American side, the emphasis
should be on the Far East and Latin America. Excluding the English-
speaking bloc, American book exports m a y be broken down as
follows :
Far East 33%
Latin America 27%
Europe 25%
Near East 8%
Africa 4%
Miscellaneous 8%

T h e size of these enormous distribution circuits is increasing from

year to year. They involve both advantages and disadvantages. T h e
advantages are especially evident in regard to the distribution of
functional books in the developing countries. In almost all cases,
these books are not and cannot be produced by the importing coun-
tries. But the same does not apply to literary books, which are, when
all is said and done, the only m e d i u m for cultural communication.
T h e literary book is, as w e have already said, distinguished by the
fact that it calls for active participation on the part of the reader. It
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 95
is the reader w h o must stimulate production, whether local or
imported.
Large-scale exports of such books under the translation pro-
grammes laid d o w n by the country of origin and in which the
receiving country has no say therefore represent the main obstacle
to the emergence of a genuine written culture for the masses.
This danger, moreover, has been recognized on both sides. T h e
Soviet Union n o w sponsors books published outside its o w n fron-
tiers—books which therefore represent a more direct means of main-
taining contact with the consumer public.
Similarly, a conference on the development of publishing which
took place in Washington in September 1964 noted in its recom-
mendations that a policy of publishing development was needed in
the user countries themselves and that assistance should be granted
to local publishing and bookselling industries.
In any case, a genuine world book market requires the stimulus of
translations m a d e locally and in immediate contact with the reading
public rather than exports and imports of printed matter.

Translations
Translations account for approximately 10% of the titles produced
throughout the world. According to the IndexTranslationum, 31,384
translations were published in i960 by forty-four countries whose
total production in the same year amounted to about 310,000 titles.
Allowing for the fact that m a n y original works are translated into
several languages and therefore occur several times in the list of
31,384 titles, and also that a certain number of the works—between
3 and 5% approximately—are classics translated from dead lan-
guages, it is clear that translations still play only a small part as a
means of international communication.
T h e situation is aggravated by the fact that 72 or 73% of transla-
tions throughout the world are from one of the main literary lan-
guages, English, Russian, French or G e r m a n . This proportion has
scarcely varied since 1950. English has the lion's share with 34%,
Russian accounts for 16%, French for 13% and G e r m a n for 10%.
In the case of Russian, however, it should be noted that thefigureof
16% does not have quite the same significance as thefiguresin
respect of the other languages. So far as the latter are concerned
(except in the cases of Switzerland and Belgium which are special),
translation implies in principle export outside the national frontiers.
Q6 THE B O O K REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing

In regard to Russian, on the other hand, almost half of the transla-

tions are intended for peoples of the Soviet Union w h o do not use
Russian as their language of communication. In order to obtain an
acceptable basis for comparison in respect of international circula-
tion, w e must therefore eliminate translations from the Russian
published in the Soviet Union. But this solution is not entirely
satisfactory either, since the Soviet Union also exports books trans-
lated from the Russian into languages which are not spoken by any
of its peoples. For this reason, the two series offiguresare shown
side by side in Table X I V below, which sets out the gross translation
figures for forty-four countries in i960. In the comparisons to be
m a d e hereafter, however, only the second series will be taken into
account—i.e., the series which leaves out translations from the
Russian distributed within the Soviet Union.

TABLE XIV
Translations throughout the World
(Gross IQ6O Figures for 44 Countries)

TRANSLATING TOTAL ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

COUNTRY English Russian French G e r m a n Others
44 countries 31,384 10,808 4,958 3,965 3,050 8,633
USSR 5,5o8 663 2,289 186 298 1,820
USSR* 2,967 663 — 186 298 1,820
Germanyf 2,958 1,321 323 527 4 783
Czechoslovakia i,548 no 405 76 119 838
Italy i,5i3 583 45 440 227 218
France 1,425 678 65 43 206 433
Spain 1,416 651 15 305 220 225
United States 1,294 5 168 428 286 407
Netherlands 1,269 750 29 143 220 127
Sweden i,075 667 33 74 109 192
Japan 976 579 73 166 132 26
Belgium 874 420 17 119 177 141
Yugoslavia 849 190 88 121 122 328
Poland 803 186 172 106 100 239
Portugal 797 202 12 143 28 412
Norway 761 562 6 26 37 130
Switzerland 677 288 n 126 no 142
* Not including works translated from the Russian,
f Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Germany.
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 97
TRANSLATING TOTAL ORIGINAL LANGUAGE
COUNTRY English Russian French German Others
Denmark 666 355 14 57 73 167
India 618 262 47 28 H 265
Finland 618 298 17 36 77 190
Rumania 595 26 247 26 34 262
Bulgaria 548 24 296 19 31 178
Israel 532 237 21 38 52 184
Brazil 464 210 19 120 35 80
Argentina 421 203 10 77 55 76
United Kingdom 411 7 15 126 69 194
Turkey 400 151 17 85 41 106
Hungary 398 64 119 69 71 75
UAR 306 234 II 31 6 24
Korea 233 147 10 28 30 18
(Republic of)
Greece 192 107 18 44' n 12
Mexico 173 116 5 17 9 26
Iceland 134 50 2 10 18 54
Ceylon no 58 8 3 0 41
Albania 108 2 20 8 5 25
Austria 103 62 3 22 0 16
Iran 102 79 3 4 3 26
China (Taiwan) 100 83 2 8 3 4
Canada 53 29 0 8 2 14
South Africa 52 28 0 4 7 *3
Indonesia 50 18 2 1 2 27
Viet-Nam 49 22 0 25 2 4
(Republic of)
Chile 42 16 3 8 4 9
Burma 35 27 0 2 0 6
Pakistan 29 24 0 0 0 5

T h e translating countries have been listed in the above table in

order of importance, beginning with those which publish the largest
number of translations. It will be observed that, even w h e n works
translated from the Russian are excluded, the Soviet Union still
heads the list, immediately followed, it is true, by Germany, or,
more precisely, the two Germanys, since the translation statistics
m a k e no distinction between them.
T h e main currents of exchange m a y be seen at a glance. T h e most
important is from the English area in the direction of Germany
(1,321 titles), with the English flow towards the Netherlands, France,
g8 T H E BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
the U S S R , Sweden, Spain, Italy and Norway coming well behind
and being of very similar importance (750 to 562). T h e n comes a
fairly wide gulf between this group and Belgium's 420.
It is at roughly this level that the French currents begin, the most
important being the Franco-German (527), followed by the Franco-
Italian (440), the Franco-American (428) and, trailing far behind,
the Franco-Spanish (305). T h e outflow from Russian naturally goes
in thefirstinstance to the socialist countries, extending from 405 in
the case of Czechoslovakia to 119 in the case of Hungary, although
G e r m a n y is still a good customer with 323, as is the United States
with 168. T h e G e r m a n currents are more diffused and distributed
more evenly—the U S S R and the United States are roughly at the
same level, and Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and France come
between 298 and 206.
It will be observed that only a few translations are published in
the United Kingdom, although this country is the second largest
exporter of books in the world. This indicates, up to a certain point,
that translations may be regarded as complementary to the book
export trade. Within this language bloc, where production is high
and a large number of customers exists, there is no necessity to call
on outside production: books in English are exported from one
English-speaking country to another and are exported primarily
from Britain. T h e United K i n g d o m is the perfect example of what
•we have called a "literary anticyclone". Currents go out from it but
are not drawn into it. This self-sufficiency results from the strength
of the British book market, but as far as the future is concerned, is
also one of the great weaknesses of English literature.
T h e fact that certain countries attract translations while others
resist them becomes evident w h e n , instead of the grossfigures,w e
consider thefiguresin relation to national production. W h a t is the
proportion of translations in each country in relation to the total
production of books ? W e have already seen that the world average
was 1 0 % , but there are very considerable variations from this
average, as m a y be seen from Table X V .
O n e thing is immediately apparent from this table. A s already
pointed out, the world average is in the region of 10%, and it is
here that w e find such countries as France and Germany, where
the pattern, generally speaking, is close to that of the world average.
But twenty-six countries are above the average while only eighteen
are below. This imbalance clearly demonstrates that the countries
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 99
TABLE XV
The Proportion of Translations
Percentage of translations in relation to national production (i960)
LARGE TRANSLATORS AVERAGE TRANSLATORS SMALL TRANSLATORS
Country % Country % Country %
Israel 34-0 Italy 197 Rumania 9-4
Albania 2
S-5 Denmark 18-9 Brazil 9-4
Finland 24-8 Iceland 18-9 Mexico 8-8
Belgium 23-9 Sweden i8-5 United States 8-6
Norway 23-3 Iran 17-9 Hungary 7-6
Spain 23-3 Czechoslovakia 17-0 China (Taiwan) 6-3
Bulgaria 16-3 Ceylon 6-2
Netherlands 161 India 5-8
Yugoslavia 15-8 Viet-Nam
Korea (Republic of) 5-0
(Republic of) 14-4 Pakistan 4-8
Switzerland 13-8 Indonesia 4'5
UAR 13-3 Japan 4-1
Greece 12-2 USSRf 4-0
Portugal 12-0 Austria 3-0
Turkey II-6 Chile 27
France II-2 South Africa 2-0
Poland II-O Canada 1-9
Germany* I0-9 United K i n g d o m 1-7
Burma 10-6
Argentina 10-4
* Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Germany.
j- Not including works translated from Russian into another Soviet language.

below the average are those with the highest production, and these
include the United States, Japan, the U S S R and—the furthest b e -
low of all—the United K i n g d o m . This provides a striking confirma-
tion of the fact that the higher a country's production, the less need
that country has of a contribution from outside. This is one of the
least obvious but most serious dangers that material and intellectual
strength can entail for the culture of a great country.
Unless precautions are taken for the systematic maintenance of
links with other countries, there is reason to fear the consequences of
cultural inbreeding. It is not only the underdeveloped countries
which need a strict publishing policy.
ioo THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
However this m a y be, the main translator countries are headed by
those "low-pressure areas" mentioned above—first and foremost,
Israel, followed by Finland, Belgium and N o r w a y (Denmark, Ice-
land, S w e d e n and the Netherlands c o m e fairly close behind, a m o n g
the average translators). W e also have the other type of translator
country, such as Albania or Spain, which, because of temporary
historical circumstances (very different in the two cases), is not in
a position to produce at a level high enough to meet its d e m a n d .
In the face of this imbalance, it m a y be asked to what extent the
translator countries are tributary to the large producer countries.
Table X I V showed the dominant currents of translation in absolute
terms. It will be interesting to consider them also in relative terms—
i.e., to see what proportion of translations in each country are drawn
from one or another language. A n attempt has been m a d e to establish
this in Table X V I , where the countries are classified according to the

TABLE XVI
Dominant Translation Trends—Dominant Languages in ig6o
Percentage of translations in each translator country for each
original language

COUNTRY ORIGINAL LANGUAGES

Miscel-
English Russian French German laneous
A . Dominant language :English
i. Only dominant language
Pakistan 83 — — — 17
2. Plus Russian dominant
Ceylon 52 7 3 — 38
India 42 8 5 2 43
Indonesia 36 4 2 4 54
Poland 23 21 13 13 30
3. Plus French dominant
China (Taiwan) 83 2 8 3 4
Iran 78 3 4 3 12
Burma 77 — 6 — 17
UAR 77 4 10 2 7
Mexico 67 3 10 5 15
Austria 60 3 21 — 16
Japan 59 8 17 14 2
Greece 56 9 23 6 6
 Miscel-
EnglishRussian French German laneous
Canada 55 — 15 — 30
Argentina 48 2 18 13 19
Spain 46 1 22 16 15
Brazil 45 4 26 8 17
Germany* 45 11 18 — 26
Switzerland 43 2 19 16 20
Italy 39 3 29 15 H
Chile 38 7 19 H 22
Turkey 38 4 21 10 27
Portugal 25 2 18 4 49
Yugoslavia 22 10 H 14 40
4. Plus German dominant0
Norway 74 1 4 5 16
Korea (Republic of) 63 4 12 13 7
Sweden 62 3 7 10 18
Netherlands 2 11 J
59 17 3
South Africa 54 — 8 13 25
Denmark 53 2 9 11 25
Belgium 48 2 14 20 16
Finland 48 3 6 12 31
France 48 5 3 15 29
Israel 45 4 7 8 36
Iceland 37 2 8 13 40
USSRf 22 — 6 10 62
B . Dominant language : Russian
1. Plus French dominant
Albania 6 61 7 5 21
2. Plus German dominant
Bulgaria 4 54 3 6 33
Rumania 4 42 4 6 44
Hungary 16 30 17 18 19
Czechoslovakia 7 25 5 8 54
C . Dominant language : French
1. Plus English dominant
Viet-Nam (Republic of ) 45 — 51 4 —
2. Plus German dominant
United States — 13 33 22 32
United Kingdom 2 4 31 17 46

* Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Germany.

° See also A . 2 Indonesia and A . 3 Yugoslavia.
f Not including works translated from Russian into another Soviet language.
102 T H E BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
dominant language and then reclassified within the resulting groups
according to the second dominant language.
Quite clearly, only English and Russian can truly claim to be
primary dominant languages. French dominates in only three coun-
tries, two of which are the great English-language producers—
namely, the United States and the United Kingdom, where English
obviously cannot be a source of translation and hence does not c o m -
pete with other languages. T h e third country is the former French
colony of the Republic of Viet-Nam.
The position of French is none the less still strong, since the most
frequent combination is English as thefirstdominant language, with
French as the second. Such is the case of eighteen countries out of
forty-four. A m o n g these countries, the cases of Germany and Austria
in regard to translations from the G e r m a n is similar to that of the
United Kingdom and the United States in regard to translations
from the English, in that G e r m a n is the national language and there-
fore cannot compete with other languages as a translation source.
T h e same applies to France, where G e r m a n is the second dominant
language, since French, as the national language, cannot compete
with G e r m a n . This being said, it will be observed that those coun-
tries which combine English and French are,firstof all, the countries
of Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal), together
with the Middle Eastern countries (Iran, U A R and Turkey), the
Latin American countries (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Chile) and
certain Far Eastern countries (China (Taiwan), Burma and Japan).
T h e case of Canada is too obvious to require comment.
While the English-French combination is found in eighteen coun-
tries, English-German is found in twelve. Most of these are Northern
European countries with a Germanic rather than a Latin tradition.
T o these should be added Israel, where, however, French is almost
on the same footing as German.
T h e English-Russian combination is found in five countries,
three being relatively underdeveloped Far Eastern countries (Cey-
lon, India and Indonesia) and two European people's democracies
(Poland and Yugoslavia). Similarly, people's democracies appear
among the countries—five in number—where Russian is the main
dominant language. Russian is most frequently linked with German
(Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) since the latter
has always been one of the main languages used for the communica-
tion of Marxist thought. French is the second dominant language
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS IO3
only in the case of Albania, a fact which is not surprising since most
of the Albanian leaders are French-speaking.
Another question arising is that of the nature of the translations.
W e k n o w that the place held by literature in the production of the
various countries differs very greatly. T h e same applies to transla-
tions. A country m a y be primarily interested in obtaining literature
from another country or, alternatively, m a y be primarily interested
in obtaining scientific information. Table X V I I embodies three lists,
each of them representing a regrouping of the decimal classification
categories. T h efirstconcerns translations of a literary nature, the
second those relating to the social sciences (history, sociology, d e m o -
graphy, h u m a n geography, economics, etc.), and the third works in
the pure and applied sciences. In each list, the countries are ar-
ranged in decreasing order of the importance they attach to the
category concerned. Thus, 84% of the translations m a d e in Iceland
consist of literary works, whereas only 14% of those in Indonesia
belong to that category. Conversely, 70% of Indonesia's translations
relate to the social sciences, as against only 13% of Hungary's. It
will be observed that three columns, numbered 1, 2 and 3, follow
each of the percentage columns. C o l u m n 1 refers to "literary low-
pressure" countries—i.e., with a high cultural level and hence a
high d e m a n d , but a numerically small population and a small dis-
tribution area for the language. There are six such countries, each
of them indicated by a cross. C o l u m n 2 relates to the seven English-
speaking countries on the list, whether English is the main or only
the secondary language. Finally, column 3 refers to the eight coun-
tries of the European socialist bloc. This arrangement will enable us
to examine the relation between each of these three very different
factors and the dominant interests in translation.
It is obvious that the "literary low-pressure" countries confirm
the hypothesis w e made about them. It will be seen that they are
all grouped together at the head of the "literature" list. S o far as
these countries are concerned, translations representfirstand fore-
most a supplement to the literary material available. N o n e of them
devotes less than three-quarters of its translation activities to litera-
ture. O n the other hand, the same countries, which have highly
developed university systems, are less dependent on foreign produc-
tion in respect of the social sciences and occupy a position at the
foot of the social science list which is absolutely symmetrical with
their position at the head of the literary list. N o n e of them devotes
io4 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
TABLE XVII
Dominant Translation Trends—Types of Works dominating in ig6o

LITERATURE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Country % 1 2 3 Country % / 2 3
Iceland 84 Indonesia
Norway
+ United Kingdom
70

Portugal
81
81
+ Iran
63
58
+
Hungary Burma
Denmark
77 + UAR
51

Sweden
75 + Argentina
50
46
Austria
75 + Pakistan
Netherlands
74
United States
45 +
Finland
74 + Brazil
44 +
Canada
73 + India
43
Albania
72
+ Ceylon
42
+
Greece
71
69
+ Chile
41
40
+
Germany 66 South Africa 39 +
Belgium 65 China (Taiwan) 37
Viet-Nam Mexico 35
(Republic of) 63 Spain 35
Turkey Bulgaria
Yugoslavia
63
62 Israel
34 +
France 62
+ Switzerland
34
34
Israel 60 Italy 33
South Korea 59 Japan 33
Italy 57 Viet-Nam
Switzerland 56 (Republic of) 33
Czechoslovakia Korea
Chile
55 + (Republic of)
55 31
USSR France
Poland
54 + Poland
30

Japan
53 + Yugoslavia
28
+
Spain
51
Rumania
28
27
+
China (Taiwan)
51
Albania
+
India
51
Belgium
26
+
Rumania
50
48
+ Canada
26

Ceylon 46
+ Germany
26
+
Brazil
+ Greece
26
26
44
South Africa 44 + USSR 26
+
UAR 42 Austria 24
Argentina 40 Czechoslovakia 22
+
United States Turkey
40
+ 22
Burma 37 Denmark 20 +
Bulgaria 37 + Netherlands 20 +
Mexico 36 Portugal 18
United Kingdom 30 + Finland 18 +
Iran 2 Sweden
Pakistan
3
Norway
16 +
17 + 15 +
Indonesia H Iceland +
Hungary 13 +
PURE AND APPLIED SCIENCES
Country % 1 2 3 Country % 1 2 3
Pakistan 38 + Switzerland 10
Bulgaria 29 + Yugoslavia 10
+
Mexico 29 Belgium 9
Rumania 25 + Finland 9 +
Czechoslovakia 2 Sweden
USSR
3 + France
9
8
+
20 + 8
Poland
Iran
19 + Germany
India
18 8 +
South Africa 17 + UAR 8
United States 16 + United Kingdom 7
Indonesia 16 Israel 6
+
Japan 15 Netherlands 6 +
Turkey 15 Chile 5
Spain 14 Denmark 5 +
Argentina 14 Greece 5
Brazil 13 Norway 4 +
Ceylon 13 + Viet-Nam
Burma 12 (Republic of ) 4
China (Taiwan) 12 Albania 3
Hungary Canada
+
Italy
10
10
+ Austria
3
2
+
South Korea 10 Iceland 2 +
Portugal 1
m o r e than 20% of its translation activity to these sciences. A s regards
pure science, the trend is the same as in the case of the social sciences,
although it is not perhaps quite so clear-cut. Although the six coun-
tries c o m e at the foot of the list, they are not grouped together to the
same extent as in the previous column. T h e reason for this difference
is probably that the production of original social science books calls
mainly for social scientists, whereas the production of books dealing
with the pure a n d applied sciences calls for technical installations
which are not always within the reach of countries with a small
population, however rich those countries m a y be.
io6 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
A comparable symmetry is apparent in the case of the English-
speaking countries, but the general trends are less clear-cut. Canada,
in particular, displays a pattern which deviates from that of the other
countries in its language bloc and comes closer to that of the coun-
tries in column i. T h e other English-speaking countries do not
translate m a n y literary works, a fact which confirms the belief that
the insularity of English is indeed of a literary kind. O n the other
hand, the same countries are extensive translators of social science
publications, although membership of the English-language bloc is
apparently not a factor of distinction in respect of the pure and
applied sciences. In this branch, the United States and the United
K i n g d o m , which have similar patterns for literature and the social
sciences, differ very greatly from each other. It is probably because
of the development of atomic and space research in the United States
that this country is more receptive than others to foreign scientific
production.
A s far as membership of the group of European socialist countries
is concerned, this would not seem to constitute a factor of distinction
in regard to literature. In Hungary, literature represents 77% of all
translations as compared with 37% in Bulgaria. T h e socialist coun-
tries, however, display a c o m m o n attitude towards functional books.
All of them are m e d i u m or moderate translators of the social sciences,
the proportion being between 13% and 34%. This is perhaps attri-
butable to the fact that, in afieldwhich is closely connected with
their fundamental doctrine, these countries translate mainly within
their bloc and, more especially, from the Russian. It might, h o w -
ever, be remarked that while this would not apply to the pure and
applied sciences category, the percentage of all translations is in
this case only between 3% and 25%, for these countries.
All the foregoing shows that translation plays a very localized and,
above all, a very specialized role in international literary exchanges.
Moreover, w e have so far considered only the four main languages.
W h e r e the others are concerned, the part played by translation is
virtually non-existent. In Italy, for example, between 2,000 and
2,50oliterary works are published annually. Less than fiveof these are
at all likelyto be translated in the United States and less than three in
the United Kingdom. In other words, the distribution of Italian
literature in the two great English-speaking consumer countries is
negligible, even though Italian is the language of a European coun-
try. If w e n o w turn to Chinese, for example, w e find that all the
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 107
translations m a d e in Western Europe and the United States together
amount to barely one half of one thousandth of one of the richest
productions in the world. This is not due to political considerations,
since Japanese is just as badly placed : the total n u m b e r of trans-
lations from the Japanese varies within a given period between 1-2
and 1-5 for every thousand translations m a d e throughout the world,
and literature accounts for only half of thisfigure.Yet Japanese litera-
ture at present represents between 4% and 5% of the world's output.
There are m a n y reasons for this situation. So far, attention has
been concentrated mainly on the problem of international copyright,
which involves the same institutional barriers which hinder the free
circulation of books. Additionally, the system for paying authors
varies greatly from one country to another, and the protection of
literary property after the author's death likewise varies to a con-
siderable extent. A s early as 1886, forty-six countries, most of them
European, and including the United K i n g d o m , France and the
British and French possessions, accepted the Berne Convention,
Article 4 of which stipulates that "authors w h o are subjects or
citizens of any of the countries of the Union shall enjoy in countries
other than the country of origin of the work, for their works, whether
unpublished orfirstpublished in a country of the Union, the rights
which the respective laws do n o w or m a y hereafter grant to natives."
Article 2 of the Universal Copyright Convention, concluded in
Geneva in 1952 as a result of Unesco's efforts, embodies a similar
position but carries protection still further. This convention has so
far been signed by forty-five countries, most of them already signa-
tories to the Berne Convention.
It should be added that the pirating of books, which consists of
translating a work without paying royalties, is still very c o m m o n .
This is regrettable both morally and economically, yet it must be
recognized that elimination of this clandestine market would reduce
exchanges still further. It exists mainly in those countries where the
currency is too "soft" or the market too small for publishers to be
able to add the payment of substantial royalties to their other costs.
T h e real obstacle to translation is therefore the problem of invest-
ment arising from the particular costs of this type of publication. If
w e agree that the smaller the market, the larger a publisher's profit
margin should be, it is obviously difficult for a small country to
indulge in publishing ventures where to the residual rights of the
original publisher and the author must be added the translator's.
io8 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: The New Look in Publishing
T h e translation market is unlikely to develop in the near future
since its shortcomings are precisely those of international life in the
modern world. It is true that it has the benefit of certain technical
advances, more especially in the sphere of communications. T h e
time for translation has considerably decreased over the last few
hundred years. In the days of Don Quixote, it tookfiftyyears for a
book to circulate throughout Europe, whereas n o w books are c o m -
monly translated within a year of their original publication. This
apart, however, the situation is basically the same as it was w h e n
printingfirstbegan. Translation is not an extension of publication
but is superimposed on it and introduces a new complexity into the
already cumbersome machinery.
Books undergo theirfirsttest within a certain literary market,
language bloc, ideological bloc or State. W h e r e a book fails this
test, there is no longer any question of translating it even though, in
other countries, there m a y be an unsuspected public eager to wel-
come it. If it has some success, options will be taken on it, but will
hardly ever be implemented and the book will undergo a second
process of selection, m a d e haphazard on the basis of superficial
readings. This selection is all the more severe in that it is gratuitous
and without any sound sociological groundwork: very few people
are capable of appraising a book in one language and predicting the
effect it will have, w h e n translated, on a public speaking another
language.
Hence, even if the book is accepted by a foreign publisher, it must
run all the risks involved in a second venture, with the translator's
involvement added to that of the author, sometimes with disastrous
results. T h e venture, moreover, is all the less tempting in that the
financial risks are increased because of the n u m b e r of parties con-
cerned. Translated books must compete with books published in
their original language. It is difficult to increase a margin of profit
which must provide for payment to the author, the original publisher,
the second publisher and the translator. Generally speaking, it is the
latter w h o suffers—which is a mistake, since good translations are in
fact rewritings and the ideal translator should be at least as talented
as the author he is translating.
Since translators are mostly mediocre and poorly paid, it is by no
means certain that the enterprise will be a literary success even if it
provesfinanciallyadvantageous. Works in translation are offered to
a public for which they were not originally designed, a public which
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS 109
did not demand them, which did not seek them; they are sent forth
in garments which are not their o w n nor those of which the n e w
readers dreamed, and they are therefore deprived of that capacity
for dialogue which is basic to literary life. T h e most that can be
hoped for is that the book will at least be "deformed" to some pur-
pose, that it will serve, as Kipling said, "to uphold or to embellish
same ancient truth restated, or some old delight returned" (9). It
would be a mistake to neglect the contribution m a d e by such "crea-
tive treason" (10), to which so m a n y works owe their survival and
even a sort of immortality, but it can scarcely be accepted as a rule
and still less as the basis for a translation policy.
If there is any solution to the problem it m a y perhaps be found in
mass publication, which cannot m a k e do with unduly narrow dis-
tribution areas. T h e huge printings involved mean that linguistic
boundaries must be overstepped and the heavy investments m a d e in
such publishing provide the means to achieve this. Continental
Europe and Asia, each in its o w n way, m a y find a solution to their
multilingual problem in one or more " c o m m o n translation markets".
T h e system of translations within the U S S R m a y provide a source
of inspiration, if not a model. Fifty out of every hundred works
translated into Russian were originally published in other Soviet
Union languages andfiftyin foreign languages. Out of every h u n -
dred works translated into the various non-Russian languages of the
Soviet Union, five were originally published in one of those lan-
guages, eighty in Russian andfifteenin a foreign language. Out of
every hundred works translated into foreign languages, ninety were
originally published in Russian, between six and eight in a non-
Russian language of the Soviet Union, and the remainder in a
foreign language. It is true that Russian accounts for the bulk of
these exchanges, but this is justified by the overwhelming numerical
superiority of Russian-speaking people in the U S S R , while, in any
case, the volume and variety of the exchanges are very m u c h greater
than any to be found elsewhere in the world.
A few tentative but successful efforts (11) suggest that a similar
policy might be established between European countries which do
not have a universal language. It would be sufficient to regard pub-
lication of a book from the outset as being designed for several
countries. T h e books to be published could be selected on the basis
of the global requirements of a public drawn from several nationali-
ties. At the very beginning, the author would collaborate with his
i io THE BOOK REVOLUTION : The New Look in Publishing
translators, guiding and perhaps being guided b y t h e m . While the
artist'sfiatm a y remain an individual thing, there is none the less a
stage in the process of literary composition which can be carried out
by a team. W h e n the time c a m e to manufacture the book, it w o u l d
already have several different faces, all of them similar; it would have
several voices, all of t h e m authentic; and it would already have over-
c o m e the language barrier. Just as the author's royalties would be
included in the fees paid to the team, so the cost of each national
edition would be included in the overall calculations for the financial
undertaking.
In terms of paperbacks, conceived o n the scale n o w found in the
United States, the increase in costs would have only a minimal effect
o n the retail price per copy and, in any case, the translated editions
would be m o r e profitable than at present.
T h e above paragraphs are in the subjunctive, but could certainly
be put into the indicative at s o m e future stage. Undertakings of this
kind will b e c o m e practical propositions only w h e n the revolution in
the book world has m a d e itself felt in the hearts and minds of m e n .
F r o m one end to another of the chain, author, publisher, bookseller,
librarian and even individual readers must consent to undergo the
radical change which books themselves have already undergone.

NOTES
(i) See David T . Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Régime,
op. cit., and m y o w n article, also quoted previously, La problème
de Vâge dans la productivité littéraire.
(2) T h e generally accepted figure of 3-5 readers for 1 purchaser was
confirmed by all surveys. T h e expression 'act of reading' is used
to mean reading by an individual of an individually acquired text.
(3) R . E . Barker, op. cit., p. 21, Table 3.
(4) School and technical books at present account for 9 0 % of consump-
tion in the economically developing countries (Conference on the
role of books in economic and social development, Washington,
11-15 September 1964).
(5) In regard to the questions dealt with in the following pages, see the
Unesco pamphlet Trade Barriers to Knowledge, revised edition, 1956.
(6) La Monographie de VEdition, published by the Syndicat National des
Editeurs Français, on p. 83 of the 1963 edition, givesfigureswhich
 THE MAIN EXCHANGE PATTERNS III
differ slightly from ours but are of the same order (United King-
d o m : o-8%; United States: 0-4%; France: 0-59%; Federal Ger-
m a n y : 0-26%).
(7) Book Publishing in the USSR, American Book Publishers Council,
N e w York, 1963, p p . 39-43. This is the report of a delegation of
American publishers w h o visited the U S S R in 1962. T h e figures
are given in 'heavy' 1962 roubles.
(8) Report by M r Warren M . Robbins, of the United States State
Department, on the role of publishing in cultural development
(typed Unesco document).
(9) Address to the Royal Society of Literature, 1926.
(10) See R . Escarpit, "Creative treason" as a Key to Literature. Yearbook
of Comparative and General Literature, Bloomington, Indiana,
N o . 10, 1961.
(11) E.g., the joint publication by Sythoff of Leyden and Heinemann of
London of Netherlands novels in Dutch and in English, in the
'Bibliotheca Neerlandica' series, with the assistance of the Prince
Bernhard Foundation. B y mid-1965, eight major publishers an-
nounced they had formed a group for the co-publication of books
in seven languages. They belonged to the following countries:
U . S . A . , United Kingdom, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Ger-
m a n y , Italy, Spain. T h efirstfivebooks were to appear in February
1966.
PART THREE

Future Prospects
 CHAPTER
I

The Publishing Dilemma

Immediate popular successes and steady-sellers

I N a famous passage in his Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie,
Diderot wrote, " A folly continually committed by those w h o let
themselves be ruled by general theories consists in applying the
principles of cloth manufacture to the publication of books. These
people reason as though publishers could manufacture in strict pro-
portion to their sales and the only risks involved lay in eccentric
tastes and changing fashions; they overlook or are unaware—which
they m a y indeed be—that it would be impossible to sell a book at a
reasonable price without producing a sufficient number of copies
of it. W h a t remains of an old-fashioned material in the mercers'
warehouses is still of some value; what remains of a poor book in a
publisher's stocks is of none. T o this must be added the fact that,
out of every ten ventures, one is successful—and this is already a
great deal—four make ends meet in the long run, andfiveshow a
final loss." (i)
This text dates from June 1767. T w o hundred years later, not-
withstanding all the changes that have occurred both in publishing
techniques and in the structure of the reading publics, it remains
essentially true. Let us concentrate on thefinalobservation concern-
ing publishing ventures. Diderot distinguishes three types of books:
those which are immediately successful, those which succeed "in the
long run", and those which fail. H e considers that the proportion
of failures is the measure of the commercial hazard that publishers
have to face. In this particular regard, the situation is probably
somewhat different nowadays. Publishing houses have become large
firms with huge capital resources which enable them to spread the
risk over a large number of operations.
It is none the less true that a book is a failure if the publisher loses
all or part of the m o n e y he puts up, and that it is a success if the
116 THE BOOK REVOLUTION : Future Prospects
publisher not only recovers his investment but also makes a more
or less substantial profit. Moreover, modern publishers, like Diderot
himself, consider that there are two sorts of successes—a "cash-
d o w n " success, where a book brings in returns very quickly in a
single operation without any further tying-up of capital, and a "long-
term" success, which calls for a long-range policy during which the
capital involved and even all or part of the profit are hazarded several
times over.
There are, therefore, several forms of success. "Fast-sellers" very
rapidly achieve high sales, pay for themselves within a few weeks
and then gradually drift into oblivion without there being any need
to tie u p fresh capital for reprints. "Steady-sellers" start slowly but
evenly and their sales are subject only to seasonal variations occa-
sioned by holidays, the beginning of the school year, literary prizes,
gift seasons, etc. These books pay for themselves over a period of
months or even years, but their enduring popularity enables the
publisher to reinvest his capital several times over without any
danger. Finally, best-sellers represent the most spectacular type of
success, since they combine both sorts of sales—beginning as fast-
sellers, they end u p as steady-sellers.
T h e curves in Diagram 2 illustrate these three types of successes(2).
T h e months are shown along the axis of abscissas, and monthly sales,
estimated as a percentage of the m i n i m u m quantity of copies which
must be sold to ensure a profit, are given as the ordinates. In actual
fact, publishers do not k n o w the exact salesfigures,at any rate in the
months immediately following publication. T h e y only k n o w the re-
stockingfigures—i.e.,the orders placed by bookshops after the
copies they hold on a sale or return basis, or previously purchased
by them, have been sold. It is only w h e n unsold copies are returned
after several months that the real sales can be evaluated. Neverthe-
less, if w e accept the hypothesis that any re-order represents the sale
of at least one copy, w e can obtain a fair idea of the rate of sales. T h e
main thing is to be able to forecast the situation with sufficient
accuracy to decide in good time whether the book in question
should be reprinted or not. A n over-evaluation of sales m a y leave the
publisher with unsold stocks on hand which will eat up, and more
than eat u p , his profits. Miscalculation in the other direction is
liable to break the flow of sales by interrupting supplies to book-
sellers while reprinting, decided on too late, is hastily carried out.
T h e following examples are based on actual cases, but distortion
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 117
due to the individual features of the works concerned have been
eliminated so as to make these cases more representative.

DIAGRAM 2
Restocking Curves

Fast-seller
so 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — I — 1 —
B r e a k - e v e n point
11
40
/ \
30 X S.
/
.20 / X • » >
10
<

Steady-seller
B r e a k - e v e n point Decision
to rep nn •

1
"N. S

Best-seller

s
S

In the case of the fast-seller, the curve is a simple one. After a

time-lag, which m a y vary in duration but which seldom exceeds
three weeks, sales begin and rise immediately to their m a x i m u m
level. Thereafter, they tend to diminish steadily in line with a curve
118 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects

which is recognizably a hyperbola of the function x = -. If the fore-

casts have been accurate, sales will drop to practically nothing just
before the initial stocks are exhausted, so that there will be no
occasion to reprint.
T h e curve in respect of the steady-seller is quite different. Sales
figures do not soar sharply at an early date, but maintain a regular
level and seasonal variations recur in roughly the same form each
year. It is therefore relatively easy for the publisher to m a k e his
forecasts. Profits are slow, but the decision to reprint can be taken
without undue risk once a certain stage has been passed—e.g., w h e n
stock in hand is less than sales over the precedingfinancialyear.
T h e best-seller curve combines the features of both the fast-
seller and the steady-seller. A best-seller is in fact a fast-seller which,
at a certain point, develops into a steady seller while still retaining
certain features of its original sales pattern. It starts like an ordinary
success : a time-lag followed by a peak and then by the beginning of
a
a decline in line with a hyperbola of function x=-. At a certain point,

however, the descending curve is interrupted and starts to follow

the m o v e m e n t of that of a steady-seller. M a n y publishers fail to ap-
preciate the significance of this break in the curve and are taken un-
awares by the sudden change in the pattern. It is true that it is very
difficult to m a k e forecasts in respect of best-sellers since, as will be
seen later, best-sellers are books which break out of the social circle
for which they were originally intended. Sales show the same seasonal
variations as in the case of the steady-seller, but, from time to time,
there are seemingly unaccountable upward movements w h e n the
best-seller penetrates a hitherto untouched social group. T h e pattern
is then the same as in the case of the book's original launching. Sales
rocket, sometimes higher than at the time of the initial spurt, and
this is followed by the beginning of a descending hyperbola. If the
book is destined for lasting success, a secondary breaking-point is
then found, reintroducing the pattern of the steady-selling book.
T h e three types of curves seldom occur in their pure form. T h e
typical steady-seller is almost always a functional book which meets
a continuing need—e.g., a school textbook, a scientific treatise or, an
even better example from the stability angle, a cookery book.
Successful literary books generally have the transitory quality of
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA I19
the fast-seller. Best-sellers are extremely rare and represent barely
2 or 3 % of successful books. Even so, it must be clearly understood
that the best-seller is determined not by the number of copies sold
but by the type of sales pattern, in other words by the combination
of an initial peak and a descending hyperbola interrupted at the
breaking-point w h e n the book's sales level off. A book m a y be a best-
seller with a sale of 50,000 just as m u c h as with a sale of 3,000,000.
Very few books have a long life. O u t of a hundred works published,
scarcely ten still sell a year later, and ten times fewer twenty years
later. A confirmation of this m a y be found in the fact that the number
of titles available for sale in a given country amounts to about ten
times the average yearly production.
This rapid attrition in literary production has been highlighted by
H a n s Ferdinand Schulz in his book Das Schicksal der Bücher und der
Buchhandel (3). His method consisted in examining successive re-
issues in relation to G e r m a n literary production between 1950 and
1958. It can be seen at once that, o n the average, second editions
represent roughly 10 % offirsteditions, that eighth editions represent
1% and that twenty-fifth editions represent o-i%. "Edition" is
taken here as meaning not only n e w publications of the same text by
the same or another publisher, but also successive re-impressions of
a given work using the same plates. It will therefore be seen that
there is only one impression where the overwhelming majority of
books published in the Federal Republic of G e r m a n y is concerned.
These are either failures from the bookseller's point of view or books
of the fast-seller type.
It is of particular interest to check the hypothesis put forward
earlier w h e n w e identified popular successes with literary books and
steady sellers with functional books. H a n s Ferdinand Schulz pro-
vided separate figures for the various types. Table X V I I I repro-
duces those relating to literary books, on the one hand, and to school-
books, o n the other. In order to facilitate comparison, the first
column, for each type, gives the grossfigureswhile the second shows
h o w m a n y thesefiguresrepresent per 1,000 first editions.
It is clear that literary books decline m u c h more rapidly than
school-books.
In fact, two entirely different types of publishing are involved. It
is not the different features of their form or their aesthetic merits
which determine whether books belong to the category of popular
successes or steady sellers, but the very structure of the publishing
120 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
T A B L E XVIII
Reissues in the Federal Republic of Germany between igjo and IQ$8
LITERARY BOOKS SCHOOL-BOOKS
EDITIONS Gross Figures per 1,000 Gross Figures per 1,000
ist 24,455 1,000-0 8,462 1,000-0
2nd 2,403 98-3 2,677 316-4
3rd 732 29-9 1,404 1659
4th 471 19-3 1,074 126-7
5th 334 13-7 825 97-5
6th 272 II-2 664 78-5
7th 188 11 505 59-6
8th 146 6-0 389 46-0
9th 142 5-8 288 34-0
10th 102 4-2 217 25-6
nth 82 3"4 168 19-8
12th 66 2-7 124 14-7
13th 59 2-4 87 10-3
14th 63 2-6 81 9-6
15th 61 2'5 73 8-6
16th 54 2-2 71 8-4
17th 47 19 55 6-5
18th 35 1-4 54 6-4
19th 37 1-5 49 5-8
20th 45 1-8 47 5-6
(Source: Hans Ferdinand Schulz.)

process as deliberately laid d o w n by the publisher, having regard to

the type of work which h e is distributing and the type of public at
which he is aiming.

Programmed publication and non-programmed publication

T o convey the concept of publication most languages use one of two
metaphors which are contained in the Latin word edere {ex dare) and
publicare. T h e former means literally to bring into the world, to give
birth, and is to be found in such words as the French éditeur, the
Russian izdatelstvo and the G e r m a n Verlag and herausgeben. T h e
latter implies the existence of an anonymous mass of prospective
readers at the disposal of w h o m the literary work is put and accounts
for such words as the English publisher, the French publier and the
G e r m a n Veröffenlichung or Verbreitung.
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 121
In the one case attention is directed to the work and its birth, in
the other to the u n k n o w n reader and his unpredictable reactions.
T h e mere issuing of a book (in the edere sense) is a self-contained
and self-justified action, while its publication involves considerable
risks. N o - o n e publishing a book can forsee exactly h o w m u c h atten-
tion potential readers will give it. H e m a y make guesses or even fore-
casts, but he cannot outline in advance the path to be followed by a
book which has been put into circulation, he cannot determine the
stages and limits of its distribution; in a word, he cannot establish
a programme for it. Strictly speaking, publication is non-programmed
issuing.
But there is also programmed issuing. T h e clearest case of this is
the sale of a book by advance subscription. A s the market is guaran-
teed by the fact that the volume is paid for in advance, the program-
ming is very strict. It is somewhat less so in the case of book-club
editions, but these h e m in the potential reader with so m a n y c o m -
mitments that the dangers of variation m a y be regarded as reduced
to a m i n i m u m .
Certain forms of semi-programmed issue bear the same relation
to publication in the true sense of the term as ground-bait fishing
does toflyfishing.This is the case, for instance, of books distributed
within a closed circle whose requirements are k n o w n and whose
preferences have been thoroughly established. A s w e have already
seen, this applies to most functional books and, more especially, to
school-books. But it also applies wherever a specialized public is
involved, a group of readers socially distinct from other groups and
with readily identifiable characteristics. Devotees of science fiction,
for example, or of certain types of detective novels, are often grouped
around those somewhat esoteric magazines which Americans call
"fanzines". It is easy to establish the tastes of such readers and to
foresee their reactions, if only through the letters they write to their
favourite magazine. This gives rise to literary production which is
both programmed and alive, in that the exchanges which take place
around the fanzine keep it from becoming mechanical and cut- and-
dried. T h e same cannot be said, unfortunately, of groups of readers
which are too large for communication to be established, but whose
tastes are sufficiently similar to be satisfied by rudimentary program-
ming. This applies particularly to a whole section of children's
literature which works on a very narrow range of themes and ap-
proaches. It applies, above all, to the "photo-novels" or sentimental
122 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
popular novels which represent a very low level of psychological
maturity.
This, incidentally, is the great danger of programmed publication.
F r o m the publisher's point of view, it isfinanciallysafe; but it im-
poverishes and sterilizes literary communication precisely because
it does away with the element of uncertainty. A s far as a large section
of literary opinion is concerned, the unforeseeable choice m a d e by
the reader is the only way in which he can indicate his aesthetic
judgment and cause it to be reflected in production. Non-program-
m e d publication, involving a large number of ventures and relatively
few successes, makes a sort of natural selection possible. It m a y well
be felt that natural selection is not the best means of ensuring high
quality in literary communication, but it must be recognized that, in
the world as it is, it is also one of the few means practicable.
Nor must w e minimize the importance of literary works which do
not succeed. Success is merely the spectacular aspect of an intellec-
tual and artistic life, which takes m a n y forms. It m a y be that only
one book in a hundred achieves lasting fame; even so, one hundred
books have been published and have, all in all, been read by a not
insignificant number of readers, one hundred publishing ventures
have been carried out by publishers whose selection was m a d e from
a m o n g hundreds and perhaps thousands of manuscripts submitted
by as m a n y potential authors, with all that this implies in the way of
intellectual and artistic activity at every level. T h e intensity and
richness of a country's literary life is to be measured not by the
n u m b e r of its best-sellers, but by the n u m b e r of its writers and
readers, by the range of their talents and tastes, by the multiplicity of
the exchanges, by the variety of cultural experiments of all kinds.
France is neither the largest producer nor the largest consumer of
books—far from it—but it is undeniably one of the countries whose
literary activity is most intense. Paris is one of the cities where an
author receives his laurels, just as a bullfighter receives his in Madrid.
Literary books with sales in excess of 10,000 in a given year account
for barely 3 or 4% ofthat year's total production and, at most, for
10% of the strictly literary production; books which fail economi-
cally represent—as m a y easily be calculated—a number of acts of
reading at least equal to and probably higher than those in respect
of successful books.
This gives us food for thought. W h e r e publishers, avoiding risk,
seek to do too m u c h programming and, in particular, are loath to
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 123
push a book beyond the limits of its original public by means of bold
reprintings and energetic sales promotion, they do, of course, keep
their firms going, but they forget that their duty and their interest
also lie, on the one hand, in giving the unknown writer his chance
and, on the other, in ensuring that an established author finds a
suitable reward for his work. If other publishers adopt the same
attitude, they all run the risk offindingthat the intellectual effer-
vescence and restlessness which are the very atmosphere of literary
activity have disappeared, and without that effervescence and rest-
lessness books lose their living social support and become consumer
goods like any others, like those—as Diderot would say—which are
produced in manufactories. T h e y run the risk, in fact, of killing
their o w n jobs.
This being said, the fact remains that too little programming is
as bad as too m u c h . M a n y publishers, especially in Europe, tend to
operate on the basis of big hauls, taking in scores or even hundreds
of titles. T h e returns are very low. It is no longer, as Diderot sug-
gested, one book in two which fails but eight or nine in every ten.
A publisher w h o turns out 120 novels a month is not surprised to
find that more than a hundred of them are read by only a handful of
people.
N o n e the less, he continues on the same lines, thereby proving
that, generally (but not invariably), he makes a profit. H e does so
because the operation is distorted at the outset by the commercial
machinery which has grown out of a publishing industry more con-
cerned with security than with expansion. Natural selection, which
becomes lethal from the writer's point of view, is largely offset, as
far as the publishers are concerned, by the law of large numbers. In
this gamble, they win every time or, at any rate, do not lose very
much—except, obviously, in the event of persistent ill-luck, inveter-
ate blundering or major shortcomings in organization. Everything is
based on experience and on commercial calculation. Experience
shows that, given a m i n i m u m degree of care in selecting titles, b e -
tween 4 and 5 % of the works published will run to medium-sized
printings and one, from time to time, will make its way into the
category of very large printings. Commercial calculation reveals that,
once a certain sales level has been passed, the scale of profit sud-
denly changes, so that a single success can offset scores of failures.
A book's retail price is calculated on the cost price of the first
printing, which, nine times out often, as w e have seen, is the only
124 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
printing. In France, for instance, the m a x i m u m retail price, as far as
literary works are concerned, is established on the basis of the
KF .
formula C = — - , C being the retail price, d being the author's
I ~ Kw
royalty per i franc of the retail price, k being a coefficient varying
according to the rate of such royalties, and F being the unit m a n u -
facturing price. In practice this amounts to multiplying the m a n u -
facturing price by a coefficient which m a y vary, depending on the
country and the type of book, from 3 to 5. T h e cheapness of a book
depends on the low cost of unit manufacture in thefirstprinting.
Since basic printing costs are considerable, the unit manufacturing
cost decreases in proportion to the n u m b e r of copies printed. T h e
whole secret of mass-circulation books is that the initial printing is
extremely high, a circumstance which naturally implies tying up
considerable capital. W h e r e ordinary non-programmed publication
is concerned (and especially literary publication distributed on a
limited scale), such risks cannot be afforded, so that, except in the
case of an established author, the printing is limited to a number of
copies sufficient to provide a reasonable profit at a reasonable retail
price. This initial printing generally ranges, depending on the
country concerned, from 3,000 to 10,000 copies.
T o illustrate these somewhat abstract data, let us take the case—
purely theoretical and very m u c h simplified—of a publisher w h o
has paid $5,000 for the type-setting, printing, paper and binding
of 5,000 copies of a book (4). T h e unit cost being $1, he decides to
fix the retail price at $5 a copy, the coefficient in this case being 5.
W e shall assume as a reasonable average that the author's royalties
and distribution costs (advertising, commission to salesmen, dis-
count to wholesalers and booksellers, etc.) amount roughly to 66f %
of the retail price, so that the publisher takes in more or less $1.65
for each copy sold. Before he can m a k e up his accounts, however, he
must, no matter what the sale m a y be, begin by recovering the
$5,000 he paid out to the printer and then meet his direct and
general overheads (editorial and business salaries, warehousing, ship-
ping, taxes, etc.), which w e shall assume for the sake of argument to
represent 40% of the investment m a d e in the book concerned—i.e.,
in this case, $2,000. In order to recover this $7,000, the publisher
must sell 4,250 copies of the 5,000 he printed. H e reaches then what
is k n o w n as the "get out" or "break-even" point, and he can expect
to m a k e a profit on the sale of the remaining copies, which, by the
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA "S
way, are m u c h less than 750, since two or three hundred have been
sent out for review or used for other publicity purposes and a few
m o r e given to the author. T h e yield of those copies will be more or
less $700 net—i.e., including the recurring expenses in the invest-
ment—a profit of roughly 10%. Should the book sell out within a
few months, this rate of interest is not to be lightly dismissed.
W h e r e sales are disappointing, the m a x i m u m loss amounts to $5,000
or, if recurring expenditure (direct and general overheads) is in-
cluded, $7,000.
O n the other hand, there is no limit to the profits which m a y be
m a d e if the book continues to sell. Let us assume that our publisher
reaches the break-even point in six weeks, sees indications that he
has a best-seller, and decides to reprint. Let us likewise assume that
he is cautious and orders a reprint only of the same size as the original
edition. This time he will not pay $5,000 for 5,000 copies since the
printer will have kept the type set up. T h e manufacturing costs of a
book are of two kinds. O n the one hand, there is what is known as
the plant (composition and, eventually, plates), for which the pub-
lisher has not to pay again, and on the other hand there is manufac-
turing proper for which he has to pay in proportion to the size of the
printing. T h e latter includes paper, presswork and binding. Bind-
ing is an important item in hard-cover publishing, so that a reprint
is always more advantageous in countries like France where even
quality books are currently paper-bound. In an article on general
publishing in Britain (5) W . G . Taylor states that while producing
the printed sheets of a 256-page crown octavo book in afirstedition
of 3,000 copies costs about £350 (in 1957), a reprint of 1,500 sheets
of the same book costs about £120, which means the unit manufac-
turing price of the reprint (excluding the invariable cost of binding)
represents approximately 65 % of the original manufacturing price.
O f course, the proportion varies according to the size of the original
edition.
In our example (a 5,000 copiesfirstprinting and a 5,000 copies
reprint) w e shall admit the unit cost drops by 30%—i.e., from $1 to
70 cents. T h e retail price, however, does not drop, and the return is
still $1.65 per copy sold. T h e n e w investment amounts to $3,500
plus $2,000 in recurring costs—i.e., $5,500—from which m a y be
deducted the $500 profit on thefirstprinting, leaving a total of
$5,000. As soon as the 3,oooth-odd copy of the second printing has
been sold, the publisher reaches a n e w break-even point and, if the
126 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
second printing sells out, he makes a profit of roughly $3,250, which
means that if he wishes to try it again, he needs an additional invest-
ment of only $250 for the printer. At this point his profit margin
reaches a m a x i m u m since, manufacturing costs being practically
covered by earlier profits, he has to meet only those running costs
which cannot be reduced. This means that if the book has an actual
sale of 100,000, he m a y expect a net profit of well over $50,000.
Before w e cry out against thisfigure,w e must remember that a
sale of 100,000 is exceedingly rare, at any rate in respect of ordi-
nary editions with a limited distribution. In fact, weighing u p
chances, a publisher with a single book is hardly any better placed
for a comparable gain than the owner of a sweepstake ticket.
Fortunately for the trade there is no such thing as a publisher
with a single book. In the long run, failures and successes counter-
balance one another, and according to a survey conducted in 1964 by
the American Book Publishers Council, only actual sales being taken
into account, the average profit represents roughly 9-5% of the
manufacturing investment and 4 % of the total investment, all over-
heads included (6).
This is indeed a very narrow margin. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that publishers should seek methods to avoid risks. O n e of
those methods is a "Malthusian" policy tending to underestimate
the prospective sales of a particularly risky book (thefirstnovel of a
young writer, for instance) and to satisfy itself with a "cash" break-
even which leaves the care of heavy general overheads to safer ven-
tures. In an article on the management and accounting of the book
business (7) George P . Brockway studies the case of an ordinary-
length $3.50 novel. Although his methods of calculation are s o m e -
what different from ours, one m a y easily compare his figures with
those w e quote above. H efirstgives the case of a normal edition of
7,500 copies taking the general overhead into account and then that
of a "safer" cut-down edition of 5,000 copies which leaves aside the
problem of the general overhead. (See table opposite.)
Obviously in thefirstcase the publisher cannot sell 7,759 copies
out of a printing of 7,500, while in the second case, if the edition
sells out rapidly, he m a y hope for a cash profit of $2,500, which will
boost his business and allow h i m immediate reinvestment in a fur-
ther venture. In fact, this short-term policy m a y prove extremely
advantageous to him. T h e trouble is it cannot prove advantageous at
all to the author whose gains even in the case of a sell-out will be
 T H E PUBLISHING D I L E M M A 127
strictly limited to a bare $1,750. Only a long-range publishing
policy—which necessarily takes the general overheads into account
and sets the whole operation on afirmfinancialbasis—can give him
a fair chance and provide h i m with an incentive to go on writing.
Normal edition Cut-down edition
Investment
Plant $1,000 $1,000
Manufacturing $3,750 $2,750
Advertising $2,000 $1,500
Total $6,750 $5,250
Unit sales pice $ 3-50 $ 3-50
Unit costs
Discounts 1-50 1-50
Royalties -38 -35
Direct overhead -io -io
General overhead -65
Total 2-63 1-95
Amount available -87 1-55
n r 1 $6,750-00 $5,250-00 00
Break-even sale - =7.759 J" =3,388
$ -»7 $ 1-55

Another method is to rely on the fact that in the long run the p u b -
lisher's profits are bound to offset his losses, since the latter are
limited in extent, while the former are not. Even casting his net at
random in the current literary production, a publisher is statistically
sure to haul every n o w and then, a m o n g the small fry of unsaleable
books, a sufficient percentage of m e d i u m - or best-sellers. This is
particularly true in a country like France where literary life is both
active and varied. Let us assume that a French publisher has c o m -
pleted a publishing programme covering fifteen identical works.
Each of these books had afirstprinting of 3,000 and the total in-
vestment, including recurring expenditure and general overhead,
amounted to 210,000 francs. Even if onlyoneof these books is reprint-
ed m a n y times and sells 100,000 copies while the others sell none at
all (something which never happens), the net profit still amounts to
90,000 francs, a comforting 43 % and a very satisfactory return. If
w e take a more likely eventuality and assume that, out of a pro-
g r a m m e of one hundred titles, seventy sell an average of 200 copies,
ten sell out thefirstprinting, nine sell 20,000 and one sells 100,000,
the profit still amounts to some 200,000 francs on an original invest-
ment of 1,400,000 francs.
128 THE B O O K REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
All of this, obviously, is purely theoretical, but it applies in a great
m a n y cases. It has very often happened that a single best-seller, p u b -
lished in several hundreds of thousands of copies and intelligently
exploited, has kept a publishing house going for several years without
being immediately endangered by careless management, errors of
judgment and commercial blunders. A great deal of bad publishing
can be done under the shelter of a little good publishing. This sort
of negative security encourages publishers to avoid making a respon-
sible selection. This is a lottery in which the law of averages always
operates in favour of the punter. T h e result is that the profitability
of the venture as a whole is always guaranteed without directly
bringing into question the personality of the authors or the quality
of their work. It is for this reason that a great part of the literary
production (especiallyfiction)circulating nowadays is m a d e u p of
slapdash, ill-digested and badly written works which any self-
respecting literary editor should either reject out of hand or send
back for rewriting.
Hence, non-programmed publishing, like programmed publish-
ing, w h e n carried to excess, leads to economic neutralization of the
writer, to a divorce between his profit-earning capacity and that of
the publisher. Experience proves that any such divorce invariably
results in a deterioration in literary communication. A s long as
literature was only a socially limited phenomenon, as long as it was
possible to regard as literature only those works which are considered
by an intellectual élite to be good, this deterioration could be over-
looked and the works affected by it could be consigned to the under-
world of sub-literature. This becomes utterly impossible as soon as
literature emerges as an act of mass communication.

Mass-circulation books
T h e falling hyperbola representing the sales rate of a fast-seller is
due to the gradual saturation of the public for which the book was
intended. This saturation naturally does not apply to all the indivi-
duals making up that public, but only to those to w h o m this particu-
lar book is likely to be of interest—i.e., those w h o are likely to react
consciously and independently on reading it. Doubt as to the iden-
tity of the potential readers, together with the impossibility of fore-
seeing their reactions, is precisely the factor which gives n o n -
programmed publication its creative quality. That a fast-seller
should be unable to go beyond a certain distribution is quite natural,
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 129
since the limits are set by the n u m b e r of people in the public
concerned by that particular book.
This public, moreover, must be sufficiently large to "carry" the
book both from an economic and from a literary point of view. In
the vast majority of cases, however, this public is a social group
which is both narrow and scattered. Even in those countries where
the cultural training of the masses has been undertaken on a systema-
tic basis, it is evident that the reading public (which w e have
already defined as the public capable of independent acts of reading)
is not commensurate with the cultivated public (i.e., people capable
of making a reasoned judgment of what they read) and, even less,
with the real public consisting of the actual book purchasers.
In the large book-producing countries of Western Europe, the
real public represents between 3 and 5% of the reading public. T h e
whole machinery for the production and distribution of books is
designed with a view to this minority. T h e ceiling for an ordinary
bookshop success can therefore be estimated on the basis of the
number making up that public. In France, for example, where the
real public numbers approximately one million, the m a x i m u m sale
for a book distributed through normal bookselling channels m a y be
estimated at roughly 300,000, on the assumption that there is an
average of 3-5 acts of reading for each purchaser.
It is very likely that a book reaching this level will already be
shaping as a best-seller, since it is inconceivable that all the readers
constituting the real public should have been interested in it from
the outset. It mustfirsthave proved successful with a portion ofthat
public and then, before reaching saturation point, have gone beyond
the bounds of this initial group to win over other groups and, step by
step, the public at large. Once again it must be pointed out that this
crossing of social boundaries constitutes the specific phenomenon of
the best-seller. Hence, there m a y be best-sellers at several levels.
T h e example described above concerns a best-seller within the real
public, and, in France, its sales m a y range from 150,000 to 300,000.
Such is the case of a good Prix Goncourt winner. Other best-sellers,
even before saturating that portion of the real public which they
m a y reach, begin to gain segments of the literate public which are
not ordinarily in the habit of reading. Sales m a y then be very high
indeed, amounting, as far as France is concerned, to between 500,000
and 800,000. In the early years of its existence, Pierre Daninos'
Les Carnets du Major Thompson was a typical example of this sort of
130 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
success. It should be noted that the change in the scale of sales does
not lead to any significant change either in the distribution or in the
presentation of the book. It continues to sell at a high price, in an
edition similar to that of books with a limited circulation, and it is
purchased mainly in the ordinary bookshops.
T h e situation is quite different as regards a third type of best-
seller which is peculiar to our age. This is the book which goes
beyond the limits of the literate public to penetrate the broad masses
of the reading public. In this case, other social strata and classes
are involved. It is no longer possible to use the same technical pro-
cesses or to follow the same routes. T h e book must undergo that
mutation which has given rise to the mass-circulation book, the
paperback or livre de poche. So long as it remained within the bounds
of the cultivated public, the book had to do with relatively h o m o -
geneous social groups, having comparable social behaviour patterns,
living standards, habits, tastes and intellectual background. Beyond
those limits, however, it enters u n k n o w n territory and everything is
changed—price, appearance and selling methods.
O n e of the reasons w h y the paperback revolution was so dramatic
in the United States is that the real reading public as w e defined it
earlier never amounted to more than 1 to 2 % of the adult literate
population. Even n o w the cultivated readers of regular bookstores
are hardly more numerous. This means that the conventional book
trade in the United States had to rely on a mass of prospective
readers no bigger than the French million and certainly less than
half what the British book trade can expect. Indeed, such a situation
was clearly reflected in the outputfiguresof the earlyfifties,w h e n
the United States were seventh a m o n g book producers, just after
France, and halfway from the British Western world leadership. It
is also reflected in the distribution of books as it was described in
1958 by Frank L . Schick: "There are about 9,000 outlets of all
kinds and sizes for hard-cover books in the United States, of which
about half m a k e an effort to handle new, non-specialized books, but
only 500 can be considered to be effective stores, adequately stocked;
an additional 1,000 stores attempt to offer a fairly good general book
service; and 3,000 stores provide at least the most popular modern
books." (8)
If w e consider that the French network included at that time more
than 3,500 regular bookshops—one for each 10,000 adult literate
Frenchmen, the American situation certainly looks rather appalling.
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 131
T h e consequences were all the more spectacular when the paperback
broke into the mass-circulation network which Frank L . Schick
describes as including "nearly no,ooo retail outlets, ranging from
newstands on street corners, in subway and railroad stations, bus and
air terminals, drug and department stores and supermarkets, to ex-
clusive paperback stores and general and college bookstores". (9)
T h e mass-circulation book must go where the masses are. It
accordingly takes on the appropriate appearance, abandoning the
sobriety designed for an élite in favour of the vivid colours designed
to appeal to mass tastes. A n d the price, in particular, is brought into
line with the prices charged for ordinary consumer goods mass pro-
duced by modern industry. W h e n thefirstPenguin books appeared
in 193 5, they cost sixpence—i.e., slightly more than 5% of the price of
a normal hand-bound volume. Although in the United States 25-cent
paperbacks have n o w disappeared, the average retail price of a mass-
circulation paperback is 50 cents—i.e., between 10 and 13% ofthat
of a hard-bound adult trade book. Although the percentage m a y vary
(in France it ranges from 15 to 20%) the price of a mass-circulation
book tends in most countries to be no higher than the entrance
ticket to a popular cinema. This is true also of socialist countries :
in the U S S R the price of a paperback novel is roughly 55 kopecks,
or about 60 cents.
A s w e already know, such prices m e a n huge printings. In the
United States, where big business, with its enormous capital and
high-power methods, broke into the book trade in the late forties,
the initial printing for a mass-circulation paperback is seldom less
than 100,000 and is frequently very m u c h higher. In January 1963,
for example, Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, which
was published by the N e w American Library in its Signet Series at
95 cents (already a "quality" price), had afirstprinting of 1,050,000.
It is true that not all printed copies are sold. Unsold paperbacks
in the United States represent an estimated 40% of the printings,
a m u c h higher proportion than for hard-bound books. O n the other
hand, the overwhelming invasion of paperback titles is not so clearly
reflected in the sales. In the mid-fifties 1,200 paperbacks were pub-
lished yearly in the United States out of a total book production of
12,000 titles—i.e., a bare 10%—while in the mid-sixties, w h e n the
American production reaches close to 30,000 titles a year, paper-
back titles number nearly 10,000, which means an astounding 33!%.
In the same ten years paperback sales climbed only from 250,000,000
132 THE BOOK REVOLUTION : Future Prospects
copies sold for 50 million dollars to 600,000,000 copies sold for
100 million dollars, which means a comparable proportion of the
general volume of the trade.
O n e of the reasons for this kind of comparative stagnation of sales
is the abundance of titles put on the market. T h e same happened in
Britain to Penguin Books, as Sir Allen Lane very clearly explained :
" T h e more choice the reading public is offered, on its limited book-
buying budget, the more selective it becomes—with the result that,
as the years go by, m a n y titles sell less than their predecessors did.
Instead of afirstprinting of 80,000 or 100,000 copies, therefore, a
more prudent current figure will be 40,000 or 50,000 copies—and
this cutting-down of printing quantities becomes an element in
fixing the selling-price of the book." (10)
T h u s a Penguin book which cost 6d. w h e n a hard-cover novel was
priced 7s. 6d., n o w costs 2s. 6d. when the hard-cover novel is still
only 18s. In the United States, after the heyday of the 25-cent paper-
back, prices began a steady climb towards the dollar. At the same
time a n e w type of paperback developed, with a m u c h more con-
servativefinancialbalance and a m u c h more reduced prospective
public. Those "quality" paperbacks, sold for 95 cents to 2 dollars
and more, cannot be considered as a mere reinvention of the French
livre broché. T h e y differ from the mass paperback only by the fact
that they aim at a limited public which is still "a mass", but not
any mass, which of course reduces the risks.
A very significant feature of the quality paperback trade is that it
m u c h more readily publishes n e w books than the mass paperback:
75% of the latter are reprints, while 57% of the former are n e w
books. In fact, the quality paperback is an attempt—the future will
say if it is a successful attempt—to cope with the problem of pro-
gramming in mass publishing.
L o w prices demand huge printings, but huge printings demand
enormous investments. A hard-bound novel can be published in the
conventional way for a few thousand dollars, while a paperback
publisher m a y have to pay several hundred thousand dollars in
royalties, printing, advertising, before he is likely to receive a cent.
It will be appreciated that a non-programmed edition can hardly be
considered for this type of book. T h e cumulative risk would be too
great, and it would be impossible to find sufficient capital to ensure
that the law of large numbers came into play.
T h e American literary paperback is therefore most often a reissue
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 133
of a book which has already proved itself or is in process of proving
itself a best-seller among the literate public. This is the only w a y of
reducing the hazards. T h e same does not apply to the functional
paperback, the very nature of which makes strict programming pos-
sible since it is designed to meet an identifiable need. Although it
m a y seem paradoxical, scientific books are the ones which can most
readily be adapted to the requirements of mass distribution. It was
a scientific collection, the Que sais-je? series, whichfirstused the
formula successfully in France. B y systematically introducing the
paperback into universities, the Americans have managed to make
libraries less like m u s e u m s , turning them into consumption centres
where students find themselves in the very heart of the living world
of books and can engage in daily intercourse with those books ( n ) .
A s far as literary books are concerned, it is infinitely harder to
establish intercourse with the consumer. T h e mass-circulation book
as it is at present conceived, and as it is conditioned by our social
structures—more especially, the social structures of the Western
world—provides the masses, in what m a y be called a dictatorial way,
with works called forth by and designed for narrower social groups.
Here w efindourselves, at the level of social strata and classes, con-
fronted with the same problem of "bestowed" or "imposed" litera-
ture which, at the national level, w e found between literary high-
pressure and low-pressure zones.
If, for example, w e consider French production of the pocketbook
type, w e see that, in the literary sector at any rate, most publishers
have restricted themselves to two types of books : as regards con-
temporary literature, to best-sellers of all kinds; as regards earlier
literature, to works considered of importance in literary history as
seen by the universities. Atfirstglance, this might seem to furnish
adequate material, and, in the enthusiasm aroused by novelty, the
reader is amazed at coming on cheap editions of texts which have
become unfindable or inaccessible. In this latter respect, he is quite
right, but this apparent abundance is misleading. Year in, year out,
a country like France publishes between 150 and 200 successful
books, of which barely twenty are genuine best-sellers. A s for the
classics, the stock of those remaining to be rediscovered is by no
means inexhaustible. T h e thousand or so authors w h o make up the
historical image of French literature as seen by scholars (and the list
includes the lesser known authors) have at most produced 5,000 or
6,000 works which are really suitable for mass distribution or,
 THE B 0 0 K
134 REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
indeed, for distribution of any kind. Even if translations be added,
this gives a corpus of only a few thousand older titles, to which are
added, at best, two or three hundred modern titles a year, and nothing
further can be expected from programmed literary publication which
is restricted to certainties, and will not run the risks inherent in trial
and error. This is quite inadequate to sustain a publishing trade and,
above all, to arouse and maintain genuine intellectual activity among
the masses.
Penguin Books in Great Britain recognized the problem long ago
and have attempted to solve it, but the solutions so far tried have
been no more than palliatives. If w e look closely at the Penguin out-
put, w efindthat the firm is kept going by the programmed sector,
whether in the form of the functional books of the Pelican series, the
children's Puffin books, the green-covered mystery and crime thril-
lers, or reprints of standard works in the main Penguin series.
Compared with this huge programmed production, the attempts
m a d e to branch out into n e wfieldsseem insignificant, even if some
of them—such as the famous experimental Penguin N e w Writing—
have had a beneficial influence on British literary life. It is, besides,
doubtful whether, at any rate until recently, the Penguin manage-
ment really thought in terms of real mass publication. Even now, as
w e have seen, they feel that their books are designed for an élite.
T h e fact is that they derive originally from an élite, and this is the
great difficulty. Various efforts have been made in France and G e r -
m a n y over recent years to inject n e w blood into mass-circulation
books, but such efforts have always come from fairly narrowly de-
limited cultivated circles, and often, indeed, from literary cliques.
W e have left the socialist countries out of account, since their pub-
lishing is always more or less programmed and their books are always,
in principle, aimed at the masses.
T h e problem of the mass-circulation book therefore remains u n -
touched. By making works produced by the cultivated sector available
to a far greater readership than they have ever had before, publishers
m a y save literary life from the emptiness, sterility and decline to
which undue concentration on non-programmed publication in the
erroneous fashion outlined above m a y reduce it; but such books are
still none the less "imposed" books, eliciting no response. It is a fact
that literary criticism does not give the same place to mass editions
as to traditional editions, even in the United States, where p u b -
lishers c o m m a n d enormous means of propaganda (12). In France,
 THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA 135
it w a s ten years before the m a i n literary papers paid any attention to
pocket books (13).
A n d even if the literary critics and literary periodicals were to give
particular attention to such books, the problem would not b e solved,
since the literary opinion reflected in such criticism and such
periodicals is still that of the cultivated public. W e shall always dis-
cover without difficulty h o w an intellectual or a semi-intellectual
reacts to a popular success which has run its course in a few weeks,
but w e shall not k n o w the reactions of the office worker, the factory
hand or the housewife w h o has suddenly c o m e u p o n Sartre, Goethe
or H o m e r through a chance purchase in the local chain store.

NOTES
(1) Denis Diderot, Lettre historique et politique adressée à un magistrat
sur le commerce de la librairie, June 1767, pp. 38-39.
(2) For concrete case studies, see Jean Hassenforder, Etude de la diffusion
d'un succès de librairie, multigraphed document from the Centre
d'Etudes Economiques, Paris, 1957. See also D r Peter Meyer-
D o h m , Der Westdeutsche Büchermarkt, op. cit., passim.
(3) Hans Ferdinand Schulz, Das Schicksal der Bücher und der Buchhandel,
2nd edition, Berlin, i960.
(4) See Daniel Melcher, Trade Book Marketing in the United States, in
Book Distribution and Promotion in South Asia, edited by N . San-
karanarayanan, Unesco and Higginbothams, Madras, no date,
pp. 140-8.
(5) W . G . Taylor, General Publishing (p. 50), in The Book World Today,
edited by John H a m p d e n , London, Allen and U n w i n , 1957.
(6) Thisfigureis drawn from the very interesting study L'industrie et le
commerce du livre aux Etats-Unis, published by J. M a m e , President
of the Centre de Productivité du Livre, in Bibliographie de la
France, N o s . 21-22, 25 M a y and 1 June 1965.
(7) George P. Brockway, Business, Management and Accounting (pp. 226-
228), in What Happens in Book Publishing, edited by Chandler B .
Grannis, N e w York, Columbia U . P . , 1957. See also Break-even
Point on Novels: What Cost Factors are Involved, in Publishers'
Weekly, 12 October 1964, p. 27.
(8) Frank L . Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, Bowker, N e w
York, 1958, p. 102.
136 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
(9) Ibid., p . 103.
(10) Sir Allen Lane, Paper-bound books (p. 104), in The Book World
Today, op. cit.
(11) See Paperbacks in the Schools, N e w York, Bantam Books, 1963.
(12) See Jay Tower, Reviewing Paperbounds, in Publishers' Weekly,
11 September 1961, pp. 30-33.
(13) See the special numbers of Lettres Françaises, N o . 1051,29 October-
4 November 1964, and of Les Temps Modernes, Nos. C C X X V I I
and C C X X V I I I , April and M a y 1965.
 CHAPTER
2

Bookshops and Mass Circulation

The cultivated circuit and the popular circuit

C A N books become not only a m e d i u m of mass communication but
also the basis for a mass literature solely through sales in chain stores
and drugstores ? T h e answer to this is contained in a second ques-
tion: are chain stores and drugstores equipped to create that c o m -
munication between the producer of books and the consumer of
books which w e n o w know to be indispensable to any literary
activity ?
T h e special feature of the traditional bookshop is that it is, or
should be, organized with such communication in mind, which is not
the case with the book counter of a store or even with a news-stand
selling books as a sideline. T h e ideal solution would therefore seem
to be to channel all books through the bookshops. Unfortunately,
these shops are instruments for limited distribution and are, for the
most part, accessible to the cultivated section of the population only.
Naturally there is no law or regulation which imposes this social
limitation, but it is just as m u c h imposed by opening hours and
geographical location. In an article published in 1957, Benigno
Cacérès observed that, "With few exceptions, bookshops selling
serious novels are not to be found on the routes used by the ordinary
worker." (1) This means that in the course of his everyday m o v e -
ments, the worker has virtually no occasion to pass by a bookshop
w h e n it is open for business, and, w h e n the opportunity does occur,
he has no sufficient motive to inspire him to go in and buy a book.
This situation was highlighted by the survey conducted in Bor-
deaux in 1960-61 concerning the distribution of book sales-points
in the city (2). There is m u c h evidence that the observations m a d e
during that survey are applicable to most cities in Western Europe
and the United States.
A distinction was drawn in this survey between bookshops, whether
138 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
large or small, which sell books mainly and have an independent
business policy, and bookstalls or sales-points which are distribution
units without real responsibility, book sales dominating in some and
being of secondary importance in others.
T h e bookshop as distinct from the bookstall or sales-point is
therefore distinguished by the extent to which the bookseller is
aware of his public. T h e extent of this awareness can be very easily
measured : one need only compare the window display with the stock
available for sale inside the shop. T h e window is the face which the
bookshop shows the world and hence reflects the image of itself and
its activity which the bookseller would like to convey to his fellow
citizens and potential clients. It reflects, in short, the image of a
theoretical, ideal reader. O n the other hand, the stocks inside repre-
sent the experimentally established reality of the actual public which
frequents the shop.
T h e difference between the window contents and the shop con-
tents therefore indicates h o w far the actual customers differ from the
customers desired, and this discrepancy itself demonstrates h o w far
the bookseller is commercially independent. If his attitude is passive,
if he carries on his trade mechanically, there is no reason w h y there
should not be absolute identity between the contents of the window
and the contents inside. If, on the other hand, he is trying tofindthe
part he should play, to place himself in relation to the public, then
significant differences m a y be expected to emerge.
A n d , in fact, they do emerge. Diagram 3 gives a comparative
analysis of Bordeaux bookshops and bookshop windows. T h e figures
shown as ordinates are the percentages of businesses of the various
types offering books of the kind shown as abscissae either in
their windows (thin line) or in the shops themselves (thick
line).
O n e point is immediately apparent : the contents of the window
and of the shop itself coincide exactly in the case of bookstalls and
more or less exactly in that of sales-points : there is no discrepancy
between the commercial reality and the social image. O n the other
hand, there is a very definite discrepancy in the bookshops and,
more especially, in the large bookshops, which generally have a
complete range of all types of books but systematically keep out of
their windows—besides second-hand books, which are a special
branch of the trade—popular novels, thrillers, mass paperbacks and,
for the opposite reason, more serious literature, the latter no doubt
 DIAGRAM 3
Window Contents and Shop contents

Large bookshops 100

90 ^
80
70 s
\
\
\
\
\ '
• / •

v
\
60
50 \ zz \
40 \ / \
30 _SZ \*r
\
20
10
0

Small bookshops 100

90
80 y \ 1k
70 \ \
y \ \ / ^ L
1\ \
y V // \\
60
SO \ \ /
40 \ >f < s // \\
\\
30
20
V /
\ /
\\ //
V /7 W\ V
10 \1 \ >
0 ' \ .--—
Bookstalls 100
90
80
70
60
,4
,y ^
\
——
V i
I\
t
SO
40
30
//
/
A
Vl I1 \X-
f ^ y V. 1
X ¿^ / ^4
20
10 A^/f Zj
'r— •

0 ^ f
Sales-points 100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
Shop 20
10
Window 0
 140 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
being regarded as too dull even for the ordinary cultivated customer.
Bookshops, therefore, are the only establishments which are de-
liberately aimed at a clearly defined group of customers and which
recognize their customers as such. They are accordingly the only
establishments likely to create the conditions required for a sort of
intercommunication between the producers and the consumers. But
it is obvious that this intercommunication must remain strictly
limited. T h e exclusions and omissions in the booksellers' windows
give sufficient indication of the social groups for which they are
designed. In the large bookshops, the fact that thrillers are kept very
m u c h in the background while more serious literature is given a
relatively honourable place calls to mind the stereotyped attitudes
(which do not necessarily reflect actual patterns of behaviour) of the
intellectual middle class and the liberal professions. In the smaller
shops, thrillers move up and more serious literature comes d o w n ,
but the discrepancy between the window display and the contents
of the shop itself is none the less considerable in respect of all types
of "popular" books. It m a y therefore be thought that w e are once
again confronted with middle-class readers whose cultural attitudes
are perhaps somewhat less exclusive, but who are still very conscious
of belonging to the educated class.
T h e fact that bookshops as a whole are specially designed to cater
for the small cultivated public is demonstrated by their treatment of
recent publications. These are displayed both in the windows and
inside in almost all bookshops. This, indeed, is a distinctive feature
of bookshops, for recent publications are found only in 60% of the
bookstalls and 10% of the sales-points. But such publications, in the
sense of books which have appeared during the previous twelve
months, represent the material from which the cultivated reader
makes his considered choice and by reference to which literary
opinion takes shape.
T h e location of the various types of businesses reveals similar
trends. T h e bookshops are all grouped together in the shopping
centre or in the vicinity of cultural institutions such as schools and
universities, but are not on the routes normally taken by workers
going to or returning from their jobs. T h e meeting points (more
especially, bus stops) around which they mostly have occasion to
walk are situated in residential areas on the outskirts of the town or
in industrial areas where there are virtually no bookshops. Even
those w h o work in the business areas seldom have occasion to use the
 BOOKSHOPS AND MASS CIRCULATION 141
streets in which the bookshops are situated, at any rate w h e n these
are open.
O n the other hand, the sales-points and bookstalls are widely scat-
tered. There are several in practically every district. While means of
transport did not appear to affect the cultivated circuit, they play a
most important part in this latter case. There are bookstalls in all
stations and very often a sales-point near the main bus stops. It is
particularly noteworthy that in those areas where workers leave their
buses or trains and, more especially, in a sort of ring around the
shopping centre, there is a marked concentration of tobacconists
where books are sold.
Allowing for the variations due to different social structures and
cultural levels from country to country, the same pattern recurs
everywhere : a double distribution system comprising two circuits,
one having all the resources and habits required for literary inter-
course but catering only for a limited section of the population, and
the other aimed at the population as a whole but able to serve for
communication in one direction only.
It is therefore obvious that no genuine mass literature can emerge
and develop unless responsible booksellers conscious of the part they
have to play agree to change their approach sufficiently to serve the
huge public of the ordinary m a n and w o m a n w h o have hitherto been
left to what might be called an "authoritarian" distribution machin-
ery. This implies a complete recasting of bookshop structures, a
re-evaluation of the nature of the book trade and a revision of its
obligations. But if this is to be possible, bookshops must not be mis-
understood by the society they are called upon to serve.

The traditional image of bookshops

F r o m the statistician's standpoint, the book trade is lumped to-
gether with furniture, boots and shoes, hardware and textiles under
the general heading of non-food trades. Booksellers are looked on as
book merchants—i.e., as retailers handling objects manufactured
from a raw material, which happens to be paper, and processed by
certain techniques, which happen to be those of the printing trade.
F r o m a strictly economic angle, it must be admitted that this defini-
tion of the bookseller is as good as any other (3).
T h e authorities have not always displayed the same detachment
as the economists in regard to bookshops. Books are not only objects
m a d e out of paper, but also a m e d i u m for communicating thought.
142 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
T h e bookseller who distributes them is in an exposed position at the
end of the chain of communication which spreads information and
culture throughout a country. It is a position which inevitably at-
tracts official attention, disturbs the authorities and arouses in them
a desire to control the distribution of commodities as dangerous and
as effective as books. Ever since bookshops came into existence, all
authoritarian régimes have done their best to shackle them with
strict rules and regulations.
It m a y reasonably be argued, therefore, that the authorities are
aware of the phenomenon of the book trade only so far as it forms
part of a group activity which they consider important: the retail
trade for the dissemination of information and culture. These are
unquestionably group activities covering the book trade, but to
regard bookshops only in terms of such activities is to disfigure them,
distort them and rob them of their very nature. T h e y are no longer
seen whole and round, as a specific phenomenon. Their position in
community life suffers both quantitatively and qualitatively.
T h e quantitative distortion is perhaps the most obvious and
dramatic. Bookshops represent a major element in thelife of the c o m -
munity, as m a y be seen from such elementary considerations as the
space occupied by their displays in the streets of a town or the time
spent by a given social category in reading books purchased from
bookshops; but, if w e consider them in terms of retail trade, w e are
forced to recognize that they are not a m o n g the most important
branches. Their turnover cannot be compared with that of the food
trade or even that of sanitary engineering or household electrical
appliances. Furthermore, if w e consider them as a part of the c o m -
munications machinery, w e are obliged to admit that as a mass
m e d i u m they cannot compete with the cinema, with radio or with
television, even though mass distribution has, of recent years, given
books a greater measure of influence.
Qualitatively, the situation is still worse. Even w h e n States
recognize the existence of the cultural phenomenon, provide an
administrative structure for it, a budget and perhaps even a Minister,
booksellers are looked on as "tainted" because of their commercial
or technical interests and are treated like the money-changers in the
temple, if not indeed worse. Education and religion are protected by
a variety of powerful taboos, yet, in certain respects, are also mass-
communication phenomena, indeed economic phenomena, and have
been studied as such by sociologists. But culture and especially
 BOOKSHOPS AND MASS CIRCULATION 143
literature are still realms where, as far as m a n y countries are con-
cerned, the awe of the sacred overrides social perspicacity (4). Yet it
is obvious that, were there no bookshops, there might be writers but
they would very often go hungry. W h e n w e consider the decisive
influence which the need to live has had on the emergence or orienta-
tion of a given basic literary work, w e cannot but be struck by the
essential nature of the economic relationship between writer and
bookseller.
Whether they will or not, then, booksellers are regarded by their
countries' authorities as dealers in printed paper on the same basis
as newspaper vendors. Booksellers, moreover, often do sell news-
papers as well. Whatever view m a y be taken of it, the sale of news-
papers often provides a very useful support, as far as the public is
concerned, for the sale of books. "Pure" bookshops are rare and, of
all the supplementary activities which accompany bookselling, the
sale of newspapers is far and away the commonest (5). In the
socialist countries where an effort is m a d e to apply a policy to the
book trade, it is effective only so long as books are not separated
from newspapers at distribution level. This situation offers great
advantages but also considerable disadvantages, including the fact
that the public is often inclined as a result to confuse two activities
which, while they m a y be complementary, are none the less very
different one from the other.
T h e public's notion of the nature of bookshops, moreover, is very
vague, even vaguer than that of governments, since the latter are at
least compelled to establish their policy in terms of clear and distinct
categories, even if these are not always in line with reality. This does
not apply to consumers, w h o regard consumer products, and hence
those w h o distribute them, in terms of a need to be satisfied rather
than in terms of a community activity. Whether produced locally
or imported, whether paid for in francs, dollars or pounds, coal is
always a fuel and the coal merchant is the m a n w h o ensures that the
kitchen stove or the heating system keeps on working. As far as the
housewife is concerned, the only difference between the coal m e r -
chant and the supplier of fuel oil, electricity, gas or any other means
of producing heat lies in the varying cost or degree of convenience.
Problems of national or international power policy are on quite a
different level, more especially as domestic consumption of fuels
has only a slight bearing on them. Exactly the same situation prevails
as regards the attitude of the public towards booksellers. Booksellers
 THE
144 BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
are people w h o supply reading matter. Since newspapers represent
an enormous proportion of reading matter, booksellers are basically
no different from newspaper vendors.
In discussing bookshops, therefore, w e are confronted with a fluid
and variable concept which encompasses disparate phenomena with
no points of comparison between them. T o this must be added what
might be called the archaeological strata of the word, since there is
no word which does not have a certain semantic m e m o r y attached to
it and, in the case of words relating to literature, this is particularly
pronounced. W e must not forget that booksellers existed before
printing, and that it is only a relatively short time since the emergence
of the publisher deprived them of most of their responsibilities and
left them with only the least spectacular, which, however, is also
the most formidable, of these responsibilities.
A s m a y be seen, then, the position of the bookseller is by no means
clear cut. W e can n o w appreciate some of the reasons for the in-
definiteness which hinders the practice of the trade and is disastrous
as far as the organization of the profession is concerned. In the eyes
of the authorities and of the general public, alike, booksellers are
always defined by reference to problems which are not specifically
theirs and in which they represent only one element, and by no
means the most important. Dealer in printed paper, distributor of
information and culture, supplier of reading matter—all these des-
criptions undoubtedly apply to booksellers, but cannot possibly by
themselves suffice to define their functions.
This is perhaps because no effort has ever been m a d e to define
them on the basis of books as such, and this omission, in turn, is
perhaps due to the fact that w e do not know exactly what a book is,
even supposing a book to be always the same thing. T h e only useful
definition of a book is one which takes account of the use made of it
and is based on literary or functional communication as described at
the beginning of this study.
W e can then appreciate how far the definition of booksellers in
terms of book sales falls short of perfection. Booksellers sell books
because someone has to recover the costs of manufacture and dis-
tribution and, at the same time, pay for the services rendered, but it
is not hard to imagine systems whereby books would be given away
for nothing without booksellers ceasing to be what they actually are
—one of the channels whereby literary opinion influences production,
one of the aspects of literary production offered to literary opinion.
 BOOKSHOPS AND MASS CIRCULATION 145

Bookshops and social environment

It must, however, be admitted that, technically speaking, bookshops
c o m e under the heading of retail trade. A s such—but only as such—
they are subject to the economic laws governing trade. Books are
something more than packaged goods, and the distribution of reading
material is something more than the mere provision of a service (6).
In his Lettre sur la Librairie from which w e have already quoted,
where Diderot pointed out that other unsold merchandise still
retains some value whereas unsold books have none, he also m a d e the
following observation which is no less clear-sighted : "Books are not
the same as machines whose effect can be shown by testing, they are
not the same asinventions which can be checked ina hundred different
ways, they are not the same as secrets whose success has been
demonstrated. T h e success even of a good book depends on an
infinite number of circumstances, rational or unpredictable, which
not all the shrewdness of self-interest can foresee." (7)
This passage sums up the two problems peculiar to the book trade
which make it different from any other trade—the problem of selec-
tion and the problem of stocking. H o w is the bookseller to tell what,
in an enormous output, will prove saleable, before the full weight of
unsold items affects the balance of his business, and h o w is he, at
the same time, to hold a stock large enough to enable the public to
choose freely ? H e m a y seek to escape from this dilemma by becom-
ing the passive sales representative of large publishing houses or
distribution networks, but he is then no longer a bookseller. H e m a y
take refuge in the sale of safe items to a restricted circle of customers,
but he thereby cuts himself off from all that is vital in his trade and
d o o m s himself to mediocrity and stagnation. O n the other hand, he
m a y protect his business from the danger of idle stock by speculating
on the latest publications, but this is a dangerous g a m e in that it
implies a constantly changing clientèle : readers remain faithful to
their o w n discoveries and failure to follow up a book, an author or a
type of literature means dismissing the public responsible for their
success.
This brings us back to the fact that books are undefinable. T h e
story is told of a certain country with a great m a n y generals where it
was decided to present a rare and valuable edition of an old book to
a general about to retire. T h e old soldier looked at the volume and
remarked, " A book? What's the point? I've already got one!"
146 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
T h e anecdote provides an amusing illustration of the specific
difference between books and other consumer goods, between the
provision of reading matter and other services. W h e n butchers sell
meat, w h e n garage owners repair cars, w h e n chemists recommend a
particular soap, their activities are of interest to all those w h o eat,
travel and wash—i.e., virtually all their fellows. W h e n a bookseller
sells a book, what he does is of interest only to those to w h o m that
book means something. With certain differences in convenience or
enjoyment, one piece of meat can be substituted for another, and the
same applies to cars and soaps. But a given book cannot be replaced
by another, each act of reading is a particular, individual adventure
which cannot be reproduced, replaced or imitated.
It therefore follows that the placing of a book on sale is not c o m -
parable with the same operation for any other product. It excludes
advertising of the usual kind. Anyone wanting to sell soap puts u p
posters in the street, since theoretically he is appealing to everybody.
T h e efficiency of his advertising must be calculated in terms of the
total number of those w h o notice it. O n the other hand, any given
book appeals only to a group which is, simultaneously, determinate
as regards its tastes and indeterminate as regards its make-up, social
level and geographical distribution. T h e use of the hoardings in these
circumstances would necessarily give only an insignificant return in
comparison with the cost involved, since it has to be calculated, not
on the total number of those w h o notice the advertisements, but on
the unidentifiable fraction w h o m a y be interested by the book.
T h e programming of publishing obviously makes it possible to
isolate large groups of specialized readers and justifies a certain type
of group-directed advertising but, if the same system were to be
extended to all publishing, it would m e a n abandoning any selection,
that vital selection which, as w e have seen, m a y be the fundamental
hazard of publishing but also ensures its vitality and creative power.
Advertising in the book trade cannot be other than selective and
aimed at a clearly defined public. This means, in a word, that pro-
gramming, while dangerous at the publishing level, is essential at
the bookshop level. It is for this reason, incidentally, that book-clubs,
door-to-door bookselling and sales by direct mail all represent
serious competition with the traditional type of bookshop. These
various methods of selling consist, in fact, in approaching customers
w h o have been singled out and identified and w h o , in any case, are
not anonymous. In the United States those marginal types of book-
 B O O K S H O P S A N D MASS CIRCULATION 147
selling have developed in proportion to the inadequacy of the regular
bookshop network. This leads American publishers to enormous dis-
tribution expenses, to an inordinate amount of advertising which
represents often more than 10% of the total volume of trade. T h e
system is disastrously inefficient for the publishers are not aware of
their real or prospective customers, and n o programming of retail
distribution is possible.
O f all those involved in the book trade, only the bookseller is in
direct contact with the reader. H e is, so to speak, the sensitive an-
tenna of the structure. Like a front-line soldier w h o simultaneously
carries out the orders of his commanding officers and keeps those
officers informed about the terrain, the enemy, his o w n requirements
and the progress of the battle, thereby contributing to the prepara-
tion of later orders to be carried out, so the bookseller, while acting
as an agent for the literary producer, must also act as his guide and
adviser. His stock of recent publications constitutes the testing-
ground which should enable him, if not to bring into focus the fact
that literature is not necessarily a matter of history—a long-term
task which belongs to criticism—at any rate to determine what is
viable in literary production and to act appropriately.
T h e two main concerns which should govern the bookseller's
policy and, more especially, its adaptation to the environment, are
to detect from the reactions of thefirstreaders the image of what is
likely to survive and then to find a m o n g the general public those
other readers—the "steady readers", so to speak, following the
pioneers—who are awaiting this production and will give it their
support.
A bookshop must be organized and managed differently depend-
ing on whether it is situated in a large city and aimed at the passing
trade, whether it is an all-purpose bookshop in a village, or a utility
bookshop in a housing complex, but, in all cases, the bookseller
must adjust to the threefold necessity of seeking potential readers in
the surrounding population, of being situated on routes taken by the
population in the course of their daily activities, and of awakening
that response which alone enables literary intercommunication to
develop.
It will n o longer be possible for the booksellers of the future to
remain in their shops and wait for customers to turn up. Like it or
not, they will have to become some of the cultural leaders in the
place where they live, whether it be village, district of a town or
148 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
housing complex. This is a task which is already beyond the scope of
individual resources, and booksellers are entitled to expect the col-
lective power of the publishing industry to provide them with the
necessary support and opportunities, while they are likewise entitled
to demand of the public conscience that books should have the
benefit of the same infrastructures as other mass-communication
media and artistic techniques—cinema, radio and television. A s
Joffre Dumazedier, the sociologist of leisure, has written, "Book dis-
tribution must become a process of permanent conquest, as other-
wise the forces hostile to reading are likely to gain the victory
because of their powerful publicity resources. Publishers and book-
sellers must apply to books some of the mass-information techniques
used by film producers and distributors." (8) W e might go even
further and urge that publishers and booksellers must themselves
invent n e w publicity and sales techniques. Door-to-door selling,
vending-machines, participation surveys, reading clubs and m a n y
other methods, if handled by a professional and responsible book-
seller, offer a whole range of possibilities from which a choice can
be m a d e according to the demands of the environment and the dis-
tributor's intentions.
It must be repeated that conscious demands and conscious in-
tentions are both needed. T h e distribution of reading matter—
distribution and consumption—is not an operation allowing of
neutrality. It is a militant activity which must always be based on a
certain ideology, even if it is only a cultural ideology that is involved.
W e need only remember that the advance of Methodism in England,
rationalist teaching in France and Marxist propaganda in the U S S R
lay at the roots of some of the most outstanding successes in the
realm of books considered as a source of culture.
Booksellers must therefore regard themselves as the agents of con-
tinuing cultural activity, whose connection with books does not end
with the selling of them. In this, they resemble those other distribu-
tors of reading matter, the librarians. Little has been said in this
study about libraries, because their position is still not fully under-
stood. In most countries, libraries are only just beginning to emerge
from the tradition which regarded them as places for the preserva-
tion rather than the consumption of books.
T h e latest statistics none the less indicate that reading in public
libraries is particularlyflourishingin those countries which are also
major consumers of books from bookshops. This makes it clear that
 BOOKSHOPS AND MASS CIRCULATION 149
the t w o methods of distribution, far from being competitive, c o m -
plement each other. T h e y are subject to the same constraints and the
same demands. It would be as illusory to set u p public libraries in a
country or social environment which lacked the cultural channels
needed for literary communication as it would be to open bookshops
there for the sale of books created in another world. Libraries and
bookshops can, however, co-operate in order to create the conditions
needed for cultural communication.
Reading at the place of employment represents one of the areas
most favourable to co-operation of this type (9). W e are beginning
to appreciate the vital importance of factory libraries in the cultural
awakening of the workers. Factory libraries are socially effective only
if their establishment and m a n a g e m e n t spring from interest s h o w n
by the workers themselves, but they are culturally worth while only
if they operate in liaison with booksellers and educationists, without
thereby being subjected to commercial pressure from the former or
didactic pressure from the latter.
T h e balance is not easy to maintain, but books, after all, are
"reading machines", and what applies to other machines is also true
of them. Between the liberation they offer and the subjection they
m a y impose, the slightest touch is enough to alter the balance.

NOTES
(1) Benigno Cacérès, Comment conduire le livre au lecteur ? in Informations
Sociales, Paris, January 1957, N o . 1, p. 107.
(2) Concerning the subsequent discussion and Diagram 3, see Robert
Escarpit and Nicole Robine, Atlas de la Lecture à Bordeaux, Centre
de Sociologie des Faits Littéraires, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences
Humaines, Bordeaux, 1963.
(3) T h e substance of this chapter was elaborated by the author in a paper
presented at the 2nd International Booksellers' Congress, Paris,
Unesco, 1964, under the title Le Libraire, le pouvoir et le public.
(4) In this connection, see Gilbert Mury's article, Une sociologie du livre
est-elle possible ?in Informations Sociales, Paris, January 1957, N o . 1,
pp. 64-70.
(5) Only three 'pure' bookshops were found in Bordeaux out of fifty-two.
O n the other hand, 12% of the large bookshops sold newspapers as
a secondary activity, and 28% of the small bookshops as a main or
secondary activity. 60% of the bookstalls also sold newspapers.
150 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
(6) T h e author expanded the substance of this section in a paper presented
at the X X X t h Congrès National des Libraires de France, Paris,
Unesco, 1964, under the title Uadaptation de la librairie au milieu.
(7) Op. cit., p. 15.
(8) J. Dumazedier, Vers une civilisation du loisir?, Paris, 1962, pp. 175
203.

(9) A participation survey has been under way since 1962 at the Centre de
Sociologie des Faits littéraires de Bordeaux, initially under the
direction of J. Boussinesq and latterly under that of H . Marquier.
See J. Boussinesq, La lecture dans les bibliothèques d'entreprise de
l'agglomération bordelaise, Centre de Sociologie des Faits littéraires,
Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines, Bordeaux, 1963. Another
instalment is being prepared under the direction of H . Marquier.
A symposium on libraries in places of employment was also organ-
ized in November 1961 at Unesco by the French National C o m m i s -
sion for Unesco, which published a report on the proceedings.
 CHAPTER

3
Towards a New Form of
Communication

The writer's position

T H E writer has not yet found his place in the contemporary c o m -
munity. T h e reason for this is perhaps that the modern community
is an enormous mutual-security structure designed to protect its
members from the hazards of nature in the raw and man's estate.
But there is n o way of protecting writers as such. True, they can be
given the same social security as all other citizens, old-age pensions,
free medical care, and legal aid, but they cannot be insured against
their literary hazards.
W e are n o w sufficiently well acquainted with the mechanics of
literary life to appreciate that the writer proposes and the public
disposes—and so it must be. Literature is born out of this intercom-
munication, derives its sustenance therefrom and develops because
of it. But it is a murderous system in the sense that, for every thou-
sand works conceived, ten c o m e to birth and one to maturity. T h e
proportion can, of course, be improved by various technical devices,
notably by broadening the social bases of intercommunication, by
improving distribution channels, by giving the reader better and
more frequent opportunities of expressing his considered judgment,
but the hazards cannot be eliminated nor even reduced to any sig-
nificant extent. All efforts at really effective programming end u p by
fixing literature in a rut w h e n they are applied to thefilterof p u b -
lishing. W h e n applied to the writer, they lead purely and simply to
sterility.
It is for this reason that success is a form of literary death. A
writer's success is not quite the same as a publisher's. It is not enough
for a book to sell well and provide a certain return. H o w indeed
could w e calculate the interest on an investment reckoned in terms
of life, thought and action ? Whatever hisfinancialgains, the writer
never recovers his capital; he works without security. W e can, none
152 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
the less, accept an economic definition of a writer's success : it is the
point at which the sales of one of his books enable him to live by his
writing. This point, moreover, represents another aspect of success
—the point at which a writer saturates his possible public. However
w e m a y look at the matter, it is from this point onwards that the
writer is regarded as such by a certain social group which will never
again release him, which will never again leave him his freedom,
which will impose on him a particular image of himself and which,
with the very understandable and natural complicity of the p u b -
lisher, will, so to speak, "programme" him arbitrarily.
"Never go back the way you came," said Kipling, speaking of
literary success. Unless the writer has sufficient strength to tear h i m -
self away from his success, to hold himself aloof from it, and even—
as has been done—to embark on his career afresh under another
n a m e , h e is inevitably doomed within ten orfifteenyears at most—
by which time his original public will have grown older—at best to
sterility and at worst to oblivion.
Nothing therefore can save the writer from the necessity of run-
ning risks and of doing so alone. Even so, the cards should not be
stacked against him, as they m a y be—and generally are—in two
different ways—economically and psychologically.
W e have already referred to the disastrous discrepancy between the
publisher's profit and that of the writer. There is nothing n e w in this,
and the starving poet is a familiar literaryfigure.Even in the days
w h e n an enlightened prince might act as patron to some m a n of
letters, it was at best a subsistence allowance which he provided.
Louis X I V ' s privy purse supplied the King's protégés with no more
than the income of a journeyman printer. In the twentieth century,
it can readily be calculated that, to enjoy the standard of living of
a skilled linotype operator, a novelist would have to produce a book
every eighteen months which sold between 8,000 and 10,000
copies—which is most unusual and indeed extremely improbable (1).
There are numerous alternative solutions to enable writers to
survive : a second profession, literary "fringe" activities, journalism,
translation, criticism, the economic support of other and more
profitable media such as radio, television, films, etc. All these solu-
tions have the drawback that they are not really solutions but merely
loopholes, evading the real problem—that of giving the writer back
a place in the commercial circuit of the book trade, and linking the
return on creative activity to that of publishing activity (2).
 TOWARDS A NEW FORM OF COMMUNICATION 153
T h e problem, moreover, is infinitely more complex than in the
days of Louis X I V or even Diderot. O u r society demands something
more than the mere survival of its citizens. T h e writer must not only
be given an opportunity to live b y his writing, he must also be
assured of a standard of living appropriate to the needs of his pro-
fession. T h e myth of the romantic poet w h o can prove his genius
only by dying of cold and hunger in a garret is a deliberate falsehood
spread by emergent capitalism with a view to dissociating brain
workers from m e n of action and keeping the intellectual at a distance
from economic and social concerns.
M o d e r n thinking demands that the writer's profession be organ-
ized within the community, but other problems thereupon arise.
T h e myth of the intellectual worker cherished by emerging socialist
societies is no less dangerous than that of the starving poet. It is an
appealing phrase which expresses an abstract economic relationship
but does not necessarily represent any real, living integration of the
writer into the working world. Whether w e like it or not, and no
matter what the structure of society, literary creation implies a cer-
tain freedom to c o m m a n d one's time which—at any rate in the pre-
sent state of technology—is incompatible with the constraints i m -
posed on the manual worker, either in industry or on the land.
Physical or nervous fatigue is not literary. It is probably more
difficult to be a worker-writer than a worker-priest. T h e proletarian
writer must choose between solitude among his o w n kind and social
exile. If he chooses exile, even as a State artist, even as a paid m e m b e r
of a writers' union, even as an employee of a publishing firm, he m a y
wellfindhimself isolated or treated as an inferior within another w a y
of life, and m a y forget the overwhelming reality of the things he
stands for, retaining only a bitter, negative philosophy. H e m a y even
—and this is something very serious—pass over the pleasures of the
c o m m o n people because he feels them to be degrading. Only a very
great artist and a very great m a n can understand and make others
understand that such terms as "popular" and "vulgar" do not neces-
sarily imply inferiority.

Criticism and literary opinion

In a book full of feeling and good sense, the French critic André
Thérive raises the problem of the attitude of critics towards what he
calls infra-literature, or what others term sub-literature or marginal
literature. H e does so as a cultivated m a n subscribing to traditional
 THE B 0 0 K
154 REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
values, but with a striking clearsightedness. T h o u g h he does not
accept a sociological conception of literature, he brings out perfectly
the social imbalance which affects its future : "As education spreads,
and with it the ability to read, an enormous public of readers is
spreading out around the small cultivated public." (3) In particular,
he recognizes the paradox inherent in the fact that the cure m a y be
worse than the disease and that the solution of the problem raises
still more serious problems: "Literature will never be reconciled
with society so long as society is at variance with itself, in other
words, without c o m m o n principles and natural hierarchies. A n d
w h e n order is restored, people will undoubtedly regret the present
easy-going anarchy under which literature is merely a game played
by fewer people and less respected than basketball." (4) At once
despairing and apprehensive of the eventual establishment of such
a society without cultural classes, André Thérive, for his part, pre-
fers that form of freedom represented by the dilettantism of the
expert amateur : "Literary criticism is not a court of law but a pic-
turesque and essential stall on the fairground, somewhere between
the lucky dip, the menagerie, the sweetmeat stall and the 'chamber of
horrors'." (5)
Appearances notwithstanding, André Thérive here comes very
close to providing a h u m a n and viable solution to the difficult prob-
lem inherent in establishing values for mass-circulation literature.
H e rejects the authoritarian, standard-setting criticism, with its
stiff-necked didactic approach, which lays d o w n the law from outside
without regard to the realities of life, but he also rejects the absence
of criticism, the commercial neutralism, the statistical indifference
of chain-store sales. His picturesque little fairground stall has the
merit of rejecting neither the proximity of the humble, everyday
pleasures of the crowd nor the responsibility of a conscious taste
which knows h o w to select.
There is too m u c h talk of h o w reading should be "guided" and
readers "directed". These are dangerous terms which, in any case,
have nothing to do with the true role of criticism, which is to bear
witness rather than to teach. It cannot be held against a critic if he
voices the aspirations and trends of a literary clique : minorities, and
experimental minorities in particular, must be able to make them-
selves heard. But it is equally important for other critics to provide
other evidence bringing larger groups of writers and readers into
contact. This depends on their psychological and social personality,
 T O W A R D S A N E W F O R M OF C O M M U N I C A T I O N 155
on their integration in the thought and the society of their times.
T h e deeper and sturdier the roots that a critic sinks into his o w n
time, the better equipped he is to speak for the countless anonymous
readers with w h o m he has ties of every kind. T h e truer his indepen-
dence as a writer and his freedom as a m a n , the more likely he is to
provide the people at large with an accessible and intelligible image
of literature.
This last point is important, for it relates to a new scale of critic-
ism, opened u p by such modern media of communication as films,
radio, television and, to a certain extent, strip cartoons. Nowadays,
the critic can speak to the general public on behalf of literature and
can reach that public. H e need do no more than become an adapter
or commentator. A sensitive and straightforward analysis of a text
is tremendously effective on the television screen. T h e interpretation
of a literary masterpiece on television or radio m a y perhaps be a
misconstruction of the work, but it is certainly of the type of those
that w e have called "creative treasons". Film producers have always
encouraged people to see the film after reading the book. T o read
the book after seeing thefilmis no less to be recommended and in all
probability more fruitful.
G o o d criticism consists in calling the muses d o w n from on high to
take their place among h u m a n beings. Here w e have the same values
of action, commitment and humanism which enable writers to break
away from their solitude in the modern community. T h e critic can
become a mediator and a witness only if he isfirstof all a militant.
As Richard Altick has pointed out (6), the Methodist preacher w h o ,
in the nineteenth century, was the narrowest and most didactic of
censors, had been one of the most effective popularizers of literature
in the preceding century. It was John Wesley himself w h o , as early
as 1743, published an abridged pocket edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress at fourpence. His successors were to follow this trend and
circulate books which were by no means all religious, since they in-
cluded some of the best romantic poetry, but which all crossed the
social barrier on the same wave of faith and enthusiasm. Methodist
preaching and the cultural work that accompanied it are among the
real causes of the sudden literary advancement of the British people
at large, of the resulting mutation of books, and of the new course
taken by English literature from 1830 onwards. If, at that point, the
influence of the religious movement proved deadening rather than
stimulating for Victorian literature, it was because Methodism, like
 156 T H E B O O K REVOLUTION : Future Prospects
so m a n y other movements, had by then begun to conceal the fact
that its enthusiasm was dwindling under a mask of strict dogmatism.
It m a y be thought that such considerations have nothing to do
with the problem of criticism. In fact, however, the situation of the
critic in our paperback civilization m a y be compared to that of the
wandering preacher going from village to village. H e has his personal
mission but this must be subordinate, on the one hand, to the m e s -
sage which is transmitted through h i m without being his, and, on
the other, to the actual situation of the living communities which he
has to penetrate without doing violence to their group consciousness
or interfering with the expression of that consciousness, which is
always a frail thing.
T o put it more simply, this means that any literary criticism suited
to mass-circulation literature should be based on a knowledge of the
literary behaviour of the public at large, acquired from inside, and
personal experience of it. In the extreme case, it m a y even be con-
sidered that the critic is not absolutely needed as an intermediary.
In the socialist countries, contacts between writers and workers in
various sectors are systematically organized, being based on living as
a community and working as a team. These methods are undoubtedly
effective, but it is difficult to do without an organizer to establish a
c o m m o n language and prevent misunderstandings. Here, perhaps,
is the newfigureneeded in our present age—the cultural leader w h o
does not restrict himself to the facile resources of image and sound
but uses them in order to undertake, with all the intellectual humility
and team spirit required, the difficult task of organizing communica-
tion between the people at large and the individual.
T h e success of mass-circulation literature depends on the exis-
tence of such exchanges. T h e meeting-ground will necessarily be
non-literary precisely because the exchanges must go beyond the
limits of the cultivated public. Even if a writer and a reader are
physically and intellectually very distant from one another, the
sharing of trade union, political, religious or even just sports activi-
ties m a y m a k e it possible to create the conditions required for c o m -
munication between them.
It is here that the literary prize, so often and unfairly denounced,
m a y take on a fresh significance. Such attempts at making a respon-
sible selection from a necessarily anarchic output are useful and even
vital in themselves. T h e y essentially imply an academy, for through
them a representative selection of cultivated people belonging to a
 T O W A R D S A N E W F O R M OF C O M M U N I C A T I O N 157
certain social group clearly and firmly express the preferences of
that group. In various forms, the system operated very satisfactorily
for centuries, in fact so long as the cultivated group remained rela-
tively small and homogeneous. T h e difficulties began in the nine-
teenth century, and have steadily increased up to the present, as new
social groups took their place in forming literary opinion, set up their
o w n academic standards and developed their o w n judgments. O n e
of the results of this increase in the number of academies, whether
avowedly such or not, is the present plethora of literary prizes which
deprives the selection of all its value.
But there is something still more serious to be considered. In an
élite culture, values remain stable whereas, in a mass culture, they
are fluid and constantly called in question, since what is involved is
a way of life rather than a way of being. T h e academic accolade of
the literary prize is, in the literal sense of the word, a consecration.
It marks out the author as one entitled to the enduring respect of
his peers for certain merit which can never again be depreciated, but
it also places him irremediably out of reach of the people as a whole
by transforming him into a celebrity. This phenomenon of celebrity,
very clearly recognized by Carlyle as early as 1840 (7), dates from
the earliest large-scale printings at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. O n e of the most spectacular examples at that time was the
Byron cult. B y no means all the winners of the Prix Goncourt or the
Nobel Prizes in our own day receive the hero-worship from which
Byron suffered, which was almost comparable with that n o w ex-
tended towards film stars; but the mere prestige of their awards
turns them, as it were, into institutions, legends, totems or, at best,
shining examples. This is one of the swiftest forms ofthat literary
death which accompanies success and, unless he has an exceptional
determination to recreate himself and maintain his independence,
no writer can hope to escape it.
With or without mass-circulation books, societies possessing a
long-established literary tradition will find it difficult to preserve
themselves from the academic reflex and will long continue to treat
their writers as heroes of the mind, but the younger nations where
literature is currently emerging must beware of the snare of institu-
tionalization. If they set up literary prizes—and they would be wrong
to disdain this method of selecting and encouraging writers—they
will have to ensure that these reflect broad currents of opinion
deriving from the inmost feelings of the people, even perhaps before
158 THE BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
the intellect comes into play at all. With all due respect, it may be
asked whether those mysterious ground swells which lift u p to the
heights of glory this or that singer or musician, or even this or that
poet w h o has chosen the record as his medium, m a y not be more
effective and more authentic than the pondered judgments of the
experts. T h e ideal would be for the two forms of evaluation to be in
agreement, but this is still, for the time being, a vain hope.

Active readers and passive readers

W e must, after all, face up to the facts. T h e present mutation in the
world of books may prove successful but will be neither complete
nor final. W e may talk of mass circulation, but by n o means all the
"masses" are involved. Even in the most advanced countries, only a
fraction of those able to read will take to reading during the present
stage—that fraction which succeeds in gaining control of the social
structures required for that end. In the developing countries—and
w e must bear in mind that the reading public in Asia represents a
quarter of the total population and in Africa one-eighth—many
other stages and m a n y other mutations will be needed before what-
ever is to replace books as they n o w are (perhaps at no very distant
date) can ensure that the messages of information and culture circu-
late freely among all m e n .
But even then there will still be active and passive readers. There
will always be people w h o , through idleness, timidity or inclination,
will decline communication with the writer. There will always be
those w h o love books as objects and will not dissociate the message
of the binder and the printer from that of the writer.
This is of no great importance. T h e main thing is to ensure that
active readers should be more and more numerous and more and
more receptive. There is no reason w h y plastic values should not be
integrated with the values of action, intelligence and sensitivity—in
fact, with all those values which give reading its place in h u m a n life.
T h e revolution in publishing is the most liberal of all revolutions.
All it asks is that there be neither prejudice nor inflexibility.
Fetishism or fanaticism attached to books is incompatible with the
generosity of books. Books are like bread. Throughout the world,
the production of grain and the basic foodstuff derived from it was
primitive man's great victory over hunger. T h e result was that bread
became something almost holy, the symbol of liberating labour, sur-
vival and communion. T h e instinctive reactions of m a n y peoples
 TOWARDS A NEW FORM OF COMMUNICATION 159
still e m b o d y this sort of innate respect for bread, which is obscurely
enshrined in their collective m e m o r y as a saviour. Books are the object
of the same sort of unacknowledged veneration since they were the
bread of the mind, the great victory achieved by somewhat less
primitive m e n over ignorance and the slavery it means. A book
which does not last, an ephemeral book, a book which is an act and
not necessarily a lasting reality, a treasure to be preserved, a posses-
sion for all time—ktêma es aei—is something which profoundly
shocks our instinctive feelings and m a y even disgust us.
At the same time, w e are very well aware that the poor man's
bread in the present-day world has ceased to be a symbol and has
become a mere metaphor, and a bad one at that. W e k n o w that the
world's hunger will not be overcome this time by the individual
magic of the ear or the loaf, but by a vast collective effort bringing
into play all the scientific, technical, and mechanical resources of the
advanced civilizations, by a profound and systematic reform of social
structures, by a concerted world policy which will affect m a n y other
sectors besides those of agriculture and food.
N o r can the great hunger of the mind be overcome in any other
way. T h e individual demands of writers, the refined tastes of culti-
vated book-lovers, should be given neither more nor less weight in
our plans for the future than the majestic gesture of the sower or
the gastronomy of Brillat-Savarin in the discussions of the Food and
Agriculture Organization. W e must deny nothing, but nor must w e
interpose anything between books and life, and especially not myths.
W e are living in an age w h e n great things are being done by teams
assisted by machines. W e readily accept this for the arts which have
developed along with mass civilization, such as radio, television and
films, not to mention the theatre, where there is direct contact with
the audience and where the principle has always been more or less
accepted. W e must n o w go on to accept it in respect of books. It
goes without saying that the very nature of reading will always neces-
sitate a greater measure of solitude than other forms of communica-
tion or artistic expression, but the solitude of the writer, like the
solitude of the reader, is not anti-social. It is only the means whereby
each m a y find the other. A m a n reading alone in his room often has
more companions than if he were watching a film with a thousand
other spectators in a cinema.
It is this inherent virtue of books which must be maintained
and developed. Dissemination, limitless and ceaselessly renewed
i6o T H E BOOK REVOLUTION: Future Prospects
communication among all men—that is the true function of the book.
Once it ceases to fulfil it, howeverfineits appearance and however
noble its content, it is merely so m u c h waste-paper, a soul-less
treasure. O n e might as well put a stone in its place.

NOTES
(i) According to J. W . Saunders, The Profession of English Letters,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964, " T h e average reward
for the good romantic novelist is somewhere in the region of £150
per novel" (p. 241). See also R . Escarpit, La rentabilité de la lit-
térature, Actes de 5 e Congèrs de la Société française de Littérature
comparée, Lyon, 1962.
(2) A s regards the problem of a second profession, see Taha Hussein's
articles, The Writer in the World Today, in The Artist in Modern
Society (International Conference of Artists, Venice, 22-28 Sep-
tember 1952), Paris, Unesco, 1954, pp. 69-83.
(3) André Thérive, La foire littéraire, Paris, L a Table Ronde, 1963,
p. 225.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid., p . 256.
(6) The English Common Reader, pp. 99-128.
(7) T h o m a s Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History,
London, 1840, Lecture V , The Hero as Man ofLetters.