NAL {New American Library} was a major publisher of paperback books. In the united states, cheap paperback editions had begun to be popular in the late 1930s, pioneered by Pocket Books. The new paperbacks were distributed to the four thousand bookstores that covered the united states at this time and to nonbookstore outlets as well – the famous cigar stores, newsstands, drugstores and the like – which numbered seventy thousand. These had been part of the old magazine distribution network, started after Prohibition by former bootleggers such as Annenberg, initially to distribute the racing form. These new distributors soon moved on to a broader range of magazines and later into the book business, with much success. They treated books like periodicals, returning unsold copies at the end of the month. This new system worked extremely well and resulted in phenomenal sales. The NAL's most successful title ever, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, sold 4 million copies in its first two years, with the rest of Caldwell's work selling a further 4 million. James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, which had sold a mere 500 copies as a hardcover in its first year of publication, sold 350,000 in paperback. Close to 50 million paperbacks were bought annually, roughly a fifth of all the books sold. A substantial number of readers of regular trade books quickly became attached to the new paperback format. Such books were often based on the old popular magazines such as True Detective, True Romance, as well as on short westerns. In the 1940s, 10 millions magazines were sold every week, as well as a phenomenal 25 million comics, so that the books, even in their new formats, were still a relatively small percentage of the reading matter being sold to the country as a whole.

To a large degree, the new paperback lists of the previous decade. Books like Thornton Wilder's The Bridge at San Luis Rey, the novels of Zane Grey, and highly popular books like Forever Amber repeated their initial hardcover sales in paperback. However, NAL saw its task as going beyond the westerns and the thrillers and began to make available a far more intellectual selection. Following the example of Penguin's Pelican imprint, they launched the Mentor series under the slogan "good reading for the millions."

NAL published all of William Faulkner and a number of contemporary realist European authors, such as Curzio Malaparte and Piere Paolo Pasolini. Among their early books were Martin Eden, Jack London's radical classic, now unavailable in any edition, and Carson McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. At the same time, readers of the Mentor series could buy Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa or Marquis Child's Sweden: The Middle Way, as well as a long list of political titles. I remember as a teenager buying a Mentor books called The Christian Demand for Social Justice, not a title you'd find in today's airport newsstands.

These paperbacks cost twenty-five to thirty-five cents, the price of a pack of cigarettes. One of the most expensive books we published was Studs Lonigan's Lonigan Trilogyit was so long that we had to charge fifty cents for it. the sales people finally decided that the book's spine should be broken into bands, so tat the customer could see that he was getting two books' worth and would not feel ripped off.

The jackets of these paperbacks were uniformly lurid. If you did not look at the title, you would be hard pressed to know whether what you had in your hand was by Mickey Spillane or by William Faulkner. Even though Faulkner was described on all of his paperback covers as the author of Santuary, a book widely read for its highly charged sexual content, the entirety of his work was, in fact, a staple of college courses, ironically losing most of their popular audience as they become elevated to the cannon.

I can't remember where I heard about The Business of Books, but I'm glad I did. If you're interested in the world of publishing, this well-written and extremely informative book should be a good choice for you.