A Companion to the History of the Book (65 page)

The fact that books became cheaper, and that competition in price was obviously effective and becoming more prevalent, posed a problem to the book trade. The “fixed book price” presented itself as one solution. In the Netherlands, prices had to all intents and purposes been fixed since the foundation of the Dutch
Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels
in 1815 (the oldest of the modern book-trade associations) with the express purpose of preventing any form of piracy or undercutting of prices. Sweden’s book prices were similarly effectively fixed from the foundation of the Swedish Publishers’ Association in 1843. In Germany, the
Buchhandlerische Verkehrsordnung
of the
Börsenverein
(the German book-trade organization) took effect in 1888, limiting the discount that booksellers could give on books. The Swiss and Austrian book-trade regulations were adjusted to the German rules. In an attempt to defend themselves against competition by kiosks, the booksellers’ syndicate in France, in cooperation with the publishers’ syndicate, set a maximum discount too. In 1943, this turned into a real fixed book price. In spite of this book price cartel, in the period 1890–1938 book prices in France went up by a factor of four only, compared with a factor of nine for retail prices in general (Martin et al. 1986).

The fixed book price could not disguise the fact that publishers, authors, and the new book-buying public began to enter into more direct commercial relationships. The potential for authors to earn real money with their writing, for example, caused authors to organize themselves, with a special focus on their economic interests. The ratification of the Berne Convention in 1887 was in some ways a direct consequence of this pressure. The Deutsche Schriftstellerverband in 1877 united two existing rival organizations. In 1909, the Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller (SDS) was founded, becoming an important force during the book crisis in the second half of the 1920s when writers (especially “serious” ones) were in a very weak position. Membership rose from 1,400 in 1920 to 2,404 in 1932 (Wittmann 1991). In Italy, the Authors’ Society was founded in 1882; it later became the Società italiana degli autori ed editori (SIAE). In smaller countries, where due to the smaller market authors had less to gain, such organizations generally occurred later. In the Netherlands, the Vereeniging van Nederlandsche letterkundigen was founded in 1905; in Flanders, the Vereeniging van Vlaamsche letterkundigen in 1907.

At the same time, this more commercial footing and publishers’ more finely tuned commercial antennae did not stop more ideologically informed publishing ventures from being successful. Especially in Germany, the ideals of worker emancipation and socialism informed many initiatives for the publication and distribution of books, such as J. H. W. Dietz (1881), Buchhandlung Vorwärts (1894–1924), who published, for example, the
Berliner Arbeiterbibliothek
and an edition of the
Communist Manifesto,
Malik-Verlag (1916–38), with the satirical artist George Grosz as its most prominent employee, and book clubs such as Der Bücherkreis and Büchergilde Gutenberg (both founded in 1924). In France, the Librairie du Travail (1918–37), and in the Netherlands Arbeiderspers (the continuation of Ontwikkeling, 1916– ), did much to spread the ideology of socialism.

Religious publishing slowly declined, but remained an ideological force in the twentieth century. In Catholic Belgium, Brepols (1796), publisher of playing cards and liturgical books in thirty languages, became “Éditeur Pontificale” in 1905. In the Netherlands, the Roman Catholic part of the population was served by its own Catholic publishers. Their close links to the hierarchy safeguarded Catholic readers from the dangers of moral corruption and Protestant influences. But it was in Protestant countries, where religious publishing had always been more substantial, that the decline was particularly noticeable. From accounting for about one-fifth of titles in the middle of the nineteenth century, by 1920 the publication of religious books had already more than halved in Germany and the Netherlands. It was to dwindle to below 5 percent by the middle of the twentieth century.

The shift with the most wide-ranging consequences in the period we are concerned with is that from a demand-led book economy to a supply-led one. This was the result of many factors. We have already encountered some of the nineteenth-century technological changes in print production. The invention of the rotary press particularly affected print production by favoring larger print-runs. But the combination of increased title production, on the one hand, and increased book consumption, on the other, made for a much more diffuse market.

The increases in production (starting in most European countries at various stages in the nineteenth century) eventually gave rise to a perceived problem of overproduction. This widely heard complaint may have had some basis in fact (during World War II it was possible for publishers to keep active despite paper shortages by divesting themselves of accumulated overstock). Mostly, however, it was less a matter of overall quantity than of a growing challenge to match supply and demand. In a market in which the number of both book titles and readers was expanding, it was simply increasingly difficult to locate potential readers for a particular title in the sea of potential book buyers.

Another factor was that of competition to the print media, not only from other media, but also from other forms of entertainment. If the nineteenth century had been the “Age of the Book,” the book’s position was certainly challenged in the twentieth. In absolute terms, the book market kept growing steadily, in title production as well as total volume, and leisure time was expanding too. But a spate of new media was beginning to compete with print for news, information, and entertainment. First there was the cinema (initially silent; from the end of the 1920s, talking), then radio, and, finally, television. In addition, there was the popularity of music, both live and recorded, and of going out to the movies and dance halls. Yet the book profited from these other media, too: through serialization of fiction, radio plays, and readings. Often films stimulated public awareness of a book, and could make the difference between commercial success and failure. Many authors – such as Thomas Mann – took a great interest in the filming of their books.

Last but not least, there was the more general economic crisis of the 1920s, fueled by postwar inflation, which eventually led to the Great Depression. This severely cut the purchasing power of the middle class. All these factors contributed to the “book crisis” of the late 1920s and 1930s. It hit the Netherlands and Germany in the 1920s; Italy in the 1930s.

One of the most notable effects of these various factors on the book industry was the growing need for a greater emphasis on marketing. This could be seen in the attention lavished on covers (for example, the use of photographs and color), and the rise of advertising. But it also led to book-promotion activities on a national scale. In Germany, National Book Day (March 22, the day of Goethe’s death) was instituted in 1929 by the Börsenverein. From 1934, this was replaced by the annual National Socialist book week to promote the German book. In the Netherlands, CPNB (Collective Propaganda for the Dutch Book) was founded in 1930, organizing its first “book week” in 1932. When the Associazione Editoriale Libraria Italiana (AELI, founded in 1922) handed over its responsibilities to the fascist regime, the fascists took the promotion of the Italian book firmly in hand. Book promotion was part of a wider program of state control, which included standardizing state school books and making sure that they carried a recognizable fascist tone. But the fascists also proposed to institute formal rules for economic competition. It was hoped that centralized control would solve other aspects of the book crisis: the sense of overproduction and that pré-unification heritage, the chaotic nature of the book market. Thus these measures could actually count on wide support even if censorship and enforced conformity to fascism were not objectives shared by everyone (Santoro 2003).

In the face of increasing pressure from other media, and competing leisure-time activities, booksellers, too, realized the need for a more active approach to the potential buying public. No longer could they afford to sit waiting passively in their shops; they needed to reach out through such sales and marketing techniques as prospectuses, advertising, attractive window displays, and greater attention to interior decoration. Overall, this development is epitomized by the move in the 1920s and 1930s from the closed bookshop where buyers were served by an expert bookseller to open-shelf shops where the customers could browse and handle the books. A more outward-looking attitude on the part of regular booksellers was also stimulated by the competition from other sales outlets, such as railway station kiosks, department stores selling books, book clubs, and the flourishing practice of colportage. Kiosks, tobacconists, and similar points of sale were also used for the distribution of cheap series of entertainment fiction published by newspapers and high-circulation illustrated periodicals. It was easy for them to market such “exclusive readers’ offers” to their readers, and production was cheap on newsprint using the rotary presses they already owned.

The increased media use in general (radio and film besides newspapers and illustrated weeklies) caused a greater awareness of the world outside the traditional community, whether local or regional or even on the scale of the nation-state that had for so long provided the natural range for so much European publishing. The importation of elements of mass culture from the US and, to a somewhat lesser degree, from Britain that we have observed must be seen in this context. After World War II, it would contribute to the rise of English as a
lingua franca.

While we can recognize this pattern of media use in many Western countries, in the Soviet Republic – and later in all of its Eastern European vassal states – the situation was very different. Since state propaganda was regarded as an effective means of eradicating bourgeois thought and establishing a socialist ideology, the entire chain of print production (paper production, typesetting, printing, binding) and distribution were brought under state control. Printing had come to Russia late, and it was only late in the nineteenth century that a serious commercial publishing industry had come into being. In the brief window before the October Revolution of 1917, Russian publishing showed itself to be very cosmopolitan, publishing more or less everything that was appearing elsewhere in Europe. The industry’s domination after the Revolution by the huge state conglomerate of Gosizdat (1919) smoothed the way for the even tighter state and party control of the Stalinist era. It is a measure of the success of this control that in Russia during the Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to 1990, 80 percent of all publications were issued by the state. Official censorship, carried out by the censorship agency Glavlit (1922), was ultimately in the hands of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department. Through the effective mechanism of granting the right to publish only to approved institutions, conformity to party ideology could be ensured. In addition to official censorship, Russian libraries also exercised self-censorship – a practice prevalent in Nazi Germany too – which was sometimes even more rigorous (Remnek 1991; Line 2003).

The relaxation of censorship and control after Stalin’s death in 1953 was only very gradual. But all sorts of materials unacceptable to the regime did eventually begin to circulate in the clandestine
samizdat
or self-publishing circuit. During the Cold War period, books that had been smuggled out of the Eastern bloc were regularly published in the West. An example of such propagandist publishing was the first printing of
Dr. Zhivago
in the Netherlands at the request of the CIA.

The same complete, centralized, state control was imposed in one after another of the Eastern European states as they fell under the communist sphere of influence. Finland, too, came briefly (1944–6) under a “Soviet Controlling Commission,” which used methods of censorship similar to those in the USSR. This censorship involved removing politically incorrect (anti-Soviet and Nazi) books and other materials to the
spetskhran –
the closed collection housing books that were forbidden but nonetheless catalogued and stored (Ekholm 2001).

The situation in Germany too was, of course, decidedly atypical. Apart from the widespread effects of the economic depression (which actually hit the book trade less badly than it did other sectors of the economy), the 1930s saw the first effects of the Nazi regime in Germany. Within four months of the National Socialists taking power in 1933, the first book burnings took place. The exile of German writers and publishers for political reasons started long before persecution for race became instituted in 1938. In all, some 1,800 writers and journalists are known to have fled the country. German book publishers settled in many countries, not necessarily German-speaking, attempting to supply banned books from exile. With the new German departments they created in the period immediately after 1933, Dutch publishers Querido and Allert de Lange published some 200 titles by over one hundred authors between them. The Swiss publisher Oprecht published 145 titles by 115 exiled authors; Malik in Prague 40 titles by 22 authors. After brief stays in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland, Bermann Fischer settled in Stockholm, where he made use of offset lithography for reprints for the Scandinavian market of Werfel, Schnitzler, and the Mann brothers. Despite the fact that so many authors and publishers emigrated to the US, the only successful publisher was Friedrich Ungar (from Phaidon, Vienna), who published about one-third of the roughly 350 exile publications that appeared in the US in the period 1933–55 (Wittmann 1991).

Earlier, France had similarly been home to a large number of exiles, though of another kind. Each for their own reasons, a host of writers, especially from an Anglo-Saxon background, found Paris a congenial place to work and be published. Apart from James Joyce
(Ulysses,
published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co in 1922), famous authors who availed themselves of the greater freedom to publish in France included Henry Miller
(Tropic of Cancer,
published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press, 1934), Samuel Beckett
(Watt,
1953), Vladimir Nabokov
(Lolita,
1955), and J. P. Donleavy
(The Ginger
Man,
1958). The last three were published by the Olympia Press, founded by Kahane’s son Maurice Girodias, who published numerous other expatriate authors.