I discovered that somehow, in the rush of the mad social whirl that is my existence, I had failed to observe the seventy-fifth anniversary of “The Lottery”. This was a subversive, controversial story which is probably still one of the top ten items which caused people to cancel their subscriptions to The New Yorker. The problem was that in it, Shirley Jackson suggested the American Heartland, the small towns and rural areas, might NOT be the refuge for common sense and folk wisdom we all know it to be.
(It would be an interesting list to see what the top ten reasons for subscription cancellations was for some of our major journals. I believe the Saturday Evening Post had its moment in 1955, when Norman Rockwell did that cover featuring a—kind of—topless mermaid And I had an editor suggest to me once that my editorials were really dragging down readership of…well, why do HIM any publicity?)
So I hurried to the Interwebs to find out what other literary occurrences rippled our ponds in 1948. I was not expecting to be thrown headfirst into Book Fairs of the past. I don’t know if the shelf life of a book is thirty, forty, or fifty years, but book after book from 1948 came in time after time among the donations at the end of the last and beginning of this century.
None of these books were necessarily bad; they were just books which a LOT of people in Chicago decided had taken up shelf space long enough. These included later books by people famous for earlier works–Peony by Pearl S. Buck. Catalina by Somerset Maugham—as well as bestsellers which made a stir in their day but now gather dust (until the next movie version, of course): Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County, or Harry Bellaman’s Parris Mitchel of King’s Row.
Some books went on to land on Required Reading lists: Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, or James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust came out in 1948, as well as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Elizabeth Bowen published The Heat of the Day in 1948, but no one seems to have bothered much with it until the late 1980s, when suddenly everybody had to buy it (and, a decade later, donate it.)
Other books of 1948 seem to have been perennials, books which people will continue to buy whether there’s a movie or a protest movement or a critic touting them: My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett (illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett) or Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind. Winston Churchill started publishing his history of World War II in 1948, Thomas Merton produced the Seven Storey Mountain, and Evelyn Waugh gave us The Loved One.
And I was reminded of several running gags, mere expressions of prejudice against certain authors who probably deserved better. For reasons not known to us, virtually every Chicago collection of Thomas Mann’s works (including, always, his 1948 opus Joseph and His brothers) came to the Book Fair in a roughly six year period. All of these treasured volumes were looked up against current book prices, and NONE of them was ever worth more than the average price for HB Literature, M-Z. This led to despairing cries of “Thomas Mann!” every time a box was being unpacked.
The Golden Hawk, possibly our most donated work by Frank Yerby, was published in 1948. One of the most jovial and active of Book Fair volunteers, a constant source of ignored advice, used often to inform me that Yuppies (which she had decided were our core market) would not buy any book more than five years old, and objected to my championing of bygone authors like Frank Slaughter and Frank Yerby. She would generally finish her latest advice with “And I say the hell with Frank Yerby!” (I felt vindicated when a seminar on Frank Yerby’s work was offered at the Library, but this did not move her.)
But then I found IT. This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of one of the top ten best selling books in American history, a book that haunts my dreams, a book that I, personally, have probably dumped into the recycling bin more often than any other book written by man, woman, or computer in this world of toil and tears.
If you get a chance, pour yourself a very dry beverage some time this year and raise a toast to Paul Samuelson, and his immortal textbook “Economics”. I do not know how much Dr. Samuelson had to do with those horizontal stripes on the cover of the book, but I suspect the classic design was at least PART of the reason he won his Nobel Prize.
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