Will we see the end of book publishing in America?

The question would have been unthinkable not very long ago. Today, it’s worth asking because there’s the possibility that electronic books will outgrow and replace printed books. The first electronic book reader was introduced in 2006. Five years later e-books began to outsell printed books.

While digital publishing seems to be growing, the printed book industry is continuing its long decline. Countless independent bookstores have vanished from the American landscape, followed by the demise of the Border’s bookstore chain in 2011. Now, most Americans live within driving distance of only one bookstore—Barnes & Noble—and that company’s health is not exactly robust. (The company plans to close 20 of its stores every year for the next decade.)

However, the fear that book publishing will disappear has been around for more than a century. Back in 1958, for example, this fear prompted American Publisher Bennett Cerf to write “Books Are Here To Stay.” He was writing in response to the concern of parents, educators, and publishers that young Americans were becoming addicted to television. Kids, they said, showed no interest in reading but remained glued to the tube all day. Soon the great publishing houses would shut down, they assumed, and books would start to disappear from the American home.

But Cerf saw things differently, and he knew what he was talking about. He had run Random House publishing for 30 years, and could assure Post readers that “publishers cry more easily than anybody else on earth. … To hear them tell it, there’s always something threatening to bankrupt half the publishers extant. Television is merely their latest bugaboo.”

And then, interestingly, Cerf told us several things that were going to destroy publishing before television.

In the 1900s, he said, a New York publisher prophesied that interurban trolley cars would bring about the end of reading in America. The new trolley lines being built in those days allowed Americans to easily commute between the country and the city. They also permitted the youth to go joyriding for a day, taking a trolley from Chicago to Milwaukee, for example, or Philadelphia to Atlantic City, New Jersey. What youngsters, the publisher asked, would be content with books if they could ride for hours in a trolley car?

Even before the interurban lines were bearing youths away from their books, Cerf said, the bicycle was going to kill the book. Young men and women of the 1890s spent all their free time on bicycles, even taking 100-mile, weekend-long rides, leaving them no time or energy to read.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, books faced growing competition from the phonograph, the radio, and the affordable Model T that seemed to consume more and more of the average American’s time.

Yet with all these alternatives to reading, the popularity of books continued to grow. The Book Of The Month Club, founded 83 years ago this month, proved immensely popular. Between 1926 and 1929, membership grew from 2,000 to 100,000.

Today we are far from seeing the end of publishing. More than a million new titles are produced every year, including over 200,000 self-published books. This latter number is misleading, though, since many of these ‘books’ are purely digital and will never see a single sheet of paper.

As we’ve stated before in the Post Perspective, the love of reading and the love of books are not the same thing. The lovers of reading don’t care if they read text out of a book, off a smartphone, or from the back of a cereal box. As long as it’s legible, they’ll enjoy it.

Book lovers, on the other hand, are enchanted by the feel of a cloth binding, the scent of the pages, and crisp, dark type on white paper. They’ll spend fortunes on books, and care for them tenderly, and might even read some of them.

For lovers of reading, the future has never been better. More people are reading and writing than ever before, and the Web offers an endless supply of new, unexpected material. But for book lovers, the future does not look promising. The number of bookstores, and the size of their inventory, are not likely to grow. However, book lovers should take comfort in the fact that no form of entertainment has ever disappeared. The Internet hasn’t replaced television, which didn’t replace radio, which didn’t replace movies, which didn’t replace the theater, etc. Americans are continually rediscovering and reviving old entertainments and crafts.

We will see fewer large-inventory bookstores in the future, but a growth of print-on-demand (POD) publishers. These small, independent operations will print and bind any book of your choice. You can get the title you want in minutes, and the POD operation doesn’t have to pay the costs of maintaining an inventory of unsold titles.

The good news is that book publishing won’t disappear. The better news is that Americans today are reading more than ever.

Are Books Really Here to Stay? The Saturday Evening Post

Back when it was crowded with booksellers, Book Row would have attracted anyone who loved reading. But it was irresistible to bibliophiles and bibliomanics. A bibliophile is anyone who loves the look, feel, and scent of books as much as their contents. Bibliomanics, however, are obsessed by books. They are fanatic hunters and compulsive buyers, usually purchasing more books than they can read in their lifetime.

In his 1944 article, “Book Row,” Don Samson gives a brief history of a bibliomaniac who haunted the area.

A shoe clerk from Brooklyn wandered into one of the secondhand bookshops on Book Row. He had never bought a book in his life, but picking up a musty volume, he liked the feel of it and bought it. The more he handled it, the more he liked it. He began buying books, and after a year his modest apartment was filled with them. Finally, his wife couldn’t take a bath because the tub was full of books. “You love your books more than you do me,” she wept, and threatened to go home to mother unless he got rid of them. He did. But within two weeks he was buying books again. His wife? She went home to mother.

There is something about books that provokes fascination and the odd compulsions that Samson saw in Book Row’s regulars:

A regular cash customer is the lady of the evening who collects the works of Marcel Proust. There is the Bowery bum who panhandles to buy books containing the word” hell,” books which he burns” to destroy the devil.” And there is the lawyer, internationally known, who collects books with uncut pages. “Virgin books,” he calls them.

Some people buy anything. Others, like the editor who has seventy-five copies of South Wind, will buy only copies of a single title. A collector who has all the dealers mystified is a banker who buys books in one series, Burt’s Home Library of popular classics. He tears the covers off and has the books and the covers restitched, switching titles and covers so that no book has the right title. Thus Alice in Wonderland becomes Black Beauty; The Divine Comedy, The Last Days of Pompeii, and so on. He boasts to the dealers, “You should see my library. It’s wonderful!”

The hangout for lovers of the unusual is a shop that specializes in strange books. Many are first attracted to the shop by the huge, black, plaster-of-Paris cat that crouches menacingly in the window; others are led here by their “vibrations.” An old German woman used to come regularly to buy books on the occult. One day she bought a book entitled “How to Make Yourself Invisible.”

“And she never came back,” says the dealer. “At least, we never saw her again.”

Book smellers are common. But they are hard to detect because, while running the nose along the bindings, they appear to be short-sightedly browsing. One smeller, a college professor, collects old, odoriferous volumes and wears the badge of his fraternity—a redrubbed nose. A well-known actress, a confessed smeller who never buys a book, is allowed the run of the shops because of the trade she attracts.

There are also book dusters. A good one can dust as many as fifty books in a single visit. He picks up a book, looks at the price marked in it, snaps it shut and, with a mighty huff and puff, blows the dust off before easing it back into place. Ironically, more men than women are dusters.

Odd behavior, I’ll grant you. An electronic book would never excite such mania, or even a semblance of this fascination. E-books will never hold the sensual appeal of what, for many Americans, is the “real thing”: a clean, hard-bound, octavo with clear, dark type on bright, clean pages. And books have several practical benefits. In a recent New York Times article, Sam Grobart wrote about the technical gadgets we won’t need in the future: desktop computers, digital cameras, and iPods. But he advised readers to keep their books. Compared to e-books, the real thing has “a terrific, high-resolution display,” durability, greater water-resistance, and “tremendous battery life.”

The Bibliomaniacs of Book Row The Saturday Evening Post

BUT, if you love books themselves, you may have chosen the wrong century to live in. The real-world, physical, walk-through-and-browse bookstore is disappearing from the American landscape. Independent bookshops have been quickly fading away, and now Borders Books, the national chain with 642 stores, has filed for Chapter 11 status. It will close about 200 stores this year and un-employ 6000 workers. If it can’t clear its debts, publishers will have to absorb millions in losses, which may require them to cut back on the number of books they print this year.

The fate of Borders will make little difference to the people who are happy reading their novels on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. But it will mean a great deal to devoted bibliophiles, who would prefer an afternoon in a good bookstore to a day at a theme park. For them, the online bookstore can never replace the pleasures of strolling down aisles of books, scanning new titles or picking up new releases that unexpectedly tickle their curiosity.

The peculiar lure of bookstores dates back to the 18^th century, when printers began turning out books in quantities large enough for create a reading public. Bookstalls appeared in cities like Paris and London and drew a steady stream of old scholars, young students, doctors, ministers, and merchants who searched for hardbound treasures.

One of America’s earliest booksellers, Leary’s Book Store in Philadelphia, was a happy hunting ground for book lovers between 1850 and 1969. As Pete Martin described it in a 1949 Post article, “House of a Million Books,” Leary’s was the antithesis of the modern chain bookstore. It was old, dark, dusty, cluttered, and staffed by silent, reserved salespeople.

"Books that stay on the shelves too long are moved to stalls out on the sidewalk, where they are offered at twenty-five cents each or five books for a dollar. If they don't sell there, they are presently junked."

In Leary’s nobody asks you anything, unless you yourself ask a question first.  Hung on the walls are placards that read:

To make you feel perfectly at ease in examining our immense stock, the employees are instructed not to offer assistance without being asked. This, we hope, will not be considered as inattention on our part. If you desire information, ask all the questions you want, without feeling under any obligation to purchase.

In theory, this means that if you felt like it you could visit Leary’s every day of your life and read your way at least partly through the 106 departments into which the store divides its more than 900,000 books. Throughout all those years spent reading, no one would ask you to buy a single book.

To booklovers, it comes close to being an American institution… Leary’s has been run for 113 years on the principle of not selling the customer. Businessmen may prove with charts and graphs that you can’t do business that way. But it’s been done that way at Leary’s ever since the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes was a youth just a few years out of Harvard.

This notion is so thoroughly inculcated on Leary’s salesmen that a few years ago one of them carried it to its ultimate conclusion. He stopped speaking to his customers altogether, even when they spoke to him, and had to be retired to pasture.

If there is such a thing as poetic justice, he is being allowed to browse there without interruption.

Leary’s “laissez faire” sales policy proved to be  just what serious bibliophiles wanted. Generations of book lovers became deeply attached to the old store on Philadelphia’s South 9^th Street.

[Novelist Christopher] Morley pays Leary’s this tribute: “It would be as impossible for any bibliophile to pass this secondhand bookstore as for a woman to go by a wedding party without trying to see the bride.”  Morley also remarked that he would rather see one of the nation’s historic shrines demolished by fire than to be told one morning as he donned his bathrobe that Leary’s was no more.

Stories are current in Philadelphia about exciting book finds made at Leary’s. The most persistent of these has to do with the Leary’s customer who was supposed to have found a first edition of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, for ten cents and afterward sold it for $5000. Leary’s has no way of knowing whether this story is even partly true. It does know that the peak price brought by a Maggie was about $2000. But even if true, no one at Leary’s would feel regret at having been so outsmarted.

Mrs. William S. Stuart, president of the Leary Stuart Corporation, remembers a valuable early edition of Robert Louis Stevenson that was picked up by a customer on the fifty-cent table. She also recalls that a book written by one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and presented by him to George Washington—the book bore both Washington’s autograph and that of the signer—was found in Leary’s in a basket of books previously thought to be junk.

This illustration by Carl Spitzweg was on every sign for Leary's Bookstore.

When Leary’s closed in 1968, several valuable items were discovered in the process of emptying the store. One of them was a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, which was sold for $400,000.

Learys is still fondly remembered by former customers, as you can see at books-rare.blogspot.com/2006/07/this-is-picture-learys-old-book-store.html.

Will anyone remember Amazon.com so warmly 40 years after it closes?

Next: The Curious Habits of the Bibliophile In Its Native Habitat

Late, Great American Bookstores: Leary’s Books The Saturday Evening Post