A Companion to the History of the Book (66 page)

In spite of all the attempts to enforce the political conformity of publishers, authors, and booksellers, the role of the book as an instrument of propaganda in the Third Reich was actually much less important than it was in communist Russia. It was also much less important than film, radio, illustrated periodicals, and newspapers, for the methods of totalitarian regimes of controlling their citizens also move with the times. The notable exception, of course, was Hitler’s blockbuster
Mein Kampf
(1925). By April 1933, sales stood at 340,000; by April 1940, after the book had been decreed the compulsory official gift for all German newlyweds, the total number of copies in print had reached 6 million (Wittmann 1991).

As had been the case in World War I, the conditions of World War II disrupted the book trade in many ways. The international trade was an obvious victim: in particular, the regular import of English-language books to the continent, as well as the continental publication of English books, came to a virtual standstill (though both revived with unprecedented vigor after the war was over). In Germany, Jewish, French, and English books, as well as light reading with an Anglo-American character (such as Wild West and detective novels), were banned. Paper shortages as well as widespread and often far-reaching censorship led to a shortage of any but the safest titles everywhere. There was no room for any sort of speculation, and new titles were rare. For publishers, an unlooked-for benefit was the opportunity to sell off unsold stocks, sometimes decades old. To alert entrepreneurs, opportunities offered themselves occasionally. In 1943, the appearance on the French market, starved of Anglo-American comics, of
Le Téméraire: journal pour la jeunesse
met with huge popular acclaim, moving from 100,000 to 150,000 copies within a year (Martin et al. 1986).

While the production of printed matter for National Socialist propaganda purposes used many resources, a small but vigorous clandestine press did manage in most German-occupied territories to put out news sheets as well as books. De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam and Les Éditions du minuit in Paris were examples of publishers that grew out of illegal activities to turn into leading literary publishers in their countries. With the onset of the Allied campaign in continental Europe, service editions began to find their way into civilian hands. These were soon joined by a wide range of publications specifically designed for European distribution by the British and American propaganda offices. After the war had ended, many British publishers were quick to seize the opportunities engendered by the wartime scarcity of non-propagandist reading matter and an interest in the Anglo-Saxon culture of the liberators.

As soon as paper supplies began to revert to normal after the war, the book industry took off. From the mid-1950s, but especially during the 1960s and 1970s, it began to experience a boom. In the 1920s and 1930s, experiments in pocket-sized, mass-produced books had occurred in various countries, but the concept of the mass paperback, as we know it today, did not take off on the continent till after World War II. Belgium (Bibliothèque Marabout, 1949) and Germany (Rowohlt’s Rotations-Romane, RoRoRo, 1950) were the first to adopt this new form on a large scale. Rowohlt had been one of first publishers to gain licenses for all sectors of occupied Germany. The paperbacks, which had initially appeared in newspaper format, were printed in massive print-runs (of 55,000 and up) on two sides simultaneously, used the innovative “perfect binding” technique invented by Lumbeck, and carried advertising in the middle of the text (Wittmann 1991). The Netherlands soon followed with Prisma pockets (1951); France with Livre de poche (1953). In Italy, the mass paperback did not really take off till the 1960s (Oscar Mondadori, 1965). In conjunction with the postwar economic boom, new series were started everywhere. Especially popular were current
belles lettres
(both in the national language and in translation), detectives, and other similar entertainments.

Apart from the more predictable economic causes of the postwar publishing boom, the effect of the Cold War is worthy of note. This was both a direct influence, resulting from all sorts of propaganda activities, and a much more diffuse one. Among the more diffuse effects of the Cold War was the tendency to redefine national culture. This resulted in many new publications, but also notably in new editions and revisions. The rewriting of history books, both general and textbooks, is an obvious example.

Textbooks were always in need of minor revisions to reflect new knowledge, changing geopolitical circumstances, spelling, and so on. Mostly, these were of a kind that could easily be made in new printings as the market absorbed them. From time to time more major revisions were required. Italy and Germany show peaks in textbook production in the 1930s, as a result of the ideological changes instigated by the National Socialist and fascist regimes. In France, the first major impetus for the school-book industry after the various nineteenth-century national education acts came from the confluence of a number of changes after World War II. These included new notions about the nature of childhood and the role of education, the professionalization and concentration of school-book publishing, as well as updates of the books’ factual and ideological content. With 750 new titles, textbook production in France in 1950 returned to levels seen last in the 1880s (compared with an average of 300 in 1930–40; the average between 1880 and 1890 was 750; Martin et al. 1986). In the Netherlands, textbooks had grown to become the largest category by volume in the period after the introduction of compulsory primary education in 1900.

Especially notable among postwar developments was the surge in interest in English and American culture, and the rise of English as a
lingua franca
in Europe. The general book-buying public displayed an apparently insatiable demand for English-language books. Berhard Tauchnitz, who had started publishing his “Collection of British and American Authors” in 1837, had already proved that a sizable market existed for them in continental Europe. Even before World War II, publishers John Holroyd-Reece (Britain) and Kurt Enoch (Germany) had founded the “Albatross Modern Continental Library” (1931) in the same fashion – going on to buy Tauchnitz in 1934. It was the successful Albatross series that provided Allen Lane with a great deal of inspiration for his famous Penguins. He took not only the idea of the bird name, along with a stylized black-and-white picture of it, but also the color coding of the covers. The very first Albatross – in yellow, indicating “psychological novels, essays, etc.” – was James Joyce’s
Dubliners;
other early authors included Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, and Virginia Woolf. During the war, the Continental Book Company of Stockholm and London joined the market with their “Zephyr Books: A Library of British and American Authors.”

However, it was after World War II that books in English began their triumphal march in earnest. Old stalwarts Tauchnitz and Albatross continued to be available, but a host of new competitors made an appearance. Star Editions, “To be sold on the Continent of Europe only,” were produced in England. In 1946, the Swiss company of Scherz & Hallwag started publishing their “Scherz Phoenix Books” in Berne and Paris, with A. J. Cronin’s
The Keys of the Kingdom.
Soon, however, in recognition of the European hunger for books in English, many British publishers began to organize their own networks of European representatives. In 1953, William Heinemann, for example, set up a subsidiary company in The Hague. This took care of warehousing but when, following the general postwar paper shortage, supplies of paper became available, it also published and printed a number of Heinemann titles. In fact, the Netherlands went on to become the biggest non-English-speaking per capita consumers of books in English.

Translations were another form in which Anglo-American culture spread on the continent. The French “Série Noire” (Gallimard, 1945– ) was a series of hard-boiled crime novels, mainly of American origin. During the Cold War period, the French Communist party resisted the perceived intellectual and moral damage this and other series represented. It was also committed to combating the adverse effects on children of American cartoons by offering non-capitalist French parallels. Illustrated weeklies for children were very big business. In France just after World War II, there were some thirty titles, at around 3 million copies per week, not counting the fortnightlies or the issues of complete stories, which brought the total up to 22 million per month (Martin et al. 1986; Fourché 1998).

At the end of the nineteenth century, the German book had been a global commodity, with almost 500 shops selling exclusively or preponderantly German books in America alone, and 245 foreign members of the German Book Trade Association scattered across the globe. Before World War II, a great deal of international scientific publishing had taken place in German, as well as in various national languages. After the war, when Germany had lost so many of its scientists, the epicenter of scholarly publishing was clearly shifting. European scholarly publishing became increasingly international, and increasingly looked to English as its main vehicle. There were many exceptions to this general trend, such as the use of Russian in Eastern-bloc countries after 1948. Also, in science, the tendency was more pronounced than in other disciplines (notably the humanities). What aided the trend, and helped the growth of scholarly publishing at large, was the postwar growth of the academic population, and of its international mobility. The resulting competition placed greater pressure on scholars to publish outside of dissertations (Altbach and Hoshino 1995).

However unhappy editors of national scientific journals were with this development, internationalization, especially in scholarly publishing, was unstoppable in the postwar period. With their roots in the nineteenth century, the big European multinationals in publishing, Hachette (1826), Bertelsmann (1835), Wolters Kluwer (Wolters, 1836; Kluwer, 1889), Springer (1842), and Reed Elsevier (Elsevier, 1880; Reed, 1894) had all gone through a period of sustained growth before World War II. It was the science publishers that were the first to publish multinationally. Elsevier, one of the first publishers in Europe to be founded as a limited liability company, entered into a joint venture in New York in 1937 for the publication in English of German scientific works. In 1939, Elsevier opened an office in the UK. Springer, too, first looked to the US, setting up an international venture in New York in 1965. The international expansion of Kluwer, especially in the field of law, began in the late 1960s, with the acquisition of a number of smaller Dutch scholarly publishers with an international portfolio: Martinus Nijhoff, Junk and Stenfert Kroese, and later through the acquisition of German law publishers and a joint venture with British Harrap. For Hachette and Bertelsmann, general publishers with a sizable home market, international expansion came later. With its emphasis on solid religious publishing and its old-fashioned taste in children’s literature, Bertelsmann had only just managed to survive the German book crisis of the second half of the 1920s. Not long after the end of the war, Bertelsmann began its media diversification, starting with music in the 1950s, and moving into film in the 1960s. Bertelsmann became a limited liability company in 1971, but is still not publicly traded. While Bertelsmann’s international expansion started in the 1970s, that of Hachette began even later, although it had begun to experiment with co-publications in Germany and England before World War II.

While scholarly publishing at large, and scientific, technical, and medical publishing in particular, were undergoing a process of concentration and internationalization, the democratization of print production offered new opportunities for more marginal publishing ventures. From the end of the 1960s, political, “countercultural,” and feminist publications were availing themselves of the opportunities of offset printing, photocopying, and mimeographing. While offering exciting opportunities for new entrants to the field of print production, the photocopying machine was perceived as a serious threat to profitability, especially of scholarly publishing. But, once again, the book managed to weather these technological challenges.

References and Further Reading

Altbach, Philip G. and Hoshino, Edith S. (eds.) (1995)
International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia.
New York: Garland.

Bachleitner, Norbert, Eybl, Franz M., and Fischer, Ernst (2000)
Geschichte des Buchhandels in Öster-reich
[History of the Book Trade in Austria]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Biblioteca dei miei ragazzi (
www.bibliotecadeimieiragazzi.it
).

Bibliothèque de Suzette (
www.bibliothequedesu-zette.com
).

Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel
[Newspaper for the German Book Trade].

Datenbank Schrift und Bild 1900-1960 [Database Text and Image 1900–1960] (
www.polunbi.de
).

Le droit d’auteur
[The Author’s Right]:
revue du
[Newsletter of the]
Bureau de l’Union Internationale pour la Protection des Oeuvres Littéraires et Artistiques.

Ekholm, Kai (2001) “Political Censorship in Finnish Libraries from 1944 to 1946.”
Libraries and Culture,
36 (1): 51–7.

Fourché, Pascal (ed.) (1998)
l’édition française depuis 1945
[French Publishing since 1945]. Paris: éditions du Cercle de la Librairie.

Glas, Frank de (1989)
Nieuwe lezers voor het goede boek: De Wereldbibliotheek en Ontwikkeling/De Arbeiderspers vóór 1940.
Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek.

Hall, Murray G. (1985)
österreichische Verlagsgeschichte 1918–1938
[Austrian Publishing History 1918–1938], vol. 1:
Geschichte des österreichischen Verlagswesens
[History of the Austrian Publishing World]. Vienna: Bohlau.

Kuitert, Lisa (1993)
Het ene boek in vele delen: De uitgave van literaire series in Nederland 1850–1900
[One Book in Many Parts: The Publication of Literary Series in the Netherlands 1850–1900]. Amsterdam. De Buitenkant.