| In October 1930, Macy's book department used the inexpensive book series, "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books," as a loss-leader to draw customers off the street and into the store. Selling for only nine cents a copy, the small-format, modern classics attracted crowds willing to withstand a fifty-foot line. Businessmen, housewives, students, and bohemian intellectuals stood together in midtown Manhattan to buy authors like Tolstoy, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf in the prestigious series. At the same time, writers for the New Republic, the Nation, and the Bookman were worrying that mass-production, "book ballyhoo," and new book distribution schemes would commodify literature and deny the promise of American culture. It was a significant moment in American cultural history when a series of books respected and praised by the nation's self-appointed arbiters of taste could attract a throng of middle-class consumers without damaging its reputation as "serious culture."; From 1917 to 1941 the Modern Library of the World's Best Books achieved remarkable commercial success delivering "quality literature" to a broad audience. Its owners, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, actively courted a large middle-class book-buying public to push annual sales over one million copies throughout the Great Depression. As a result of marketing strategies, editorial decisions, and close attention to book design, the series pleased self-consciously "intellectual" cultural critics and professional-managerial consumers.; The Modern Library's reputation stands in stark contrast to the reputations of similar publishing ventures dismissed by critics as "middlebrow culture" such as Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Harvard Classics and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Even though the Modern Library offered a uniformly packaged, pre-selected set of "the World's Best Books," it succeeded in fitting into a definition of "genuine culture" being worked out by the nation's intellectuals. By examining the Modern Library's advertising policies, distribution methods, title selection, and physical design this dissertation explores the cultural dynamics that allowed the Modern Library to exploit the forces of mass-production and treat books as commodities, yet still position itself as a revered cultural entity. |
