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Trysh Travis, Ph.D. Candidate
American Studies
Yale University
1996-1997
I apologize once again for my tardiness in sending this letter to you. Rest
assured that my delay in no way reflects any bad feeling about my work in
the Princeton archives; it's merely a sign of the chaos of life away from
the mellow precincts of Mudd library.
I applied for the Princeton Library Research Fellowship in order to use the
archive of the Council on Books in Wartime. The Council's wartime efforts
to promote reading as an essential element in a democracy indicate the self-conscious
role that trade book publishers assumed for themselves in mid-century American
culture; I explore this role at length in my dissertation, "Reading Matters:
The 'Serious' Reader and the Rise of Mass Culture, 1930-1970. "
The book industry's contribution to American cultural life has been largely
overlooked. This is in part due to disciplinary blindness, ("who cares about
publishers? they're just a bunch of functionaries-- it's the writers who
really make culture happen!") augmented by a lack of archival resources ("where's
the evidence that publishers were important?!"), which in turn reinforces
the existing disciplinary blindness ("if publishers were important, archives
would exist to document their work!"). My dissertation argues that, contrary
to this set of suppositions, the publishing industry at mid-century conceived
of itself as a literary community entrusted with guarding American culture
and democracy. My hypothesis was formed in part when I learned about the
work of the Council; it was confirmed many times over while I worked in the
Princeton archive.
Unlike many contemporary book trade organizations, the Council kept careful
records of all their doings. This suggests they were quite self-conscious
about the importance of their work-- both within the context of the war effort
and within the evolving profession of publishing. Looking at the meeting
minutes of their Board of Directors, Executive Committee, and the various
sub-committees allowed me to see how different kinds of publicity strategies
(both for reading as a leisure activity in general and for specific books)
evolved, matured, and died. Within the different promotional strategies conducted
through radio and film, book fairs, speakers, reprints, posters campaigns,
etc., I could see different sectors of the trade weighing in on larger questions
of industrial modernization: vertical integration, mass production and distribution,
use of market research, etc. This crucial part
of the business of publishing is usually lost to history, since the traces
it leaves (memos, minutes, drafts of press releases, etc.) are distinctly
unglamorous.
In addition to retrieving this evidence of how the nuts and bolts questions
of book promotion were worked out by Council members, I also learned a great
deal about the professional culture of the book trade: individual publisher's
ideas about certain books, about promotion in general, about what were desirable
new audiences and how (or whether) to cultivate them, about the use of other
media to promote reading, and, most important, about the merits of different
kinds of reading practices (i.e, 'escape' vs. 'serious' reading). Determining
that this set of evaluative criteria exists, and figuring out its nuances
is important for understanding canon formation-- that is, for figuring out
how publishers' prejudices, along with those of critics and scholars, influence
what counts as 'literature.' In addition, retrieving the intricacies of this
professional culture complicates the often static notion of 'bias' that accompanies
so much discussion of canon formation. I looked at the arguments that different
Council members had over what titles were good, over what the public needed
to hear about the War and about reading, over which public they wanted to
reach and what methods they should use to do it, and over how they could
maintain autonomy even as they worked with the government. Few of these arguments
were resolved unanimously; both the politics and the aesthetics of the book
men who made up the Council were contradictory and often ambiguous. These
findings seem crucial to my project of breaking down familiar and often simplistic
arguments about white male cultural hegemony and the links between culture
industry workers and products and capitalism as a social force.
Finally, one of the richest parts of the Council archive is its collection
of soldier letters written in response to the Armed Services Editions. Records
of ordinary people's reading experiences are extremely difficult to come
by. This cache of several hundred letters is a valuable resource for seeing
a cross-section of an historical reading public describe the ways in which
they read and the pleasures they took from different kinds of books. While
any group of fan letters (and these would fall into that category) is a self-selected
and unscientific sample, that fact in no way diminishes the usefulness of
these letters. Without claiming to be representative, they are highly suggestive
of the variety of reading practices common at the time, and document the
wide register of appeals that books made to their public. Most interestingly,
the fact that Council members have gone through and highlighted these letters
for excerption in some kind of (unrealized) promotional effort reveals how
publishers thought of their readers, and what aspects of reading they wanted
to claim as their own. The purple pencil marks that amend the soldier letters
are an extremely rare instance of dialogue across what Robert Darnton has
called the communications circuit of the book.
It would be hard for me to find fault with the Council archive as it exists
at Princeton. Council members were quite meticulous both about what they
kept and about what they expunged. There are hints in various places of purged
correspondence (especially about the Council's blue collar rival, the Book
Mobilization Committee), but it is clear that these gaps were created by
Council members, not by careless handling of the documents at Princeton.
I found the collection to be meticulously maintained and organized, with
an excellent finding aid. I was given abundant, comprehensive, and friendly
assistance by the gracious and intelligent staff at Mudd Library. My only
wish is that Mudd's related collections, especially the Franklin Book Program,
Inc. Archives, were processed and available for cross-referencing. The Council
worked in an artificially discrete time frame, which makes it a tidy entity
for research. Yet towards the War's end much of their activity was focused
overseas; many of their projects for the publication and distribution of
English-language books were picked up by larger, ongoing organizations, and
it would've been very useful to mark the points of connection and cross-over.
While Columbia's Publishing Archives are more extensive than Princeton's,
I believe that the book trade organizations whose documents are housed at
Mudd are an equally important part of twentieth-century American book history.
It was my pleasure to work among them, and I look forward to doing so again.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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