Every time consumers opted for paperbacks over hardbacks, their decisions hit publishers, booksellers, and authors in the wallet. Book people saw only one way to recoup the loss: volume and plenty of it, selling mountains of books in all formats from morning to night.
That’s exactly what happened. During the 1960s, books sold as never before. Better yet, publishers of bestsellers discovered a new way to hit the jackpot: auctions of mass-market rights. In the 1950s, bestsellers’ mass-market rights sold for around $10,000. In the ’60s, some netted six figures, and by the ’70s, millions.
Even so, in the 1960s, the University of Chicago professor Edward Shils (1910–1995) declared bookselling endangered, asserting that Americans showed little interest in reading. And in 1966, the media analyst Marshall McLuhan said, “Clotheslines, seams in stockings, books and jobs—all are obsolete.”
Yet during the 1960s, despite the lure of movies, television, and transistor radios, baby boomers became history’s largest generation of readers, and book sales reached heights previously unimagined.
Although PR pioneer Edward Bernays failed to dissuade Depression-era book borrowing, another of his ideas bore juicy fruit. He urged publishers to encourage builders to add something novel to new homes: built-in bookshelves. Bernays figured that homebuyers would fill them—which they did, during the post–World War II explosion of suburbs—and thanks to Epstein and Pocket Books, they were not above filling them with paperbacks.
But where did literary suburbanites go for books? Until the 1960s, independent booksellers inhabited small, funky, cluttered shops off the beaten track. This made perfect sense. Bookselling was a low-volume, low-profit business best suited to low-rent locations.
But after the war, bookselling changed, which transformed publishing. The middle class moved to the suburbs, where they found not historical retail districts with perhaps a little bookshop down a side street, but enormous shopping malls anchored by department stores.
Starting around 1960, mall-based department stores faced a strategic dilemma: What to do about books? Eighty years earlier, the first department stores had embraced bookselling to capitalize on their cachet with upscale shoppers. In the 1960s, department stores in the new malls began turning their book departments into freestanding bookstores for the same reason, to add class to suburban shopping centers.
Walden Book Company went from renting books during the Depression to selling them after World War II. Renamed Walden Books (later Waldenbooks), in 1962, the company opened its first store in a suburban Pittsburgh mall and soon expanded to others, becoming the first chain bookseller.
Executives of the Dayton Company, a Minneapolis-based department store firm (now Target), watched closely. They liked Walden’s model, and in 1966, at a mall in Edina, Minnesota, they opened the first B. Dalton Bookseller.