An Unhinged History of American Publishing, episode 3.3: The Crown Publishing Group, or: Look At That Trash Panda Go 😭

A storied literary brand that grew like an exotic fungus from a pile of supermarket erotica and garbage, encouraged along by a beady-eyed hoarder with a heart of gold.

What a thrilling time the 1910s and 20s were for American publishing. Modernism! Art deco! Relativity! Loose morals! Speakeasies! The Harlem Renaissance! The birth of all four storied publishing houses I’ve profiled in my unhinged history of publishing so far—Knopf, Norton, Random House, and Simon and Schuster—all of which were led by cool young people!

A voracious reading public! A revolution afoot in a sclerotic 19th-century field, led by enterprising twentysomethings! WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

The Great Depression. The Great Depression is what could go wrong, Myrtle.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, the American people ran out of both money and fucks to give to book publishers. Books had always been a fairly big-ticket luxury item; only hardcovers were available back then, after all, and although hardcovers cost an almost eerily equal amount then vs. what they do now,¹ it was the 1910s and 1920s. You know, with the robber barons and the nonexistent social safety nets and the Triangle Shirtwaist factories. Families back then did not have a lot of Fun Money kicking around in the bank, and that was before the bank whoopsy-lost every remaining dime they had.

Within months of the stock market crash, stacks of gorgeous books were mouldering unsold in warehouses all over America. Wealthy publishing executives pumped personal funds into their companies to keep them afloat; many sank anyway. It was a sad and scary time.

Which means it was also a Pizza Rat time.

When the world gets apocalyptic, a certain kind of folk hero emerges. Think of Gritty at the height of the Trump era, Pizza Rat after the Ferguson uprising, or Benjamin “wholesome pervert” Franklin at the onset of the Revolutionary War. Think of the orca who kept ramming the boats off the coast of Spain this summer.

Humanity rejoices in cretins such as these in times of unrest and despair. The world’s unkillable horseshoe crabs remind us that if you’re willing to be a little gross and unsettling, a little low to the ground, you can survive an extinction event—even one of Cretaceous-Paleogene proportions.

Horseshoe crabs might be repulsive—at least to me, nyuhhuhuhuhuh—but they sure know how to survive, and they do it with monsterly aplomb. Like Gritty himself, their googly eyes bobble us forth into a future we once thought unsurvivable.

Nathan “Nat” Wartels, cofounder and public face of Crown Publishers, was one such cretin.

Before the Depression, Wartels and his cofounder Bob Simon were rank-and-file book salesmen. You know—the guys who work for publishers and travel the country convincing retailers to buy their employers’ books.

Salespeople are enormously important in this field, but for a variety of reasons,² they’ve historically not gotten anywhere near as much respect from editors, agents, publishing executives, and authors as those people give each other.

One of the reasons for this, if I’m being honest, might be that salesmen are nowhere near as neurotic as we are, and their sure-footed self-esteem reminds us we don’t have that, and that annoys us. Salesmen generally live in reality and are realists. They rarely need the sort of psychobabble I dispense in this newsletter.

Here’s what salespeople know better and more crucially, accept more readily—than anyone else in this industry: You cannot, cannot, sell a book to a reader by arguing, wheedling, demanding, insisting, pouting, or fantasizing that you know their needs better than they themselves do. You cannot drag them to you; you must instead meet them where they are.

Doing so requires observant attention, adaptability, and a very, very flexible ego. This is….groan…but it’s the only way to publish a book people will actually buy.

In other words: you’ve got to read the room. Which is what just about every publisher in America failed to do during the Depression. They failed to meet American readers and book buyers where they were. Even if readers could afford it—and most people couldn’t—who on Earth in 1929 had the thought, “I could really go for Alfred Knopf’s effete endpapers and couture pricing right now?” Who wanted the Nortons’ soaring explorations of theoretical physics and German poetry?

People were stressed the fuck out!! Stressed-out people want reptile comforts. They want easy. They want cheap. They want dopamine. And in their free time, such as it is, they just want to masturbate.

This is where Wartels and Simon came to the rescue.³ They watched consumers during the Depression, accepted reality as it was, and quit their jobs to start a new venture. Together, they bought an old remainders business called the Outlet Book Company, acquiring unsold warehouse stock for next to nothing and reselling it to cash-strapped consumers at a deep discount.

For publishers, this proposition was better than a total loss. For readers, it meant the return of affordable books. And when a book turned out to be such a commercial turd that Wartels and Simon couldn’t sell it to anyone at all, they’d offer it for two cents per copy to a toy company that’d rip out all the paper and make the cover binding into a startling sort of Jack-in-the-Box toy for kids.

BOI-OI-OI-OI-OING!

(I’m not kidding.)

The Outlet Book Company was a huge success. It was such a huge success that the two founders soon had a lot of money kicking around—and that meant it was time to make a new bet. Nat Wartels was an avid gambler, at the race track nearly every week clear through his death; he’d never leave the casino when he was on a hot streak, metaphorically and otherwise. It was time to start a new venture.

Was the new venture Crown? LOL, NO. It was rental erotica, baby! Using the “rental library” model—a Red Box-like phenomenon of the pre-paperback era in which readers could borrow trash lit for cheap at the drug store—Wartels and Simon published two “hots” and two “sweets” a month for a horny, horny, Depression-dissociative customer base.⁴

The erotica venture? Also a hit. It was just the kind of brain-dead pleasure the traumatized American people were craving. More money came in, and in time, Nat grew restless to make yet another bet. This was when he and Simon started Crown.

By 1933, America’s higher neurological functions were beginning to come back online. FDR was now in the White House, ending four years of Hooverian nightmare and delivering on his promised New Deal. The economy was slowly recovering, and people had a teeny-tiny bit of fun money again. They began to think about, you know, art or whatever. Classy stuff. Like they did in the 20s before the Depression bullshit began.

It was time, Wartels and Simon decided, to start dealing in classy stuff. No more smut. JK—plenty of smut, smut forever, scum was evergreen. But alongside it: classy stuff. It was a growing market.

The plan was to hire a couple classy class-man editors and launch an imprint that wouldn’t look out of place in a country club. They just had to think of a name.

Hmm. What do you call an imprint like that? An old-money yacht man like William Warder Norton would just use his last name, of course, but that wasn’t an option for Nat Wartels, who—let’s face it—had a name that made him sound like a ribald medieval peasant with syphilis.

Here’s what you call it instead, dur: