Deceased--Oscar Dystel

At right.
Oscar Dystel
October 31st 1912 to May 28th, 2014

"Oscar Dystel, Who Saved Bantam Books, Dies at 101"

by

Doglas Martin

May 29th, 2014

The New York Times

Oscar Dystel, who combined sharp editorial judgments, shrewd marketing and attention-grabbing covers to propel Bantam Books from the brink of collapse to pre-eminence in paperback publishing after World War II, died on Wednesday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 101.

His daughter, Jane Dystel, a literary agent, announced the death.

Bantam Books was founded in 1945 to take advantage of new methods that allowed paperbacks to be produced cheaply and of a public eager to pay 25 cents for a book that might have cost $2 as a hardback.

But by the early 1950s, the industry was choking on its own success, having printed mountains more books than the public wanted. More than 175 million copies were piled in warehouses. Bantam was in chaos and had been without a president for two years when Mr. Dystel (rhymes with pistol) was hired.

“We were flooding the market to sell 100 copies,” he said in an interview for “The Bantam Story,” a 1970 book by Clarence Petersen. “I remember one executive coming into my office with a balance sheet and telling me, ‘We’re out of business.’ ”

Bantam was on track to lose more than $500,000 that year. But Mr. Dystel was so confident of Bantam’s future that he demanded a percentage of future profits.

By the end of the next year, Bantam was making a profit, and by the time Mr. Dystel retired as chairman in 1980, its sales exceeded $100 million a year. It was the largest publisher of paperbacks, with more than 15 percent of a market served by 14 principal houses and several lesser imprints. Paperbacks had come to account for more than half the dollar volume of sales in the nation’s bookstores.

Mr. Dystel reduced inventory, pushed a program to sell classic books by Dostoyevsky and other authors, expanded publishing for schools and children, multiplied the sales force and built a corporate structure.

And he did what he liked most: He found books with a shot at popularity and sold them vigorously.

An early victory was “Battle Cry,” a 1953 novel by Leon Uris about a group of Marines in the South Pacific during World War II. Bantam and a competitor, Pocket Books, each bid $25,000 for paperback rights, according to Al Silverman in his 2008 book, “The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors.” Mr. Dystel won the deal by promising to send Marines to wholesalers to explain their love of the book.

“It was a battle cry for the country that Bantam was in business,” Mr. Dystel told Mr. Silverman.

Other big sellers followed. “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann, which Mr. Dystel predicted would sell a million copies, had a press run of four million the week after its paperback publication in 1967. Four million more copies were published in less than a year.

When no hardcover publisher was interested in William Peter Blatty’s novel “The Exorcist” in 1971, Mr. Dystel bought both hardcover and paperback rights. He later sold the hardcover rights to Harper & Row. It became a best seller — Bantam sold 10 million copies — and the basis of a 1973 blockbuster movie of the same title.

Covers mattered. Bantam made red the preferred color for paperback books, and other companies followed, until bookstands were almost solidly red. It then did the same with white, and later with raised metallic titles.

When the New American Library’s rights for J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) were expiring, Mr. Dystel resolved to acquire the book. It turned out that what Mr. Salinger most wanted was to design the cover himself. “No problem!” Mr. Dystel said, according to Mr. Silverman. “We’ll publish it in a brown paper wrapping paper if he wants that, just as long as the title is legible.”

Mr. Salinger’s cover is the one that became familiar to millions: the title and author’s name in yellow against a red background.

“Catcher” sold half a million Bantam copies a year beginning in 1964, and by 1978 it had been through 46 Bantam printings.

Mr. Dystel’s idea of the perfect book was one that combined a riveting story, a compelling cover and a hit movie. Bantam paperback sales of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” (1974) reached three million and had started to wane when the Steven Spielberg movie came out in June 1975. By the end of October, six million more copies had been sold. It was an industry speed record at the time.

Mr. Dystel and his team designed the paperback cover of “Jaws,” which the movie poster duplicated. It showed a great white shark coming up from the ocean floor to attack a swimming woman. It was already one of the fastest-selling paperbacks, and its sales ballooned when the words “Now a popular motion picture from Universal” were added to the cover.

One of Mr. Dystel’s boldest initiatives was writing, packaging, printing and delivering books in what was then an incredibly short time. In 1964, Bantam turned out the complete text of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — with several original articles by The New York Times — just 80 hours after the report was released. It sold 1.6 million copies at $1 each (about $7.65 in today’s money).

“It’s a wonder it was tried in the first place,” Mr. Petersen wrote of the challenge Bantam overcame. The Bantam Extras series went on to include books on Pope Paul VI’s trip to the United States in 1965 and the first moon landing in 1969. Fifty-six Extras were published.

Oscar Dystel was born on Oct. 31, 1912, in the Bronx, the only child of parents who worked in a tailor shop and later owned a general store. As a child he played the violin and performed at Carnegie Hall, but he gave it up after realizing that he would never be a virtuoso. He received a track scholarship to New York University, which he supplemented by working as a typesetter at The Times. He graduated in 1935 with a major in advertising.

Mr. Dystel won a scholarship to Harvard Business School and graduated in 1937. He was then hired as promotion manager at Esquire magazine and later promoted to editor of Coronet magazine, which was owned by the same company. He helped increase Coronet’s circulation to two million from 87,000 before leaving in 1942 to join the Office of War Information, where he worked on psychological warfare.

He won the Medal of Freedom for planning, editing and distributing millions of leaflets to people in Nazi-occupied southern France. The leaflets were “valuable factors in reducing the enemy’s will to resist,” the citation said.

After the war, Mr. Dystel worked for other magazines before being hired to run Bantam. Under him, Bantam published 600 to 1,000 books a year. After leaving Bantam in 1980, he worked as a consultant.

His wife of 65 years, the former Marion Deitler, and his son, John, died in 2003. In addition to his daughter, Jane, he is survived by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Dystel’s maxim for publishing success was as simple as it was difficult: “There’s no disastrous situation in publishing which cannot be saved by the publication of one really big best seller.”

Deceased--Arthur J. Rosenthal

Arthur J. Rosenthal
September 26th, 1919 to July 6th, 2013

"Arthur Rosenthal, Academic Book Publisher, Dies at 93"

by

Paul Vitello

July 8th, 2013

The New York Times

Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher of intellectual masterworks in an era of fast-buck publishing who led Basic Books in the 1950s and ’60s and created a model for universities nationwide by leading Harvard University Press to solvency in the ’70s and ’80s, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by his son Jim.

Mr. Rosenthal, who founded Basic Books in 1952, let his taste in nonfiction and his quasi indifference to profit margins guide him as a publisher. But it was an early connection to the society of psychoanalysts (his mother ran a salon for psychoanalytic debate in their Manhattan home when he was growing up) that led Mr. Rosenthal to his first publishing deal, the three-volume official biography of Dr. Sigmund Freud by a disciple, Dr. Ernest Jones.

Dr. Jones’s biography, “The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,” became one of the basic texts of Freud scholarship. Dr. Jones “only expected sales of about 600 copies to other psychoanalysts,” Mr. Rosenthal told The New York Times in 1985. “We had world rights and no contract, just a handshake.” The book became a mainstay of Basic Books.

Mr. Rosenthal’s interests in psychology, sociology, current affairs, history and philosophy led him to publish a library full of important social science volumes over the next decades, including early works by the behavioral scientists Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson.

In 1972, after selling Basic Books to Harper & Row for a reported $4 million, Mr. Rosenthal took his talents to the nonprofit Harvard Press, which had been faltering. There, his ability to bring what he called “borderline academic books” to a wider audience helped put the press in the black and served as a model for university presses elsewhere. He introduced new lists in science and technology, professionalized marketing and began picking winners.

Among the titles published during Mr. Rosenthal’s tenure were Bernard Bailyn’s 1975 National Book Award winner, “The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson”; E. O. Wilson’s “On Human Nature” (1978), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s “Visible Hand,” which received both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1978; Carol Gilligan’s “In a Different Voice” (1982), which sold over 500,000 copies and became a major text of the women’s movement; Thomas K. McCraw’s Pulitzer-winning “Prophets of Regulation” (1984); Jane Goodall’s “Chimpanzees of Gombe” (1986), an account of Dr. Goodall’s first 25 years working with chimps; and Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings” (1984), which spent 46 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.

“When a press like ours can publish a roaring best seller,” Mr. Rosenthal said in 1986, “it helps all university presses, and it increases the bookstores’ recognition that we are not only handing out dead mackerel.“

He said he was proud to publish any book — whether profitable or not — that managed “to push our culture one grain of sand forward.”

John Leonard, a Nation columnist and former editor of The New York Times Book Review, described Mr. Rosenthal as an endangered species in a 1997 commentary about the corporatization of the publishing industry for the CBS News program “Sunday Morning”: “He prided himself on being able to publish any book he cared about.”

In the publishing world, Mr. Leonard added, “We used to be able to count on the Arthur Rosenthals.”

Arthur Jesse Rosenthal was born in Manhattan on Sept. 26, 1919, to Arthur and Grace Rosenthal. His father was a stockbroker and a member of the New York Stock Exchange. His mother, who was a patient in the 1920s of Dr. Otto Rank, an Austrian psychoanalyst who was one of Freud’s first pupils, pursued a lifelong interest in psychology.

After graduating from Yale in 1941, Mr. Rosenthal served four years in the Army as the chief of publications for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, directing press and propaganda work in the Philippines and occupied Japan.

Before starting Basic Books, Mr. Rosenthal was a special assistant to James G. MacDonald, the first United States ambassador to Israel.

Besides his son Jim, Mr. Rosenthal’s survivors include a daughter, Kathryn Goldman; a son, Paul; and eight grandchildren. Mr. Rosenthal’s two marriages ended in divorce.

Mr. Rosenthal, who retired from Harvard Press in 1990, was 70 when he started his last job, as publisher of Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

In an interview at the time, Mr. Rosenthal acknowledged that the business was becoming more difficult. But his enthusiasm was a constant.

“Something happens,” he said. “You get an idea. You meet an author. You can’t be depressed and be a good publisher.”

Basic Books [Wikipedia]

A Brief History of Harvard University Press

Penguin Books and Random House Books merge

Someday there will be just one book publisher. Will this merger bring a change in name...Penguin House, Random Penguin, Penguin/Random House Books?

"Random House and Penguin merge to take on retailers"

by

Kate Holton

October 29th, 2012

Reuters

Britain's Pearson (PSON.L) and Germany's Bertelsmann are to merge their publishers Penguin and Random House, aiming to gain the upper hand in their relationship with Amazon and Apple, the leaders in the ebook revolution.

Education and media publisher Pearson said on Monday the joint venture - which will bring under one roof fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, "Fifty Shades of Grey" author EL James and 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan - would be named Penguin Random House.

Confirmation of a deal came after months of Pearson board discussions and despite an informal approach from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), which was interested in combining Penguin with its own Harper Collins publishing unit, a person familiar with the situation said.

"The consumer publishing industry is going through a period of tumultuous change, propelled by digital technologies and the giant companies that dominate them," Pearson Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said in an email to staff.

"The book publishing industry today is remarkable for being composed of a few large, and a lot of relatively small companies, and there probably isn't room for them all - they're going to have to get together."

Under the plans, Bertelsmann will own 53 percent of the venture and nominate five directors to the board, while Pearson would own the rest and nominate four. Both must retain their share in the venture for at least three years.

Penguin chairman and CEO John Makinson will be chairman of the new venture, and Random House CEO Markus Dohle will be its chief executive.

Analysts said they would have preferred a bid from a group such as News Corp, which would have brought cash into the company and enabled Pearson to quit a market that has been hit by the rapid growth of the ebook and the control it has given to major distributors such as Amazon (AMZN.O), Apple APPL.O and Google (GOOG.O).

Pearson, however, said the merger would provide significant synergies and the opportunity to spend more on the new technologies transforming the industry.

"Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers," Scardino said.

The two groups said they would save money on joint warehousing, distribution, printing and central functions. They gave no details but UBS estimated possible savings of 10 percent of their combined cost base.

A joint venture will also allow Pearson to retain a link between its education division and the world-renowned Penguin brand. It also avoids a large tax bill in the United States which would have been incurred had Penguin Books been sold.

"We can see why Pearson has chosen this option, but there may be some disappointment there is no outright sale, and especially with the lock-in of the stake," Liberum said.

MAJOR CHANGE

In the first nine months of 2012, Random House was the biggest book publisher in the two major English language markets of the United States. and Britain. It was buoyed by the huge success of the "Fifty Shades" trilogy of novels, which sold more than 30 million copies between March and June, evenly divided between the trade paperback and ebook editions. Penguin was second in the U.S. and third in Britain, behind Hachette.

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of book research consulting firm Ideal Logical, said a tie up would make the joint venture by far the biggest player in the market.

"This is about negotiating power," Shatzkin said. "Random House and Penguin will have so many of the most important books, it's hard to see how any retailers can live without them."

Under the agreement, Pearson said it could sell its stake to Bertelsmann after three years, but if Bertelsmann declined to buy, the joint venture could raise debt to pay both sides a dividend. Either side could require a stock market flotation after five years.

Pearson will include its 47 percent share of the joint venture's profit after tax as an associate in its consolidated statement. While the 47/53 ratio is favorable to Pearson, given the size of the two publishers, the joint venture excludes Bertelsmann's German trade publishing business.

Shares in Pearson were flat at 1,222 pence at 1550 GMT, in line with the broader London market.

On October 3 Scardino said she would step down at the end of 2012 after 16 years, prompting analysts to wonder if the group would sell off its last remaining media assets and focus on its dominant education arm.

Many, however, had focused on whether Pearson would sell the FT Group, which publishes the Financial Times newspaper.

"Basically what people are really hoping for is (clarity) with the FT because that's the family silver and that would show they really have changed. I think they're seeing how it goes. One thing at a time," a top 50 Pearson shareholder said.

Bertelsmann, Europe's biggest media group and owner of European TV broadcaster RTL Group AUDK.LU, is also in the middle of an overhaul to catch up with rapidly changing markets.

Random House is strong in Britain and the United States, while Penguin - founded in 1935 by publisher Allen Lane, who decided the mass market needed cheap paperbacks after finding nothing to read at a railway station - is the world's most famous publishing brand, with a strong presence in fast-growing developing markets.

Both groups have had to invest in the launch of ebooks. They made up 22 percent of Random House's global business in the first half of 2012, compared with around 20 percent for Penguin.

Analysts say regulators will want to look at the tie-up. In 2011, Random House had revenues of 1.5 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) and operating profit of 161 million. Penguin reported revenues of 1 billion pounds and operating profit of 111 million.

Pearson also published a trading update, showing sales up 5 percent in the first nine months but operating profit down 5 percent, reflecting the sale of assets, acquisition costs and weakness in the British professional training market.

Penguin Books

Random House

A Penguin @ 75