Wednesday, March 6. 1963 University Daily Kansan
Page 5
Ten years ago there was a quiet revolution. All you could hear was the sound of pages turning.
The quiet revolution began in 1953. Dwight Eisenhower was our new President, Senator McCarthy was making headlines, only a few people had heard of existentialism and no one had ever seen a special paperback supplement.
In the Spring of that year the first twelve Doubleday Anchor Books appeared with the descriptive slogan: "Paperback books for the permanent library of the serious reader." These books were to be sold through bookstores and at prices well above those of the quarter "whodunits." It was clear to the skeptical that titles like Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theatre and James Conant's Modern Science and Modern Man, printed in relatively small quantities, simply could not sell enough copies to make the series profitable.
Yet by the summer of 1953 it was obvious that thousands of book-buyers were uninterested in the economics of publishing. From their point of view, a library of serious paperback books was a perfectly feasible, eminently sensible, long-overdue development. The original twelve Anchor Books sold far beyond even their editor's optimistic hopes. The quality paperback revolution had begun.
Now, in 1963, there are well over 300 Doubleday Anchor Books in print including such continuing best sellers as The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte, Jr.; C. Day Lewis's translation of The Aeneid; Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death; and Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki. Anchor itself has remained in the vanguard of the paperback revolution with a source of original "firsts"—including Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, which added a new phase to the language; the first American editions of E. M. Forster's Alexandria and Jean Hytier's Andre Gide; and Theodor Gaster's edition of The Dead Sea Scriptures.
As the paperback revolution goes into its second decade, Anchor Books continues to publish at the same high level. This March, the Seventeenth Century Series will be added to such already established specialized series as the Science Study Series, the Natural History Library and the Foreign Language Paperbacks. Anchor Books will continue to blend classics and originals; in March, for example, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke will make available a monument of English literature that has been unpublished in its entirety since 1823.
Perhaps it has been a quiet revolution. But it has changed — and is still changing the reading habits of America.
NEW DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS
Now in one volume edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus
THE LIFE AND WORK OF SIGMUND FREUD by Ernest Jones
"A welcome version of this definitive classic that . . . has not lost the flavor of the original. Lionel Trilling, an established Freudian scholar and astute intellectual, and his colleague Steven Marcus have done both professional and laymen a great service." — Institute of Applied Psychology Review. "Recommended for students and for general reading." — Psychiatric Quarterly. "No disdain for abridgments should keep one from enjoying this fascinating biography." — The American Scholar. Illus. $1.95
Winner of the 1961 Bollingen Award for the best translation of a poem into English-
THE ODYSSEY
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald; with drawings by Hans Erni
"Surely the best and truest Odyssey in the English language." — Moses Hadas. "A masterpiece. At last we have an Odyssey worthy of the original. What Fitzgerald brings back is, first of all, that crucial and elusive quality of freshness and delight so conspicuously absent from other translations." — William Arrow-smith. "Insures the reader against all trials of boredom."—Horace Gregory. With a Postscript on translating Homer by Fitzgerald.
The best-selling survey of American schools today -
THE SCHOOLS by Martin Mayer
"Without a doubt, this book is the best and most interesting reporting about the schools that has been done in this century." — Education Digest. "The Schools is the best book about education that I have ever read." — Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Commentary. "Mr. Mayer . . . is a first rate reporter . . . who has spent the last few years in an arduous investigation of schools . . . [He] has a quality that appears all too seldom in our thesis-redden and argumentative intellectual community: a love of fact, and a respect for detail." — Richard Hofstadter, The Griffin. $1.45
1953
1963 DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS
Visit your fine campus bookstore to see a complete selection of Anchor Books.