Title: The world's best books
First published: 2004
Description: "In October 1930, Macy's department store in New York City used the inexpensive book series "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books" as a loss-leader to draw customers into store. Selling for only nine cents a copy, the small-format modern classics attracted crowds of buyers. Businessmen, housewives, students, bohemian intellectuals, and others waited in long lines to purchase affordable hardbound copies of works by the likes of Tolstoy, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf.

It was a significant moment in American cultural history, demonstrating that a series of books respected and praised by the nation's self-appointed arbiters of taste could attract a throng of middle-class consumers without damaging its reputation as a vehicle of "serious culture."".

"The Modern Library's reputation stands in sharp contrast to that of similar publishing ventures dismissed by critics as agents of "middle-brow culture," such as the Book-of-the-Month Club. Writers for the New Republic, the Nation, and the Bookman expressed their fears that mass-production and new distribution schemes would commodify literature and deny the promise of American culture.

Yet although the Modern Library offered the public a uniformly packaged, preselected set of "the World's Best Books," it earned the praise of these self-consciously intellectual critics.".

"Focusing on the Modern Library's marketing strategies, editorial decisions, and close attention to book design, Jay Satterfield explores the interwar cultural dynamics that allowed the publisher of the series to exploit the forces of mass production and treat books as commodities even while positioning the series as a revered cultural entity.

So successful was this approach that the modern publishing colossus Random House was built on the reputation, methods, and profits of the Modern Library."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Books and reading, History, Literature publishing, Modern Library (Firm), Modern library of the world's best books, Monographic series, Publishers and publishing, Publishers and publishing, united states, Books and reading, history
Places: New York, New York (State), United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: Z