Scholarly Pursuits: When You Read Large Print, You Read With Hitler

2003

I checked an old book out of the UC Berkeley library. I want to say that the most interesting thing about it was the publisher's information on the front sheets. That's not quite true--it was a good book. But there was some history tangled up in the publisher's info.

They published it in England in 1944, in wartime.

PUBLISHER's NOTE

This novel contains approximately 130,000 words which, in order to save paper, have been compressed within 291 pages. There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times: margins have been reduced and no space has been wasted between chapters. The length of the average novel is between 70.000 and 90,000 words which, ordinarily, make a book between 281 and 352 pages. This novel would ordinarily make a book of about 444 pages.

BOOK PRODUCTION WAR ECONOMY STANDARD

Did publishers have a difficult time justifying printing new novels when there were so many old novels around for people to read?

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