Bookcases lead to book sales? can you help?

I heard an interview, a number of years ago, with a marketing person who was telling the story of the the book industry lobbying architects in the 195o’s to get them to design bookcases in the homes they were designing in the post war housing boom. (You know that classic little book case by the door or built into the wall in the 1958 rambler.)

The idea was that if they put bookcases in new homes people would want to fill them with books. And it worked, so the marketing guy said. Books sales skyrocketed.

I am trying to verify my memory of this story and find a source for it. Can anyone help?

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

jimmycshaw January 5, 2010 at 8:02 pm

Did you read it in Ted Striphas, “The Late Age of Print”?

In 1930 Simon & Schuster, Harcourt Brace, and several other major New York book publishers contacted public relations doyen Edward L. Bernays, the “father of spin,” to strategize how best to inject new life into the faltering U.S. book industry. In addition to attacking the industry’s price structure, which at the time relied heavily on a volatile low price/high volume formula, Bernays proposed a novel idea for inspiring people to buy more books despite the economic downturn. As Bernays’s biographer Larry Tye has written: “‘Where there are bookshelves,’ [Bernays] reasoned, ‘there will be books.’ So he got respected public fgures to endorse the importance of books to civilization, and then he persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store the precious volumes.” (Striphas, p. 27)

E-book download

Chris January 6, 2010 at 9:31 am

ask and you shall receive. Crowdsourcing, ftw.

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