The New Nostalgia… Many Happy Returns (June 1970 | Volume: 21, Issue: 4)

The New Nostalgia… Many Happy Returns

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Authors: Barbara Klaw

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June 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 4


An anthropologist studying the reading habits of Americans at the turn of the late, unlamented decade would find some revealing contrasts. On the one hand he would note the smashing success of Portnoy’s Complaint —with more than 600,000 hardcover copies sold as of the end of 1969—and dozens of other fast-selling titillations. On the other, quite opposite, hand he would find that Americans by the hundreds of thousands were also reading nostalgia—volume after volume of unabashed, hard-core nostalgia.

Of course books that appeal to our affectionate memories have always been around, but the rush of them, and the numbers sold, have been quite phenomenal in the last year or two.

The current epidemic probably started with the publication in 1968 of a facsimile edition of the 1897 Sears Roebuck catalogue, a venture that a smart young publishing firm, Chelsea House, launched in a modest fashion. The idea was suggested by their advisory editor, Fred L. Israel, who also teaches history at City College in New York. Israel decided to assign the Sears Roebuck catalogue to his students to illustrate points in his lectures about American living styles at the end of the nineteenth century. Finding the catalogues very hard to come by, he guessed that a larger audience than his students might respond to the delights of the one elusive early catalogue he managed to locate. Chelsea House, a small company that distributes its books through larger publishers, took the idea around to six firms—all of which yawned politely—before finding one, Random House, that agreed to distribute the book.

Chelsea House printed only five thousand copies at first. “We didn’t even put a dust jacket on it,” Harold Steinberg, the president of Chelsea House, said. “We thought its sale would be entirely to libraries.” At last count the sale of the book, at $14.95, has exceeded 140,000 copies, and it is still selling briskly—to its publisher’s unutterable delight. Other publishers have hurried into print with the 1902, 1903, 1908, and 1927 Sears catalogues; the 1902 number has sold over 400,000 copies in hard-cover and paperback form for $6.95 and $3.95, respectively. Perhaps the finest feat of salesmanship in the whole venture was selling the book back to Sears Roebuck itself. The mail-order store bought ten thousand copies from Chelsea House as gifts and has also been selling the facsimile of its 1897 catalogue ($14.47) through its new catalogue (free to loyal customers).

The publishing formula for nourishing our appetite for nostalgia varies, but one of the most successful—witness the 1897 Sears catalogue—is to find an old yet familiar item, print a facsimile of it, embellish it with new front matter, package it handsomely, and sell it for a large sum. This procedure has certain obvious advantages for the publisher. The volume chosen is often old enough for any copyright to have expired, editorial costs are negligible, and the illustrations are built in.