Harriet de Onís was one of the most influential translators of Latin American literature and foresaw its mid-century boom. [Read more…] about A Glutton for Books
Alfred A. Knopf
Austin Community Foundation grant assists forthcoming Mexico Modern exhibition
The Harry Ransom Center is pleased to share the news that we received a $17,930 grant from the Austin Community Foundation. [Read more…] about Austin Community Foundation grant assists forthcoming Mexico Modern exhibition
Out of the classroom, into the collections: Undergraduate class brings students to Ransom Center archives
Kathleen (Katy) Telling is a Plan I Honors Junior at The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in History and French. She’s taking Dr. Robert Abzug’s “Religion and Psychology in Modern American Culture,” which meets periodically at the Harry Ransom Center. [Read more…] about Out of the classroom, into the collections: Undergraduate class brings students to Ransom Center archives
Bringing undergrads into the thick of research
Dr. Robert Abzug is a professor of History and American Studies as well as the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies and the Director of The Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. [Read more…] about Bringing undergrads into the thick of research
World War II-era Armed Services Editions boosted troop morale and fostered a new generation of readers
The book, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning, celebrates the importance of the Armed Services Editions. Published between 1943 and 1947, these inexpensive paperback editions were given to servicemen on the frontlines. As Manning points out, not only did the editions achieve their principal purpose of raising morale, they encouraged a whole generation of readers who retained their appetite for reading when they returned home. Possibly a few stopped bullets or shrapnel. It’s necessary to remember that the cheap paperback edition was still a novelty at the beginning of the war, having been pioneered by Penguin Books in England and Albatross Books in Germany during the 1930s.
Armed Services Editions were made possible by a group of publishers called the Council of Books in Wartime. This group collaborated by eliminating royalty payments and arranging for the production and distribution of paperbacks in the most inexpensive possible formats. The Ransom Center has a couple of connections with these books. Although there are larger collections at the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress, we own more than 1,400 of the books, most of them shelved together as a discrete collection in the stacks, while some are kept with other editions of our major authors, such as John Steinbeck. Because they were printed on poor-quality wartime paper that is now brittle and brown, each is protected in a simple acid-free enclosure, invented by the Center’s Conservation department in the 1980s, and called a “tuxedo case.” Students of publishing history can use the collection to study which books were most successful (Manning concludes that books with a touch of nostalgia or sex were particularly popular with soldiers, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was one of the best-selling titles, even though it was considered a flop when first published in hardback during the 1920s). The books were generally published in an oblong format, with the cover notation “This is the complete book—not a digest.” In all, some 125 million copies were produced.
Among the founding members of the Council of Books in Wartime was Alfred A. Knopf, the eminent literary publisher (the massive Knopf, Inc. archive is here at the Center). Ironically, Knopf was famous for encouraging high production values in his own trade books, but he immediately recognized the importance of encouraging reading and raising morale and contributed a number of series titles by familiar authors in the Knopf stable, including thrillers by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler and more literary works by Thomas Mann and Sigrid Undset.
In the postwar era, a number of paperback reprint publishers capitalized on increased demand for books, the availability of new outlets for cheap editions, such as chain department stores and drugstores, and Americans’ newly enhanced disposable income. Pocket Books debuted in 1939 and became well known after the war for its lurid covers, which, as Louis Menand points out in an illustrated recent New Yorker piece, graced not only the unabashed pulp of Mickey Spillane but also higher-toned works by William Faulkner and James Joyce. Ballantine and Bantam editions flourished, and the era of the mass market paperback had arrived. Nearly every prominent American hardback publisher developed a line of paperback books. Oddly, Knopf, Inc. was a holdout, arriving late to the game with Vintage Books in 1956. But it was the Armed Services Editions that gave the American paperback its big push.
Related content:
Penguin and the Paperback Revolution
New book sheds some light on “The House of Knopf”
“Publishing isn’t just about contacts; it’s equally a matter of human relationships”
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Fellows Find: When Knopf Inc. published a master work by Fernando Ortiz: A strange hurricane
Armando Chávez-Rivera, an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Victoria, has published four books, among them Cuba per se. Cartas de la diáspora (2009), which summarizes extensive information about Cuban writers located off the island. He worked as a journalist for more than a decade in Latin America, with long stays in various countries in the region, and has published in magazines and popular journals. Currently his academic research is concentrated on Spanish-American literature while he maintains his work as a columnist for the Latin American Data Base, a unit of the Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexico. His research at the Ransom Center was funded by the Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment. The Ransom Center is now accepting applications for 2013–2014 fellowships.
In the spring of 1947, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. published the first English translation of Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar) by Fernando Ortiz. This inspired essay explores the island’s history, culture, and economy through references to its principle crops, and provides detailed information about the internal tensions within society and its relationship with the United States.
The Harry Ransom Center preserves the correspondence between Ortiz and the publishing house, as well as routine communications of the legendary team formed from Herbert Weinstock, editor, and Harriet de Onís, translator, who were responsible for the first English translations of other celebrated Latin-American writers like Alejo Carpentier.
Knopf Inc.’s growing interest in Latin America was rooted in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, and Blanche W. Knopf visited several countries in the region in 1942. Contrapunteo was the first important Cuban work published by Knopf Inc.
Ortiz’s book created a controversy among the editorial advisors; one of them undervalued it for being written in a supposedly “tropical” style, grandiloquent and almost impossible to translate. Nevertheless, Ortiz’s international prestige as an academic and his encyclopedic knowledge of culture, versed in ethnography, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields, tipped the scales in his favor.
The book received excellent reviews from the press, with praise for a translation that maintained the original language’s seductive blend of rigorous scientific knowledge, profusion of quotations, and sustained poetic prose. We now know the subsequent impact the volume had on terminology, coining terms like “transculturation,” to refer to the mutual exchange between cultures in contact.
Contrapunteo reviewed Cuba’s economic situation and its dependence on foreign markets and capital, primarily from the United States. The book found a way to state scientific knowledge without sacrificing literary elegance, while addressing political, cultural, and economic aspects of a region that the U.S. public knew little about or viewed stereotypically.
Ortiz’s works—as well as those by Knopf’s tireless collaborators in those years, Columbian Germán Arciniegas and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre—hinted at the brewing political upheavals that would yield uprisings, revolutions, and dictatorships, and focused on milestones such as the Cuban revolution and its radicalization to communism and confrontation with the United States.
In the course of my two-month stay at the Ransom Center, I followed this thread of analysis in the letters between Knopf Inc.’s editors, translators, and advisors from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the subsequent reaction of the press and the markets. Knopf’s publications promoted a better understanding of the rest of the hemisphere by the United States and laid the groundwork for a favorable reception of Spanish American Boom literature.
I read the Knopf Inc. archive as if it was an intellectual, cultural, and societal “counterpoint.” Several books from the New York publisher showed the cultural change, literary renovation, and the approaching political explosion in neighboring countries. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar was one of those rare books that, through its information and biting political reflections, was a strange hurricane of premonitions, bitter and sweet, for the Knopf editors and United States’ readers.
