by Richard Russell

Created on: July 28, 2007

When the American Publishing Company closed its doors for the last time in 1898, Alexander Grosset and George T. Dunlap were outside the doors. Newly unemployed, with the plates of a couple dozen books originally pirated by John Lovell. Standing out on Sixth Avenue with boxes of supposedly worthless printing plates, these two young men stole a page from the notebook of Mr. Lovell and shook hands on a partnership that changed the face of American publishing.

Grosset and Dunlap began as a pirate enterprise. Cheaply bound books, sold cheaply, without the expense of royalties. The next step was the outright purchase of paperbound books and cut and gathered sheets to be rebound in cloth and sold at deeply discounted prices. Grosset & Dunlap made an immediate impact on the market. Durable, hardback copies of popular books were available at a price that put them in competition with paperbacks and dime novels. The thing that John Lovell had attempted, and failed at, the partnership of Alexander Grosset and George Dunlap had made reality. Books as a mass market product, not a limited market for the well to do.

The next step was to contract for and buy sheets, then eventually plates, from trade publishers. It became pro forma for publishers to overrun first printings and cover their costs with sales to Grosset. The results transformed popular authors, putting them in a class with performers as celebrities. The prominence of pulp writers like Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, began to rival that of "literary" writers, and, in terms of recognition from the general public, eclipse them.

When motion pictures started to gain in popularity, Grosset was one of the first companies in the bookselling business to recognize their potential. Motion picture stills replaced illustrations in Grosset "motion picture" editions. Special editions named for stars like Clara Bow or Jackie Coogan were produced with stills from motion pictures supplied by studios, gratis, as advertising. Originally publishing classic stories, such as the "Jackie Coogan" edition of Ouida's A Dog of Flanders, Grosset began to commission novelizations of screenplays that were to feature prominent stars. All of a sudden, Grosset & Dunlap, kings of the reprint, were publishing first editions that grabbed several rungs on the best seller lists. Lilac Time, The Patent Leather Kid, and the first academy award winner, Wings, found slots on best seller lists from L.A. to the Big Apple. Nor did the advent of talkies

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