During his quarter century as president of Bantam Books, Oscar Dystel was the most successful publisher—ever—of mass market paperbacks. He was one of the greatest stars of 20th-century book publishing, and his legacy reminds us that the vast breadth of today’s book business is built on the sturdy four-by-seven-inch spine of the mass market paperback. Furthermore, Oscar served as a lasting role model for enlightened management in an era of corporate publishing.
It is perhaps fitting that Oscar died on May 28, just days before the 75th anniversary of the first American mass market paperback list. Oscar did not invent the paperback book, nor did he invent the paperback-book business. The pioneers of the American paperback were Robert De Graff, who published that first list in 1939 at Pocket Books, and Betty and Ian Ballantine, who founded Bantam in 1945. All three shared the belief that once printing presses advanced to the point that books in a smaller, paperbound format could be produced affordably in great quantities, huge numbers of potential readers would read all types of fiction and nonfiction voraciously.
But that great experiment might not have lasted more than a decade if not for Oscar Dystel. He was hired to be president of Bantam in 1954, when the company was struggling to survive its own first decade. Oscar was a magazine executive and—horrors!—had an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Unlike many of the M.B.A.s who later came strutting into book publishing from “real businesses,” Oscar never let his analytic and skeptical brain forget to respect the people he encountered inside and outside his company—and just as importantly, he always respected the work itself. He learned quickly that much of what goes into creating books and attracting readers is an unknowable mystery. No publisher could guarantee success, but Oscar could guarantee the effort to seek success with the strength of his entire organization.
Oscar believed in the infinite possibility and wonder of books as much as any editor, but he realized that to connect all those books with paying customers, a publisher had to master the tools of commerce. Armed with his experience in magazine distribution and an unwavering confidence in readers themselves, he led Bantam (and the industry) to recovery and then growth. The explosion of mall superstores, and the mega-sales of trade paperbacks, hardcovers, and e-books, could not have happened without generations of readers forming their reading habits with mass market paperbacks during 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
Like the paperback pioneers, Oscar was a democrat with reading. He believed that a reader of Shakespeare was no better than a reader of a romance, and he knew that some people read both. Bantam became known as a house of bestsellers, but much of the everyday strength of paperback sales came from devourers of genre fiction. From Ph.D.s to high school dropouts, these readers made time in their lives for books every day. At Bantam, a Louis L’Amour western would be on the same list as Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell, a Dr. Atkins diet book, and a Barbara Tuchman history.
One of Oscar’s other core paperback principles was that the so-called disposable format did not mean paperback books needed to have an ephemeral shelf-life. In fact, paperbacks books could live for years, actively distributed, sold, and read—reprinted over and over again as needed.
Oscar also used the crazy practice of book returns to great advantage. The returns policy was a shared risk, encouraging all involved to keep books on sale and take chances on new authors and diverse titles. Unlike bananas and tissues, books were not products most consumers woke up every day needing to buy—but selling books in non-bookstores, right down the aisle from bananas and tissues, proved that many people did feel a need to buy books. And if they didn’t wake up feeling that need, it could be awakened by impulse whenever a cover caught their eye.
Perhaps Oscar’s greatest talent was allowing Bantam to thrive within the world of corporate ownership. He perfected the seemingly impossible task of getting the monied (and generally non-book-hugging) owners to invest very serious resources in a completely unpredictable business of unknowable, changing products. All the while, Oscar would keep the owners at bay so that most of the Bantam staff never had to deal with corporate pressure. Rather, Oscar pressured every colleague to bear the responsibility of doing right by authors, distributors, retailers, and readers, knowing that if they selected good books and published them well, the profits would come.
There is no glory in publishing a good book poorly. By his leadership, Oscar showed us all that the reason people of diverse talents come together in a publishing house is not that they love to read—but that by combining their talents to support good books, they can help authors sell books to readers, and lots of them. That is the ultimate mission of any publisher. There is no shame in the commerce of publishing, Oscar taught us. In fact, that’s the whole point of the enterprise.
Irwyn Applebaum began his publishing career in 1976 as an assistant in the president’s office at Bantam Books, working with Oscar Dystel. Sixteen years later, he became the president and publisher of Bantam. In total, he spent more than two decades as the publisher of Pocket Books, Bantam, and the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. He can be reached at yippytia@gmail.com.
