New American Library

• 1. Introduction

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  New American Library began its life not as an American company at all, but as Penguin U.S.A., a transatlantic outpost of the British publisher Penguin Books. What separated it from that parent, and what set it on its own course, was a tangle of exchange controls and import regulations that made the existing arrangement unworkable. In 1948, Penguin's American assets were purchased and the company was renamed the New American Library of World Literature. The Penguin and Pelican trademarks stayed in Britain. Everything else changed hands.

  The men who bought those assets were Victor Weybright and Kurt Enoch. Enoch had previously run Albatross Books. Together they would build NAL into one of the most productive paperback houses in the United States, selling more than 50 million Mentor and Signet volumes a year by 1965. How they got there involves censorship battles, Cold War politics, a billion paperback books in print, and a decades-long series of mergers that eventually folded NAL into one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world.

• 2. Paperbacks for Everyone

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  Kurt Enoch served as president of New American Library from 1947 to 1965, a tenure that coincided with the paperback revolution sweeping American reading culture. NAL's earliest mission was to put affordable editions of classics and scholarly works within reach of ordinary readers. Signet Books carried popular fiction; Mentor Books aimed at readers who wanted serious nonfiction, operating under the slogan "Good reading for the millions."

  The imprint list grew quickly. Mentor-Omega featured Catholic philosophers. Mentor Executive Library targeted businesspeople. Signet Key was designed specifically for young readers between the ages of 10 and 14. A Shakespeare series brought in respected scholars, editors, and translators to produce editions aimed at high school and college students. Those paperbound books spanned the humanities, the arts, and the sciences.

  NAL also ran two distinctive literary publications that sat somewhere between periodicals and books: New World Writing, active in the 1950s and early 1960s, and New American Review, which ran in the latter 1960s and early 1970s before moving to other publishers under the title American Review. These "magazines in book form" gave the company an unusual foothold in literary culture beyond the standard trade market.

  By 1956, the Signet Books edition of From Here to Eternity alone had sold over 3 million copies, a figure NAL publicly reported.

• 3. McCarthy, Censorship, and Self-Regulation

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  The 1950s brought a particular kind of pressure to American publishers. The McCarthy era, notorious for its campaigns against communist influence in American life, produced federal investigations and congressional hearings that extended into the book trade. NAL found itself drawn into censorship trials when certain titles were judged inflammatory and banned.

  Victor Weybright was asked to testify before a 1952 House Committee convened to examine pornography in publications. Rather than accept the government's proposed restrictions, Weybright argued for a different approach: self-regulation by the publishing industry itself. His testimony drew a direct line between NAL's serious Mentor list and the company's credibility when defending more provocative fiction. Weybright put it plainly in his own words: "I pointed out with some justification, but certainly not as my basic argument, that the Mentor list was essential as part of the character and prestige of our company and an indispensable exhibit when our more daring fiction-by Faulkner, Farrell, and Caldwell-was attacked by the censors."

  The argument was strategic as much as principled. Weybright was using the company's literary respectability as a shield for its more commercially adventurous titles. That balancing act between serious publishing and popular fiction would remain characteristic of NAL's identity for decades.

• 4. Hardcovers, Fleming, and New Territory

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  Original works of mystery, romance, and adventure proved profitable alongside the reprint business. In 1963, NAL moved into original hardback publishing, and the title that illustrated the ambition of that move was the James Bond "007" series by Ian Fleming, which the source describes as immensely popular.

  NAL had actually begun publishing hardcovers earlier, in 1980, though with what the company itself acknowledged was mixed success. That earlier effort made the acquisition of E.P. Dutton in 1985 feel like a correction. Dutton was an established independent hardcover and trade publisher, and NAL's purchase of it was driven by industry-wide pressure on paperback houses to add hardcover divisions. The thinking was that Dutton would give NAL a real competitive position in that space.

  In the spring of 1965, New York University Library received the NAL archive as a gift from the company. That donation preserved the record of what had been built over the preceding two decades, just as ownership of the company itself was beginning to shift.

• 5. Ownership and the Long Merger

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  Times Mirror of Los Angeles purchased NAL in 1960. The transaction did not disrupt the company's day-to-day operations; NAL continued to function autonomously within Times Mirror, and its management remained unchanged. The arrangement held for more than two decades.

  In 1965, John P. R. Budlong became president of New American Library, at which point Kurt Enoch stepped down from the presidency to the role of Vice-President. Enoch went on to lead book publishing at Times Mirror.

  In 1983, Odyssey Partners and Ira J. Hechler bought NAL from Times Mirror for over $50 million. At the moment of that sale, New American Library had over 1 billion paperback books in print. That figure points to the scale the company had reached from its 1948 starting point with Weybright and Enoch.

  In 1987, NAL was reintegrated into Penguin, the publisher its founders had separated from nearly four decades earlier. Penguin itself had been purchased by Pearson PLC back in 1970. Then in 2013, Pearson merged Penguin with Bertelsmann-owned Random House to form Penguin Random House. NAL became a sister imprint to the Berkley Publishing Group within the Penguin Publishing Group.

  In June 2015, Penguin announced that starting in fall 2016, Berkley would take on all fiction titles while New American Library would publish exclusively nonfiction. Berkley/NAL Publishing Group president Leslie Gelbman described the change as a move that would "delineate the two publishing lines and sharpen their publishing identities."