Word: salop
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What makes Salop a legend is his genius for selling books-any book. When a publisher has done all he knows how and still has copies on hand, he sends for Max Salop to come and get the remainders. Within the next few months Max Salop has sold not only the publisher's dead stocks, but has reprinted maybe 5,000, 10.000, 20,000 copies besides...
Twenty years ago Max Salop and two brothers, Morris and Abraham, were in the retail shoe business. Then Max went into second-hand books, started the Harlem Book Co. as a retail bookstore on Manhattan's 125th Street. When Depression hit, he waved ready cash under publishers' long faces, cornered the market in publishing's distress merchandise. Today he owns several bargain bookshops, a reprint house which publishes under half-a-dozen aliases. Not even Salop himself knows how many books he sells a year...
...Typical Salop issues: At $1.89, a $5 book on American birds, a $3.50 book on insects; at $1.48, a $5 volume on American glass. From Publisher Horace Liveright he once bought a book called Orpheus, a scholarly study of religion by French Archeologist Salomon Reinach. Reduced to $1.49 from its original price of $5, it sold around 35,000 copies...
...Salop's success does not depend merely on price-cutting. Even more spectacular is what he does to a book's appearance. A collection of Ibsen plays (his first big success) was made from Modern Library plates, but reprinted on larger, thicker paper, with the imprint: Norwegian Publications, Oslo, Norway. Another Salop success was a 1,136-page volume titled Five Sinners and a Saint priced at $1.69. Inside this new literary package readers discovered six time-worn staples-the autobiographies of Madame P'ompadour, Benvenuto Cellini, De Quincey, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, St. Augustine. Another time Salop...
...Salop's theory of bookselling is simple: people like big books, pretty books, with red and green covers, nice pictures. When he buys books, he buys by weight, size, color. What is inside the book does not interest him. Pulling down a volume from a publisher's stockroom shelves, he turns it over in his plump hands, says: "Tick [thick], 18?." If it is thin, he says: "Tin, 8?." Some sixth sense supplies him with his shrewd literary judgments. Of one unfortunate author he is supposed to have said: "Dat guy? Dat guy? He couldn't even...