Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: A Critical Edition

Blondes at Boni & Liveright

Overview of Boni & Liveright History

Boni & Liveright began as a popularizer of modern classics but proceeded to become a champion of new writers and a foe of censors in the twenties before financial troubles ended its operations at the opening of the 1930s. New Yorker Albert Boni (1892-1981), owner of Washington Square Bookshop, had already published early experimental modernist poetry and co-founded the Little Leather Library. When he sought a partner to open a new publishing house, he settled on Pennsylvanian Horace Liveright (1884-1933), who until then had spent his time in New York working in paper distribution. The two founded Boni & Liveright in February 1917 and by March had begun the Modern Library, a series of cheap reprints of modern books, many in translation, which helped to popularize new writers. The series, among other things, introduced Nietzsche to a wide public, and republished Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in its final revised form.1

The partnership lasted a brief six months before differences between the two founders left the company in Liveright’s hands. He pushed acquisitions in the direction of American writers and slowly reduced the number of books in the Modern Library series through the early 1920s until selling the series off in 1925. This sale was one of a series of business miscalculations that frequently hurt the margins of the company. As one minor example, he insisted on hiring Ralph Barton (the later illustrator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to design the cover for the fall 1924 catalog but let Barton name his price, only to find out later to his dismay that they had agreed to an exorbitant (for the time) $300.2 The growing financial problems of the company led to recruiting investors, who eventually forced Liveright out of his own company in 1930. This move did not save the publisher from bankruptcy, leading to sale of what had become Liveright, Inc. to Norton.

Censorship Battles

Boni & Liveright’s early years coincided with World War I, a period of intense government censorship. While the press did publish controversial content during this time, it voluntarily pulled two titles in the course of the war. These included Leon Trotsky’s anti-war pamphlet The Bolsheviki and World Peace, which it withdrew in the wake of Russia’s peace agreement with Germany. Other titles were censored by the post office for content deemed unpatriotic or anti-war.

The publisher’s crusade against censorship began in 1920, when for the first time one of its books was censored for a reason other than patriotism. On March 22, a New York police officer confiscated 137 copies of the anonymously authored The Story of a Lover, a novel about an open marriage. The case was covered in the mainstream and trade press with significant criticism of the censors, and the charge was dismissed about a month later.3 Liveright took the opportunity to advertise his victory and thank readers and the press for rising up in support.4

This controversy initiated a number of strategies, some business and some in the political arena, to fight censors. In the course of the censorship of The Story of a Lover, Liveright proposed that individuals should not be able to censor content on their own but should need the backing of a larger committee representative of the community. On the business side, Liveright began developing an approach that technically evaded the censors by selling limited editions of books by private subscription. This worked but drew the attention of John S. Sumner, the secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Sumner suggested books sold in this manner were really being “sold to any one who would pay the price,” and Liveright sued him for libel claiming that the statement was about the Boni & Liveright translation of The Satyricon, which was under Sumner’s investigation.5

Sumner lost his attempt to suppress The Satyricon, leading to a bid to change New York law so that books could be censored on the grounds of individual passages removed from context, whereas the existing law required consideration of the book as a whole.6 Liveright and a group of other publishers fought against this bill and won the battle in 1923. Liveright’s role in the fight was celebrated with a formal dinner, for which John Emerson (husband of Anita Loos) was on the organizing committee, but the fight was expensive and another blow to the coffers of Boni & Liveright. The censors eyed three titles in 1925, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but only one was formally charged with obscenity: Maxwell Bodenheim’s Replenishing Jessica. After this point, Liveright increasingly shied away from risky publication choices. Nonetheless, he left the Publisher’s Association when they backed a new pro-censorship bill.

Bringing Publicity to Publishing

In 1919, Liveright contracted Edward L. Bernays for a year’s work to apply modern publicity techniques to five Boni & Liveright titles. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, had experience driving up circulation of medical magazines through articles that encouraged debate between experts.7 He had also worked on selling Broadway shows and opera musicians (as personalities) to the public, and served as a war propagandist during the First World War. In his autobiography, titled Biography of an Idea, he recounts opening in 1919 an office providing services in “publicity direction,” which he would reframe later as “counsel on public relations.”8 He quickly became a figurehead and lightning rod for the new field, and while his methods were not all unique he played a key role in popularizing them broadly and disrupting book publishing specifically.

Bernays took on Liveright’s offer with this in mind, seeing book publishing as “static in the content of its books and in its promotion” and deserving “the dynamic treatment the entrepreneurs give a new drama, opera or sporting event.”9 He saw Liveright as just the publisher to partner with to shake things up, and although his work for Liveright only lasted a year, the publisher’s approach, and indeed the approach of other publishers, underwent a lasting change due to Bernays’s influence. His relationship with Liveright also continued, leading to his brokering of an agreement for Liveright to publish the first English-language translation of Freud’s The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis at a moment when psychoanalysis was gaining popularity but where it was impossible to read Freud’s work outside the original German. In 1923 Bernays would publish his own manifesto for publicity, Crystallizing Public Opinion, with Boni & Liveright.

Key to Bernays’s approach was using news stories to get the word out through “unpaid advertising.” In a 1920 essay for Publishers’ Weekly, Bernays laid out his argument to book publishers that they should adopt techniques of propaganda from the war, which Bernays was actively rebranding as “publicity” in the context of business. While the book industry already used advertising, Bernays noted that “publishers admittedly advertise their books mainly in order to sell them to book dealers”; to advertise at a scale to reach a mass public in the way achieved by popular goods like soap was not similarly profitable.10 Beyond advertising, he argued, book sellers needed to adopt publicity methods that would cause books to become the news through controversy and conversation, and not simply rely on good reviews. Publicity for a book could create ties to current events and create free promotion of the book in sections including “news, editorials, women’s feature, financial, sporting, society, etc. Books and their authors can be put on every one of these pages because they are particularly interested in them.” The job of the publicity agent was to identify the likely areas of social relevance in a book and make the connection for news editors. At Boni & Liveright, Bernays implemented this for numerous books. For one of the first, Hutchins Hapgood’s anonymous The Story of a Lover, Bernays had numerous famous actresses offer their definition of love for news stories.11 In the case of Waldo Frank’s Our America, which applies principles of psychoanalysis to understand U.S. culture, Bernays got newspapers to print a special series of articles psychoanalyzing a series of American cities.12

The Story and Reality of Blondes at Boni & Liveright

Loos in her later biographical writing maintained a story that the book edition of Blondes had been a fluke, essentially a last minute decision in fall 1925 to produce a gift edition for friends with only a small print run, largely at the prodding of Boni & Liveright editor Tommy Smith, who she claimed had a crush on her and offered to print the book as “a nice gesture” after it had completed its run in Harper's Bazar.13 The success of the book was, by this account, an overnight surprise. While Boni & Liveright did publish a limited gift edition as the initial run, there are reasons to be suspicious of this story on its own merits: given its extreme popularity in the pages of Bazar, it is hard to imagine the publisher, author, and illustrator did not see the opportunity for a substantial market.

And indeed, various other accounts and documents tell a very different story. In his biography of Loos, for example, Gary Carey notes that while Smith and Loos joked about a “vanity edition” that carried a higher than normal price, their strategy specifically included plans for “a second printing [that] could be brought out quickly ‘by popular demand’” when the first run sold out.14 Even as early as April 13, 1925, a letter from Anita Loos to Elizabeth Anderson (wife of Sherwood Anderson, a friend through husband John Emerson, who grew up with Anderson in Ohio and whose work was being championed by Boni & Liveright), shows Loos was in active negotiations for the publication of the book with Boni & Liveright as early as the appearance of the second chapter in Bazar, and she implies that she had interest from other publishers as well and was playing them off one another for the best deal. In this letter, held by the Newberry Library, she states, “[Boni & Liveright] have also made me an offer for my book but I have had so many offers that I am getting kittenish and coy and am going to flirt with all of them before I finally decide.”15 Very clearly a book was imagined from the early magazine stages and Loos considered herself to be in a strong negotiating role for a major title.

The explanation for the discrepancy in timelines may be found in Loos’s explanation for how the “vanity edition” was rationalized to John Emerson and Frank Crowninshield (editor of Vanity Fair and a friend), who opposed publication—Emerson due to jealousy of Loos’s celebrity and Crowninshield out of prudishness regarding the book’s contents.16 Far from being a true expectation of the book’s actual success, the idea of the small first run as a Christmas gift seems to have been a calculated way to get the book in front of a public against the objections of the two men, after which its success could speak for itself and allow B&L to go forward with further printings.

According to the account by Charles Egleston, who otherwise repeats the idea that the book was a late breaking idea, Loos indeed was able to negotiate a favorable deal, to the extent that it was yet another financial miscalculation for Boni & Liveright. Normally, publication contracts included an “excepting clause” that gave authors lower royalties for books shipped internationally so that the publisher could give Canadian booksellers discounts that would cover import fees. Liveright apparently allowed Loos the unusual favor of writing her own publication agreement, and she wrote it such that Liveright had to pay her normal royalties in these cases.17 This contract compounded challenges presented by higher printing expenses due to the book’s designer calling for thicker paper and enlarged images to give buyers the impression they were getting more for their money, which Liveright did not know when he made a late decision to lower the cost of the book from $2.00 to $1.75 to encourage sales.18 A special, more expensive hard cover designed for the “vanity edition” was used for the larger printings instead. Despite the fact that the novel was a best seller for B&L, instead of serving as a windfall it was a financial disaster for the company, to Loos’s gain.

The book was published November 11 and appeared in the week’s roundup of new books in Publishers’ Weekly on November 14. Exact numbers for print runs of early editions are unclear. Egleston includes significant details of the novel’s production based on the Boni & Liveright ledgers. However, his reliability regarding timeline is difficult to ascertain because there is one clear factual error in his claim that the Harper’s Bazar run began, rather than ended, in August 1925. Numbers reported by Egleston, based on Boni & Liveright ledgers, are much lower than other statements. These ledger numbers were 1,244 copies of the first printing, 3,000 for the second, 1,335 for the third, 2,100 for the fourth, and 5,000 for the fifth—all of which appeared before the end of the year. Interestingly Egleston notes the second printing was produced before October 31, which suggests advanced planning for the first edition to sell quickly, but according to Carey the second printing (which he places at 20,000 copies) didn’t appear in stores until two weeks after the first, around the time of the first reviews, which doesn’t make sense if it was already printed in late October.19 Carey goes on to note that nine printings appeared by March 1926, with 10 more following over the next three years.

Regardless of numbers, the book entered the lists of best sellers and top-loaned library books within a few months. The first list appears to have been the top weekly sales for the week of Christmas 1925, when Blondes was third among sales at the nation-wide bookstore chain Brentano’s. It first appeared in The Bookman’s (monthly) “Guide to Fiction” in February 1926—to do so it needed to be among “the books most in demand” from lists maintained by R. R. Bowker, Baker and Taylor, or The Bookman’s own “Monthly Score,” a list of the current most-loaned titles in public libraries. It was the number one book in Publishers’ Weekly from April-July 1926, hitting #1 on the Baker and Taylor list on May 2 (for the prior month) and the Bowker list on May 30 (also for the prior month). The library popularity lagged popular sales, with Blondes debuting on the “Monthly Score” at number nine in July 1926, and jumping to number two the following month, its peak position before declining and falling off the list after the February 1927 report.

While it is impossible to pinpoint the specific source of its sales success, Blondes benefitted from the Bernays legacy in Boni & Liveright’s book publicity, with the title serving as a provocation to commentary on beauty standards and the relations between men and women. The first review of the novel In November 1925 pointedly questioned the claim of the title. On December 1, 1925, Doris Blake wrote an article in the pages of the Chicago Daily Tribune, “’Tis Said Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Echo Queries, ‘Is Zat So?’” The article is partly a rebuke of the idea of the preference but also offers a complaint that children’s tales teach young boys to prefer fair haired maidens. Still, she maintains men would “probably admit they preferred both, as a safety first sex.” The phrase “gentlemen prefer blondes” itself took off and became a meme used as the basis of newspaper jokes about sexual relations and as a reference in advertising and publicity for other products, including other novels.

Footnotes

  1. Key sources for the history of Boni & Liveright, drawn on throughout this essay, include Charles Egleston, ed., The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917-1933: A Documentary Volume, Dictionary of Literary Biography 288 (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2004); and Tom Dardis, Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright. (New York: Random House, 1995).↵
  2. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 64.↵
  3. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 38.↵
  4. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 40.↵
  5. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 55.↵
  6. Dardis, Firebrand, 162-163.↵
  7. For a broad overview of the life of Bernays, see his biography by Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998).↵
  8. Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 288.↵
  9. Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 277-8.↵
  10. Edward L. Bernays, “Promotion Expert Urges New Sales Methods for Books,” Publishers’ Weekly, March 20, 1920, 933. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015033468839&seq=961↵
  11. Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 280.↵
  12. Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 282.↵
  13. Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 271; Anita Loos, A Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977), 80.↵
  14. Gary Carey, Anita Loos: A Biography. (New York: Knopf, 1988), 95.↵
  15. Loos to Elizabeth Anderson, April 13, 1925, Sherwood Anderson Papers, Newberry Library, Series 2, Box 23.↵
  16. Loos, A Girl Like I, 270-71.↵
  17. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 364.↵
  18. Egleston, The House of Boni & Liveright, 368.↵
  19. Carey, Anita Loos, 95.↵

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