Major Trends In American Book Publishing

Lacy, Dan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1539 Copy

Description

Title

Major Trends In American Book Publishing

Author(s)

Lacy, Dan

Issue Date

1967

Keyword(s)

Publishers and publishing --United States

Abstract

Two principal forces have produced the rather dramatic changes in the character of American book publishing that have taken place in the last fifteen years. One has been the very large increase in the number of children born annually since World War II. The other is the changing patterns of American education. Other factors have, of course, been influential, but these have been determinative. During the years of the depression, the number of births in the United States fell to about two and a quarter million a year. It was the children of this decade who passed through the schools in the 1940's and early 1950's, and it was typical of school enrollment in those years to remain stable or even to decline from session to session. The routine replacement of worn out textbooks was almost the only stimulus the schools provided to publishing. Suddenly, at war's end, the birthrate increased by 65 percent in the brief period from 1945 to 1947. Thereafter the annual number of births climbed more slowly to an average of over 4,000,000, where it remained until the last few years. It then began to decline, at first slowly and for the last two years rather rapidly. This tidal wave of post-war children began to enter the schools about fifteen years ago and the impact was immediately felt, grade by grade, as they passed through the educational system. By 1965, the school system had 41,000,000 students enrolled in kindergarten and grades one through twelve, as compared with only 28,000,000 in 1950, a figure that had remained relatively stable since 1930.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (14th : 1967)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1539

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1967.

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