CASH REGISTER BELLS FAIL TO RING OUT FOR SVETLANA
A gloomy Christmas seems in store for the publishers of the Twenty Letters to a Friend, authored by the most sensational literary find of the year, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
According to Newsweek [December 4], "To the surprise and occasional pique of booksellers around the country last week ...-Cthe book] was proving to be one of the major publishing disappointments of recent years. Everyone had presumed that because Svetlana was Joseph Stalin's only daughter and an intimate witness to the family life of one of history's bloodiest tyrants, her reminiscences would automat-— ically make a runaway best seller."
But the owner of a small bookstore in Chicago, Stuart Brent, whose reaction was held to be typical, was reported as saying, "That book is as dead as the trash in my wastebasket."
A first edition of 125,000 copies was printed. So far, the publishers managed to place 115,000 in bookstores. But the cash registers did not begin pealing. Samuel Sheridan of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, said: "Never has a book fallen so flat on its face." He has sold just one out of the twenty-five copies in his store.
The author is reported to have received the highest price ever paid for a single manuscript -- somewhere around two million dollars.
This is about double what Eisenhower is reported to have been given for his memoirs on the eve of entering the White House. Even taking into account the inflation of the dollar since Eisenhower got his check, Svetlana seems to have been considered by the publishing world to be a much more impressive writer.
One of the explanations offered for the low sales is that the book was killed by the extensive publication of serials in the newspapers and Life magazine. Everett Noonan, manager of a bookstore in Beverly Hills, California, thinks it is due to the disappointing quality of the book. "If the book was a good description of what Stalin was like we would be selling it out. But all she says is that my heart belongs to daddy."
There is still an outside hope that Christmas sales may register a rise in the book's popularity. After all, it is not easy to find a more perfect example than is offered by Svetlana of the American Way of Life where hard work receives its just reward.
In accordance with this image, most of the American press have pictured Stalin's only daughter in the most favorable light -- like a true princess. An exception is Esquire, "the magazine for men" (or the men's room). It was not entirely respectful. The November issue used a full-color portrait of Svetlana on the cover, but put a black mustache on it exactly like Stalin's. And the promotion department attached a label: "Exclusive and Unauthorized: HOW SVETLANA FLED COMMUNISM FOR AMERICA AND FOUND GOD, HAP- PINESS AND TWO MILLION DOLLARS."
It was a case, it seems, where the editors succumbed to the temptation to let truth, for once, win out over beauty.