Literary time capsule

While sorting through a box of old newspapers last week I came upon some copies of The New York Times Book Review from February 1969 (Feb. 2 and 16). I don't know why I kept them, but 50 years later they serve as something of a literary time capsule, revealing what was going on in the book world back then. Some observations:

1. At the center of each issue was a two-page ad for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Ads for the Literary Guild of America, the Mainstream Book Club, the Commentary Library, the Book Find Club, the Classics Club and the Public Affairs Book Club are also present. Today the phrase "book club" has quite a different meaning, but back then many people, myself included, yielded to the temptation of getting three or four books for a dollar, and then they would be subjected to monthly choices. Forget to send back a card and you would receive books in the mail whether you wanted them or not.

The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild still exist, but in somewhat different form.

These editions also carried ads for record clubs and even a Sculpture Collectors Club.

2. One of the Book-of-the-Month Club ads offers The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough. That is the only book I found mentioned in these pages by an author still writing (and producing best sellers) all these years later.

3. I can remember that books weren't cheap in 1969. Then, as now, I mostly purchased paperbacks. Yet seeing the prices in these Book Reviews, they certainly seem cheap. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, all 463 pages in a new clothbound edition, could be had for $10. Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill cost $8.95. Novels were much less costly, mostly $4.95 or $5.95.

Paperbacks were much cheaper, of course. One could buy Cancer Ward for $1.25 and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time for 95 cents.

4. Most books, including those touted as important by the New York Times, have little staying power and are forgotten within a few years. Few books mentioned in these issue are still read today or still in print. The best-selling novel at that time was The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes. Thanks to the reissue of her books in paperback a couple of years ago, some people may still be reading this book. The same goes for Force 10 from Navarone by Alistair MacLean, also because his books were reprinted awhile back.

A few other mentioned books may still be in print -- an Agatha Christie mystery, a John le Carre spy thriller, Ulysses by James Joyce, the poems of Robert Frost, Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- but for the most part, time has left most of these books and their authors forgotten in the past. Too bad. It demonstrates just how difficult it is to achieve immortality in literature.

5. Two books in these issues awoke happy memories in me. There's a one-age review of Robert L. Short's The Parables of Peanuts by Tom F. Driver. Driver, a professor of theology, panned the book because of its poor theology and because, apparently, it just isn't serious enough. But this was Peanuts, after all. The "theology" was meant to be fun. I thought the book was more entertaining than enlightening, which I gather was how it was meant to be.

Then there is a full-page ad for a novel called The Black Ship by Paul and Sheila Mandel, which I read some months later when it came out in paperback. I enjoyed it greatly and wouldn't mind rereading it someday.