Cashing In on Culture

With more leisure in which to indulge an old itch to improve themselves, many Americans are casting an eye on culture, and catching up on philosophy as never before. No U.S. enterprise has done more to foster this trend--or has cashed in on it more successfully--than Chicago's Great Books of the Western World. This week, as it celebrates the completion of its first decade in business, Great Books can boast that it has sold more than 153,000 of its 54-volume sets, which include works by 74 authors ranging from Homer to Freud. Last year alone, 51,083 Great Books sets were sold for $22 million, a 27% increase over 1960. As a division of Publisher (and ex-Connecticut Senator) William Benton's Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., Great Books keeps mum about its profits, but Britannica executives concede that it earns enough to pay some of its regional sales managers $100,000 a year.

Million-Dollar Index. Great Books is the fruit of an inspired collaboration between an intellectual with a taste for "business romance" and a hard-driving salesman with a rare knack for marketing culture. The intellectual is restless Mortimer J. Adler, 59, a martini-sipping scholastic iconoclast who first imposed himself on the national consciousness as a University of Chicago philosophy of law professor and a protege of former Chicago Chancellor Robert Hutchins (who still holds the title of editor of the Great Books). In 1943 Adler scraped up a $60,000 grant to begin work on his Syntopticon index for the Great Books. The Syntopticon unabashedly categorizes the "102 Great Ideas of Western Civilization" (from Angel and Animal to Wisdom and the World ) and refers the reader to everything of note that the great authors have said about them.

Eggheads Are Not Enough. Before he was through, it cost Adler nine years and $1,000,000 (mostly wheedled out of Benton) to put the Syntopticon together. With heavy publicity mailings to industrialists--often followed up by whirlwind visits from Adler--Britannica managed to sell 1,863 Great Books sets in 1952. But in 1953 sales plummeted to 138.

The turning point came in 1956, when Benton brought into Great Books the salesman--stocky, bespectacled Kenneth M. Harden, a veteran of 37 years of encyclopedia selling. At the time he took over as national sales manager, recalls Harden, Great Books executives "felt there was a 2% cream on top of our society who were Great Books prospects--the eggheads." Countered Harden: "Let's go after the mass market--the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker."

Learn Now, Pay Later. To reach the butcher and baker, Harden set about building an indefatigable, door-to-door sales force. Operating out of Los Angeles, Harden set up a course at which new salesmen learned how to use the Syntopticon and to pronounce the names of the authors (reading them is not required).

In the field, Harden's salesmen offered the Great Books (sold in sets costing from $298 to $1,175, depending on binding) for as little as $10 down and $10 a month, and threw in a bookcase and a Bible or dictionary to boot. In chart-studded sales broadsides, they talked earnestly of the importance of a liberal education for children, and displayed Great Books reading lists for youngsters. To help spread the Great Books idea, more than 50,000 adults were signed up in Great Books discussion groups (run by the non-profit Great Books Foundation).

With this kind of hard sell. Harden increased Great Books sales 400% (from 5,256 sets to 26,607) in the first three years of his regime. Today his salesmen earn an average annual salary of $9,000, some make as much as $30,000, and managers take home much more. Harden insists that "they are not just making money. They are carrying the banner."

Spillane v. Spinoza. Some scholars feel that the Great Books banner is a bit tattered. Many of the translations, they complain, are expurgated Victorian versions, and the series' concentration on pre-20th century classics leaves electricity, for example, covered only by a loo-year-old treatise by Michael Faraday.

Adler, who now devotes most of his time to San Francisco's Institute for Philosophical Research, but remains associate editor of Great Books, shrugs off such criticism. Great Books, he points out, updated its series with an annual $6 supplement, which last year included works by Einstein, Toynbee and John Dewey. Furthermore, the excited salesmanship of Great Books has switched many Americans--at least temporarily--from the works of Spillane to those of Spinoza and St. Augustine. As for the cash payoff on all this, Salesman Harden predicts that within five years he will be selling Adler's classics at a $40 million-a-year clip.

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