Low-Cost Publishing Firm to Offer 'Good Books' for Limited Audience

Three men have establish a non-profit publishing house in Cambridge to serve writers who aim at a limited audience. Personal advertising and a low overhead will enable the firm to break even while distributing only "good books," according to Thomas A. Bledsoe, editor-in-chief of the new company.

High operation costs and inefficient advertising make it impossible for big publishers to make a profit without selling at least 7,500 copies of every book, Bledsoe said yesterday. Therefore, "only works that are oriented to the masses can be considered good risks."

The organization, Arlington Books, Inc., has reduced overhead to a minimum, with its only office in Bledsoe's home. All editors and advisers contribute their services without pay except Bledsoe, who left his job with the Beacon Press to work full time on the new enterprise.

Low-Cost Advertising

Advertising is carried out at minimal cost on a person-to-person level. In the belief that publishing is in "esence a cooperative adventure between author and reader, with the publisher as middle man," Bledsoe publicizes his books through a direct mail campaign.

A list of available publications and a newsletter reporting literary conditions abroad will be included in a letter that will go periodically to about 30,000 educators.

With these innovations Arlington Books "will be able to resist the current trend of printing bad books on the theory that this is the only way one can afford publishing good ones," Bledsoe asserted. Darwin, Wallace by Bert J. Loewenberg was the first book released by the company, and two others will be published next week.

Besides Bledsoe, the other founders of Arlington Books include Arthur B. Silverman, associate editor, and William R. Polk '51, research fellow in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, senior editor. Assisting these there is a board of 35 advisers, including six Harvard professors. Five Faculty members serve on a smaller board of editors.