I was limited to whatever series were available at the local library. And whatever books were available in those series. Looking back, it seems more probable that people simply kept them or stole them than the library not buying them. They were addictive. Once you read one, you wanted to go through the whole series like peanuts.
We don’t have any sense of how big and important and rolling dough Time-Life was in those days. The books were a natural outgrowth of the Time style of team written journalism and the Life style of hiring the best photographers and allowing them to exceed unlimited budgets. There’s a chapter on the books in the giant corporate history The World of Time Inc. vol. III that’s amazing to read as a blast from a past that’s forgotten history though close enough so I lived through it.
The company got the idea in 1959 after doing some one-shot books. They sent out a test mailing to Life subscribers to see if they wanted to subscribe to a Life World Library. In those days 2% was a good response rate. (It’s much lower today.) They got 7%. After they popped their eyes back in their heads, they thought that maybe they ought to go and, you know, actually produce a book, which they hadn’t bothered to do yet. It was put together, from hiring a writer to printed copy, in three months. The writer got $10,000, huge money for what was essentially a long magazine article. The texts were under 30,000 words. Texts were malleable, basics that were added to by writers, fact checkers, and researchers, rewritten by editors, and massaged by series editors to give a uniform voice. Writers hated it. Few went through it twice.
It was worse in the office, where the schedules were impossible, a book every two months for a series, a book a week altogether. A few of the expert authors were great, most were so awful that they were entirely rewritten. Popular series were extended with trivia - the office joke was that World Library would include North Vietnam, East and North Vietnam, West. The graphic materials beyond the pretty pictures had tons of mistakes not caught by the overburdened editors. And it was purely by accident that someone pulled open a sealed mail sack full of the first books printed to find that every one had pages glued together by a sloppy binder. No one had thought to quality check. The science books, as wonderful as they were, cost $200,000 each to produce, a staggering amount.
They sold like IHOP could only wish flapjacks sold. Many of the series had more than 400,000 subscribers, numbers that meant each volume, presold and prepaid, brought in more than most bestsellers of the day. By 1964 the division was selling 11,000,000 books. Then things got better.
Then they got worse, when Life died a hideous death, the moribund and right-wing Time was threatened by Newsweek, group journalism became looked on as suspicious corporate propaganda, and the launch of People magazine proved that pictures about celebrities sold better with fewer of them nasty thought-requiring words.
I can’t imagine a magazine that could afford to do a Time-Life Books today, or a website, or cable company. I think the closest thing to them come from the British firm Dorling Kindersley (DK Books). Hardbacks run $30-50, which is another reason why the series would be impossible today, a relic like the 12 cents comics and 50 cent paperbacks I read in the 1960s. Current prices probably aren’t that much higher in constant dollars, but they feel much higher.
Great books, though. That’s timeless.