The 60s was such a great time for the science fiction magazines, you really had something to look forward to. The Masters were all still writing, the up-and-comers had some real juice and the covers were things of beauty. I keep an eye on the book section at yard sales and Goodwill hoping to add another bleak and woggle 50s color scheme cover to the collection.
Thanks for the flashback Expano!
Nobody has ever explained that! 
There was no official final ballot. Just the winner was announced. However, other novels published in 1953 include:
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
Shadows in the Sun, Chad Oliver
A Mirror for Observers, Edgar Pangborn
A couple of classics there.
I picked up a couple hundred SF Mags from the used book store in the early 90’s for 10 cents a piece over about one year. Any they got I went home with, so long as it wasn’t a duplicate.
I read (and really liked) Caves of Steel as a kid. Which of the others in that list is worth reading? (You said there are a couple of classics. I assume CoS is one of them. Which is (or which ones are) the others?)
-FrL-
Just to jump in on this, Mission of Gravity is considered one of the key Hard SF novels.
Mission of Gravity is one of the all-time classics of hard sf. It’s set on an extreme high gravity planet and extrapolates what life what be like there.
A Mirror for Observers is much more literary, about Martians seeking to influence earth culture. Oddly, it won the International Fantasy Award for the year over Mission of Gravity.
I’m not familiar with the Oliver novel offhand, but he was an anthropologist by training which gives his work a very different slant. The Amazon reviews says “This work is one of the earliest attempts to approach an SF story from the viewpoint of complex social interaction rather than purely mechanical or ideological forces.”
Asimov’s book is more famous than good, but I have a lower opinion of Asimov’s fiction than most do. It’s still surprising that it was overlooked.
Any of the four would be accepted today without comment as a worthy winner. “They’d Rather Be Right” didn’t even come out in book form until the Gnome Press edition in 1957 and in paperback under the title of The Forever Machine until 1958. So it doesn’t even have that as an excuse.
The only thing I can say is that it’s one of the first “computer becomes intelligent” novels. And as the blurb on the hardback says:
Man, if that isn’t completely apropos today, then nothing is. Maybe it did deserve to win!
I didn’t hate Dune, but it wasn’t the best thing Herbert wrote. I much preferred the Jorj X. McKie stories, but maybe that’s because I think our government could use a Bureau of Sabotage, and the ideas behind Gowachin law appeal to me.
Of course what they’d rather be right about is that they don’t think scientology and Ayn Rand will make them into gods, so I’d rather be right too.