Harper's Perennial Library, 1964-1990

Author: Peter Coveney

This essay joins several earlier pieces on this site about Harper & Row's series of paperback books issued in the 1950s up to the 1990s. Those prior pieces include two about the Harper Torchbooks (by John Mellman) and two others about the Torchbooks and the Harper Colophon books (by David Paul Wagner). The article below is a history of Harper's Perennial Library series of mass market paperbacks up to the 1990s, when they ceased publication in the mass market format, and is excerpted and modified, with permission, from my longer piece on just the Perennial Library Mystery series (1976-1990), that appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine, pp. 8-19. That issue can be ordered here: https://firstsmagazine.com/product/july-august-2021/

The Beginnings of the Perennial Library

Shortly before Harper & Brothers bought Row, Peterson, of Evanston, Illinois, and became Harper & Row (in 1962), they decided to get into the paperback market, beginning with Harper Torchbooks in 1956. The Torchbooks were, "an attractive-looking and carefully chosen series designed to appeal largely to college and graduate students," in the words of former Harper president and board chairman Cass Canfield, all of which were reprints of older scholarly titles. The Torchbooks imprint was followed by Colophon Books, launched by his son, Cass Canfield, Jr., in 1958; they issued their first title in 1962. Both the Torchbooks and the Harper Colophon Books were trade paperback size.

Harper's third paperback line, in mass market size, was the Perennial Library, which got its start in 1964, but its beginnings were a little more accidental than deliberate. First, because of a pending deal to distribute Penguin Books in the U.S., Harper had hired fifteen sales people. When that deal fell through, Harper had a sales force with nothing to sell, and they had to come up with a line of books.

So Harper management decided to start an imprint along the lines of Dolphin Books at Doubleday and Collier Books at Macmillan in the late 1950s, both of them part of the new "quality paperback" idea pioneered by Jason Epstein at Anchor Books in the early 1950s. Harper hired Bob Haynes to run Perennial and the new sales force, and Haynes hired as editor former Dolphin editor Tom McCormack (who went on to later publishing fame at St. Martin's Press). But the new imprint struggled at first.

The problem with using Dolphin Books and Collier as models was that they had each lost several million dollars, basically failing because of distribution: mass market paperbacks at the time were distributed by magazine wholesalers and placed mainly in groceries and drugstores rather than bookstores (most bookstores at the time did not have an area for mass market paperbacks), and those paperback racks were already occupied by the other mass market publishers who didn't want to give them up. This was the heyday in the U.S. of such giants as Bantam Books, Avon, Pocket Books, NAL, Fawcett, Dell, Ballantine, Berkley, Pyramid, Popular Library, and others, and they had a lot of clout.

Perennial had expected to get into those same racks, the "meat and potatoes of the true mass market lines," and, after their initial list of eight or so titles they were publishing two to three books a month. But they had a mass market list without mass market distribution, and Haynes had to resign. They were left with a line of books about which management said, just scrub it. But Cass Canfield, Jr., said, "don't destroy the imprint. We have a little nugget here; let's build on the forty or so titles that are working. This could work if we seed it very carefully -- it's the only mass market line we have." With that, the imprint began to prosper and became profitable.

Haynes was succeeded by Hugh Van Dusen, who edited and managed the Perennial Library over a period of fifty-eight years. Van Dusen had graduated from Harvard in June 1956 and that same month had started as "boy Friday" to Mel Arnold at Harper & Brothers, located at that time on 33rd Street in New York. Arnold, with Van Dusen as his editorial assistant, launched the Torchbook series in 1956. By 1968, Van Dusen had succeeded Arnold as director of Torchbooks, having taken over as manager of the paperback department.

Fig. 1. Titles from Perennial's first year of publication (1964):
P1, John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, Memorial Edition
P2, Fred Gipson, Old Yeller
P20, Thomas Wolfe, The Hills Beyond



The First Perennials

The Perennial Library's list in its early years was a mix of reprints that would appeal to the growing market of school and college students in the 1960s: history, politics, the environment, popular psychology, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, literary criticism, education, fiction, race relations and civil rights, humor, science, and current events.


Fig. 2. The Perennial Library reprinted a mix of titles related to African Americans and civil rights:
P120, Herbert Hill, ed., Anger, and Beyond (1968)
P184, Louis Lomax, The Negro Revolt (1970)
P264, James R. McGraw, ed., Dick Gregory's Political Primer (1972)



Fig. 3. Four books on parapsychology and meditation from the early 1970s:
P228, Mary LeBeau, Beyond Doubt: A Record of Psychic Experience (1971)
P289, Anthony Campbell, Seven States of Consciousness (1974)
P372, Louisa E. Rhine, PSI: What Is It?: An Introduction to Parapsychology (1976)
P386, William Johnston, Silent Music: The Science of Meditation (1976)



Fig. 4. "Issues" titles from the 1970s:
P286, The Editors of Fortune, Consumerism: Things Ralph Nader Never Told You (1973)
P292, Colin Greer, ed., The Solution as Part of the Problem: Urban Education Reform in the 1960s (1973)
P352, E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1975)
P505, Environmental Action Foundation, Accidents Will Happen: The Case Against Nuclear Power (1979)


The list featured standard works from their backlist by Alan Moorehead, Frederick Lewis Allen, Richard Wright, Mark Twain, James Thurber, E.B. White, Thomas Wolfe, Aldous Huxley, Joyce Cary, Betty Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Eric Hoffer, William Gass, J. Krishnamurti, D.T. Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Dick Gregory, R.D. Laing, John Cheever, Gordon Parks, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Illich, and many others.


Fig. 5. The Perennial Library reprinted a dozen titles by Aldous Huxley, among them:
P23, Brave New World Revisited (1965)
P30, Antic Hay (1965)
P317, Eyeless in Gaza (1976)
P466, Brave New World (1978), NBC Universal TV tie-in cover



Fig. 6. The books of the moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer were popular on campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s; shown are:
P110, The Ordeal of Change (1967)
P133, The Temper of Our Time (1969)
P267, First Things, Last Things (1972)



Fig. 7. Religion titles by J. Krishnamurti were also popular:
P192, Think on These Things (1970)
P302, The Flight of the Eagle (1973)
P414, The Urgency of Change (1977)



Fig. 8. The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn; Perennial's three volumes appeared as:
P332, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume One (1974)
P345, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Two (1975)
P396, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Three (1976)


The titles in the first few years were priced between 60 cents and 95 cents, and by the early 1970s that had increased to $1.95.

In the twelve years from 1964 through 1975 (what I think of as the "first phase" of the imprint), Perennial issued some 350 titles. The very first title, P1 in the series, was a "Memorial Edition" reprint of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, in 1964.


Fig. 9. Notable works of literary and cultural criticism:
P117, Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel (1967)
P125, Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (1968)
P207, John W. Aldridge, In the Country of the Young (1971)



Fig. 10. Representative religion titles:
P21, Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (1964)
P272, Harvey Cox, Feast of Fools (1972)
P311, Teilhard de Chardin, The Prayer of the Universe (1973)



Fig. 11. Science fiction titles from the 1970s:
P306, Robert Silverberg, ed., The Mirror of Infinity (1973)
P354, Robert Silverberg, ed., New Dimensions #5 (1976)
P471, Fred Hoyle & John Elliot, Andromeda Breakthrough [Andromeda #2] (1979)


Van Dusen was always on the lookout for books to add to the line; the rate of published titles had to keep pace with the sales force. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, he added an enticing mix of overlooked and out of print classic fiction as well as reprints of more current titles, concentrating at one point on well-reviewed but underappreciated women novelists such as Angela Thirkell (six titles reissued in the Perennial Library), Barbara Pym (ten titles), Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (each with three titles apiece).


Fig. 12. Three women novelists:
P432, Travelers by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1978)
P498, Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell (1979)
P653, An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym (1983)


Van Dusen was also able to license nine Bertie Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse and all six of the Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F. Benson.


Fig. 13. Three of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels (all 1983):
P666, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
P668, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
P659, The Mating Season



Fig. 14. E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, Parts IV, V, and VI (all 1984):
P714, Mapp and Lucia
P715, The Worshipful Lucia
P716, Trouble for Lucia


But he needed more product, and decided to experiment with reissuing a handful of mystery novels. This set the stage for Perennial's second phase.


Enter the Mystery Library

In 1976, Van Dusen began publishing mass market paperback reprints of British mysteries under their Perennial Library imprint, in what became, informally, the Harper Perennial Library Mystery Series. Between 1976 and 1990 they released over 350 mysteries, titles that had been published originally by Harper and other houses between 1913 and 1990.

Nearly all of these novels had been reprinted in paperback by other publishers in the past, some of them many times, but Harper's series was the most sustained and elaborate effort by a single publisher of curating, appreciating, and returning to print previously overlooked mysteries, rediscovering neglected classics, and reclaiming forgotten but worthy novels that had sunk from notice over the years.

In a recent email, Van Dusen described to me how he started publishing vintage mystery novels:

"I started out the Perennial mysteries with some I remember my mother reading in the 1940s and 50s--Nicholas Blake and Andrew Garve. I then discovered A Catalogue of Crime [by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor (Harper & Row, 1971)] and quickly found that Barzun's taste and mine were very close, so I could rely on his (and his co-author's) judgment. I remember spending a whole winter reading one mystery after another--books Barzun recommended in the [Catalogue]--and finding several--in fact, many--authors we both liked."


Fig. 15. The first four novels to appear in Perennial's Mystery series were by Nicholas Blake, who eventually had seventeen titles reprinted in the Perennial Library (not counting reissues):
P397, End of Chapter (1977)
P398, Head of a Traveler (1976)
P399, The Widow's Cruise (1977)
P400, The Worm of Death (1976)


The first mystery titles, in 1976-78, often retained the "Harper Novel of Suspense" tagline on the front or back cover (and later, just "Harper Suspense"); the Perennial Library series eventually encompassed mysteries, detective novels, thrillers, and espionage titles.


Fig. 16. The author with the most titles in Perennial's Mystery series was Michael Gilbert; his first three books in the series (above) appeared in 1978. Note that the publisher has retained the "Harper Novel of Suspense" tagline:
P446, Blood and Judgment
P447, Death has Deep Roots
P448, The Danger Within



Fig. 17. Three of Andrew Garve's nine mystery titles in the series, all from 1978:
P441, No Tears for Hilda
P450, The Riddle of Samson
P451, The Cuckoo Line Affair


Van Dusen had been told by a savvy senior editor that the books would sell more if he published several titles by each author, which explains why books by a particular author or in a particular subgenre often appeared in batches of three.


Fig. 18. Gavin Black's three titles in Perennial's mystery line, from 1979-80:
P472, You Want to Die, Johnny?
P473, A Dragon for Christmas
P485, The Eyes Around Me



Fig. 19. Three later examples of titles retaining the "Harper Suspense" tagline, with covers signalling they are part of the same series and genre:
P647, Oliver Bleeck, The Procane Chronicle (1983)
P654, Charles Williams, The Sailcloth Shroud (1983)
P665, John Welcome, Stop at Nothing (1983)


In the late 1970s, the new art director decided that the paperback mystery covers needed a little freshening up, and began interviewing designers who were inspired by movie posters of the 1930s and 1940s, or who had some experience with airbrush technique. The result was a dramatic shift in the look of the series that was popular with book buyers and reviewers alike.


Fig. 20. Three early covers by Irving Freeman, showing the change to a new look for mysteries in the Perennial Library:
P426, Austin Ripley, How Good a Detective Are You? (1977)
P440, E.C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case (1978)
P506, Edmund Crispin, Buried for Pleasure (1980)



Fig. 21. Three later covers by Irving Freeman, who designed 38 covers in the series between 1978 and 1984:
P544, Edward Young, The Fifth Passenger (1981)
P552, Hillary Waugh, Last Seen Wearing . . . (1981)
P597, Matthew Head, The Congo Venus (1982)


Not counting reissues or reprints, the author with the most books in the series was Michael Gilbert, with 20 titles, closely followed by Douglas Clark, with 18. Tied for third, with 17 apiece, were Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake. Dorothy L. Sayers had 13, and Ross Thomas (including Thomas's pseudonym Oliver Bleeck) and Patricia Wentworth each had 12 titles. Cyril Hare was tied with John Dickson Carr and Desmond Bagley (at 10 apiece). Rounding out the list were Andrew Garve (9), Michael Z. Lewin (8), and Frank Parrish, John Creasey, and Henry Wade (each with 7 titles apiece).


Fig. 22. Michael Innes had as many titles in the series as Nicholas Blake (seventeen); the first cover above was designed by Irving Freeman, the last three are by Jon Weiman:
P575, The Long Farewell (1982)
P590, Hare Sitting Up (1982)
P632, The Case of the Journeying Boy (1983)
P633, The Weight of the Evidence (1983)


Van Dusen's plan was to publish approximately two mysteries a month, 24 in a year, though it took several years to reach that level. Each title had a print run of 17,500 copies. It took a while for these printings to sell out, and certain better-selling titles were reissued at that point with new cover designs. In addition, Harper had to reprint the books via offset using the typesetting of the original edition--it was too expensive to reset the type--and in some cases this meant the type looked a little small when a hardcover page size was adapted to a mass market paperback.

The Scope of the Series

Because I worked at Harper & Row in the 1980s, I was able to purchase a number of titles in the mystery series in the company bookstore on the ground floor of their offices, using my employee discount (that bookstore no longer exists). I own 77 of the Perennial Library mysteries, and before I embarked on my original essay, I guessed that the total number of mysteries that Harper published in the series might be around 100.

For my article in Firsts magazine (July/August 2021) on just Perennial's mystery series, I set out to find how many mysteries were ultimately in the series, and I soon learned that no list of titles existed; further, there was no comprehensive listing of all of the titles in the entire Perennial Library, mysteries and nonmysteries alike. So I had to make one. After speaking with Hugh Van Dusen and researching online and in company histories, I began to assemble as comprehensive a list as possible of all Perennial Library titles, from its inception in 1964 to 1990, the last year, I believe, when Perennial issued paperbacks in mass market format. In all I was able to identify nearly 800 of the more than 1,200 titles in the Perennial Library. They are listed at the end of this article.


The End of Mass Market Paperbacks at Harper & Row

By the mid-1980s, Harper's paperback lines included the Perennial Library, Torchbooks, Colophon Books, and Barnes & Noble Paperbacks (mainly handbooks and how-to titles, sold to Harper by the bookseller in the days before it became a national chain). Around 1985 Harper hired a new sales director and head of paperbacks, Bill Shinker, who said it was not a good idea (confusing to the public and to vendors) to have all three imprints, and he proposed keeping only the Torchbooks imprint.

Van Dusen said, no, not Torchbooks--but "we have a wonderful imprint called Perennial." They had seen that they could sell as many copies in the trade paperback size, at a higher price, as they did with the mass market size--which then became irrelevant. After that, every paperback was under the Perennial imprint and in trade size. By the end of 1990 the mass market paperback at Harper was virtually eliminated (with a few minor exceptions). This marks the end of what I think of as the "second phase" of the Perennial Library (1976-1990).


Fig. 23. Later titles from 1988-89; the following year was the last year the Perennial Library was published in mass market paperback size; note the change in the "torch" logo from the previous books:
P902, Mary O'Hara, My Friend Flicka (1988)
P931, Charles A. Goodrum, The Best Cellar (1988)
P980, John Dickson Carr, The Crooked Hinge


When I asked Van Dusen why Perennial's mystery series stopped, he said that he simply ran out of authors he wanted to reprint, but also that it no longer made economic sense: sales had been going down due to competition, and the mysteries were not selling as well. So the end of mass market paperbacks at Harper coincided with the end of their mystery series.

It's perhaps an apt dividing line, as Harper & Row officially became HarperCollins in 1990, following its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch and his subsequent purchase of William Collins Sons, merging the two companies under one name. In mid-1991, the Perennial Library imprint was changed to "Harper Perennial." The signature "torch," its trademark for fifty years, was changed in 2005 to an olive. The Perennial Library continues to this day as Harper Perennial, with all titles in trade paperback format.

Collecting the Perennial Library

I'm not sure about values, but after hours researching these titles on multiple internet sites (Goodreads, eBay, AbeBooks, Biblio.com, etc.) I can report prices generally from $3 up to $20, depending on condition.

Here are some basics. First, as with many paperbacks, the earliest of these, some of which were published 55 to 60 years ago, can be hard to find in decent condition. The paper tends to brown at the edges a bit with age, and the paperback covers can turn brittle, leading some covers to separate at the front or back hinges.

Virtually every title includes "First Perennial Library edition published 19XX" at the bottom of the copyright page, followed by the print string (5 4 3 2 1, etc.), preceded by a year string (80 79 78, etc.). As some of the earlier or more popular titles were reprinted, often several times, you will want to look for this.

The series number is printed on both the spine and the front cover, and, for later titles, the ISBN also provides a guide to the series numbers: the last three digits before the final dash and "check digit" is also the series number. So, using just one example, Minute for Murder by Nicholas Blake (originally P419, issued in 1977), the 1985 reissue's ISBN is 0-06-080782-2, indicating it is P782 in the series.

There does not seem to be any site devoted to collecting just the Perennial Library paperbacks, but that may change. John Krygier, an academic at Ohio Wesleyan University, has an incredibly vast and useful site, "A Series of Series," on which he documents his "personal collection of around 3000 books with dust jackets in over 450 different publishers book series published from the 1890s through the 1980s." John has made a start with short pieces on Harper's Perennial Classics and Harper Modern Classics. The former had both hardcover and paperback incarnations (Hugh Van Dusen described this series as a "subset" of Harper's Perennial Library); the latter series was hardcover only.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to John Krygier for putting me in touch with Paul Wagner, and to Paul for pointing me to the Internet Archive site, for extensive and helpful advice in assembling this article, and for putting me in touch with John Mellman, and to John for his excellent pieces about the Harper Torchbooks on this site and for passing along Hugh Van Dusen's email address. Thanks especially to Hugh Van Dusen for several long and very pleasant phone conversations sharing reminiscences of his days at Harper, and for numerous follow-up emails.

List of sources

Books

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres. NY: Harper & Row, 1971. Revised and enlarged ed., 1989.

Canfield, Cass. Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life. NY: Harper's Magazine Press, 1971.

Davis, Kenneth C. Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.

Petersen, Clarence. The Bantam Story: Twenty-Five Years of Paperback Publishing. NY: Bantam Books, 1970.

Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States, v.4: The Great Change, 1940-1980. NY: R.R. Bowker Company, 1981.

Magazines

Souza, Glenn. "Collecting Mystery Paperbacks." Firsts, June 1992, pp. 14-20.

Websites and blogs

"Henry Hugh Van Dusen," in Prabook. NY: World Biographical Encyclopedia, Inc. [an English-language, web-based, open-content collaborative reference]. (https://prabook.com/web/henry_hugh_van.dusen/357704)

Krygier, John. "Harper Perennial Classics." A Series of Series: 20th-Century Publishers Book Series. (https://seriesofseries.owu.edu/harper-perennial-classic/)

"Longtime HarperCollins Editor Hugh Van Dusen to Retire." Shelf Awareness, 6 August 2016 (https://shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2813#m33465)

Mellman, John A. "The Harper Torchbooks Series: A History and Personal Assessment." Publishing History. (https://www.publishinghistory.com/harper-torchbooks-history-and-assessment.html)

Schmidt, Shannon McKenna. "Hugh Van Dusen Remembers Harper Perennial." Shelf Awareness, 7 October 2016. (https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2359#m25905)

Van Dusen, Hugh. "Hmmph. Wagner. No Melodies." The Jacques Barzun Centennial site, 2007. (http://barzuncentennial.murphywong.net/HughVanDusen.html)

Wagner, David Paul. Publishing History website. (https://www.publishinghistory.com/)

Interviews

Hugh Van Dusen, 18 and 26 January, and 22 March 2021.

About the Author

Peter Coveney is a writer, editor and publisher living in Connecticut and Florida, and has served since 2016 as a contributing editor to Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine. He is the author of over two dozen articles, reviews, and essays on various aspects of book culture, publishing history, and book collecting, and has given post-graduate lectures on becoming an editor and on the design, production, and manufacturing of books. He formerly held senior editorial positions at Wiley, Blackwell Publishing, and Oxford University Press, and has also worked at Greenwood Press, Harper & Row, IBM, and CBS College Publishing. His chapter on college textbooks appears in What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing (University of Chicago Press, 2017). His talk, "My Life in Mylar: Fifty Years of Collecting Hemingway and His World," was delivered at the 19th annual meeting of the Ernest Hemingway Society, Paris, July 2018. He is coauthor, with Karen Salsgiver, of Riomar Country Club: A Centennial History (2019).

Mass Market Paperbacks in the Harper Perennial Library, 1964-1990

Books listed below are grouped by their year of publication in the series, then within that by series number (P1, P2, P3, etc.), author, and title, followed by year of original publication in parentheses, if known (missing in many cases). The series numbers are not in perfect sequence; gaps indicate either missing numbers I have not been able to locate, or they are out of sequence after being organized under publication year. There is one duplicate title under two different series numbers for some unknown reason (P515 and P532, Malice Aforethought by Frances Iles). Some later titles are either reprints or reissues, often with new cover art. Entries in color are titles in Harper's Perennial Library Mystery series, beginning in 1976. The alert reader can see at a glance that 1983 through 1986 was the high tide of the mystery series, with 143 titles appearing in that four-year period; after that the number of mysteries begins to fall off.