Books For Bus Terminals: Whatever Happened to Belmont Productions?
A dozen or so stalwart readers have been following my series on novelizations, for which I’m grateful, but even some of the regulars must be wondering why this is on the Forbes website. Well, as a sop to convention today’s entry will take the form of good, old-fashioned document trolling. I’ll look at some decades-old rulings in an attempt to throw some light on the business end of the novelization industry.
My copy of the 1963 edition
In the early 1960s novelizations of two of Sam Fuller’s films, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, were published by Belmont Productions. Directors as diverse as Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino have acknowledged Fuller’s influence on their work, so novelizations of his films might conceivably be of some interest. That would be especially true of the print version of The Naked Kiss, one of the few novelizations written by a major director (and the subject of my next and–I promise–last piece in the series).
The end pages of my copy of Shock Corridor list about 60 Belmont titles under the familiar back-page formula “If You Enjoyed Reading This Book, You Will Want To Read These Other Belmont Books,” with a special offer coupon to be mailed to Belmont headquarters at 66 Leonard Street in Manhattan (now in tony Tribeca, then in a factory district). Getting your copy of Nymphs in Suburbia delivered postage free by a burly postman might have added a certain frisson.
The list presents a snapshot of Belmont’s products. Michael Avallone, the amazingly prolific novelizer of Shock Corridor, is represented by The Bedroom Bolero and There Is Something About A Dame, promising titles, though perhaps tame compared to later works of his like Kill Her, You’ll Like It and The X-Rated Corpse (both among at least 11 Avallone books from 1973). Avallone wrote fast and was rumored to have rewritten the same book three times, selling it to three different publishers as a romance, a mystery and a horror story. But alongside the thrillers that Belmont lists, there’s also Francis Bacon’s Complete Essays (50 cents!) and Kipling’s Soldiers Three.
Belmont’s attraction to the big-name authors was what got it into trouble with the FTC in 1964. It seems that the company was in the habit of reprinting books from which portions had been deleted and of reprinting books under misleading titles. A cautious reader might not have been fooled: Belmont often printed “Uncensored Abridgement,” “Authorized Abridgement” and “Authorized Condensation” in, as the FTC pointed out, “small, inconspicuous letters on the lower right corner of the front covers.”
Less careful or more presbyopic buyers were probably disappointed by the Belmont book whose spine read “HEMINGWAY The Secret Agent’s Badge of Courage,” so titled because of the Hemingway essay that appears on page 158 of the 158-page book. Irwin Shaw fans got a better deal: The book represented as Shaw’s The Day the War Ends had two pages of Shaw in a 140-page book. Fans of Nikita Khruschev at the height of his shoe-pounding fame must have been very disappointed by Khruschev’s Mein Kampf, which was, as the FTC put it, “not written or authored by Nikita Khruschev.” But it was a fairly cheap way to get ahold of the Rules of the Soviet Communist Party “stating plainly what it means to be a member of the Communist Party,” as noted on the third unnumbered page of the book.
Belmont published about a dozen titles a month, with print runs ranging from 30,000 to 70,000 copies. Titles were usually not reprinted, appropriately for novelizations, and other than their mistitled titles Belmont’s list consisted primarily of westerns and mysteries “in the lowest price range”–as noted in a New York State tax judgment directed at the supplier of Belmont’s cover art. S.A. Summit got $300 per illustration provided for Belmont’s covers (like the one above).
If you wanted to find a copy of either Shock Corridor or The Naked Kiss back then, you’d be wasting your time by visiting Scribner’s or the book department at Bloomingdale’s. Belmont’s books were for sale in “railroad, airport and bus terminals, and outlets in hotels and office buildings,” as noted in a 1962 Federal Trade Commission Consent Order. Those outlets were also the same places that you’d likely find comic books–no surprise because the owners of Belmont, as revealed in another FTC order in July 1964, included John L. Goldwater, Louis H. Silberkleit and Maurice Coyne, a group that had been involved in publishing pulp fiction in the 1930s and had gone on to become the publishers of wholesome, family-friendly Archie comics.
Distribution of cheap paperbacks and comics was always a competitive, cut-throat business that depended on distribution to sales outlets, and that’s what got Belmont in trouble in 1962, when they were caught making payments to select drugstore chains to provide a sales outlets for Belmont’s books (and not those of competitors). The FTC considered that a violation of the Clayton Act. You may prefer to think of it as the print variant of payola, the practice of paying radio stations to play records that was popular in the 1950s.
We’ll have to assume that Belmont wisely complied with the FTC’s request to cease and desist these deceptive practices since Belmont still existed in some form in 1972 when, as the Wall Street Journal reported, a company named VTR Inc. sold all its assets to an “unidentified and unaffiliated Canadian company.” Those assets included Belmont, which then disappeared from recorded or at least Googleable history.
Next up: The final installment of my novelization series, where I’ll make my case for the novelization of The Naked Kiss.
