We’re still talking about the factors that made Magnificent Obsession a bestseller. Perhaps you’ve noticed that some of the factors mentioned in previous posts were picked up by the newspapers. The clergy preached about Lloyd Douglas’s book to their own flocks, but then their message was amplified by being repeated in the papers. Reading groups and women’s circles reviewed the book amongst themselves and enjoyed refreshments afterwards (one of them had hot cocoa and cake), but their influence was broadened as summaries of their meetings were printed in the local papers.
The press was an important factor in Douglas’s success all along, even in his earliest days as a pastor. I’ve mentioned again and again how he was the darling of the local journalists, mostly because he knew how to supply them with usable information about his sermons and speeches, complete with soundbites. He gave them “copy” they could easily print without much editing, but he also thought like they did and presented his ideas in a way that would be considered “newsworthy.”
In the course of my Lloyd Douglas research, I’ve read a lot of smalltown newspapers from those years (1903 to his death in 1951), and one thing that stands out is a shift in what was considered “news.” One hundred years ago, local newspapers chronicled the daily lives of the people in their towns or cities. The focus wasn’t on shocking the reader; it was on keeping townspeople informed on who was doing what. While Douglas resided in Washington, DC, for instance (from 1909 to 1911), the newspapers printed the names of women who were accepting “calls” that day – in other words, women who were available to receive visitors from others in their social class. It was useful information that also tells us a lot about who these people were and how they lived.
This feature of local newspapers (their ability to reflect their readers’ daily lives) was especially helpful in spreading the word about Douglas’s novel. As each city’s influencers reviewed the book, the newspapers recorded that fact and increased awareness to people who were not present at those events.
Many newspapers also had a Book Review section. Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook contains a number of reviews of his book from newspapers in small towns and big cities throughout North America. And because he had made an impression on the journalists in each of the cities where he had served as pastor, the papers in those places treated the book’s publication as a newsworthy event in its own right.
Chief among these was the Times-Press of Akron, Ohio. Douglas was treated as a local celebrity during the years he served as pastor in Akron (1921-1926), and they still revered him and printed news about him for some years afterwards. When Magnificent Obsession was published in the fall of 1929, that newspaper purchased the rights to serialize the novel, beginning in December of that year. Here’s the announcement:
And, when they printed the book in serial form, they did it in style. They gave each episode a nice banner…
…and had a local artist draw illustrations: of Perry Ruggles trying to rescue Dr. Hudson from drowning…
…and of Nurse Nancy Ashford talking with Bobby Merrick in the hospital after his accident:
I’m not going to claim that the artwork was exemplary (the images of Nancy and Bobby are not quite how I would envision them), but I do think that the newspaper did its very best to present Douglas’s book to the Akron reading public in a positive light. And that was something Douglas greatly appreciated.
We’re retracing the steps that led to the success of Magnificent Obsession, and the attention of newspapers was certainly one of those steps. Another contributing factor was Douglas’s move to Montreal. I mentioned in an earlier post that he left Los Angeles at the beginning of 1929 to serve as pastor of St. James United Church of Montreal. As it turned out, that one little detail benefitted the book’s sales in a way that Douglas could not have predicted. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 