In 1939, the Bro-Delle Book Shoppe at 1049
Bergen Street, between Lehigh Avenue and Harding Terrace in Newark's
Weequahic section, was running a thriving lending library out of
their book store premises.
The only problem was that after a relatively short time, the thin
paper jackets on the rental books frayed and tore easily, shortening
the book's lending life.
The shop owners, Ruth and Samuel Brody, had talked about this
jacket problem with their 19-year old son, Arthur -- a recent Weequahic
High School graduate (Feb. 1939). After some thought, he came up
with an idea that he believed might be able to get his parents'
bookshop a longer rental life for their books
He went to a place that manufactured sheets of clear plastic and
experimented with various thicknesses, eventually finding a thin
sheet that he found to be foldable without special tools.
He cut the sheet down to book jacket size and made the folds in
the plastic by using the rubber wringer rollers from his grandmother's
wringer washing machine.
He then placed the resulting protective plastic cover over the
paper covers of a number of rental book jacket covers in his parent's
book rental library.
Nineteen-year old Arthur Brody's idea worked. The paper book jackets,
when protected by the plastic covers, were virtually indestructible.
Excited by the success of the plastic jacket covers in the Bro-Delle
Book Shoppe, Brody decided he would gamble his modest savings by
placing an advertisement for the covers in a publication that reached
librarians.
He found that Library Journal, based at 1180 Avenue of the Americas
(Sixth Avenue) in New York City, reached nearly every public and
high school library in the United States.
He went to Library Journal, obtained a meeting with their longtime
advertising manager, Les Cooley, and told Cooley what he had done.
Brody said he thought Libraries might be interested and asked Cooley
to create an ad in Library Journal for his covers for the amount
of money he had available.
The ad ran in Library Journal.
It brought in orders from scattered libraries, and Brody kept
repeating the advertising, using the income from library orders
to buy repeat ads1.
Thus was born the Brodart Company in 1939, and the birth of a
new industry -- the plastic book jacket industry.
Today, it is a multi-divisional company which Arthur Brody still
heads as its active CEO. It has headquarters in Williamsport, Pennsylvania,
and well over 1,000 employees.
And today, plastic book jacket covers are manufactured in plants
worldwide, and there is hardly a public library in the United States
-- or, for that matter, in any large library in any country of the
world, where at least some of the books are not protected by a variation
of the plastic book jacket covers created by Arthur Brody on Bergen
Street in Newark in 1939.
Currently, in addition to book jacket covers, for which all of
Arthur Brody's early patents have long since expired, Brody's company,
The Brodart Company, sells a complete line of library supplies,
equipment, and systems, as well as books, to libraries worldwide.
* * *
(An earlier version of this memory appeared in
"The Joy of Publishing" by Nat Bodian, Open Horizons Publishing
Co., Fairfield, Iowa, 1996).
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