These days The New York Times best-seller list is filled with conservative books by authors such as Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Nearly every mainstream publisher (Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette) has its own conservative imprint. In the last decade, Regnery Publishing, the venerable conservative publisher, has seen 30 of its titles become best-sellers. In short, conservative books sell quite well.

But 50 years ago, mainstream publishers were convinced conservative books were the literary equivalent of the third rail. They accepted the stereotypical image of conservatives as beer-guzzling troglodytes who expressed themselves only in “irritable mental gestures,” as Lionel Trilling once said. Publishers joked that with their limited mental capacity, conservatives rarely bought anything more challenging than a comic book—except perhaps the Bible. It was agreed that any publisher who took a chance on a conservative or anti-communist title was bound to lose money—and lots of it.

Read the article “How Publishers (and Readers) Learned to Love Conservative Books” on dailysignal.com.