Madison Avenue, 1960 to 1970, and an agency full of people who sell the idea that you can start over. The reading is better than the drinking. Don Draper takes poetry and Dante on vacation, Sally reads Gibbon to her grandfather, and Bert Cooper hands out Ayn Rand like a business card. Matthew Weiner's writers' room treated a paperback as a character note.
Built on the lists Mental Floss, the NYPL and Open Culture kept first.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in S1 E1? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
The secretarial pool is passing around D. H. Lawrence, and the Chicago Public Library has Joan returning a borrowed copy. The women tell Peggy that men won't read it because it's romantic. Joan's review is that it shows people think marriage is a joke, which is a bold thing to say out loud in an office run by married men.
Same episode, second book. Don reads Rona Jaffe in bed next to Betty, and the Chicago Public Library has him doing it as research into what women want. Later the two of them talk about the movie. A man studying women from a paperback while one is lying next to him is most of season one in a single frame.
Sterling Cooper is pitching Israel's tourism board, so Don takes Leon Uris home and brings his questions to Rachel Menken, the one Jewish person he knows well enough to ask. Bustle has the tourism people handing him the novel as homework. Selling a country as a beach vacation when its founding novel is a war story takes a certain kind of nerve. Don has that kind.
Bert Cooper recommends Atlas Shrugged to Don, and Mental Floss says Don's next client pitch picks up some of Rand's ideas. Bert is the partner who takes his shoes off at the office, so his reading list comes without a dress code.
Don sees a stranger reading Frank O'Hara in a bar, buys his own copy, and later mails one to Anna Draper. The season finale takes its title from the book, so the poetry opens the year and closes it. A man living under a stolen name picks up a book called Meditations in an Emergency. Matthew Weiner left that one at a normal volume.
Peggy's mother says she has to renew her library copy of The Agony and the Ecstasy and that it is taking forever. It is a novel about Michelangelo, so this is a book about spending four years on a ceiling.
Arthur Case recommends 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' in this episode, and Betty is later seen with the collection. The story is about a family sitting on a mountain-sized diamond and hiding it from the world. Betty already lives in a house with a secret that size.
Joy reads Faulkner in bed after the night with Don, and Don writes Anna's address in the margins of her copy. A book as stationery. Joy was probably hoping for a bookmark.
Sally reads Gibbon to her grandfather every night, and later she steals five dollars from him and lies about it. Rome fell, and so did her grandfather's wallet.
Waiting at the hospital after the accident, Lane tells Don he has been reading Tom Sawyer. He is an Englishman running the books for a New York agency, so Twain counts as homework.
LitReactor has Roger summing up David Ogilvy's memoir in one line: it's the book everybody writes, only he got it published. Then Roger goes and writes his own. The show's producers actually published it in 2010 as Sterling's Gold, so Roger beat most real ad men to a book deal by being fictional.
Betty reads Mary McCarthy in the tub in The Color Blue, the episode where she finds the key to Don's desk drawer and the box of Dick Whitman's life inside. The A.V. Club clocked the book. A woman who just learned her husband is someone else, reading about college friends let down by their husbands one chapter at a time. McCarthy did her homework.
The same week the partners cram for Honda, Sally is reading William Pène du Bois. ABAA's Mad Men roundup points out it is close to the same story as the Fitzgerald collection Betty read two seasons earlier. The mother got the diamond as big as the Ritz. The daughter got the version with balloons.
The agency wants Honda, so the partners cram. Time has the execs eating at Benihana and skim-reading Ruth Benedict before the pitch. Roger, who served in the Pacific, would rather not learn anything at all. Benihana opened its first New York restaurant in 1964, so this is a business strategy built on a book report and a hibachi grill.
In The Beautiful Girls, Sally takes the train into Manhattan on her own to stay with her father. Bardbrawl has her reading Nancy Drew that week. She also starts asking pointed questions about Faye, the woman who seems to know a lot about what's in Don's kitchen. Sally picks her role models carefully.
In the season four finale Don takes the kids to California, and by the end of the hour he has proposed to Megan, his secretary. The Chicago Public Library has him reading John le Carré in the same episode. A book about a man who lies for a living and can't quit is a strong pick for a guy whose real name is Dick Whitman.
Henry reads Huckleberry Finn before he confronts Betty about firing Carla, the Draper housekeeper. Huck's big moment is deciding to go to hell rather than turn in Jim. Henry's version involves a living room and Betty.
Megan's parents are in town, and Don is in bed with Bernard Malamud. TV Tropes has Megan mistaking it for a James Bond novel, and Don points her to the real thing instead. Her father is a Marxist professor who doesn't think much of his new son-in-law, so the Pulitzer winner on the nightstand is either a coincidence or a defense.
Lady Lazarus opens on Pete reading Thomas Pynchon on the train into the city. Time called it heavy reading for a commute. The NYPL notes the prop was a collectible copy in a fine dust jacket, which is about as Pete as a paperback gets. He spends the episode chasing Beth, the wife of a fellow commuter, so a book about a hidden world under a normal suburb was fair warning.
Dark Shadows is the week Sally learns about Anna, the first wife nobody mentioned, and freezes out Megan for keeping quiet. The NYPL list has her reading Lloyd Alexander that week. She picked a book about a pot that turns the dead into an army. Megan should check what's on the stove.
Dark Shadows is the week Don, feeling his age, takes Ginsberg's Sno Ball ideas to the pitch and leaves them in the back of a cab. The NYPL list puts a Dick Francis paperback in his hands that same episode. A racing novel called Odds Against, read by a man fixing the race at his own office. The writers' room had the option to be subtle and passed.
In The Other Woman, Pete reads Goodnight Moon to his daughter Tammy. It's the same episode where he brokers the Jaguar deal that sends Joan to a client's hotel room. The writers put the gentlest book in America in the hands of the man doing the worst thing at the agency, and they knew what they were doing.
The season six premiere opens with Don on a Honolulu beach, holding the Inferno while his voice runs the opening lines: midway through life, lost in a dark wood. Wikipedia has Sylvia Rosen, the neighbor he is sleeping with, handing him the book. Most people pack a paperback for the beach. Don packed a guided tour of hell.
Ted Chaough flies Don to a Mohawk Airlines meeting in his own small plane, and once the turbulence passes Don opens Larry McMurtry. The Chicago Public Library traces the copy to Sylvia, who reads it earlier in the episode and hands it off. That makes two books from Sylvia in one season. Dante came first, so at least this one is set in Texas instead of hell.
In The Crash, Sally reads Ira Levin in bed, and later that night a stranger named Ida walks into the apartment claiming to be her grandmother. The Artifice reads the book as Sally's story, a girl nobody believes. Of all the nights to be reading about a friendly older woman with an agenda.
Back at work on probation, Don is banned from new business and from drinking at the office. Tablet catches him killing time with naps and solitaire, and with Philip Roth. The partners took his scotch and left him a book about a man telling his analyst everything, so the therapy was technically on the table.
