Profits and values in publishing
Hausknecht, Murray
Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings ("has left to pursue other interests"). Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs...
...Michener is an obviously valuable product...
...Vitale responded that he was "accessible to Mr...
...Bernstein said he quickly cut it short by saying, 'He's in jail...
...The ad placed by the Writers for Pantheon proclaimed, "An important part of national dialogue, the basis of an informed citizenry in a democratic society, has been silenced...
...He and others were probably lured into publishing for the same reasons Jason Epstein was, but arguments like Englehardt's make it more difficult for McDonald to come to terms with the occupational ambiguities of publishing—part profession, part business...
...the profits they earn from a Scott Turow or a James Michener book allow them to take a chance on the first novel of an unknown author...
...O]ne would think that a publishing house which allowed challenging ideas to enter our lives year after year would be considered a national treasure . . . [A]uthors came to us . . . to be identified with a house that considered publishing an act of social responsibility...
...The occupational ideology of publishing stresses its similarity to the traditional professions by playing down self-interest and highlighting publishing's contributions to culture...
...It is also true that the rejection of a book because it will not sell is different from a rejection that is a step to the gulag...
...Michener any time...
...The perspective adopted by publishing barons may be a narrow one, but given its premise, it is logically consistent...
...The authors tend to be natural allies of the Pantheon editors...
...Their work is part of a "national treasure...
...in recent years several publishing empires have been put together here and abroad...
...James Michener originally took a dim view of the developments at Random House under Vitale, and threatened to leave for "some small house, obedient to the old traditions...
...Forty Random House editors also joined the fray, issuing a statement denying that the intellectual environment had been chilled and asserting their belief that it was possible to "publish books of enduring quality" while practicing "fiscal responsibility...
...Five million copies of anything, that's a product...
...Why did so "normal" an event cause so much moral indignation...
...Publishing has changed from a cottage industry to a postindustrial, transnational phenomenon...
...Publishers often point out that they frequently accept books that will never be profitable...
...Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings ("has left to pursue other interests...
...Their charge of a failure of social responsibility is really a statement of a major defect of a capitalist society...
...their work helps people understand their lives and the world in which they live, and the books contain what a society needs in order to fashion its continued existence in the world...
...But if publishing is a business, then it will become increasingly difficult to have one's work published—not everyone is as good a product as Scott Turow or James Michener...
...But I'm happy to cash the 528 • DISSENT Notebook checks...
...despite the protestations of editors, it is still a business...
...in those societies there is no assurance that the works of novelists, poets, and scientists that are necessary for meaningful lives will ever reach those who need them...
...Whose hand should draw the proverbial bottom line and under what...
...Schiffrin's firing clearly struck a nerve...
...The New York Times on March 19 quotes Newhouse as saying, "I believe my operations should show the sense of security that comes from knowing their work leads to a profit...
...The novelist Scott Turow unabashedly acknowledges, "Sure I'm a product...
...It was Vitale who fired Schiffrin...
...The future of that illusion became more questionable with the firing of Schiffrin...
...Ordinary people and intellectuals there are entranced by visions of the benefits of "the free market," and who can blame them after all they have suffered from command economies...
...The notion that publishing serves a public good was underlined in an anecdote at the height of the dispute...
...Just as the metaphor of "national treasure" leads to notions of "social responsibility" and "cultural obligations," McDonald's metaphor led to the accusation that the Pantheon editors and their supporters "have eschewed any notion of selfreliance and responsibility...
...The conception of Pantheon as a "national treasure" was rejected by those who defended the firing of Schiffrin...
...Editors and authors to the contrary, the publisher has no cultural obligations, because, given the premise of a capitalist economy, the publishers' social responsibilities are discharged when their businesses are profitable...
...The work of authors, editors, and publishers—the writing and distribution of novels, poetry, and nonfiction—is necessary to "the health of the society...
...FALL • 1990 529...
...McDonald's annoyance is understandable...
...Late in 1989 the head of Random House, Robert Bernstein, was replaced by Alberto Vitale, formerly head of Bantam Doubleday Dell, owned, in turn, by a German publishing empire...
...The insistence on "cultural obligations" could only irritate others in the business...
...There is a moral here for the contemporary world of Eastern Europe...
...Newhouse and his family, who also own a string of newspapers...
...Jason Epstein neatly exemplifies one dimension of this ideology when he remarks that the dream of riches is not, or ought not to be, what lures most people to this highly speculative, not very profitable handicraft...
...Implicit in this conception of a profession is a claim to superior status based on education and greater virtue: it is clearly more virtuous to put the interests of others before one's own...
...Strands of the occupational ideology of publishing are to be found wherever people think of themselves as professionals...
...It must have come as a surprise to many, then, that the firing last February of Andre Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon Books, became a minor cause célèbre in which book editors dueled in the New York Times, and authors walked a picket line and subscribed to an ad in the New York Review of Books protesting Schiffrin's firing...
...Erroll McDonald, a vice president of Vintage Books, attacked the authors' picket line as an example of "a welfare mentality...
...Ours is fundamentally a capitalist economy, and that means that the obligations of the owners, the only ones formally entitled to draw the bottom line, are to run profitable enterprises...
...What the next generation of authors who may not have the opportunity to enter the mainstream through Pantheon will pay . . . is literally incalculable...
...If education separates the professional from the skilled craftsperson, the former is distinguished from the businessperson by "service to others...
...Professional practitioners are, ideally again, not solely oriented to making money...
...They did indeed meet, and when asked about his plans Michener said, "I left it in the hands of my agent . . . who is very able in those affairs...
...A profession is distinguished by the requirement, ideally, of a specialized education...
...Once publishers have been defined as "custodians" with "cultural obligations," then publishing as an economic enterprise drops out of sight...
...Schiffrin's dismissal is part of a larger phenomenon...
...But this is a limited perspective, and that is why honor must be paid to the Pantheon editors and their supporters...
...A month later it was announced that Michener was staying with Random House...
...it was an affront to the editors' self-esteem and a reminder that publishing is, after all, a business...
...Another dimension was caught when Helen Wolff, a respected editor, expressed outrage over the dismissal of Schiffrin by saying that he was "treated as if he were a shirt dealer...
...Buy the book.' " The public good that the ideology of advertising invokes is nothing less than the preservation of a "national treasure...
...But if intellectual work results in financially unprofitable books, there are no institutionalized means for that work to reach people—capitalism has a secure place only for profitable products...
...Or, to put it another way, publishing companies and their authors are national treasures only when profitable...
...Still, the Pantheon case should serve as a warning that capitalist societies have their own built-in dangers...
...It is almost impossible to see an editor's social role as similar to that of a physician's, no matter how much the metaphor of "the health of the society" is invoked...
...When there was a discussion of the cost of the Czechoslovak writer Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga, published in 1988 by Knopf, Mr...
...Random House is a publishing conglomerate that is reputed to be worth more than $1 billion...
...Doctorow, the prizewinning author who publicly rallied support for the Pantheon editors, said that Pantheon was "a forum for the critical, the unpopular, the scholarly, the dissenting, the difficult, the impassioned, the contrary...
...The fundamental idea was stated by one of the Pantheon editors, Tom Englehardt, in the New York Times...
...Pantheon is owned by Random House which is part of Advance Publications, a company owned by S.I...
...On the one hand, the occupational ideology as voiced by Englehardt is congruent with their own self-image...
...To be sure, the creation of democratic governments and the dismantling of command economies will mean, initially at least, an immeasurable improvement in the intellectual environment...
...Usually what lures recruits . . . is a displaced literary impulse, as it was for me and for most other publishers I know, people for whom literature or at least writing had become, at a critical point in their lives, more compelling than anything else, including money...
...Not all authors overlook the commercial aspects of publishing...
...But the course of economic developments does not always run smoothly...
...E.L...
...that is, the dedication to furthering a public good...
...Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs is a capitalist fact of life...
...The growth of Random House and its acquisition by the Newhouse family is not unique...
...But publishing as an occupation has an ambiguous status...
...Random House was losing money, and Pantheon, a small division representing only 2 percent of the total revenues, was contributing to the loss...
Vol. 37 • September 1990 • No. 4
