Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books and Jason Epstein's Book Business
Mobley, Vanessa
THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS: How INTERNATIONAL CONGLOMERATES TOOK OVER PUBLISHING AND CHANGED THE WAY WE READ b1 Andre Schiffrin Verso Books, 2000 181 pp $23 BOOK BUSINESS: PUBLISHING...
...After the war, Pantheon achieved considerable commercial success, first with an English translation of Zen and the Art of Archery and then with the Bollingen series, which made available in English the work of Carl Jung and prominent Jungian theorists...
...Andre Schiffrin, former managing director of Pantheon Books and now publisher of the 148 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 New Press, and Jason Epstein, founder of Anchor Books and longtime editor in chief of Random House, are successors to the golden age of publishing...
...Where Schiffrin characterizes the tightening of the industry as the consequence of shareholder and executive greed, Epstein—taking a cue from one of his authors, Jane Jacobs—locates the cause of the crisis in the demographic shift that created the largest population growth not in cities but in suburbs...
...Epstein has continually succeeded by taking advantage of one of the central oversights of the industry: a conservatism that used razor thin profit margins to excuse an almost complete lack of innovation...
...He left Doubleday after the house, citing an unfavorable read by the publisher's wife, refused to publish Lolita...
...Between these two, in the crawl space where writers labor to keep producing the kinds of books that a few editors build their careers to publish, is the reality • VANESSA MOBLEY is an editor at Basic Books...
...Were Pantheon in the position to supply its own sales and distribution force, surely it would have felt the belt-tightening that low profit margins, and the ire of booksellers, bring with them...
...Schiffrin's short tenure at the NAL was his first and last foray into traditional publishing...
...quality painted by both Schiffrin and Epstein constitutes a rarefied parlor game...
...But thanks in part to the publication of two memoirs by leading editor-publishers, publishing is getting another shot at describing that particular breach between the ideal and the possible in which all those who profit off ideas must operate...
...For example, his launch of the Library of America, an idea hatched with Edmund Wilson to create a domestic Pleiade, overcame twenty years of objections from the Modern Language Association, which was opposed to the idea of multiple definitive editions of the American classics...
...Suburban bookstores faced pressures to offset their steep rents with a swift turnover in inventory...
...Chain superstores are able to negotiate lower rents, using the sizable amount of foot traffic they command as leverage...
...There had been years when Pantheon earned only a small amount but, as Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer's successor Bob Bernstein was often to insist, at no time did we lose any money out of pocket...
...In spite of this, Schiffrin wears as a badge of honor his distinct disinterest in the bottom line...
...This period, too, marked the first time that publishers began operating as real businesses aided by a national concentration of interest and civic energy, publishers began to take their first cues from the marketplace about how to tailor their books not just to an undifferentiated mass of readers, but to specific markets...
...Belief in the market, faith in its ability to conquer everything, a willingness to surrender all other values to it—and even the belief that it represents a sort of consumer democracy—these things have become the hallmark of publishing...
...The war proved a boon to the book business...
...Schiffrin appears to anoint his independent favorites without acknowledging the resemblance— in the form of subsidized overhead, distribution, or the practically guaranteed cash flow that comes from textbook publishing— they bear to their corporate betters...
...Many editors who have been around long enough to remember the times before conglomerates keenly regret the decimation of thoughtful publishing...
...The publisher's job is to supply the necessary readings...
...publishing...
...He describes the Columbia classroom, with a large number of classmates who had recently returned from the war, as the origin of his ambition: When I became a publisher it was my undergraduate encounter with books that I wanted to share with the world...
...brisk sales of maps, atlases, and books about Europe and the war led to increased sales of other genres...
...If you believe Schiffrin, the small but vital margin of quality publishing that we enjoy today may become even more endangered...
...I believed and still do that the democratic ideal is a permanent and inconclusive Socratic seminar in which we all learn from one another...
...The council's story serves as a reference point for both Schiffrin's and Epstein's entry into the business...
...It was a time when returning soldiers, many of them beneficiaries of the GI Bill, flooded the ranks of book buyers, elevating what was perhaps America's mean level of literary interest into something both nobler and less cash poor...
...The environment for Pantheon grew more hostile with S. I. Newhouse's acquisition of Random House in the 1980s...
...Among the handful of boutique houses that Schiffrin cites as bulwarks against the coarsening of the book business, two of them (W.W...
...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...The net effect of their dominance of the market is, ironically, the reproduction of one high-quality showroom for literature after another—each so amply stocked with front and backlist titles that many people mistake the local Barnes & Noble for a research library...
...The GI Bill had democratized higher education and liberated it from its aristocratic tradition...
...That is, Pantheon covered its own costs even if it did not always contribute the required amount to Random's expenditures, a sum of which we were never informed and could not negotiate...
...The newly profitable house was sold, after the elder Schiffrin's untimely death, to Bennett Cerf, who a few years earlier had taken Random House public and, flush with cash, purchased Alfred A. Knopf, another house known for its equally distinguished list of literature in translation...
...Soon, he sold foreign licenses for these editions, and the business, which he established with capital raised from friends, joined forces with Kurt Wolff's Pantheon Books...
...Perhaps the best example of this effort was the Council on Books in Wartime...
...Although Schiffrin's determination to continue to publish in his father's tradition is commendable, it appears as if his convictions are fueled more by an exquisite sense of privilege— the world of ideas contracting comfortably around his own ambitions—than a determination to respond to the financial realities BOOKS of publishing...
...Schiffrin and Epstein draw from the same well of publishing myth to establish their very different reputations in the industry: Schiffrin's is that of the noble heretic, railing against dereliction of intellectual responsibilities in favor of the profit motive and Epstein's is of the ceaseless innovator who achieved the trifecta of publishing—the approval of his peers and authors, the attention of the reading public, and the satisfaction of his investors...
...1 52 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...
...In a delightful, if sketchy, outline of how he came to choose it as a career, Epstein focuses on his experiences at Columbia, beginning with his 1945 freshman class...
...Epstein is credited with founding the Anchor series at Doubleday, yet another commercially successful packaging of literary classics and nonfiction in paperback...
...150 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 Willing to concede that the country, and its book-buying habits, have changed, Schiffrin appears unwilling to adapt his business in any way, lest it appear as if he is capitulating to the heathens—be they his corporate overseers or faceless customers...
...No publishing house can thrive for very long if it is coasting on the proceeds from its backlist...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...Though the yoke of profitability is both unsightly and uncomfortable, it is— even for a nonprofit publisher—a necessary condition for the existence of a publishing house and, therefore, the livelihood of the authors it employs...
...Schiffrin and Epstein entered a publishing world that was in flux but still thriving...
...In effect, Schiffrin lost his birthright: the Pantheon history that was his proudest accomplishment...
...A series of punishing cost-saving measures were ordered, all of them amounting to a kind of tithing for Pantheon's place in the Random House firmament...
...Tailored to fit into the pockets on BOOKS a soldier's uniform, they included popular and classic novels and, to a lesser extent, nonfiction works edited by army and navy officials...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...pub lishing is unlikely to operate dramatically differently, and it is unclear whether the cultural role occupied by Schiffrin and Epstein—the protean editor-publisher—will continue to exist after publishing, one of the last remaining holdouts of antiquated management techniques, incorporates some of the decentralized decision-making practices that have benefited other creative industries...
...Innovations in the way books are read (electronically) or printed (on demand) may free up—much like the original paperback imprints— space for the appearance of new writers and subjects and the enduring presence of older writers, but the core issue of the fight for the attention of potential readers will likely remain the same...
...The chain stores and Amazon.com constitute well over half of the market for books, with indeDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 1 5 BOOKS pendents accounting for roughly a sixth...
...This idyll of quality publishing, in Schiffrin's estimation, ended as soon as the merciless searchlight of corporate avarice trained itself on his peaceable kingdom...
...S S CHIFFRIN'S BOOK is also a polemic against the corrosive influence of international conglomerates on U.S...
...Both Schiffrin's The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read and Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future are industry memoirs, with the mix of nostalgia, regret, and high-minded self-congratulation common in personal memoirs...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...His dear Pleiade remained in the hands of Gallimard, which, according to his son, obeyed the imperative of Aryanization over loyalty to its employees...
...If you believe Epstein, anything including a change in the very way we buy books and how we read them—is possible...
...Corporate consolidation or not, the fact remains that today's reading public sometimes rewards good books, and, perhaps most important, there are enough books published so that the definition of a good book remains in question...
...In the absence of precise demographic or detailed sales information about customers, booksellers themselves are the audience for books...
...In the near term, U.S...
...Where Schiffrin sees a mass of distracted readers, Epstein recognizes a nascent consumer population, goaded on by the desire for intellectual self-improvement to new educational and book-buying opportunities...
...T T HE ZERO-SUM scenario of commerce vs...
...While many editors in commercial houses would doubtless be delighted to experiment as we have, they are forced to concentrate on a handful of books that will allow them to meet the economic expectations of corporate owners...
...Schiffrin doesn't ask the crucial question: could Pantheon have survived in any form other than as part of a larger corporate entity such as Random House, the modern day equivalent of the kind of subsidized family publishing that was by the mid-1940s nearly obsolete...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Schiffrin's description of his years at the helm of Pantheon, before Random's acquisition by RCA, are somewhat idyllic...
...It is for these extra-curricular endeavors that Epstein is perhaps known best...
...This generation marked a real split with the past...
...Although not exactly contemporaries, both were young men after the Second World War and before the corporate consolidation of the esteemed New York family firms, many of which bore their owners' name...
...We have lost much of our curiosity about the communist world and the Third World, curiosity that once provided raw material for a great many important hooks...
...Schiffrin displays little concern for a reading public with interests different from his own or that of his small circle of advisers...
...Thus, the tyranny of the bestseller was born...
...To understand his enmity, one must appreciate his biography...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above Ito others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...The dominance of the chain bookstore has wreaked a well-chronicled havoc on the business of publishing, concentrating purchasing decisions in the hands of a few corporate buyers, thereby submitting each publisher's seasonal lists to a de facto litmus test...
...Understanding, perhaps from his father's example, the need to maintain control over his contributions to a larger corporate entity, Schiffrin quickly set out to establish his independence within the company...
...THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS: How INTERNATIONAL CONGLOMERATES TOOK OVER PUBLISHING AND CHANGED THE WAY WE READ b1 Andre Schiffrin Verso Books, 2000 181 pp $23 BOOK BUSINESS: PUBLISHING PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE by Jason Epstein Norton, 2001 188 pp $21.95 THE BOOK business has never occupied the American imagination the way the more glamorous entertainment industries have...
...10025 (212) 316-3120...
...He joined Pantheon shortly after it had been acquired by Random House (and shortly after his father's death...
...The postwar generation of which Epstein was a part constituted the establishment of a new class of readers: The great expansion of college enrollments that followed WW II produced a classless generation of serious readers to whom both Anchor Books and The New York Review of Books were addressed...
...Having inherited the promise of a country of engaged citizen book buyers, Schiffrin and, to a lesser extent Epstein, tell the story of the withering of the once vital marketplace for books and ideas and what it has meant to an industry that feeds off idealism...
...Pleiade, whose mission was to make affordable editions of the classics, was so successful that Gallimard (where Jacques Schiffrin had worked until he was drafted into the French army) bought it in 1936...
...In what is now the second wave of chain store dominance in both urban and suburban areas, the issue of square footage to net profit, which Epstein describes as the single greatest threat to quality publishing, has lessened...
...The end of the Cold War has not had a beneficial intellectual influence on publishing or, indeed, on any of the other media...
...The lesson we have drawn is that, although some types of books are undeniably harder to publish with every passing year, the audiences are there, untapped, simply because no one has tried to reach them...
...The demise of the independents, while a subject of conversation and public lamentation in some circles, has quietly and successfully changed the way that people buy books...
...In 1942, Jacques Schiffrin, his wife, and son Andre, emigrated to New York, and Jacques resumed his work as a publisher, issuing French editions of resistance writing for the small exile community...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Shortly after the French defeat in 1940, Jacques Schiffrin was fired...
...The only way for suburban booksellers—as well as chain bookstores—to thrive was to reduce the shelf space dedicated to slow-moving inventory and devote more space to the best-sellers...
...Having understood fairly early that the business of books was one of limited monetary rewards, Epstein wisely struck a deal with Cerf that allowed him to devote time to other projects...
...Shortly thereafter, Schiffrin established the New Press, which, with its slim undergirding of financial support from various foundations, stands immune from its founder's industry-wide indictment...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #1201, New York, N.Y...
...With this market dwindling, and with the strip-mall retail dictates of the suburbs taking over, a new kind of relationship between publishers and booksellers was forged...
...JASON EPSTEIN, unlike Andre Schiffrin, was not to the publishing manner born...
...Urban centers have historically been the home of the greatest variety of booksellers who helped to create a broad market for books...
...It has taken a nonprofit structure to discover those readers...
...Andre Schiffrin's first stint in publishing was at New American Library (NAL), a paperback house that published a mixture of what Schiffrin, characteristically, calls the "lowbrow commercialism of best-sellers" and highbrow offerings, including "instant books" on, for instance, the McCarthy trials as well as the Mentor series introducing academic work such as Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa...
...After a proposed corporate restructuring that would have severely restricted Pantheon's output, Schiffrin and his staff quit en masse...
...Here is where Schiffrin's Achilles' heel as publisher, and memoirist, are most evident...
...Bennett Cerf quickly hired Epstein, who would remain at Random House for the rest of his career...
...Founded and made up of several prominent publishers, the council shipped more than thirty-five million books selected specifically for the women and men of the armed forces and unavailable to civilians...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Schiffrin's father, Jacques, a Russian Jew living in France, founded his own publishing house, Editions de La Pleiade, with help from his friend Andre Gide, who translated a number of Russian classics into French...
...Epstein vividly describes what the decline of the independent booksellers has meant to publishers, likening it to "a kind of sensory deprivation, a loss of contact with the external world...
...But we have seen the development of a new ideology, one that has replaced that of the Western democracies against the Soviet bloc...
...Pantheon remained profitable, if not wildly so, through DISSENT /Fall 2001 n 149 BOOKS a combination of shrewd academic publishing, much of it by way of Europe, and new bestsellers from Pantheon's backlist authors—a formula that afforded Schiffrin the luxury of satisfying profit expectations without sacrificing editorial freedom...
...In 1965, RCA-owned Random House decided to no longer credit Pantheon with the proceeds from its own backlist...
...To this consumer-friendly list, with average prices of twenty to thirty-five cents, Schiffrin added the Signet Classic series, offering the equivalent of the Modern Library's selection of Englishlanguage, and lesser-known foreign classics in pulp paperback editions to a broader, and in great measure classroom, audience...
...Norton and the Perseus Books Group) have lists comparable to those corporate conglomerates immune from Schiffrin's dismissal, including Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, and Metropolitan Books at Henry Holt...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
