Public At Both Ends

...a great deal of new business, it seems, will be old business...

...But that historic smile, however rueful it had been, has faded away...

...But faced with the task of choosing between this not really distinguished book and that supposedly definitive treatment of such and such a subject, finding his choice among the mediocre and downright bad authors who are encouraged and the good writers who are compromised, or any number of seemingly attractive but somehow unsatisfying choices, a severe psychological hardship is worked on the reader...

...Howard W. Sams, Inc., known only to the electronics industry for which it publishes television repair manuals, bought the better known Bobbs-Merrill so that it could establish greater common interest in a common stock issue...

...This is one example of investors willing to buy in even though the ratio of stock price to dividend earnings is out of line, and the source of one pressure to get them back in line.* The trade industry's growth of sales (fiction, nonfiction, juvenile and reference books) has been steady, but previously even an annual 20 per cent increase over relatively nothing was still relatively nothing...

...THE COMPANIES ARE BIG and getting bigger, their overheads are high and getting higher...

...And as reprinting increases, individuality of books decreases, for the publishers tend to demand uniformity in titles, and package them in a rigidly consistent format, one book differentiated from another largely by the nonidentical arrangement of identical adjectives describing—or indicting—the contents...

...historically, it has best been accomplished by an editor and publisher who were the same person, and who needed to agree only with himself, a hard enough job...

...The greatest increase of business has been among the text book publishers, their sales having doubled in the last five years, and it is here that expectations of profit in educating a population outgrowing the means of conveying that education have attracted non-risk invest...

...But now, contracts with ten per cent top are not infrequently signed with similar reductions throughout the sliding scale...

...Because publishing has grown big and therefore powerful, it has equated the majority point of view with itself...

...In 1939 the volume of sales split among nearly 100 publishers was $178,000,000, and in the year 1959, it swelled to $680,000,000, the income spread among as many fewer houses as there were mergers...

...Perhaps this aspect should have been placed back in the text under considerations of the effect of bigness on writers...

...More recently, The Organization Man was turned down by the company whose editor had encouraged its writing, and when it proved successful at another house, brought it back to publish as their most successful reprint...

...These two statements seem at first to be mutually exclusive: for if there is just enough savor to go around, wherewith will the extra salt be savored...

...public stock (equity financing), can raise money for acquisition and at the same time broaden the sharing of investment risk...

...The book business is undergoing, as many other industries have already experienced it, a separation of ownership from management, the designer from the material he would design, and the consumer from any large consideration as a human to be satisfied rather than as an agent towards clearing the warehouses at a periodic frequency determined by sensible business sanitation...

...Over and over he has been quoted as saying that the business which he still runs, and which will, likely, as a subsidiary, always bear his name, will not change during his life time...

...Or perhaps, if the evil is the concentration of capital and the diffusion of talent, authors may take it into their heads to reverse the process, i.e., concentrate their talent and spread the capital among themselves in some sort of cooperative arrangement...

...Five years from now it is predicted that readers will buy almost a half a book more apiece than they do now...

...In Harrier's Magazine of a year or so ago, an article by an anonymous book editor (I can only too fully appreciate why any editor might wish to clothe himself in anonymity) entitled "Letter t oa Young Man About to Enter Publishing" advised any serious applicant that it would help if one's father were a member of some distinction in the publishing house of one's choice...

...In a single conversation I heard a publisher state both that all the manuscripts worth publishing were being published (an unprovable statement), and also that the industry will be publishing far more and much better books...

...So MUCH FOR WHY a company sells out and becomes absorbed...

...I am not insensible to the virtues of the proliferation of quality reprinting available at lower prices (although I am surlily suspicious that the friendlier bendable paperback, finding a braver audience in its bright reincarnation, is bent to the contours of the body though perhaps not to the mind...

...A company that has established its value by listing its stock finds itself in a more favorable position to raise money either by more easily obtained loans (debit financing) or by further equity financing...

...Before technocracy we become inept and find that as consumers some of our power of selection has been usurped...

...This increase accounts for all sales: to the educated, the uneducated and those being processed...

...The cheap reprinters, it is true, are forced to make more liberal payments for current properties, half of which goes to the original publisher, and often dramatically overpay royalty expectations in competitive bidding for a book...

...Benjamin appeared in the same magazine with an article entitled "The Business that Disdains Success...

...Despite the larger publishing houses' greater leverage with agents and other sources of manuscripts, a moment's investigation shows that the smaller house is far more frequently the original publisher of important new authors...

...Businessmen-publishers have fine manners—and constantly run the risk of being betrayed by them into the attitude of the jolly panderer rather than the stern elevator...

...In other words, the ratio of sales to population is not markedly increasing, and the amount spent per capita is in decline...

...This end of the industry is changing in more ways than merely an increase in size, and it is naive to think that businessmen, sedulous in the pursuit of sales, will think their duty to circulation a separate and equally serious matter...

...This is the only thorough editorial apprenticeship possible, but it must be doubted that the best candidates are lured as recruits...

...Publishing has arrived at a strange paradox: costs increase, larger editions of any single title have to be sold, there are more titles, and yet there is a diminishing difference between editions—less reason or incentive for a purchaser to settle on any given title...

...with Meridian, New American Library with the Los Angeles Times-Mirror...

...Benjamin rather than peanuts: in the year and a half that Publishers' Weekly had reported the trading, McGraw-Hill stock has increased in value from 441/2 to 123 (since split...

...Putnam, Coward-McCann and John Day...

...going public is the opposite, it is a means of growing bigger while retaining control...

...There are still thoughtful men trying to accomplish thoughtful programs...

...The first offerings of the recently listed companies have been small and heavily over-subscribed...

...And the designer of the material, both the editor and the author, must be shrewder and shrewder as they are reduced to the role of suppliers to the machinery of mass production and distribution, becoming also more and more ignorant of who their public is and what it might want.* The salesman, untrained as a designer and subject to whim and fashion, thinks he knows, and as he becomes responsible for an ever growing percentage of books, he tends to reinforce the business conceit that the process is of greater importance than the final product...

...But the overwhelmed book buyer, criminally misinformed by the astonishingly under-qualified book reviewers, begins to lose all critical faculties as he is forced to undertake simply the consumption of a reasonable facsimile of what he had last consumed...

...The books arrived in great and unexciting quantities, and the Times regretted not having something more interesting to fill its Sunday pages...

...Over the years, as the company's value increases, and expectation of growth bids up its price, more stock can be offered at the future going price...

...Harcourt, Brace merged with World Book Company, Prentice-Hall with Iroquois Publishing, Criterion with Abelard-Schuman, Avon with Hearst, World Publishing Co...

...What is new is that in 1959, to every one's astonishment, total sales of text and reference books, trade and juvenile, hard cover and soft, exceeded a billion dollars—$1,005,635,000 is the combined figure of the American Book Publishers' Council and the American Textbook Publishers' Institute, and the total for 1960 has been estimated at one billion one hundred thirty million...

...Perhaps book publishing has reached the point the movies attained some time ago...

...Here is where the publisher will find material for "more and better books": he or his salesman acting as an editor rifle the art treasures of the ages, comment on the manners of the court of Nefertiti, amplify the solemn advice of God's golfing partners, record the explorations of the heavens and the rummaging of the psyche...

...In the days when things were a good deal simpler, a book such as In His Steps could sell many millions of copies in the original edition...

...Part of this may be that writers, having delivered the blow, assume that the power of it will sweep all before it (as expressed in large sales) and can become quite ugly when this doesn't happen...

...To digress a bit: of the industrial nexus, the observation has been frequently made that mass production has blinded us to the process by which a product is produced...

...Crowell-Collier has announced expansion of its encyclopedias, a move matched by the merger of The Encyclopedia Britannica with Crompton and Co...

...It must be borne in mind that most publishing houses were begun as the single vision and personal responsibility of one man, and have been either family owned or closely held by their management...

...He chose to regard the question as a serious one and said that, no, there were too many problems nowadays...

...The old-fashioned book store, in trouble for years, may be finally dealt a blow from which it cannot recover by the discount houses stealing the dependable bestseller sales with their 20% to 40% off-list bargains...

...Behind this volume lies the power, finesse and intention to out-advertise, out-publicize and out-shrill all but the most redoubtable and newsworthy heretics...

...But these end-of-the-rainbow prices are paid only to the splashy novelists or confessing film stars, very rarely the serious fiction writers, and rarer still to biographers, historians, or scholars...

...If in their founding years publishers were moved by mainly poetic considerations, the reasons leading to their selling out are controlled by the hard facts of business sense and personal mortality...

...Book clubs, whose function is to help the readers' choice with a certain amount of pre-selection, mirror this dilemma in a different way...

...In some cases executive tax rates might be cheaper on dividend income than on a straight salary, and there is an opportunity then to attract sharp new management with the lure of stock option plans...

...A great many good things will come of the new multi-million dollar corporations...

...they have to produce in volume, yet volume does not seem to allow of variety...

...Such an organization would have the incentive to accrete new talent...

...This is an increase, adjusting dollar value, of more than 300...

...As between writers and businessmen there is no doubt, nor is there really reason even to wonder, that writers, as a gang, have far the worse manners...

...Not all publishers have prospered, and it has been the moribund houses that first experienced annexation, valued for their tax loss benefits as well as their literary properties...

...Another measure of prosperity can be found in the answer to the question, are new jobs being made...

...It is most successful and enthusiastic publishing self-help books, so-called, about how to achieve a position in that majority, not necessarily your majority, or how to get ahead in it, or how to measure how far ahead you have gotten...

...It is a long time now since craftsmen in the trade regarded with amusement any statements suggesting that publishing was a business—publishers had considered themselves gentlemen, not businessmen, and their declared concern had been with art, not commerce...

...Mergers are nothing new, viz: Morrow and William Sloane Associates...

...also interest a sizable enough public...

...In paperback publishing something over 360 million volumes were sold in 1959, or about a million books consumed a day...

...The writer writes also to get published...

...JUST HOW PROSPEROUS is the new prosperity...

...I am thinking of the change occurring in that kind of publishing, once the activity of an individual design, which took the initiative in introducing new art and serious viewpoints, and felt a responsibility to see that this work got deserved circulation...

...In the last ten years there has been an increase of forty per cent in the number of new titles published annually—over 15,000 last year.* Theoretically, it would seem that there is a greater freedom of choice for readers...

...ing in a financial statement...

...At any rate, with or without encouragement, the good books, one hopes, will be written and, reluctantly or not, they will be published...

...A few large interests with announced plans of acquisition are still looking for mergeable publishers...

...If authors became their own publishers, there might be the opportunity not only to minimize the distance between the designer and the product, but the producer as entrepreneur, writing his own jacket copy, advertising copy (it couldn't be rendered less enticing than it is now), making the selection of typeface, etc., could take his royalties as salary, thereby saving on taxes, participate in profits above royalties, and take on new talent out of enlightened generosity...

...000, movies that are seen, praised and which prosper...

...I am thinking of the publishing activity that honors the artistic method of abstraction and the artists' deputation to portray an individual ideology opposed to a social ideology...

...Last year, Mr...

...SEVEN YEARS AGO, in an article in the Saturday Review, Curtis Benjamin, president of McGraw-Hill, argued that there was no such thing as bigness in the book publishing world, and that, in fact, the peanut business, he cited figures, was larger than trade publishing by half...

...and, indeed, on the chill surface there seems to be plenty of action: Stocks increase geometrically in value...

...but if only at the smaller houses or if imbedded in long lists from the industrial combines, then their authors run the risk of being swamped in the sheer volume of publication...

...And while a prospective automobile buyer cannot buy a sturdy new 1930 Ford if that is the style he wants, the book buyer can find with increasing availability centuries old works in handsome new editions...

...I suspect that in many important ways it is quite rotten...

...In order to get published, the writer may or may not be able to avoid a self-imposed censorship...

...it is the businessman who orders from the designer and pays him for a product-design that can be economical ly adapted to the machines that can mass produce it—printing presses in this case—and the consumer takes his pick of what is available and best suits his style...

...The work of finding, recognizing and developing the careers of serious artists has been the difficult task of publishing...

...There are other reasons for expansion to result in merger and public ownership...

...Bias, however, leads to trouble...

...There are too many choices the vast majority of which have little correlation with the readers' apprehension of their own lives...

...This is not just suddenly true, but provable perhaps only over a period of time: Dreiser meticulously delineated the society of his time to indicate that, given a social reality so constituted, the crimes of Cowperwood, Griffiths and Carrie Meeber were understandable and even inevitable...

...The only significant change is Wall Street's new regard," he said...

...Therefore it cannot be chosen for real reasons...

...The book business is notoriously low-paying: secretaries, many straight from Radcliffe, start out in New York at $55 a week, and a reader, expected to be well educated in literary selectivity, even if he isn't called on to exercise it, begins at only a little more...

...Great pressure to go public is imposed on companies whose growth potential is so well documented...

...he may not muster the likely strength —without realizing its loss as a weakness—to let go the devastating blow, the stroke that would restore his majority...

...at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., presumably one man stood in danger of casting an inheritance tax burden on his heirs, with the Bureau of Internal Revenue determining, perhaps at an inflated estimate, the value of the company whose stock was untraded and unlisted...

...There have rarely been enough authors at any one time, really talented ones, to fill one publisher's list, let alone provide for nearly a hundred of them...

...Publishers could also write about the idiocies of readers...

...Editors woo and encourage authors of work appearing in the littlest magazines...

...But neither can one remain insensitive to the shameless sensationalism of the cheap reprints...

...As a result, there are now independent units of escapees from that system miraculously bringing in feature length movies under $100, • Much of the title increase is of technical volumes, and finds its market in the need to look things up in printed tables, an increase in the required number of books per student, adult education, etc...

...Random House, having acquired the Knopf trade and college departments, plans to expand, especially the latter, and has added the elementary text firm of L. W. Singer, a larger and more important addition than Knopf, though not as startling...

...ONE MUST DISTINGUISH between accomplishment and the thing that is accomplished, between production and the object that is produced...

...Further, although the consumer takes his pick only from what is available, there is a plethora of cultural modes from which to choose: a stupefying variety of materials, tools and arts from all the disciplines of all times and all places...

...This is not editorial forthrightness, but an operation of looting and mooching...

...Whose reality this is about I don't know...

...And neither are we encouraged...

...In fact there are far fewer jobs proportionately, of an editorial nature even though there are far more titles of allegedly far better books that must need someone to edit them...

...Crowell-Collier, with three magazines deceased, absorbed Macmillan and The Free Press, and now plans to reenergize the Macmillan text book list lately overshadowed by the merged giant of Holt, Rinehart and Winston...

...Only a certain percentage of the company's stock, far less than half interest, is put on the market at a value determined by assets, income statements and the like...

...And the whole point is missed...

...But the effect is all of us...

...One feels that Hearst bought Avon just because it had nowhere else to put its money...

...Rebellion," says Madison Avenue, "is our hottest property...

...Knopf, the exemplar of the publisher who wished to record an individual vision of the changing world as expressed by his serious artists and made permanent in beautifully bound volumes, has said that from the moment the subject had first been mentioned he hadn't spent four hours thinking about his company's sale to Random House...

...There are more salesmen, more administrators, more accountants—and these men have, by and large, respectable incomes—but very few new literary minds...

...He would have saved his breath...

...This lovely trend has not been allowed to languish merely in the present simply because accountants have run out of figures: The Book Manufacturers' Institute prepared a detailed forecast which predicts that "something like one billion two hundred thousand books will be sold by the American book industry by 1965, an increase of about 27% over the 1958-59 average...

...Recently there have been twenty-odd mergers involving forty presses and publishing houses...

...But consider the term as applying to actuarial realities rather than as a righteous judgment of allegedly dated business practices: Before its merger, control of Bobbs-Merrill was held by three men, two in their sixties, one over eighty—if any one died, his estate would have had to sell his holdings to pay the death taxes, leaving the other two with less than controlling interest...

...Extravaganzas set against the same stupefying variety of alleged cultures, and budgeted often at more than ten million dollars, came under the artistic direction of the bank presidents who put up the jack...

...in one way or another they apply to the book business...

...Better books...

...The initiative of the personal publisher introduced the reader to new works, but now the big business publisher is coming to follow the record of past sales (Doubleday actually employs IBM machinery for this purpose) to know what might next become popular...

...The argument still holds: people become more proficient at running the technocracy, but have less opportunity to find the literary example, specific to their time, for instruction on how to run themselves...

...Authors are no longer considered the only asset of a publisher and they are seeing not an increase in their traditional scale of royalties but rather the reverse...

...It hasn't been proven...

...Today a best seller may stay on the New York Times list for many weeks and sell no more than 15 or 20,000...

...This process is being reversed, much luck to us, by movie companies (Jerry Wald, Columbia Picture) and magazines (Life, McCall's, Time) entering the book trade...

...This leaves the businessman's committee to pass on editorial decisions, such decisions as will displease no one...

...Cashing in on the honorable investment of a life time, at twenty-five per cent capital gains tax, is the certain and expedient course...

...The knowledge and interests of editors have prompted the writing of many solid books that wouldn't otherwise have been written, and this is still so though seemingly less so...

...in March, 1960, the month before Random House acquired Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Publishers' Weekly started a monthly listing of the publicly traded book company stocks that now includes 29 issues with more to come...

...This kind of publishing, concerned with a coherent and integrated editorial point of view—opposed and controversial by definition in an arbitrary world—seems to be fast passing, editorial coherence being replaced by a sales line that is diversified and ingratiating...

...First the mergers: dramatic as they are in coalescing seemingly immutable and disparate sovereignties, they are only a secondary result of a deeper change...

...the list continues, including American publishers taking over British houses, and even such large and securely autonomous firms as Harper and Houghton Mifflin receive frequent inquiries from intermediary bankers representing investors...

...A co-op publishing house that spent a minimal amount of money on sales and distribution would, by the excellence of concentrated talent, force a decent representation of its books in book stores...

...In the rapidly expanding book industry there is a fierce rivalry between the individual firms to diversify and enlarge at a faster rate than their competitors...

...An editor of the New York Times Book Review told me that they had not commissioned many essays for the past fall season in expectation of the large number of books that were to be published...

...Sister Carrie was recalled from the bookstores by its publisher, and The Genius, was, for a period of time, suppressed...

...individual ideology...

...The only book to sell more copies recently is Peyton Place...

...The chances are good that if one's father had founded a publishing house, he has since sold it...

...But trade publishing booms too, and provided that those who have been educated continue to read, its market will continue to expand...

...It was not to the large publishing cartels that Shaw would have directed his advice that ". . . there is nothing for us but to make it a point of privileged heresy to the last bearable degree on the simple grounds that all evolution in thought and conduct must first appear as heresy and misconduct...

...the businessman is creating not an addition to culture but a concentration camp for it...

...And as the average paperback is less than a quarter the price of an average casebound book, more than four times as many would have to be sold to keep an increase of dollar volume equal to sales volume...

...And the loss is ours...

...But a Model A Ford's obsolesence has no ideological bias, whereas new books, serious books, attempt nothing if not to find new artistic representation of expressly • When so much of a publisher's income is derived from various subsidiary rights: movies, book clubs, magazine first serial, etc., a foresighted editor will edit for other industries' machinery—with which he is presumably less familiar—as well as for his own...

...I don't think this is any longer true...

...At any rate, for the cheering investor looking for glamor and adventure, books, once the unlovely commodity firmly associated with the teacher's ugly looks, are now the focus of happy and enthusiastic interest.* Or are they...

...Publishing boards of directors bristle with lawyers and advertising men, merchandisers and salesmen...

...Books worth choosing are apparently few, and frequently several clubs will choose the same one...

...Publishing is poorest where it swore it never would be: in circulating the author concerned with what is holding us back...

...An editor found that while he might not know his audience with personal intimacy, the chances were good that if the work was honest and that he could become enthusiastic about 4t, it would • I quote from the 8/31/60 quarterly report of the Fidelity Capital Fund, net investment $20,059,258: "In the quarter just ended, your fund increased its investment in the publishing industry to 10.17 of its total net assets from 4.3% in thequarter ending 5/31/60...

...The mergers and public stock issues are no longer news, though such financial transactions are, if nothing else, the criteria of big business...

...nor is public ownership new: McGraw-Hill, Holt and Prentice Hall, among others, have been traded for some time...

...I would like only to cite a few of the dangers of this bigness which, though they may not be expressed in figures, are as real a dividend as any appear...

...senescence," a euphemism employed to criticize a multitude of fiduciary sins ranging from the situation of estate taxes which must be faced, to the demands of a changing market that allegedly haven't been faced...

...I will confine the observations that follow mostly to trade publishing, but as mergers centralize all publishing, the text executive who would leave out too explicit mention of, say, Mexican territorial sovereignty in an American History seeking Texas adoption, sits ever closer beside the distributor of brightly discolored fictional paper cover maunderings to determine the content of the trade publisher's list...

...At publishers' sales conferences new books are described to the salesmen in terms of what the book resembles: ". . . it's like Rebecca, only the house is in Faulkner's Mississippi, and the hero is a little boy like in Salinger...

...The authors, will they benefit in the new prosperity...

...Investors are betting on Mr...

...Public ownership has been the case in England for decades to no serious detriment...

...This is the main point about the mergers, expansions and the heavy artillery of Napoleonic business...

...Neither do the reprinters, stripping the natural resources from the last 56 years of publishing—that is, any book still in copyright— encourage reforestation of lasting vitality by their single minded demands...

...Mr...

...According to the Book Manufacturers' Institute survey, the greatest increase in book manufacture will be in the cheap reprint category...

...is new blood being infused...

...But a phenomenon of our times, Doctor Zhivago, sold over three quarters of a million copies in hardcover, and perhaps several million more in paper...

...Better still, new acquisitions can be made by stock swapping, without the necessity of cash ever changing hands...

...This works in two ways: among reprinters, a favorite author is a dead author whose works are in the public domain...

...It is not too much to hope, indeed there are signs of it now, that independent, personal, Off-Publishers' Row publishers may appear in significant numbers...

...Appleton-Century-Crofts (merged again with Meredith and again with Duell, Sloan and Pearce...

...the readers' selections are neither unique, personal nor free, and soon, under such an anxious burden, he may stop exercising a choice without meaning...

...now, having accepted bigness, he denounced guilty preoccupation with the slogan "fewer and better books," and cheered his colleagues on to a publication explosion...

...The middleman conveyor becomes not a close encourager, but a potential ogre, the thought of whose retaliatory strength, even for a split second, turns the blow...

...Previously, an author with sales over ten thousand copies could expect to reach the plateau of 15% royalty on the list price...

...The opposed writer, creating literature by recording the uniqueness of man and pointing to salvation in resistance not submission, threatens that majority point of view.* At the beginning of his career his bias is unsalable, and throughout his career his ideology is unacceptable...

...With the possibility of non-schedule publishing, infinitesimally small overheads and combined but unmerged distributions, perhaps they can make a go of it...

...If individual, then biased—but without the artists' nervous tics or even more infuriating distortions there is no vision...

...But sales, though supporting bouyancy, show a humbler increment of gain, a gain that is matched, possibly offset, by rises in manufacturing costs...

...These are reassuring words, and yet, whereas in England Sir Stanley Unwin can write an honored book entitled The Truth About a Publisher, including a chapter called, "How to Make a Nuisance of One's SeIf," regarding cantankerously individual opposition, it is hard to imagine an American publisher writing an equivalent piece and meaning it...

...So Bobbs-Merrill has had its editorial staff completely cleared out, and Rinehart nearly so...

...In the weekly opinion magazines book club ads often follow one another on succeeding pages, boasting of the unique thoughtfulness of their identical selections...

...Knopf's Vintage Books (paper) have been added to Random House's Modern Library Paperbacks, and the combined operation is now competitive in size with Doubleday's Anchor, Dolphin and Image paper book division...

...And publish ers proudly announce that their book is a simultaneous winner with the Literary Guild, McCall's and Readers' Digest—in gushing full length, in driblets, with the life squeezed out of it...

...A delicate, and perhaps impertinent, phrase of the investment business is "management * For publishers' issues as a block, Barron's reported in January, 1961 that the ratio of price to earnings was 27 to I as compared to the Dow-Jones average ratio of 18.1 to 1. Publishers' Weekly this August noted, however, that book stocks, as a group, were down 12% in price during the second quarter this year—still up 22% over the same quarter in 1960...

...Merger has proven the fastest method to accomplish diversification: Noonday's paperbacks have been merged with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, putting the latter firm in that segment of the market, and the former more solidly in the black...

...The image comes to mind of spring ice being danced upon by a chorus of marvellously nimble accountants...

...and with hardcover publishers it is no secret that any nonauthor from the mailboy to the editor-in-chief can dream together a piece of printed merchandise...

...The limitation of sales display space threatens to cause quality reprinters the same glut crisis as was visited on cheap reprinters in 1954...

...The businessman, having discovered the economies that can be effected by combining sales, production, shipping, billing and promotion within his merged firms, longs even more ardently to invent similar savings in his editorial department...

...IT WOULD SEEM that if books are less interesting, rewarding, or valuable no one is to blame but the author...

...The worst augury is the decline in the ratio of authors to the number of books being published...

...In the case of Western Publishing, the stock was offered at 42, went up to 51 on the first day of trading, and now, a year later, after a four for three split, is something over 70...

...The book that is made into a book in order that there should be more wares to sell to offset overhead, may exist in the physical sense, but it is not real...

...The rationale of bigness is strength in the market, and competitive growth requires refinancing...

...A well known and greatly admired publisher working for a company to which he had sold his own was facetiously asked if he had ever thought of going into business for himself...

...Consider only trade publishing, and separate books that are published from the business of publishing them...

...This is, of course, not the whole truth about book publishing...

...The reasonable facsimile is usually not as good as the original, however good that might have been, and with the editor forced to please the requirements of a machine before he pleases himself, the result is a subtle, but unmistakable, programmed debasement...

...The omens are not good...

...Instrument of the cold war or no, it can be argued that despite] the book's difficult style, it was appreciated for its concern with the readers' reality...

...If he opposes, so is he opposed...

...Of course, if the ideology becomes an institution itself, and salable as any other commodity, all is forgiven if not honored...