Reflections of a Publisher

...The state of things, however, is certain not to last for very long...

...From this audience come also many of the writers, painters, composers, musicians, producers, directors, performers, scientists and, indeed, publishers and booksellers who have contributed so richly and so variously to American life...

...It is also the history of dedication in the halls of the money changers, of Good inscrutably outwitting Bad, and of something we call Progress or at least the appearance of it...

...2) they were paying the general publishers too much for the right to reprint their books, like $500,000 for the latest John O'Hara...

...A revolution in the book trade is quite inevitable and it is coming very soon...

...both are ridiculously well-heeled...

...Sixty-five years ago some disenchanted soul wrote the following about the American publishing industry of his time: "All their methods are practically antiquated...

...In fact, it is a book for practically no one...

...Their relations among themselves and their authors are complicated by red tape...

...Neither Broadway nor Off-Broadway theater could exist without it...

...They employ indifferent readers to pass upon the manuscripts that are sent to them...

...If this society is ever going to achieve high-speed mass ground transportation, surely only the government commands the necessary resources and energy to bring it off...

...Both are simultaneously fickle and devoted, undiscriminating and discriminatory...

...It all began in 1638 when the Reverend Jose Glover brought the first printing press in America to Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...seems irreversible...

...PARLOUS TIMES Reflections of a Publisher By Robert Gutwillig The history of book publishing in America, according to Charles A. Madison and my own independent observations, is one of repeated failure flying in the face of success all around it...

...Even when they do secure a book of merit, they handicap its sale by offering it at prices established years and years ago...

...In fact, in 1844 G. P. Putnam was the first American publisher to offer English authors royalties on their non-copyrighted works...

...Another apparently irreversible trend is the paperback publishers' pandering to the Young and the hardcover publishers' exploitation of the Jewish audience...

...Publishers not only stole from authors, they stole from each other-first in hard-cover editions and later, after the "courtesy of the trade" principle had been accepted by most major publishers, in "piratical" cheap reprint editions...

...Fortunately, most general book publishers also publish textbooks or reference books or religious books or children's books or something reasonably profitable...

...The two groups seem to operate psychically on the same level...

...There are only 5.5 million Jews in this country, of whom presumably less than 1 million are book buyers...

...It is the history of man's inhumanity to man punctuated by incidents of rare fidelity (such as existed between Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Viking editor Pat Covici...

...It is the history of the defeat, death and disappearance of the best and the survival of the fittest...

...Within a total population of 180 million this is a very small hard core, and I seriously doubt that it is a healthy situation for American readers or writers, let alone publishers...

...The new age really began in 1939 when Robert de Graff and a couple of other visionaries started Pocket Books, and the American branch of Penguin Books (that later evolved into the New American Library) was formed...

...Five years ago a lot of people (including a couple of Jewish publishers) got very sore when I said, among other things: "Probably the single most important book and book store audience in this country is small, vastly influential, easy to locate, hard to hit, and difficult to fool...

...Those words were written before Herzog, The Fixer, The Rabbi, How To Be A Jewish Mother, The Source, and Everything But Money among others were published...

...For within recent memory I rejected for publication Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth and Rush To Judgment by Mark Lane (the latter not once but twice...

...I think I see it-no bigger than a man's hand-on the horizon...

...they happen to be Holt's: "The more authors seek publishers solely with reference to what they will pay in the day's market, the more publishers bid against one another as stock brokers do, and the more they market their wares as the soulless articles of ordinary commerce are marketed, the more books tend to become soulless things...

...The first American publishers, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, were all printers or booksellers or both...

...In another essay, published the following year, Holt wrote that "within the past few years accidents had so far removed the publishing business from the control of publishers into that of financiers...

...By 1713 Cotton Mather, of all people, had the largest private library in the Colonies...

...Sympathetic as one is to the old man, one must remember he was opting for the piracy of his own age and kind...

...The general book publisher got it both in the neck (he started losing his writers) and in the end (he lost direct profits...

...The Bad Guys are the relatively new hardcover-paperback combines, namely New American Library, Dell (through the Delacourt and Dial hardcover imprints) and Pocket Books (through Trident and some of the Simon and Schuster titles...

...Despite this audience's high standards and usually sound taste, despite the difficulty of pandering to it, any homogeneous audience is bound to be parochial and unrepresentative of the feelings and ideas of the society as a whole...

...Although agitation for a comprehensive copyright law began in 1837, one was not enacted until 1891...

...The following words could have been written by either man...

...If you're the kind of person who stays up morbidly on election night to watch George Wallace and Ronald Reagan perform, then Book Publishing in America is for you...

...These are parlous times for general book publishers...

...This was done and American readers and writers find themselves infuriatingly in debt to the old pirate...

...It is the same audience that supports out of all proportion to its numbers symphonies, opera, ballet, museums, good films and, most recently, medical and scientific research...

...While everything has changed, nothing has changed...

...I thought passenger service likely to become government subsidized and many general book publishers absorbed by textbook companies and larger corporations not then directly involved in the publication of books...

...This premeditation seems to me to raise serious and far-reaching moral questions as well as financial ones...

...If they don't, I am afraid they are either going to go into amalgamation or go under, for the trend toward Bigness, toward the Total Publisher (books, magazines, newspapers, educational devices, information retrieval and electronic communication, etc...

...Robert Gutwillig, editorial vice-president of New American Library, was an editor at McGraw-Hill...

...They themselves are out of touch with popular tastes...

...while all my most dire predictions have come true, most of us are still in business in one form or another...

...Plus ?§a change, plus c'est la m??me chose...

...Yes, these are parlous (if nervously booming) times for publishers, all right, and the central delight in perusing Madison is to find that matters were always thus...

...In these respects, the history of publishing resembles the histories of most families and nations...

...And if we are ever to achieve the designed regular convergence of consumer and (general book) product, it seems to me that such a coincidence is more likely to be arranged by Xerox, RCA and IBM than by Viking, Alfred Knopf and Farrar, Straus and Giroux...

...It is the way this business goes...

...If they are not being bought out by the Big Boys, they are being outbought by the Bad Guys...

...When that scheme failed several of the Harper Brothers prevailed upon Morgan to bring in his own people and straighten the place out...

...Re-reading "What Ails the Book Trade" (NL, May 15, 1961) is like watching home movies at a family reunion...

...But just because it has happened does not mean it is necessarily bad...

...The Young (like those other primitives on the Right Wing) apparently are always going to be with us...

...These paperback publishers got into the hardcover dodge for three reasons: 1) It looked like fun...

...It was not meant to be a reading experience but a reference work, and it is a work to which only the most neurotic writers, the most embittered publishers, and the most jaundiced social historians need refer...

...Five years ago I was complaining about the paucity of both good books and new ideas to effect improvements in book distribution and promotion...

...of the triumph of population growth over inefficiency and myopia, of dumb luck over stupidity, of venality over common sense (and, of course, over altruism...

...The occasion for these depressing comments is the publication of Madison's compendium, Book Publishing in America (McGraw-Hill, 628 pp., $12.50), coupled with the re-reading of an essay on the book business that I contributed to these pages five years ago...

...But then I keep thinking I discern signs of resurgent German Nationalism...

...Publishers appear to be taking dead aim at the Jewish audience...

...while none of my prescribed remedies were taken they still apply (as they will in 1971...

...I very much wish it were not so, but then I also wish I were 17 again...

...Too much of the material comes straight out of company histories, company files and company men...

...It would be an immense gain for the cause of literature if the "commercial enterprise' that has come from Wall Street and the energetic West, were taken out of the publishing business...

...I speak from the personal vantage point of one who has now misspent his youth in a business that is a profession, and a profession strictly for the obsessive...

...And the young, at least, are rapidly increasing in numbers...

...3) the $500,000 only bought a paperback license for five years or so, and then the rights reverted to the original publisher...

...But what the hell...

...Five years from now I shall be doing the same...

...During the lengthy interval some publishers paid authors royalties and some did not...

...In 1776 Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 100,000 copies in 10 weeks, making it, among other things, the first genuinely American bestseller...

...The writing and reading of history, it seems, are lugubrious occupations...

...Meanwhile authors were jumping from publisher to publisher, even as they do now-with and without the aid of literary agents...

...Piracy seems as good a word as any to describe the state of publishing throughout the 19th century...

...And if, as G. P. Putnam, one of the great publishers of the 19th century said, "the history of publishing is a record of erroneous judgments," then my career could occupy Thucydides and Arthur Schlesinger together...

...Book Publishing In America is not a book for everyone...

...God help publishers if a goy backlash ever develops...

...There is too little interpretation of men, events, business conditions or publishing programs, and what there is indicates little balance, less proportion, and absolutely no humor...

...But writers are still writers, and publishers publishers...

...Harper & Brothers, the first of the great American publishers, was formed in 1817 and after flourishing throughout most of the century-through fair means and foul- was saved from bankruptcy only through the efforts of that kindly old philanthropist, J. P. Morgan, who even attempted to merge the firm with Doubleday, McClure (ancestor of the current colossus...

...I challenge any other editor living or dead to top those achievements...

...As a reference work, it is not very satisfactory...

...The paperback revolution, World War II, the population and education "explosions" that have now brought the government headlong into the subsidizing and dissemination of publishers' products- all should have made it a new ball game...

...and so far no one has gone broke in this country filling the emotional needs of either teenagers or the Right...

...Also well-heeled, but harder to hit because they are so discriminating, are the Jews...

...It lives primarily in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and their suburbs...

...In that article I compared the two parts of the business-text books, and general fiction and non-fiction sold in book stores-to the two kinds of railroad service-freight and passenger-and felt gloomy about the futures of general books and passenger service...

...I may not know anything about books, but I know what I don't like...

...As an inducement to authors (and literary agents) to leave their traditional homes, the Bad Guys told the authors they could retain all their paperback earnings, which they had been sharing previously with their hardcover publishers...

...In the November 1905 issue of the Atlantic Monthly Henry Holt, as marvelous and idiosyncratic a publisher as Alfred Knopf was to become, wrote an almost endless essay entitled "The Commercialization of Literature," which in manner and content much anticipated the remarkable Bowker lectures that Knopf gave in October 1964...