Setting the Cultural Agenda

GEWEN, BARRY

Writers & Writing SETTING THE CULTURAL AGENDA BY BARRY GEWEN If you have the impression that everyone in America seems to be writing a book, there is a good reason. Just about everyone is. One...

...Plum grew big by thinking small...
...This may not be an answer to satisfy an organizational theorist seeking limpid rationality, yet it is an accurate description of how our culture, or any culture, functions...
...Yet because of their ties to the academic community, they are shielded to a degree from the storms of the marketplace—in Plum's case almost entirely so...
...On what do they make their money...
...Plum grinds out its products like sausages or ball-bearings, substantiating the words of an editor at a rival monograph house who said: "We don't publish books...
...we produce research tools...
...Each has strong links to the academic community and, as a result, has found acozy pocket of existence...
...Anything goes as long as the cash register rings...
...The answers to such questions could teach us a great deal about oursehcs...
...Powell does not offer an answer...
...No less clearly, the systems employed and the choices made have enormous consequences for the culture in general...
...Despite the competition of television, business has been expanding since the 1950s, with sales up from half a billion dollars in 1952 to 8 billion in 1983...
...Neither goes in for heavily marketed, million-selling blockbusters or for highly lucrative, mass-produced textbooks...
...Columbia University Press, scarcely a giant of the industry, received 1,321 manuscripts in 1975, almost four a day...
...Powell focuses on two of these small firms, where in the mid-1970s he spent several months collecting information for his doctoral dissertation on organizational theory...
...Probably the major distinction between the two companies is that Apple operates in a much less predictable environment than Plum...
...For many, possibly most, of the trade companies, the only relevant consideration is sales...
...Who are the individuals responsible...
...Ease of entry assures that small firms continue to appear and occasionally to prosper byfinding their own particular niches...
...It does not have to do general advertising...
...Plum Press, a monograph house that publishes about 400 technical, scientific studies a year, along with a number of professional journals, represents a part of the industry the public rarely sees...
...Apple Press is closer to what people have in mind when they speak of a publishing house...
...These and a few others are the houses that are currently setting our cultural agenda...
...To select what to publish, Plum relies not on its in-house editors but on a stable of academics, experts in their fields, who edit its many monographic series and are up on the latest research developments...
...Other publishers will merely imitate that success until it is a tired old story...
...After a while, a new editor becomes socialized enough to know what is right for his house...
...Anyone who has spent some time around the indust ry knows who they are...
...It is the kind of publisher that considers annual sales of 1,800 for a volume "fantastic," and can reject a manuscript because the treatment is "too popular...
...Two university presses that are moving away from the seclusion of the campus, Oxford and Harvard, might also be mentioned...
...To provide a complete picture of the ways editors make their choices, Powell would have been well advised to examine a few popular houses where nothing is dictated and selection is inevitably more freewheeling...
...Before manuscripts are accepted at Apple, they are normally sent out to one or two academic reviewers for comment, but unlike Plum's editors, those at Apple exercise considerable influence on the ultimate choices...
...Although it too specializes in scholarly studies, concentrating on the social sciences, its books are more accessible than Plum's...
...Such a mountain of material presents publishing companies with a nearly impossible task of selection...
...They are genuine "gatekeepers...
...Of course, the Jeremiahs who bemoan a purported decline of standards would be quick to point out that quantity tells us nothing about quality...
...Unlike university presses, Plum and Apple are purely commercial enterprises, obliged to turn aprofit...
...which saw print, another hundred ended up as piles of paper in people's trunks...
...In 1958, a prominent editor, SimonMichael Bessie, observed that for every three novels writtenintheU.S...
...This analysis is fine as far as it goes, but it only pushes the question one step back: How did the company develop its habits and image in the first place...
...He calls them Plum Press and Apple Press...
...Yet "there is little evidence," says Powell, "thatbooksofmeritaregoingunpublished," and he notes that challenging works like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose even have a chance of becoming runaway successes...
...There is no substitute, in short, for talented individuals...
...Plum prints limited editions of relatively expensive volumes, but it knows its different audiences of professors and technicians and can predict sales with a fair degree of accuracy...
...Powell has not exhausted his subject...
...Clearly, prospecting for literary ore has to be systematized in some fashion...
...Pity the poor college graduate who lands a job at Plum Press because he or she wants to get into publishing...
...It is smaller than Plum, putting out only 60-80 works a year, and staff relations are friendlier and less routinized...
...The 1960s, frequently remembered as a decade of rampant illiteracy, were a period of particularly strong growth...
...One of the editors explained: "Welikebooks withnumbersinthem...
...the figure has probably gone up over the last quarter of a century...
...undaunted by these olfactory explanations, Powell soldiered on, claiming to discover "informalcontrol processes" behind the editors' seemingly free choices...
...Nothing has to be said or imposed from the top...
...Examples include Knopf, Norton, Pantheon, and Farrar, Straus, Giroux...
...As instructive as Getting into Print is, Powell could have written a better book had he expanded his investigations beyond his two scholarly houses...
...The structure of our educational system dictates their direction...
...Publishing houses have individual personalities, he observes—a book that is suitable for one would not fit the list of another—and editors are guided in their decisions by their companies' habits, images and traditions...
...Powell begins with an overview of the publishing industry, and as in Books, an earlier collaborative effort written with Lewis A. Coser and Charles Kadushin, he presents a picture of fundamental good health...
...Should they happen to turn out a worthwhile volume, it is really by accident...
...Nonetheless, several houses exist that do maintain standards...
...Even its offices resemble a factory, with rigid hierarchies and an alienated workforce...
...That edge of uncertainty makes it both more interestingthan Plum and more like a mainstream trade publisher...
...A high percentage of its customers are libraries...
...He might have added that names like Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Didion, and Vidal consistently grace the best-seller lists...
...When Powell asked if employees ever took home any of the compa-ny'sworkfortheirownenj oyment oruse,hewastold:"Who would want to...
...The more narrowly specialized a particular book, the more predictable its market...
...How editors go about filling their "gatekeeper's role" is the main subject of Walter W. Powell's readable and enlightening study, Getting into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing (University of Chicago, 260 pp., $19.95...
...One small publishing house that produces less than a hundred volumes a year gets an average of 35 unsolicited projects each week...
...How do they do it...
...Since Apple's books are not simply research tools targeted for well-defined populations, the company cannot be entirely sure a particular title will find an audience...
...Although mergers and acquisitions have recently introduced corporate giantism and " bottom line" obsessions into an area once considered a genteel province for the unworldly, the industry remains no more concentrated now, according to the Census Bureau's statistics, than in 1947...
...Both are quite successful, though not in conventional ways...
...Most of its announcements are made by direct mailings...
...The entire process moves along with practically a mechanical regularity, much different from the hit-or-miss procedures of more popular houses, and hardly what one imagines when one thinks of a publishing company...
...They appear in the better bookstores around the country, especially those near university campuses, and occasionally get reviewed in magazines like the New Republic and The New Leader . Apple's print runs are larger than Plum's, 2,500-6,000 a volume, if still minuscule by the standards of a Random House or Simon and Schuster...
...Unfortunately, Powell was never able to get a satisfactory answer to his question about how selections were actually made...
...They manage to walk a line between the academy and the market, consistently producing books of merit and still keeping afloat in an ocean of risk...
...A former president of Basic Books once remarked that if his house "were to give every manuscript equal attention, they would each get a three-minute glance...
...Some, like the African dung beetles that live off rhinoceros droppings, survive by reissuing titles the large companies have let go out of print...
...However, a director of a university press did: "Some publishers will be smart enough to publish books that help set the agenda of our nation's culture, that capture our intellectual pulse...
...One editor unhelpfully told him: "You have to take your chances...
...Its products, designed to keep specialists up to date in their disciplines, almost never appear in bookstores...
...No doubt a future generation will uncover an overlooked Moby-Dick or two in our midst—every age has its share—but our unknown Melville's problem is the quirky, Zeitgeistig matter of recognition, not an inability to break into print...
...Taken as a whole, the publishing industry is still doing its job of making quality books available to the reading public and, with the proliferation of small presses, perhaps doing it better than ever before...
...go with your sense of smell, and learn how to hedge your bets...

Vol. 68 • October 1985 • No. 13


 
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