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DAVID LEHMAN
375
megabook mentality hasn't meant the end of literature as we know
it. More than one editor keeps telling me, with real pride, that no
book will die for the want of a publisher in the United States today.
This is one of those propositions that's impossible to prove or dis–
prove, but I guess I believe it.
To a certain extent, books in what's called, ambiguously, the
"mid-list" range have benefitted from the axiom that one publisher's
problem is another's opportunity. Probably no house did better last
year than everyone's favorite maverick, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
with its commitment to high literary seriousness; the privately–
owned firm copped its usual collection of critical kudos, literary
awards, even a Nobel Prize, while hearing the cash register ring with
unprecedented frequency as first Scott Turow's
Presumed Innocent
and
then Tom Wolfe's
The Bonfire
of
the Vanities
climbed to the top of the
charts. Small presses and university presses have benefited, too,
from the availability of good books that can't be mass-marketed.
And then there are the elite , autonomous imprints that some pub–
lishing empires maintain as cultural luxuries - imprints like The
Free Press at Macmillan, Basic Books at Harper
&
Row, Summit
Books at Simon
&
Schuster, and most notably, Knopf at Random
House. "There's plenty of room for niche publishers," is how Snyder
puts it. "Any book of almost any talent, of almost any type, can find
a publisher," adds Dan Green, the former Snyder associate who is
now the CEO of Weidenfeld
&
Nicolson in New York. The new
firm, which published its first book in September 1986, is designed
to capitalize on the perception that "maybe the publisher won't be,
and shouldn't be, one of the huge houses."
It's costing W
&
N a fair amount of money to prove its point. A
friend of mine at a rival house shakes his head in astonishment over
the substantial two-book advance- a rumored $275,000-that W
&
N used to snare David Leavitt from the Knopf fold. "At those prices
Knopf was glad to let Leavitt go," my friend says. It may be that W
&
N has overestimated the young writer's commercial potential, his
ability to earn back an advance of such a magnitude; it is also possi–
ble that the pressure of rising expectations will hurt Leavitt's writing.
By contrast, my friend comes down much less hard on W
&
N's deci–
sion to shell out something on the order of $400,000 for Robert
Stone's next novel. He points out that Stone , a consistently am–
bitious and compelling novelist, will be a boon for prestige whatever
happens in the marketplace. But perhaps the underlying justification
is the same for both the Stone and the Leavitt advances. Perhaps the
