DAVID
LEHMAN
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about it. But," he adds, "an editor is also a translator: an editor
translates between an author's vision and a sales person's reality."
Something beyond the profit motive is at stake.
*
*
Ask New York publishing people to cite the industry's
most significant continuing trend, and half will point to "merger
mania" or "consolidation" or some other buzzword for fewer bakers
owning more of the pie. You pretty much need a flow chart to keep
track of who controls what these days. Macmillan became the cor–
porate master of Scribners and Atheneum in 1984. A year later,
Simon
&
Schuster expanded its textbook division mightily by merg–
ing with Prentice-Hall. Business as usual: Morrow absorbed Arbor
House in 1987, while Random House acquired Schocken. The big
get bigger.
The one new wrinkle in the increasingly familiar takeover
scenario is that foreign buyers have been making the loudest noises
of late. West Germany's Von Holtzbrinck recently captured the
trade division of what had been Holt, Rinehart
&
Winston. Penguin
in London, which has owned Viking since the mid-seventies, added
New American Library and Dutton to its holdings. Bertelsmann,
the West German owners of Bantam, purchased Doubleday, ending
that house's long history as a family-run concern and allowing Nel–
son Doubleday to give his undivided attention to the New York
Mets. Literary agent Richard Curtis listed these and other recent
changes of ownership in an amusing set of rhymed couplets:
Thus in frenzied syncopation
Proceeds the trade's consolidation.
Scores of famous names of yore
Have since succumbed to corporate war
Or publish books with but a semblance
Of their former independence ...
Is it possible we're heading
Toward one great climactic wedding,
When all but two remain unmerged,
The rest absorbed, acquired or purged?
Curtis's poem ran in
Publishers Weekfy,
the industry's trade journal, in
its 1987 year-in-review issue. The poem's title: "Merger, He Wrote."
The takeover experience - or threat - can have dire commer–
cial consequences. These are eat-or-be-eaten times, as Harcourt
