384
PARTISAN REVIEW
American book consumers," for putting the squeeze on "literary and
intellectual publishing" while shamelessly courting "the new mass
market of the age of consumerism and the culture of narcissism."
These are the big words that make us so unhappy.
There is something to be said in favor of "the decline of the
West" point of view , though it tends to sentimentalize the past.
There has been, inarguably, a proliferation of what the eminent
editor Robert Giroux calls
"ooks"
(meaning "publications that are
almost but not quite books"). It's undeniable, too, that conglomerate
takeovers of formerly independent presses have kept the industry in
a state of jitters. It's tempting to depict the conglomerates as the
Goliaths of publishing, and it's hard to root for a Goliath.
But the trouble with the picture drawn by Solotaroff is that it
oversimplifies a very complex actuality.
If
offers a one-size-fits-all
scenario - the philistine money men invade; the venerable publish–
ing house loses its soul; the aim is megabucks off megabooks from
here on out;
the business is going to the dogs
1
Not on ly does the script fail
to acknowledge the significant differences in character and quality
among the various publishing giants, it denies the ever-present
possibility of innovation - the possibility that entrepreneurial editors
will contrive new ways of yoking culture and commerce to their
mutual benefit.
It
also exaggerates the evil of things as they are. For
all their alleged greed, the major New York houses routinely publish
an awful lot of books that nobody expected to get rich on but
somebody believed in.
Then there's this business about publishing having once (and
quite recently) been "a genteel profession." Does that mean that peo–
ple were decent to each other or that publishing was a game only the
rich could play? In short, was book publishing ever really any better
than it is today? As Simon
&
Schuster editor Robert Asahina sug–
gests , a look at the best-seller lists from 1935
to
the present is
chastening: "You'll find the same proportion of dreck to quality
books, then as now." The reading public always could break an
editor's heart. We may be a nation of readers, but what we read, in
great numbers, are magazines and newspapers, not books. Robert
Giroux recalls learning this lesson in 1940 when fortune handed
him, then a novice editor at Harcourt, Brace, the manuscript of Ed–
mund Wilson's
To the Finland Station.
"I thought 'this book is a
masterpiece.' We published it. It sold about four thousand copies. I
was astounded." Some Golden Age.
That brings me to my favorite theory of publishing, the
