[This is the preface to the newly published "The Business of Books" by Andr� Schiffrin, who was chairman of the very distinguished Pantheon Press until it was bought by Si Newhouse Jr.'s Random House. After it was gutted, it was sold to the highest bidder. Under Schiffrin, Pantheon Press published people like Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Gunnar Myrdal, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson and always made money.] WHEN RANDOM HOUSE bought the venerable publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, the story was reported on the front page of the New York Times. Its appearance caused the attorney general�s office to call Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House. On learning that the total value of the merged houses was under $55 million and that their combined share of the market did not reach even r percent of total sales, the official expressed surprise that the story should have been given such prominence. Just the other week a similar story made the front page of the Times and other papers around the world. AOL�s purchase of Time Warner was given full headline treatment, and no one doubted that the $65 billion deal was a major turning point in the history of corporate control of communications. On this occasion, however, the attorney general�s office was not on the phone, and every indication suggested that the deal would go through, unhindered by antitrust litigation. One had to search far into the story to see the small part book publishing played in the AOL purchase, $1.1 billion to be exact. Book publishing, with total annual sales of $23 billion in the United States, is becoming increasingly engulfed in a corporate media structure, where individual companies are worth more than the entire book market. (The AOL purchase price was more than seven times the value of all books sold in America last year. Publishing is rapidly becoming a minor part of the overall communications industry.) Hardly a week goes by without a new takeover or amalgamation. In the last few months, HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, purchased the remnants of the Hearst publishing effort � a move that brought William Morrow and Avon Books into the American holdings of News Corporation. Two months after the takeover, HarperCollins dismissed eighty of Morrow�s two hundred employees. The announcement of plans for shared warehousing and other facilities led many to predict Simon & Schuster�s absorption into HarperCollins as well. On the other side of town, the German firm of Bertelsmann began the process of consolidating its vast holdings, firing a large number of major executives and assimilating overlapping parts of its empire. Bertelsmann also began negotiations to merge its book clubs under the general direction of The Literary Guild, with the Book-of-the-Month Club now owned by Time Warner. Today, five major conglomerates control 8o percent of American book sales. In 1999, the top twenty publishers accounted for 93 percent of sales, and the ten largest had 75 percent of revenues. Time Warner, which owns Little, Brown and Company as well as the Book-of-the-Month Club, is the largest of the media conglomerates, with close to $31 billion in sales. It is followed by Disney, whose publishing house is Hyperion, with $24 billion, and now Viacom/CBS, which still owns Simon & Schuster, with nearly $19 billion. Bertelsmann earns $16 billion, 34 percent of which comes from the United States, and all of which derives from publishing and music. Murdoch�s News Corporation is the smallest of the big five, with $14 billion, of which HarperCollins accounts for a mere $764 million. These media empires have grown very rapidly. In 1988, Disney took in less than $3 billion a year, primarily from its films and amusement parks; Time only $4 billion; and Warner just $3 billion. Viacom did a paltry $600 million worth of business just twelve years ago. The growth of these giants is due largely to takeovers that have left very few publishing houses independent, as we shall see. Now that virtually all of American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations, it is fair to ask how much all of this matters. Is what we are witnessing truly something new or merely a variation on an old theme? Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us? After all, some seventy thousand books were published in the United States last year. Is that not enough for every conceivable taste? Large publishers have always been with us. And looking back to the nineteenth century, we see substantial book sales then, too � numbers that, in proportion to population, are often greater than today�s. But the story of publishing is much more than a list of sales figures. The important questions are what was being published, what choices were available, and what new ideas, whether in fiction or nonfiction, were being offered to the public. The story also raises issues about the relationship of high culture to mass audiences during a still-evolving industrialization. How were the book houses themselves transformed and what was the effect of the changes on people working in publishing? It would have been helpful in writing this book if extensive research were available to document the specifics of these changes. Unfortunately, very few general histories of American publishing exist and these are generally broad surveys. There are a few memoirs � surprisingly few�a handful of biographies of famous American and British publishers, and a few corporate histories. Some, like Eugene Exman�s book on Harper�s, are admirably frank and fascinating; others are more in the nature of public relations exercises. For the most part, this book is based on my own experiences in publishing. I have also spoken with a large number of my colleagues, both in the United States and abroad, about how their careers have been altered by the changes in the industry. I want to describe a small but, I hope, indicative part of this story. focusing on how American publishing has changed over the last half century. I will begin in the early 1940s, when my father, Jacques Schiffrin, helped to found a small exile publishing house in New York called Pantheon Books, which, in the twenty years of its independent existence, brought much European writing to the United States. For reasons I�ll describe later, I found myself unexpectedly following in his footsteps. In the thirty years I worked at Pantheon I saw both the achievements and failures of independent publishing and its ultimate disappearance as a major force. The developments of recent years have shown that the Pantheon story was not as unique as many initially thought. It is of interest as an early example of a pattern that has now become commonplace. Before starting at Pantheon, I worked for one of the large American mass-market paperback houses, the New American Library, which was owned and inspired by the British company Penguin Books. This experience informs my understanding of the transformation of mass-market publishing, particularly in the United States and Britain, something I consider to be an important chapter in the history of mass culture. A decade ago, after leaving Pantheon, I started a small, independent, public-interest publishing house, The New Press, whose first years suggest a possible alternative to the increased conglomerate control of publishing. IN EUROPE and in America, publishing has a long tradition as an intellectually and politically engaged profession. Publishers have always prided themselves on their ability to balance the imperative of making money with that of issuing worthwhile books. In recent years, as the ownership of publishing has changed, that equation has been altered. It is now increasingly the case that the owner�s only interest is in making money and as much of it as possible. It is widely assumed today that approaches employed lucratively in the entertainment industry will yield similar results when applied to publishing. The standards of the entertainment industry are also apparent in the content of best-seller lists, an ever-narrower range of books based on lifestyle and celebrity with little intellectual or artistic merit. In the first half of the twentieth century, the assumption that most people only want diversion did not always hold sway (though both George Orwell�s 1984 and Aldous Huxley�s Brave New World, written in the 1930s and 1940s, were most perceptive in envisaging such a society). This was a time when many publishers clearly saw it as their mission to reach a large audience through serious work. During World War II, publishing shared in the mobilization of the population, aiming to support the war effort as well as entertain soldiers and wearied production workers. This sense of optimistic civil engagement persisted until the beginning of the Cold War, when publishing largely followed the lead of other media in drawing the battle lines in an increasingly polarized world. The end of the Cold War has not had a beneficial intellectual influence on publishing or, indeed, on any of the other media. We have lost much of our curiosity about the communist world and the Third World, curiosity that once provided raw material for a great many important books. But we have seen the development of a new ideology, one that has replaced that of the Western democracies against the Soviet bloc. Belief in the market, faith in its ability to conquer everything, a willingness to surrender all other values to it � and even the belief that it represents a sort of consumer democracy�these things have become the hallmark of publishing. It is safe to say that publishing has changed more in the last ten years than in the entirety of the previous century. These changes are most obvious in English-speaking countries, which are in many ways models of what is likely to happen in the rest of the world in the coming years. Until quite recently, publishing houses were for the most part family owned and small, content with the modest profits that came from a business that still saw itself as linked to intellectual and cultural life. In recent years, publishers have been put on a procrustean bed and made to fit one of two patterns: as purveyors of entertainment or of hard information. This has left little room for books with new, controversial ideas or challenging literary voices. More about this process will be found later in this book, but for now it is worth noting just how large the business has become. The media industries are vital to the American economy; they are second only to the aircraft industry in generating the nation�s exports. Given the major role that the military has had in developing and maintaining American aviation, it may be said that media products are the largest civilian export. Some 50,000 entities are still recognized by the Library of Congress as publishers. About 5 percent of those, or 2,600, are substantial enough to be recognized by the Association of American Publishers, the trade association. In 1998 close to 2.5 billion books were sold in the United States � far more than in any other Western country � earning some $23 billion. But sheer size does not guarantee diversity of content. On the contrary� more and more of the books published duplicate each other. And although the United States� title output (70,000 new books a year) looks impressive at first glance, it is actually lower per capita than many other countries�. An equal number of books is published in England, which has one-fifth of America�s population. France, with a population roughly a quarter of the U.S.�s, issues 20,000 titles, while Finland produces 53,000, of which 1,800 are fiction. If we look back into America�s past, it�s surprising to see how much healthier book publishing used to be. In the 1940s, for example, an average issue of the New York Times Book Review was sixty-four pages long, twice the length of the current Sunday section. Hundreds of publishing houses had books reviewed and advertised in those pages. The infrastructure of small publishing houses and independent bookstores and book clubs that existed in the 1940s was capable of reaching a very large audience effectively. The changes of recent decades have not been motivated by the need for higher efficiency or greater effectiveness. They have come about through a change of ownership and purpose. In the 1850s, Harper�s boasted that "literature has gone in pursuit of the millions, penetrated highways and hedges, pressed its way into cottages, factories, omnibuses and railway cars and become the most cosmopolitan thing of the century." Popular novels like those of now-forgotten Mary Jane Holmes sold some 2 million copies, and were reprinted in batches of 50,000 � this when the country�s population was one-twentieth of what it is now. James Hart�s very useful history, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Trade, is filled with figures that are astonishing by today�s standards. Books not only had enormous sales but exercised powerful influence. One of the most famous opinion-changers, Uncle Tom's Cabin, sold 500,000 copies in its first months and 300,000 in its first year (the equivalent of 6 million copies today), galvanizing public opinion against slavery. Miners in the gold fields of California would pay twenty-five cents, a considerable sum in those days, to borrow the book overnight. The works of Henry George, the economic theorist who argued for a "single tax" on the increased value of property, sold tremendously well: 2 million of his famous Progress and Poverty, 3 of the others. These books not only attracted a vast readership, but, like Edward Bellamy�s famous utopian novel, Looking Backward (which sold over a million copies around 1900 in the United States and England), inspired social movements. Discussion groups and clubs were created throughout the country to put the ideas in these pages into action. Many of the most popular books at the turn of the nineteenth century are now considered literary classics. The books most widely borrowed from public libraries were by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, William Makepeace Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edward George Earle Lytton, and George Eliot. During the 1920s, often thought of as a period of Babbitt-like uniformity, a widespread debate raged in intellectual circles on the dangers of conformity and indeed on the very idea of best-sellers. Sinclair Lewis refused the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, objecting to the concept of a best book or author, a critique that was echoed widely in the press. The Book-of-the-Month Club, in its early days, found its editorial choices subject to criticism from intellectuals, a debate followed in detail in Janice Radway�s A Feeling for Books. Through the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most widely read books were highly critical of the ethos of their time. Sinclair Lewis�s Main Street sold 400,000 copies in 1920; Lytton Strachey�s Queen Victoria sold 200,000. Similar demand for serious work existed in Europe. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann sold over a million copies in Germany alone, where Erich Maria Remarque�s All Quiet on the Western Front achieved equivalent sales. With the coming of World War II, readers turned to more political books. In 1940, Adolf Hitler�s Mein Kampf was a best-seller, as were the "Inside" books by John Gunther and Ernest Hemingway�s For Whom the Bell Tolls, set during the Spanish Civil War, which had sold a million copies by 1946. William Shirer�s Berlin Diary sold 500,000 copies in 1941 and Wendell Wilkie�s programmatic One World sold a million. Americans started reading books by Walter Lippmann and Sumner Wells, by former ambassadors such as Joseph Grew (Japan) and Joseph Davies (Russia), whose Mission to Moscow became a notorious Hollywood film. In addition to the millions of books bought by civilians, 119 million paperbacks were distributed free in special editions for the armed forces. It�s only in the period immediately after the war that we begin to see America�s reading hitting the doldrums. A study published in 1949 under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council9 showed that reading was falling into a predictable pattern. Of the twenty top fiction best-sellers in 5947, only one author had not been on a previous list. The most popular authors that year were a veritable honor roll of middlebrow culture: Frank Costain, whose Black Robe had sold 5.3 million in the previous year, Kenneth Roberts, Somerset Maugham, Samuel Shellaburger, A. J. Cronin, James P. Marquand, James Hilton, and Frank Yerby, whose Little Foxes sold 1.2 million. (Only John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis offered somewhat more demanding fare.) The movie tie-in to Duel in the Sun by Nevin Busch sold a phenomenal 2.3 million. The nonfiction best-seller lists were dominated by equally middlebrow and popular titles, including Will Durant�s Story of Philosophy, Hendrik Van Loon�s The Story of Mankind, and the omnipresent Dale Carnegie�s book about making friends and influencing people, which sold over a million copies in hardcover and over 2 million in a Pocket Books paperback edition. At this time, most publishing houses still belonged to the people who started them; only a few had grown into publicly held companies. To be sure, the majority of publishers in the United States and Europe were interested in profit as well as literature. But it was understood that entire categories of books, particularly new fiction and poetry, were bound to lose money. It was assumed that believing in authors was an investment for the future and that they would remain faithful to the publishers who had discovered and nourished them. Poaching authors from other firms was not considered fair play. Overall, trade publishers reckoned they would lose money or at best break even on their trade books. Profit would come from subsidiary rights � sales to book clubs or paperback publishers. Even some of the mass-market publishing houses were trying to broaden the boundaries, to seek new readers, and to raise general levels of literacy and knowledge. The most notable of these was the New American Library of World Literature, where I began my own work in publishing. NAL was initially the American branch of the British Penguin, to whom its general approach to publishing owed a great deal. Penguin was the most successful and influential of the early mass-market publishers, and its policies were emulated throughout Europe and the Americas. Started in the 1930s by a practical businessman called Allen Lane, it hired a number of talented and dedicated chief editors, among whom was V. K. Krishna Menon, later to become India�s controversial and committed ambassador to the United Nations. As has been widely discussed, notably in Richard Hoggart�s The Uses of Literacy, Penguin set out to provide the British reading public not only with the best in contemporary fiction but with a range of substantial, educative titles as well. In its Pelican series, Penguin commissioned an impressive range of original work on science, the social sciences, and even the history of art. For the most part, these books had a markedly progressive slant and were often closely linked to the politics of the British left at the time, although they were aimed at a mainstream audience and did not have any particular party bias. Penguin set out to create histories of each of the major countries, books on contemporary public affairs, and a whole range of titles that provided information and ideas for the majority of English people, who had no access to education beyond the age of sixteen. (In 1957, when I was a graduate student at Cambridge University, 83 percent of English youngsters left school at that age.) Penguin�s success was a major force in English society in the 1930s and 1940s and helped to create the support that lead to an overwhelming Labour victory at the end of the war. Those on the left were not the only ones concerned with the problems of reaching a mass readership. The battle for that audience was a hard-fought one, a story yet to be explored in the literature of publishing. The British chain of bookstores and newsstands, W H. Smith, which began in the 1850s, maintained control over the kinds of books for sale to the general public with a stern conservative eye. Even as late as the 1960s, Smith�s attracted notoriety for banning mildly subversive journals such as Private Eye and keeping a close watch on what might reach susceptible readers. The great French publishing and distribution monopoly of Hachette followed the early British example carefully and set up a similar chain of bookstores, also based on newsstands, in the country�s major railway stations. But since France in the 1850s was still very much a dictatorship, Hachette had to promise that it would not distribute anything that the government might dislike and specifically that it "would ban all publications which might excite political passions as well as any writings contrary to morality." These included Ernest Renan�s Life of Jesus, the writings of socialists, other works that might encourage the subversion of public order, and any books suspected of libertine tendencies. One of the ways around this conservative control of book chains was finding alternative channels of distribution. This was done successfully in Britain by the Left Book Club, created by the popular publisher Victor Gollancz. Collancz�s titles were often aligned politically with the Communist Party. George Orwell�s early books, such as The Road to Wigan Pier, were published by the Left Book Club while some of his other works, including Homage to Catalonia, were rejected by its editorial board because of their justifiably harsh criticism of Russia. (These were published by more independent leftist publishers, in this case Secker & Warburg.) But in spite of its party-line adherence, the Left Book Club enlisted some fifty thousand members and supplied hundreds of thousands of scholarly and important studies to a vast population. The works of Edgar Snow, such as Red Star Over China, came out under this imprint, as did major books explaining the rise of German fascism and the coming conflict in Europe. Such books would sell in the tens of thousands at prices very close to Penguin�s and helped to create a well-informed vanguard of public opinion on the left. Today such titles are issued in tiny university press editions at prohibitively high prices because of the assumption that a mass audience simply does not exist for them. But the experience of the 1930s, clearly helped by the general political impetus of society at the time, showed that a very large audience could be engaged with demanding books on political issues that often must have seemed very far from the daily cares of most readers. Gollancz, a highly energetic and effective propagandist, reached beyond his primary market. One paperback by John Strachey, Why You Should Be a Socialist, sold 300,000 copies at two pence each. In 1938, seeing the possible onset of war, Gollancz went further still in search of an audience, publishing anti-Nazi leaflets for free distribution, one in a printing of 2 million, and another of 10 million. But Gollancz and the broad range of intellectuals trying to stop Hitler would not succeed. The blitzkrieg soon saw German troops occupying most of Europe, bringing extensive and horrific changes and driving a number of refugees from Europe to the United States. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
