I found this book interesting and intriguing, first as a book-lover, second as a conservative who feels the need to dinstinguish my book-loving, great liberal tradition respecting feelings from my distaste for his leftist political and ideological committments. I somehow feel a need to say what I liked and agreed with vs. what I disliked and disagreed with. I guess this is part of the larger issue of agreeing with the classical liberals, but not with the modern liberals. I need to try to understand where he went wrong so I can avoid that fate myself! My hunch is the answer is his rejection of God and deification of human "wisdom" (i.e. literature, other art and science). This, of course, repeats the mistake of the classical liberals, resulting in "slippage" of the type described by M. Stanton Evans in The Theme is Freedom.
I'll start by citing a reference to Jason Epstein in George H. Nash's excellent The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (p. 309, context is the increasing disillusion experienced by many liberals during the 1960s as colleages radicalized): "Another increasingly noteworthy forum for disillusioned liberals was Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. Reacting to the catastrophic 1967 NYC teacher's strike (which pitted blacks against Jews), the demands on some campuses for racial quotas (which offended many Jews), and alleged New Left anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel, many American Jews began to move to the right at the end of the 1960s. One manifestation of this trend was the evolving position of Podhoretz, whose journal was seen by many observers as a rival to the radical New York Review of Books." A footnote offers "For an interesting account of Podhoretz's career and that of his rival Jason Epstein (editor of the NYRoB), see Merle Miller, 'Why Norman and Jason Aren't Talking,' New York Times Magazine (March 26, 1972), pp. 34-5, 104-111."
The book is dedicated to his (second?) wife Judith Miller. There are frequent references to his (first?) wife and current co-publisher (with Robert Silvers) of the NYRoB, Barbara Epstein.
Although a liberal, Epstein has some interesting observations in this book. He opens with a quote from George Dangerfield's TSDoLE on how members of the House of Lords fought in vain to maintain their earlier power, even though it proved to be a lost cause (a warning to publishers intent on maintaining the status quo?). He notes the origins of writing in commercial record-keeping and how the development of movable type spawned "the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions and the societies that resulted" (xi). "Technologies change the world but human nature remains the same" as evidenced by the continuing best-seller popularity of such classic stories as The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Psalms of David and Beowulf.
"In the 1920s a brilliant generation of young American publishers fell heir to the cultural transformation that became known as modernism and nurtured it with taste, energy, and passion. As Einstein's generation had introduced once and for all the themes of modern physics and as Cezanne, Picasso, and their contemporaries had done the same for painting, the writers of the early 20th century had created once and for all the vocabulary and themes of modern literature. Much elaboration would follow, but the fundamental work had been done and could not be done again. My career in publishing has traced the long, downward, but by no means barren slope from that Parnassian moment. The cultural efflorescence of the 1920s was an act of liberation - or so it seemed at the time to its makers - from a society whose moral, aesthetic, and intellectual failings had become intolerable...[this adventure] awaited the generation of Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, and Bennett Cerf 80 years ago when Joyce and Hemingway and Eliot and their peers [Faulkner, Proust, Gide, Lawrence, Stein, Stevens, Pound (93)] emerged from the muck of the World War and the terrible innocence that spawned it." He believes a new era of adventure (created by technological changes) is dawning on the industry.
"In the 1950s book publishing was still the small-scale, highly personal industry it had been since the 1920s when a remarkable generation of young men, and a few women, many of them Jews who were not welcome in the old-line houses, broke with their genteel predecessors and risked their personal fortunes and the disapproval of their elders by agressively promoting the literature and ideas of modernism...they came of age during a cultural revolution and brilliantly exploited it." Later however, they lost their revolutionary edge and became part of the establishment. The author worried that his generation wouldn't be able to match their brilliant performance...how to be freshly revolutionary but avoid revolting against them?
"General book publishing in the US is currently dominated by 5 empires":
- Bertelsmann (Random House) and Holtzbrinck (St. Martin's, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) of Germany
- Longmans, Pearson of London (Viking, Penguin, Putnam, Dutton)
- Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (HarperCollins, William Morrow)
- Viacom (Simon & Schuster, Pocket Books, Paramount, MTV...)
Barnes & Noble and Borders now dominate the retail book trade, replacing big-city independent bookstores as a result of the postwar urban migration to the suburbs. This has unfortunately meant more focus on current bestsellers and less on "backlists" (titles chosen for permanent value as much as for immediate appeal, sell well year after year). Alfred A. Knopf's (Random House) "incomparable" backlist includes Kafka, Proust, Camus, Faulkner, O'Neill, Dr. Seuss, James Michener, John O'Hara, Wallace Stevens, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Mann, Auden, many other noted authors, cookery books, American historians, children's list, dictionaries.
"Such name-brand best-selling authors as Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Grisham, whose faithful readers are addicted to their formulaic melodramas," no longer really need publishers, but only production and distribution services (a similar shift in power is occuring for brand-name film stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Costner, and Robin Williams).
"Several literary Web sites that have so far emerged are in effect vanity presses or job printers, willing to publish anything, regardless of quality, often at the author's expense. It is highly improbable that from this clutter works of value will emerge. But proven talent will coalesce in particular venues as it always has. Distinguished Web sites, like good bookstores, will attract readers accordingly. The filter that distinguishes value is a function of human nature, not of particular technologies" (28).
New publishing technologies will impact culture. "Dante's decision 700 years ago to write his great poem not in Latin but in what he called the vulgar eloquence - Italian, the language of the people - and the innovation in the following century of printing from movable type are landmarks in the secularization of literacy, and the liberalization of society, as well as an affront to the hegemony of priests and tyrants. The impact of today's emerging technologies promises to be no less revolutionary, perhaps more so. The technology of the printing press enhanced the value of literacy, encouraged widespread learning, and became the sine qua non of modern civilization. New technologies will have an even greater effect, narrowing the notorious gap between the educated rich and the unlettered poor and distributing the benefits as well as the hazards of our civilization to everyone on earth. Greater literacy will not reduce the human capacity for mischief any more than Martin Heidegger's philosophical learning kept him from supporting the Nazis...Nonetheless, the spread of learning is good in itself" (31-2).
"Manuscripts are turned into books only by hand, one step at a time. This work may take years as authors with the help of editors construct their manuscripts, so that when the book finally appears - if it does; some never do; the process is fraught with hazards and disappointment - the editor's emotions are almost as much committed to the outcome as the author's. For books of lasting value there is no use hurrying this work for the sake of a schedule or a budget" (36).
In 1958 (when the author left Doubleday for Random House), the latter was more literary, whereas the former was run by direct-mail marketers who knew how to maximize margins but were not book aficianados. The author learned many lessons from these marketers which paid off when he and friends launched The NYRoB in 1963, and later the Library of America in the mid-1980s. "At Doubleday, the highly profitable book clubs - the Literary Guild was the largest - defined the company's culture" (39). Doubleday was "devoted to commercial ephemera aimed at unsophisticated readers...[but] this had not always been so. Under its founder, Doubleday published Kipling, Conrad, Maugham, and many other lesser nobility" (41-2). Later, their list began to lack substance.
The author, whose job was to peruse a stack of manuscripts each day and decide to accept or reject, soon learned that most "could be disposed of on the evidence of a paragraph or two. The gift of storytelling is uncommon. It can be seen at a glance even by a beginner like myself. There are rare exceptions" (45).
Publisher Horace Liveright, the subject of the (unfair, the author believes) film The Scoundrel, was the first of the so-called Jewish publishers. The author feels he was not a scoundrel at all, but a "brilliantly innovative if suicidal publisher addicted to drink and dangerous love affairs" (45). He published Eliot, Hemingway, Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane, E E Cummings, Faulkner, Freud and many others (also the Modern Library, "the indispensable source in the interwar years of literary classics, major translations, and important modern writers"). Liveright's European scout was Ezra Pound, "who would later become notorious for his anti-Semitic broadcasts during WWII. The author admires Liveright's zest for life (but sees his destructiveness) and sees his predecessor Arthur Pell as an unworthy parasite feeding off Liveright's accomplishments. Epstein describes an early apartment as "fitted out like a set for La Boheme" and "more appropriate to Liveright's spirit and to my own" (50).
18 months after joining Liveright, the author launched Anchor Books, "the intellectually oriented series of paperbacks that precipitated what to my surprise became known as the paperback revolution," selecting The Charterhouse of Parma (described as "Stendhal's delicious novel about a young man as shrewd and guileless regarding life's possibilities and as unconcerned with its hazards as Liveright himself") as the first title on the list.
The author describes "the thrilling Eighth Street Bookstore, a bibliographer's paradise and an informal school for many fledgling publishers in those days...It was here that the idea for Anchor Books first occurred to me, amid neat shelves lined with hardcover editions of all the works in print of Proust, Kafka, Yeats, Auden, and Eliot, with Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Weber, with Pushkin, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, with Melville, Whitman, Dickenson, James, Frost, and Faulkner, with volumes of criticism by I. A. Richards, Edmund Wilson, and John Crowe Ransom among others, and with the works of enough other authors like these to satisfy a bookish lifetime. Even now I recall their titles with the same intensity of feeling as that aroused by old songs: After Strange Gods, The Winding Stair, The Eighteenth Brumaire, Amerika, The Age of Anxiety, Scoop, First Love, Dead Souls, Bend Sinister, Loving, The American Scene, The Future of an Illusion, A Masque of Reason, Practical Criticism, The Wound and the Bow" (51-2).
"I had installed on the bookshelves of my new apartment, alongside my Oxford editions of the English poets and my Kittridge Shakespeare with its torn binding, a leather-bound set of the collected works of Walter Pater, which I still own. Pater, a passionate but timid aesthete, had been Oscar Wilde's mentor at Oxford. He was famous for having advised his disciples that life's goal was not the fruits of experience but experience itself. Had he written in the 1920s he would have recommended burning the candle at both ends. In the 1960s and 1970s he would have stood on the sidelines of the cultural rebellion and been appalled. Though Pater was too timid to follow his own doctrine and eventually disappointed Wilde, his star pupil, he nevertheless urged his followers to "burn with a hard gemlike flame," which Wilde of course did, and so, I had decided when I read Pater in my teens, would I, once I learned how. I never did.
"What combination of genes and infantile misadventures attracted me in my late adolescence to Pater's aestheticism I have no idea, but the potentiality must have existed when I arrived...[at] Columbia in 1945...The professors were learned, fluent, and worldly...students, with the help of their teachers, were expected to make whatever sense they could of the books they were assigned...a few students, including myself, responded to their teachers so avidly that Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Keats became our obsessions too. We spent our days and nights in Butler Library reading whatever we could find about these and other writers and formed the habits of a lifetime...every undergraduate had to read the great literature of the world, when then extended from Athens to London and Dublin...I would have been happy to remain forever an undergraduate reading the authors whose manly names encircled the frieze of Butler Library, but a year of graduate school - an employment service for future professors - convinced me that I was not made for academic life. Instead the publishing business became an extension of my undergraduate years, a personal college in which my authors have been my teachers and their works in progress my curriculum. I cannot imagine a happier way to have spent this half century. When I became a publisher it was my undergraduate encounter with books that I wanted to share with the world. I believed and still do that the democratic ideal is a permanent and inconclusive seminar in which we all learn from one another. The publisher's job is to supply the necessary readings" (55-6).
"The freshman class of 1945 included many veterans...among these...were a few aesthetes who had spent the war years...reciting Dante and Racine at Anzio or translating classical Chinese poetry on a destroyer in the South Pacific. This coterie adopted me as its pupil, and to its 5 or 6 members I owe my belief, now much modified but not abandoned, that literature is not a pastime like golf or bridge but a kind of religion whose gods are manifest in the works of great writers. What else, I would ask myself in all seriousness, could have inspired The Divine Comedy or The Tempest if not a divine spirit? Shakespeare, I have since learned, had no supernatural help, and neither did Dante despite what he himself may have written. Nevertheless the young are drawn to great oversimplifications, and I was no exception.
"Whittaker Chambers...and Thomas Merton...had studied at Columbia in the 1930s, and both Marxism and an intellectualized form of Catholicism were still very much in the air. But Marxism was too worldly for my ethereal tastes and too narrowly apocalyptic to offer a convincing account of human possibility. With its promise of redemption in the indefinite future and in the meantime iron discipline under the self-invented laws of history it differed, to me, only in its decor from Catholicism. Though I much preferred and was intrigued by Catholic decor, conversion required a suspension of disbelief in transparent absurdities of while I was incapable. Moreover, I had been raised in a Catholic town and had heard enough from my terrorized schoolmates about the crime and punishment of carnal affection to know that the sex-besotted, dictatorial Church was not for me. Instead I became a Platonist. To my retrospective horror I argued bitterly one evening with a favorite professor, as we stood in the doorway of Butler Library while the snow swirled around us, that Plutarch was foolish to interest himself in merely human qualities and should have contemplated ideal forms rather than written profiles of actual people...but after a few months at Doubleday I found that literature, like all religions, is also a business, though not a very good business" (57-9).
"In the early 1950s, book publishers...were not yet attuned to the postwar generation that had already begun to turn the world of their parents upside down...Before the war, college had been a privilege. Now it was a necessity, and thanks to the GI BIll and other federal programs, millions of my contemporaries were enrolled. I didn't think much about politics in those days, but in retrospect it is obvious that the GI Bill was a glorious attempt to fulfill the promise of American democracy, along with the Marshall Plan and later the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, even if the latter two were conceived partly as Cold War strategies rather than for their own sake. At the time I took such heroic politics for granted. We had just saved the world from two terrible enemies. Why shouldn't we continue to do great and decent things?
"The 1950s are conventionally recalled as complacent and conformist, a half-truth propagated by two influential titles in the Anchor series - David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and W. H. Whyte's The Organization Man. But these years were also a highly creative, golden age in which the rights and privileges of citizenship would soon be extended well beyond their prewar boundaries if hardly to their ultimate limits. To be sure, Senator McCarthy had introduced the vocabulary of ad hominem denunciation over political differences that haunted public discourse during the Cold War, and the United States was already stumbling blindly into a very hot war by supporting the French effort to recolonize Vietnam. But the Korean War had ended in 1953 and the Vietnam mess was not yet visible...The terrors of the Depression were receding...hospitals were bursting with the Baby Boom. A postwar generation of American writers and artists had emerged. Manhattan would soon replace Paris as the world's cultural emporium, and Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn were writing its score" (62-3).
"The first Anchor list of 12 titles included To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson's study of the intellectual sources of the French and Russian revolutions; D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature; novels by Andre Gide and Joseph Conrad; and, of course, The Charterhouse of Parma...titles...that identified Anchor Books with the spirit of the new age...the postwar intellectual zeitgeist" (64-7). Ironically, the author was dismayed to see his own Anchor paperbacks upset the "serene dignity" of the 8th Street Bookstore, formerly stocked only with hardcovers, and eventually preferred hardcovers (with jackets removed) for his own shelves. "Though Anchor Books soon became known as the origin of a paperback revolution, my aim had been to restore and extend the ancien regime of literature, not to make a new world. That has always been my aim" (65-6). Similarly, while others were "issuing various revisions of the King James version [of the Bible], adapted for modern readers, my rather esoteric project [the Anchor Bible series, a multivolume edition of the Old and New Testaments, book by book, based on archaeological evidence] had the opposite aim: its editors wanted to distinguish from subsequent interpolations what the biblical authors had actually said" (67).
The author describes his disdain at the "philistine" censorship of books like Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. That, along with his continuing desire to run his own publishing show, prompted him to leave Doubleday. He and his friend Barney Rosset ("owner of Grove Press...Liveright's spiritual descendant, publisher of Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco...he fought the Chatterley case and in 1960 won before the Supreme Court, defeating the book censors once and for all...he became the publisher of the Beats" [80-1]) considered entering business together, but that didn't work out. He eventually went to work for his friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House. He warmly recalls "their instinctive respect for the feelings of others: a rare form of wisdom" (84) and describes how they nursed William Faulkner through many lean years (love affairs, drunken nights, money problems) until his work finally began selling well. They "had an aversion to chaos in their own lives and cannot have enjoyed nursing their exotic genius" through those times. They didn't expect to make big money (working "for the joy of the task"), but did indeed when they sold 30% of the firm to the public in 1959 and then sold to RCA for $40 million in 1960. "They were experts at their craft, and among the happiest and surely the sweetest men I have ever known" (87-8). Bennett later became famous as the host of the TV show What's My Line. Once RCA took over, the atmosphere began to feel more formal and big-business-like. "I preferred spending time at the Frick amid the Fragonards and Goyas or across town at the office of The NYRoB, whose battered furnishings and floors piled high with books were a relief from the increasingly formal atmosphere at the new Random House offices" (91).
In addition to the 1920s upstart publishers (e.g. "Knopf, Viking, Simon & Schuster, and the other so-called Jewish firms" [89]), "there were also Harper and Scribner, whose list included Hemingway and Fitzgerald; Harcourt, Brace, which published Eliot and several Bloomsbury writers; Macmillan and the Boston firms Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown; and W. W. Norton with its translations of Freud and its fine music list" (93-4).
"Harper Bros., one of the earliest American publishers, began as a NY printer in 1817. Soon the firm was competing with other NY printers to ship books, including pirated editions of British authors, via the Erie Canal to the hinterland, where local printers could not match NY prices. The canal gave the NY printers an advantage over their competitors in Boston and Philadelphia, which helps explain NY's preeminence as a book publishing center. There were, of course, other reasons. Boston was a Congregationalist theocracy with strong Puritan overtones, Philadelphia was a Quaker aristocracy. But NY was polyglot, comsopolitan, open to anyone with talent and ambition" (96-7).
"The US, with few writers of its own to protect and a printing industry to nurture, ignored international copyright throughout most of the 19th century...According to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham...Thomas Babbington Macaulay was the most successful of Harper's pirated authors. His History of England from the Accession of James II sold...an amazing 400,000 copies, a performance comparable to that of a major nonfiction best-seller today in a much larger America, to readers eager to outdo England's rise to world power" (97-8).
"By the 1850s, NY publishers were shipping millions of books to the hinterland. The most popular novel of the day...was The Wide, Wide World, written by an impoverished gentlewoman named Susan Warner. Harper rejected this 'pious and sentimental' manuscript, calling it 'fudge,' but G. P. Putnam, alert to the genre then as now, picked it up and sold 14 editions. In the decade before the Civil War there were 112 publishers in NY and others is Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. NY had the advantage...of a relatively carefree attitude toward 'blood and thunder adventures, sado-masochistic romances laced with sex, horror and lurid accounts of patrician villainy and plebeian mischief,' staples of the trade then as now. NY houses dominated the market for the genre until, in the 1870s, Anthony Comstock, a self-confessed former devotee of the solitary vice, convinced the city's leaders that for the sake of respectable appearances, a hypocritical electorate would not object to the suppression of its shameful fantasies. Major publishers thereafter catered to the genteel pretensions of readers who bowed to an idealized assumption of feminine modesty. It was not until the 1920s when publishers introduced the literature of modernism and its critique of all assumptions, that American publishing, to use Van Wyck Brooks's term, came of age along with the nation itself" (99-100).
The author describes the thousands of privately owned bookstores in the 1950s as places "where the accrued wisdom of the species was for sale" (101). There was no shortage of challenging new writers (as Irving, Cooper and Twain had been in their day), such as Kathleen Windsor (1944 best-seller Forever Amber), Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. The author edited Jane Jacobs' 1960 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her "classic defense of urbanism against the powerful forces that threatened it, including the proponents of suburbia as a more wholesome environment than dense cities, but I failed to see the meaning of these forces for writers and publishers" (102).
"In bookselling as in any retail business, inventory and rent are a trade-off. The more you pay for one, the less you can spend on the other. Shopping-mall rents procluded the retail structure that had evolved hand in hand with the American publishing industry for nearly 2 centuries" (103). The disappearance of independent booksellers also caused a kind of "sensory deprivation" to the publishers, who had earlier relied on daily calls to see what was selling well by region. As publishers pursued more formulaic methods (big names, established genres), specialized or speculative titles fell through the cracks. Some managed to find their way to readers, however. The author cites John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a surprise bestseller (>2 million) which originally appeared in independent bookstores and spread outward from there. "Storytelling - transmitting the wisdom and history of the tribe through word, gesture, and song - is an innate human function" that predated, and will postdate the publishing industry. New technologies will allow the industry to achieve "unprecedented scope and unimaginable consequences [but] given the mottled history of our species, one should not assume a future of unmixed joy, but there are grounds for optimism nonetheless" (109).
By the late 1950s, Epstein's search for new titles for his Anchor series (via his Columbia friends, Barbara's Harvard friends) connected him to the so-called New York intellectual community as well as the lower Manhattan Bloomsbury group of poets and artists. These revolved around The Partisan Review and included Robert Lowell, his wife Elizabeth Hardwick, Will Barrett, Dwight Macdonald, Fred Dupee, Hannah Arendt, the Trillings, Clement Greenberg, Mary McCarthy and so on. PR "had performed 2 indispensable services since its founding in the 1930s as an organ of the John Reed Clubs, a component of the Young Communist League. A year later it broke with communism and commenced its critique of Stalinism, a courageous heresy at the time. PR's circulation was negligible but its influence was enormous. For the next 2 decades it shaped the critique in the US of Soviet communism while it also introduced the writers and issues associated with modernism in literature and art to American readers. PR led if it did not actually create America's intellectual discourse during the war years and after, until it lost its bearings in the moral and intellectual chaos of the Vietnam War and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.
"This intellectual world, which had once been united in its criticism of Stalinism and its defense of modernism - the issues are, of course, related: the victory of Stalinism would mean the end of art and literature - now broke into polemical factions over various Cold War issues. Should criticism of American culture be muted, lest it help the Soviet Union and its propagandists, or is such criticism an essential function within a democracy? Could Senator McCarthy be defended, despite his Red-baiting, for having alerted Americans to the threat of domestic communism? How serious was this threat? And what should be done about the Soviet cultural offensive? Should intellectuals respond by accepting covert funding fromt the CIA to support publications that promoted our positions? Was it right for those in the know to deceive their fellow writers about these connections? Was the Vietnam War a defense of American interests or a trap from which politicians, afraid of attacks from the right, lacked the courage to extricate us?" (112-3)
Epstein complains of the debate than became "parochial and personal," with issues "framed as ad hominem attacks and justified metaphysically as the defense of 'Western Culture,' as if contrary opinions were not simply other points of view but insults to the civilization we all shared. The intellectual community whose critique of Stalinism and defense of modernism had been heroic was now disintegrating in the face of issues beyond its moral and intellectual grasp. Its more sophisticated members drifted away, while those who remained clung to various orthodoxies with passionate, often infantile, intensity" (114).
The author explains how the NYRoB came about during the 1962 strike at the NYT. "To put the problem of Times Book Review at that time most charitably, its editors had not adjusted to the sophisticated generation of postwar, college-educated readers. Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash. Authors lived in terror that their books would be assigned to a reviewer who had no idea what they were saying" (115). Elizabeth Hardwick felt its flat praise, faint dissention, minimal style, light little articles, absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity - its lack of the literary tone itself - made it merely a provincial journal. So the Epsteins and Lowells (and Bob Silvers) decided to start the NYRoB as a corrective alternative (to both TBR and PR). Unlike peer leftist magazines like PR, The New Republic and The Nation, Epstein wanted The NYRoB to be self-supporting. He says the founders "shared certain values but had no ideological position or political program (some readers...[disagree], but this may be a reflection of their own intellectual commitments. The Review has always been skeptical of doctrine except as noted below). We valued literature, the other arts, and science as the greatest human achievements. We believed that good writers could make almost any subject interesting and intelligible and bore obligations to do so within their powers; that official points of view and government activities should be viewed skeptically; and that human rights abuses whether inflicted by Communists, fascists, religious fanatics, or ourselves should be exposed. We opposed the Soviet Union as well as the war in Vietnam. We also opposed capital punishment as an act of vengeance, unworthy of a great country and an insult to the sanctity of life. But these preferences were the implicit basis of our friendship and not elements of a political or ideological program" (118). Targetted writers were "Edmund Wilson, Richard Wilbur, Roger Shattuck, Alfred Kazin, V. S. Pritchett, Fred Dupee, W. H. Auden, Dwight Macdonald, and 50 or 60 others...[all] journalists: skeptical, open-minded, objective" (119). Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein still edit the magazine, featuring such newer writers as Ian Buruma, Luke Menand, Pankaj Mishra, Geoffrey O'Brien, and Timothy Garton Ash, among many others. Epstein characterizes right-wing complaints that NYRoB was ingrown (reviewers favoring each other's books), "leftist, unAmerican, culturally subversive, and so on" as being "tendentious and easily ignored" (122).
"The great expansion of college enrollments that followed WWII produced a classless generation of serious readers...The GI Bill had democratized higher education and liberated it from its aristocratic tradition. One consequence of this new intellectual diversity was the discovery that American writers of the 19th century were not provincial relics of a genteel past but bold critics, in many cases, of a past that had itself been anything but quaint...under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Perry Miller, Van Wyck Brooks, F. O. Mathiessen, Newton Arvin, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, F. W. Dupee, Lionel Trilling, and other writers, American literature would soon become an academic industry" (125). Epstein agreed with his friend Edmund Wilson, who felt a new series of books American authors (e.g. Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn) was needed, analogous to the Pleiade, the French series. This idea became the Library of America, appearing in the 1980s. His competitor was the Modern Language Association (MLA), which enjoyed public funding (via. NEH). The LoA ended up being jointly funded by the NEH and the Ford Foundation (greased by its former president McGeorge Bundy). Epstein suggested the Loeb Classical Library (managed by Harvard) as a model for LoA to minimzize overhead, but instead a separate organization was created to manage the project, creating much unnecessary overhead. Epstein is also disappointed at several projects "that didn't meet the high editorial standards of the LoA," including "a volume of sermons most of which are without literary value or historical interest in themselves (emphasis in original); collections of first-hand descriptions by journalists of American battles, interesting in themselves but of little interest as literature; the novels in translation of Vladimir Nabokov who is [not]...an American writer...and a 4-volume anthology of American poetry...which includes...much that is 2nd rate or worse...A hint of similar trouble ahead is the announcement of a forthcoming anthology of writing by Americans about oceans, separately financed by a generous donor" (138-9). "The LoA has now published substantially all the work for which it was created and for which rights are available. Its obligation hereafter is to husband its resources so that this work remains in print and accessible to readers, and to ensure that funds are on hand for the publication of 20th-century writers as rights permit" (140). These volumes include "Emerson, James, Melville, and...nearly 60 other American writers" (141).
"My first hint of what would eventually become the Internet occurred in the late 1950s, when I...published an Anchor edition of a book called The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener, a professor of EE at MIT. Wiener had been a child prodigy who entered Tufts College at the age of 11 and received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard at 18. For 40 years he taught at MIT, where he acquired a reputation for eccentricity. But this reputation misrepresented the range and quality of his mind, which had a strong poetic component. In the 1950s, Wiener became suddenly famous as the author of an unlikely best-seller - a book called Cybernetics". This was a fairly technical discussion of so-called feedback mechanisms as they function in computers and in the human brain" (143-4). "Cyber" comes from the Greek word for steersman and Wiener saw that it created self-correcting systems. Without it, the steersman will crash his boat, "a city that poisons its air will sicken and die; a rigid society or individual unable to process new information will fail. Wiener was an early environmentalist who warned that nature could be pushed only so far before it pushed back. His warning about rigid systems unable to process new information would become for me a metaphor for the overconcentrated retail book market and the implicit censorship such a market imposed upon the self-correcting process of unmediated discussion" (146). Epstein notes that scientific terms like "entropy" (e.g. impoverished, isolated, suburban lives, cut off from external sources of vitality) and "the heat death" (both associated with the 2nd law of thermodynamics) became sad metophors (for some) for life in the 1950s. Wiener used the example of the salmon, which swims upstream to spawn and then dies; "its struggle stands for the temporary victory of life, art, and morality over the vast force arrayed against it. The salmon was Wiener's hero" (149). Wiener predicted miniturized computers linked to exchange information (i.e. the internet). This "unmediated, open-ended seminar...seemed to me the ideal democracy. He was more optimistic than I am about human nature. He thought that a global feedback system might create a self-correcting human community. I thought it foreshadowed an intensified confrontation between the creative and destructive forces within human nature but we preferred not to debate these merely temperamental differences" (150). Wiener also predicted teleportation, which became "a preoccupation of SF writers." "By describing human beings as packets of information subject to decay in isolation, Wiener had provided a metaphor for the counterentropic value of interactivity as a source of cultural renewal" (151). The words "Internet" and "disintermediation" didn't exist then, but were made fashionable later at MIT.
"My failure to take Wiener's prophecies seriously reflected the limitations of my own worldview at the time and that of my intellectual friends who were increasingly absorbed in Cold War issues and felt that the fate of Western civilization depended upon the positions they took in their articles for PR or in their dinner-party conversation. Unlike these friends, I had never been attacted to socialism, which presupposes an overoptimistic view of human nature and a premature answer to unanswerable questions. I agreed, however, with Marxists that technological changes...produce changes in consciousness. New industrial technologies in the early 19th century, for example, altered the relationship between craftsmen and their masters, who no longer worked together as colleagues but evolved into distinct classes of workers and owners in conflict. Marx's prophecy that this new class consciousness would lead to revolution, followed eventually by a workers' paradise, a wishful version of the Christian apocalypse, seemed to me foolish...movable type had enormous cultural consequences, and in the 1950s the literary culture was further transformed by the technology of internal combustion, which led to the suburban migration" (151-2).
"The handful of first-rate independent bookstores strong enough to have survived into the mid-1980s [when LoA emerged] were the last members of a species facing extinction. Elliott Bay in Seattle, Powell's in Portland, Book Soup and Dutton's in LA, Black Oak and Cody's in the Bay Area, Books and Co. in Coral Gables, Coliseum in NY, Square Books in Oxford, Miss., the wonderful Northshire Books in Manchester, VT...Denver's Tattered Cover" (153-4). Epstein attributes the latter's success to the marketing genius of its owner (rare in books...most such genius is drawn to other, more profitable goods). He discusses the original Borders store in Ann Arbor, "like the private library of a mythical polymath determined to devour all the knowledge in the world" (155). He visited Borders with his "bookish friend Mort Zuckerman" and spoke with owner Tom Borders (155). In each case, subprime locations (i.e. lower rents) explained their extensive inventories. Instead of trying this in high-rent NY, Epstein conceived and produced "a virtual bookstore - the Tattered Cover or Borders in the form of a direct-mail catalog, an annotated directory of thousands of backlist titles...The Reader's Catalog, a 2000-page list of more than 40,000 titles, as many as could be included in a directory 3 inches thick" (157).
Epstein's description of book retailing is fascinating. As the small, city-based independents closed (as people fled to the suburbs), shoppers increasingly went to suburban malls. "Traditionally, [city] department stores had subsidized their book departments as a convenience to attract customers. But when they moved to the malls, most department stores abandoned their unprofitable bookshops, counting on the mall itself to generate traffic. However, in 1969 2 large Midwestern department store chains - Carter, Hawley, Hale and Dayton, Hudson - set their book departments up as freestanding chains, one called Waldenbooks and the other B. Dalton" (104). "By the mid-1980s the mall chains had approached the limits of their expansion, and their original owners disposed of them. In 1984 Kmart bought Walden, and in 1986 Barnes & Noble bought B. Dalton. The new owners found...sales...levelling off...[and moved offsite]...the owners of...Walden...acquired Borders...while in 1989 Barnes & Noble bought Bookstop, a chain of large stores in the Sourth modeled on the supermarket concept...but the price war...[killed Reader's Catalog, hurt these stocks and prompted BN and Borders to] thin their inventories and...feature current best-sellers and their own self-published editions...at the expense of the strong backlist inventories that had been their original emphasis" (161). The winner appears to be Amazon, offering virtually unlimited selection at discount prices, although Epstein suspects its business plan is inherently flawed (margins too low). Epstein suggests an annotated universal catalog of titles be created and a consortium of publishers operate an online brokerage, eliminating wholesalers and retailers, but so far, this idea has been rejected by publishers.
He closes the book by noting that the internet will remove many types of tyranny from publishing (e.g. immediately outdated reference works, literary and political censorship...). "The critical faculty that selects meaning from chaos is part of our instinctual equipment, and so is the gift for creating and recreating civilizations and their rules without external guidance. Human beings have a genius for finding their way, for creating goods, making orderly markets, distinguishing quality, and assigning value. This faculty can be taken for granted. There is no reason to fear that the awesome diversity of the WWW will overwhelm it. In fact, the Web's diversity will enlarge these powers, or so one's experience of humankind permits one to hope" (174, hmmm, all human-created, eh?). Since on the Web, "publishers' tasks can be reduced to an essential handful: editorial support, publicity, design, digitizing, and financing" (outsourcing marketing, sales, shipping, warehousing), he predicts "publishing may therefore become once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative autonomous units, or so there is now reason to believe" (175).