Another Life (82 page)

A
S THE
eighties gave way to the nineties, where once publishers had complained there were not enough stores in which to sell books, they suddenly became impossible to escape. The wholesale building of new stores in shopping malls put bookstores all across the country where few or none had existed before, and in just the place where people might be expected to buy them, if they were going to buy them at all. Soon superstores—close to the malls but in large buildings of their own—eclipsed the stores in the malls, while price clubs at major retailers offered best-sellers at enormous discounts.

The British and Europeans, who had always looked down their noses at American book-selling techniques and boasted that in France or Germany people bought far more books per person than in America, found themselves stumbling to catch up with the transformation of America’s bookstores into book supermarkets with bright lighting, discounts, floor displays, shopping baskets, shopping carts, checkout counters, and hours that kept the stores open seven days a week until late at night, instead of being closed on just those days and at just those times when ordinary people might be free to buy a book, which had always been the traditional way of selling books. It was as if the American genius for merchandising, which had invented discounting and the supermarket in the first place, had at last been directed toward that most ancient piece of merchandise, the book, with startling results.

The immediate effect was not necessarily to enlarge the pool of readers (or to make the average American reader any more inclined than before to buy literary first novels or translations of European fiction) but to deal an almost fatal blow to the mass-market paperback business. Readers who had formerly been willing to wait a year to read major best-selling writers in paperback now “moved up” to hardcover books in droves, as discounting pushed the price of best-sellers down. In any case, it was not just the price of hardcover books that had kept many readers from buying them—previously, many bookstores had been hostile to the kind of people who bought big best-selling fiction in paperback. There was a certain snobbery to selling books, and many bookstores found it easy to make potential customers feel uncomfortable
and out of place. The new bookstores solved this problem by emulating that most user-friendly of familiar (and classless) institutions, the supermarket. It worked so well that for a while it was hard to find mass-market books in any quantity except in major airports.

I
N THE
meantime, the computer—which in some publishers’ doomsday scenario had replaced motion pictures and television as the invention that would bring the printed word to the end of its long run—turned out instead to offer publishers significant advantages, and not just as a business tool. The computer brought about a long-awaited revolution in the way manuscripts were processed. The illegible, intractable, smudged, and grimy pages that made up most manuscripts had always defied rationalization. It was a fact recognized with a sigh of resignation that the better a writer was, the more sloppy his or her manuscript was likely to be. Since the age of Gutenberg, copy editors and printers had gone blind before their time in the struggle to decode page after page of manuscript and render it correctly in type.

The archetype of the writing genius who wrote all his books in a crabbed, illegible hand was Tolstoy, whose pages were typed on a primitive typewriter by the unfortunate Countess Tolstoy, who alone could decipher his handwriting. Much corrected by him, these pages were then sent to Tolstoy’s publisher in Moscow, where printers puzzled over each line and handwritten change, crossed themselves and hoped for the best, then set it all in type. Tolstoy then corrected and rewrote in galley proofs, not once but over and over again, his changes and additions circling tortuously round and round the margins of the galley sheets until they took on the appearance of the Dead Sea Scrolls or perhaps a black-and-white work by Jackson Pollock. When Tolstoy was completing
War and Peace
, he did this so many times that his exasperated publisher finally sent a telegram to him in Yasnaya Polyana that read simply:
DEAR LEV NIKOLAYEVICH
—
IN THE NAME OF GOD
,
STOP
!

Things had not changed much if at all in all the time since Tolstoy wrote
War and Peace
. The speed with which a manuscript could be turned into a book was still dependent on hand labor and good eyesight, and printers and copy editors alike were of necessity outrageously overeducated for their jobs. It was common enough for copy editors to be fluent in several languages and more knowledgeable about most
things than the vast majority of the writers whose work they edited—indeed, most authors depended on the copy editor to make sure their dates were correct, their quotations in order, their notes properly done, and to save them in short from mistakes, ignorance, and carelessness. Given the amount of time this process took, and the fact that it had to be done over and over again in manuscript, in galleys, and in pages, the task was inevitably a slow one—it was possible to fly the Atlantic in under four hours and for a man to have walked on the moon, but manuscripts moved through the production process at the speed of a sharp pencil and no faster.

The computer—and its offspring, the word processor—changed much of that. It did not eliminate copy editors or printers, but at least it had the potential to speed up their work. The author could now hand his book in on a disk, the disk could be corrected and used to set type—the only reason for a hard copy (as the paper manuscript now came to be called) was so that the editor could read it, since the editors remained a nonelectronic link in the process, for the most part, still reading the old-fashioned way and making their changes in pencil. Indexing a book, for example, once a weary matter of reading every page carefully and noting each name down on a three-by-five card, could now be done electronically—and since time is money, the cost inevitably went down. Of course some writers and most editors remained stubborn holdouts, but it quickly became normal to demand that an author produce his or her book on disk, and that part of the business which had hardly changed since Gutenberg set his first Bible into type at last took a great leap forward.

These changes were symbolized, at S&S at any rate, by the appearance of a matte black laptop computer on the polished veneer console behind Dick Snyder’s desk. It was not, to be sure, that Dick himself had any intention of learning how to use a laptop, but he recognized before most of his fellow publishers that the computer was going to change a lot of things in book publishing and that it was crucial to be ahead of the wave. His colleagues were surprised at—and mildly amused by—Dick’s interest in computer technology, since it would be hard to find a man more technologically challenged in ordinary life, but the laptop behind his desk, though a prop, was the symbol of his determination to move S&S into the twenty-first century ahead of schedule.

Dick had always shown a certain interest in technology. Years before, when VCRs were still a novelty and the battle between the VHS
and the Sony Betamax format was being fought, Dick had tried to persuade James Beard to do a cooking tape. It was his idea that the S&S sales reps would get a whole package to sell—a book by Beard, a videotape version of the book starring Beard, and perhaps even a line of prepared foods by Beard. (He had in mind a freezer in the trunk of every sales rep’s car.) Nothing came of it (unless you count the fact that I had a delicious meal in Beard’s kitchen while trying to persuade him that his future was on tape rather than in books), but Dick did not forget. In the eighties, he challenged industry wisdom by plunging into the videotape business after discovering to his rage that the people who owned the videotape rights to
Jane Fonda’s Workout Book
were making even more money out of the tape than S&S was out of the book. Dick abruptly ordered his editors to get video rights every time they bought a book—no exceptions—and promptly set up a new division to exploit these rights. In the event, most agents refused to give up video rights, which went the way of movie rights in the twenties and thirties, and the S&S video division never got off the ground. It had spawned, however, almost as an afterthought, an audio division, which soon expanded into a major business; by the end of the nineties, S&S was the world’s largest publisher of audiotapes.

Thus, it was only natural that Dick should have been fascinated by the computer and determined to makes S&S the leader in a field that had not yet even been defined. Without most of us paying much attention to what was happening, Dick advanced on two fronts, ambitiously as always. He set out, first of all, to integrate the computer into the daily work of everybody at S&S, an enormous investment that after considerable difficulties resulted in a computer terminal on every desk. At the same time, he set out to make S&S the industry leader in the field of computer books, in pursuit of which he set out on a buying spree that eventually led to the acquisition of Macmillan from the estate of that notorious rogue elephant of the English financial world, Robert Maxwell, known to the English tabloid press as “Captain Bob.”

Dick had tried to do business with Maxwell before and nearly acquired Maxwell’s scientific-publishing assets at a price that would have been the coup of the century, but Martin Davis rejected the deal, to Dick’s anger and mortification. Fortunately for Dick, Captain Bob’s ship was destined to hit the rocks in a storm of scandal a few years later after Maxwell died suddenly—the rape of the employees’ pension funds was almost the least of the posthumous charges against him—and S&S
acquired large parts of Macmillan at a bargain price, becoming the biggest educational publisher in the world and far and away the strongest publisher of computer books. (S&S also ended up with the Free Press, Scribner, and Atheneum, all of which Captain Bob had managed to pick up while people still thought he was solvent.) The publishing house that Shimkin had sold to G+W in 1975 for $11 million in stock was now a multibillion-dollar publishing colossus in which the educational, reference, and computer business dwarfed the trade end. From Dick’s perspective, the future was already here and about to pay off.

Nor was he alone. Out there beyond Rockefeller Center, vast changes were taking place throughout the publishing industry. Buying up distinguished English publishing houses one after the other, S. I. Newhouse had made Random House the biggest publisher of trade books in the English-speaking world, setting off a trend that made Random House Australia’s leading publisher and placed S&S offices in such cities as London, Moscow, and Singapore. The German Bertelsmann group had already bought Doubleday, which itself had acquired numerous other publishing houses, as well as the Literary Guild. A different German publishing company was soon to end up with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, despite the many years Roger Straus had fulminated at the way big companies were buying up the publishing industry, Dick being his special target. The Pearson group, a U.K. publishing conglomerate, eventually picked up Viking, merged it with Penguin, then added to it Putnam to form a formidable international publishing company. The purchase of Time Inc. by Warner merged all of Time’s book-publishing assets—including the formerly august Boston firm of Little, Brown, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Time-Life books—with Warner’s, creating yet another publishing giant.

Since the booksellers were following the same path—expanding at a furious rate while consolidating by purchasing the smaller or weaker chains—it seemed likely that there would soon be two major book chains plus a rapidly diminishing number of specialty and independent stores, the futures of which were, to put it mildly, uncertain. Typically, New York’s Fifth Avenue, along the plush midtown strip between Fifty-seventh Street and Forty-eighth Street, which had once boasted two Doubleday bookstores (which stayed open until midnight), Scribner’s landmark bookstore, the Rizzoli store that specialized in art books, as well as a B. Dalton and a Barnes and Noble store within a few blocks of each other, was quickly reduced to only one store. Across the country,
famous stores and chains collapsed or were bought up—Pickwick, in Los Angeles, Kroch-Brentano and Stuart Brent, in Chicago, bookstores that had been part of the publishing scene for decades, simply vanished, replaced by superstores in the suburbs and by chain outlets in the shopping malls, themselves often swept out of business by the superstores and the price clubs.

Thus, the book-publishing industry seemed at last to have made the transformation from cottage industry to big business. True, it still rested on imponderables—little old ladies typing away at their novels on kitchen tables; the whims of writers; four-page outlines of books that were sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, on buzz alone—but most of the bigger publishers had covered themselves against these uncertainties by going into other, more predictable (and profitable) businesses, such as education. Besides, once you were beyond a certain size, you could absorb failures that might have sunk a publishing house in the old days, when a single best-seller could make the difference between wealth and bankruptcy. Insofar as any business whose foundations rest on such insubstantials as a writer’s imagination and insight might be thought of as solid, book publishing appeared more firmly planted than it had ever been before.

Of course, that was an illusion.

CHAPTER 34

When your government talks of peace, your draft card is already in the mail
.

–
BERTOLT BRECHT

T
he early 1990s may now be seen as the calm before the storm, but of course one could not have guessed that then. Looking back on it, there were warning signs of major changes to come, but I no more perceived them than I did the fact that I would be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994. I could not have felt healthier or in better shape and would have been astonished to learn that I was in for major surgery and the scare of a lifetime. I would have been just as astonished had some Gypsy soothsayer foretold many of the changes that were to sweep over
book publishing before the end of the decade. It is just when we feel ourselves to be on solid ground that the ground opens before us.