Another Life (83 page)

The nineties were a time of success for almost everyone in book publishing—the proliferation of new stores drove sales up in almost every category of book except the literary novel, while discounting made the price of hardcover books—the best-sellers, at any rate—seem almost reasonable. Bookselling was no longer part of the carriage trade, and ordinary people were buying books in unprecedented numbers. Admittedly, a lot of them weren’t the kind of books that would have pleased Henry Robbins, had he still been alive to complain, but among all the “merch” and dreck that cluttered up the aisles and the counters of the new bookstores, a surprising number of real books managed to sell. Perhaps the greatest miracle of the book industry is the way in which the public will, given the opportunity, home in on a good book by an unknown writer and make it a surprise best-seller (often surprising the publisher more than anybody). The nineties were to be extraordinarily rich in such books and continue to be as I write. The successes of
Longitude, The Perfect Storm, Angela’s Ashes, Into Thin Air
, and
Cold Mountain
are each, in their own ways, perfect examples of the public’s ability to discern a remarkable book despite all the attention directed toward bad or mediocre ones. If nothing else, this serves to remind us that even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don’t want to read. Hugh Collins is still right.

T
HE PACE
of change in the world of publishing continued relentlessly in the 1990s. The eyes of publishers were now trained on all those English-speaking countries that had once been rendered on the world map as part of the British Empire and which were now accessible at last to American publishers, if only because the Americans had bought up so many English houses, or, as in the case of S&S, founded their own.

The old distinctions that had separated the English-speaking world into the United States (plus the Philippines and sometimes Canada), the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, and the “open market” (i.e., the rest of the world), which English publishers had defended fiercely for decades, collapsed almost as fast as the Berlin Wall and at about the same time. The new world market had no divisions. Books were sold wherever there was a demand for them or a place in the local
bookstores. The bigger a publisher was, the more fit it would be to take advantage of the world marketplace—another reason for growth.

Publishing was now a hot international business, the favorite child of the information age. With the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite empire, a whole new world opened up—one of readers who had been deprived of the truth for nearly fifty years, as well as being deprived of Western entertainment. The world was reading English—or busy learning it—and hungrily consuming books of every kind.

A
ND YET
, behind the facade of prosperity, growth, and optimism, there was a certain unease to be felt, a kind of
après nous le déluge
feeling that it was all too good to be true and wouldn’t last. For the simple truth remained that the old problem of book publishing hadn’t changed: You shipped out a lot of copies, you were at the mercy of the big bookstore chains to get them displayed and sold, and the ones they didn’t sell you took back for full credit.

Much of what had happened to book publishing since the 1960s would have seemed incredible or marvelous to Max Schuster, Dick Simon, or Bennett Cerf, but the retail end would have seemed depressingly familiar. It was merely, on a larger scale, the same old story that had been worrying publishers ever since the Depression. Now, of course, it was further complicated by the fact that there were only two major bookstore chains, which wanted to dominate the publishing process, insisting on changes in jackets, titles, prices, and so forth, before they agreed to stock a book in any quantity. The business had mushroomed far beyond anybody’s expectations, but it still stood on feet of clay when it came to actually selling the product.

Snyder thought that he had found a solution: expand into textbook and informational publishing, which were more predictable businesses, and where the rate of growth and overseas expansion were far more favorable. Others thought that the solution might lie in pursuing market share. This was the “German solution” to the problem, based simply on the fact that in Germany, where the book business was dominated by a very few major players and where book clubs were far more important than in the United States, market share mattered as much in selling books as it did in selling refrigerators or any other kind of consumer goods. Newhouse had dabbled with the strategy, perhaps accidentally,
as a result of simple eagerness to acquire more and more publishing companies, perhaps because to anybody in the newspaper and magazine business, market share is the Holy Grail.

The Newhouse organization, like the rival Gannett organization, had been adept at turning places with two or three newspapers into one-newspaper towns, on the sensible principle that the best competition is no competition, and transferred the same simple technique to the magazine business, insofar as possible. Thus, growth and sheer size were not simply a question of ambition, but of
strategy
. If you added together Random House, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, Villard, Crown, Times Books, Ballantine, and Fawcett, not to speak of innumerable London publishing houses, you could begin to think about dominating the market, in addition to which, if one of your imprints failed to pick up a major author, there was at least a good chance that one of the others would. Really, on paper, it looked like the answer to the problem—one or two major publishing companies confronting one or two major bookstore chains. Reduce competition, and you could minimize your costs by consolidating shipping, marketing, bookkeeping, and so on, eliminating much of the inherent wastefulness of traditional book publishing.

It looked to some like a reasonable idea, but in practice it didn’t seem to make much difference, maybe because there were simply too many major players left and maybe because nobody at Random House took it seriously. In any event, people’s attention at Random House as the nineties unfolded was riveted on the question of whether Harry Evans, the energetic and media-conscious former journalist, was a swashbuckling genius who had found at last a way to popularize books and authors or a loose cannon about to sink the ship.

To outsiders, it seemed that Evans was onto something—his mediagenic publishing breakfasts at Barneys, his cheerful optimism, the big risks he took, his willingness to talk to the press, and his sense of humor and lack of self-importance, all had the feel of a fresh breeze in a stuffy room to people in other publishing houses but seemed to provoke the equivalent of class warfare among his colleagues. It is, of course, always risky to enter publishing late in life from another profession. Publishing people are by nature clannish and suspicious of outsiders, and Evans was a celebrity, a social figure, a famously expatriate Brit, the husband of the even more famous Tina Brown, a major figure in Fleet Street journalism, and an early victim of Rupert Murdoch (the last ought to at least have won him the sympathy of any right-thinking person
in publishing). Evans, however, had not risen through the ranks as an editor or a book publisher and didn’t seem much to care or think that it made a difference. As a result, one heard a lot about his failures and excesses but nothing about his successes—he was portrayed persistently as an amateur with a flair for self-dramatization and no interest in the details of publishing, even at times within Random House. Worse, to journalists, he was an apostate, having escaped from the newspaper world to the more glamorous world of book publishing, where his major interest might have seemed to an unkind and casual observer to lie in attending as many black-tie functions as possible. All the same, when Evans left Random House in 1997, it occurred to me that if there was no future for somebody as gifted as he in book publishing, it was a pretty bleak prospect for the rest of us. Here, after all, was a man of taste, judgment, proven editorial skills, a sense of the jugular for news and publicity and the courage to throw the dice, who had tried to make publishing fun, yet it was as if his departure, whether voluntary, or, as it was rumored, under pressure, was the first step toward the cleansing of the temple, a warning sign that it was important to take publishing
seriously
if you were going to survive in it. Having fun—particularly in public—was clearly no longer a good career move.

I
T SHOULD
have come as no surprise, however. He had been memorably preceded by Dick Snyder, who had been largely responsible for taking S&S from a company worth $11 million to a global corporation worth in excess of $5 billion and nevertheless had been unceremoniously fired by Viacom, shortly after they acquired Paramount.

It would be hard to imagine anything better calculated to demonstrate that the best way to survive in publishing is to not stick your neck out. Dick had been outspoken, quick to make enemies, hugely ambitious, and determined to continue S&S’s rapid pace of growth. However, he had supported his friend Barry Diller when Diller tried to take over Paramount, thus adding further fuel to Martin Davis’s dislike of Snyder, for Davis was determined to see Paramount sold to Viacom.

Thus Dick repeated the costly mistake he had made in 1983, when he had supported Jim Judelson instead of Davis. There was in Dick a streak of romantic loyalty, and it cost him dear, since he twice backed the loser in a major corporate fight. It cannot be said of him that he ever
wanted to be on the losing side—that was not an element of his personality—but he liked a good fight and wasn’t afraid of the odds against him. What is more, once he was
in
a fight, he didn’t hold back or try to play both sides.

I had no idea at all of what had happened when I was called to his office, shortly after lunch, on June 14, 1994. By that time, Dick was far more involved in corporate management than in the day-to-day affairs of trade publishing. After a series of stopgap experiments, he had at last found a team whom he trusted—just barely—to manage S&S, and as a result I no longer saw him as often, though we still remained friends. Even so, like most people summoned unexpectedly to his presence, I quickly tried to imagine what mistake of mine had attracted his attention. When I entered his office, I could see that he was shaken.

When he told me that he had been fired, I found it hard to believe—Dick fires people, I told myself, he doesn’t
get
fired!—and it took a few minutes for it to sink in. We sat there for a few minutes—we were joined shortly by Alice Mayhew, trying to make small talk, but there was really nothing to be said, except that it was going to be hard to imagine S&S, after so many years, without Dick. Then, gradually, the reality of it sank in. Later on that night, I remember joining him somewhere for a noisy dinner—Bob Woodward had flown up from Washington with his wife. Dick’s third wife, Laura, was also there and a lot of other people whom I don’t remember. But I do remember stepping out onto Madison Avenue with him after dinner, as we embraced in tears, and saying to him, “It’s the end of an era.”

And so it proved to be.

T
HE REMOVAL
of two of the more interesting and ambitious figures in book publishing—albeit for very different reasons—in fact set the stage, had one but known it, for an even bigger series of events. In 1998, Random House was bought by Bertelsmann, while Putnam and Berkley Books had been acquired by Pearson in 1996 and merged with Viking and Penguin. The vogue for publishing giants seemed to have reached its peak—or, as some thought, was only just beginning.

Perhaps more ironic, Viacom eventually sold the educational and textbook empire that Dick Snyder had assembled at S&S for nearly five billion dollars and held on to the S&S “consumer unit” itself, thus reducing
S&S back to the company that it had been in 1984, when Dick made his first big acquisition with Esquire. It was as if we had started small, grown to unimaginable size, then shrunk back to what we had been at the beginning—the reverse of the American dream.

I
T IS
possible to look back and see when and how this transformation began. When the Knopfs sold their beloved publishing house to Bennett Cerf in 1960 and Cerf then took Random House public, then sold it to RCA, the die was cast. After that, it was only a matter of time before publishing houses with whose names everybody was familiar—Macmillan, Harper, Atheneum, Scribner, Prentice-Hall, to name a few—fell one by one like trees to a logger’s ax. Scribner, for example, the house that employed the fabled Maxwell Perkins and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, was gobbled up by Macmillan, then Macmillan was bought by S&S, and Scribner became an “imprint” (albeit a successful one) of S&S, while its famous bookstore on Fifth Avenue, perhaps the most beautiful bookstore in the country, became (O shame!) a Benetton store!

Dick himself, by concentrating on acquisition as the quickest way to growth, had set in motion forces nobody could control, not even him. He made S&S so valuable that Viacom, in need of money to pay off the debt it had incurred to buy Paramount in a fierce bidding war, had almost no choice but to break up what he had so painstakingly built. He was—the ultimate irony—the victim of success.

O
N THE
other hand, the essentials of the profession haven’t changed at my level. Only today, the florist in the small country town where I live handed me a manuscript—a novel—and asked if I would mind reading it, if it wasn’t an imposition. No, I said, as I took it, it’s never an imposition. It’s how I make my living. My curiosity to open up a new manuscript and read it remains—strangely, after all these years—undiminished. Not that I’m a Pollyanna. I am prepared to be disappointed and very often am—this is in the nature of publishing. Last week, I received a vast manuscript from an agent, a highly touted contemporary novel about the West, and before I had read more than a few pages I knew it was merely ersatz
McMurtry, nothing like the real thing—a zircon, not a diamond. Probably somewhere out in the West, however, at this very moment, some kid with dirt under his fingernails from looking after his father’s stock is sitting down at the kitchen table, or in his room, to write a novel—on a computer, no doubt, instead of an old manual typewriter. Maybe he’ll be the new McMurtry, and maybe he won’t, but this one wasn’t. Still, I kept on reading to the end, out of duty. “Give the author a break,” to paraphrase Dick Simon.