The Image (24 page)

The expression “best seller” is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century. In 1895
The Bookman
, a conservative
monthly literary review edited by Harry Thurston Peck, published in its first issue a list of retail booksellers’ reports of the six new books most in demand in nineteen cities. In 1897 the same magazine published the first national survey of “Best-Selling Books.” The word “seller” in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression “best seller” or “seller” now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales. This was closely related to the idea that this kind of book would continue to sell well simply because it was already a seller, and thus there was a kind of tautology in the very notion. A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.

The expression soon became firmly established and entered common American usage. By 1902 “best seller” had become a term denoting not any commodity which sold, but specifically a book which outsold most others. About 1903
The Bookman
set the number of its monthly titles at six and called the list “the six best sellers.” There had, of course, been occasional earlier lists, but
The Bookman
was responsible for making them into an institution. The imprimatur of the book trade itself was given in January 1911, when
Publishers’ Weekly
printed its first annual consensus, “Best Sellers of 1910,” and later used
The Bookman’s
lists for its retrospective surveys of the years 1895–1912. Since then
Publishers’ Weekly, The New York Times
, many local newspapers, literary reviews, and news magazines have published their own lists as news items of general interest. In recent years the biggest and most widespread news of the world of books has not been who is writing what, but what are the best sellers. Newspaper, magazine, and television quizzes ask us about them. As a celebrity of the book world, a best seller has all the dignity and appeal of other pseudo-events.

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade have themselves often attacked it.
In his
Economic Survey of the Book Industry
in 1931, O. H. Cheney called best-sellerism “an intolerable curse on the industry.” But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers “want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book. As soon as everybody thinks that everybody else has read it—or should read it—a best seller gets talked about—and talk leads to the ringing of the cash register.” A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for the best seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one. If booksellers can be convinced before publication that a book is bound to be a best seller, they are apt to place large orders so as not to be caught short; if, after publication, they can be convinced that a book actually is a best seller, they will more readily reorder. According to Cheney, the substantial accuracy of this pattern had given best-sellerism its strangle hold on the book trade.

One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of
a
best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of “best sellers,” just as the media world of celebrities is full of “the biggest,” “the best,” and “the greatest.” The factual basis for calling any book a best seller is not so much a statistic as an amalgam including a small ingredient of fact along with much larger ingredients of hope, intention, frustration, ballyhoo, and pure hokum. Trade practices (hardly changed since Cheney noted them in 1931) are as follows:

Publishers’ figures are hardly a better index, because publishers do not compare sales and seldom reveal them. Therefore, any statement about which books are having the best sales cannot possibly be based on fact—even if the sales on publishers’ records represented actual sales to readers (which they do not). Inevitably, then, best seller lists are a tissue of falsehood, if not always in what they say, always in what they imply. The publishing industry thus deludes not only the booksellers and readers, but even itself. The art of promoting books, then, like the art of government administration and some others, has increasingly become a technique of telling attractive untruths without actually lying.

It is not only the moral and aesthetic effects of best-sellerism that have plagued the book trade. The commercial side-effects have been serious. In May 1961
Publishers’ Weekly
noted that bookstores in the metropolitan New York area, in their struggle to maintain Fair Trade prices, were selling fewer and fewer best sellers. This was because as soon as a book appeared on one of the more publicized best seller lists, it was customarily selected by Macy’s and Gimbel’s to be offered as a loss-leader and was then sold by them at cost or below. Under these circumstances regular bookstores could not afford to compete; they could not find buyers for the book at its list price, and hence did not order it. One bookseller proposed, therefore, that the Best Seller List be called instead a “Worst Seller List”—“this cutthroat list no bookseller wants except the outlets that football a few titles as traffic builders. If there were no best seller lists, all booksellers would sell more books at a profit.” But the public demands its best sellers and its best seller lists as it demands its celebrities and all its other pseudo-events. The synthetic character of all of them bothers most people very little. The quality of being a best seller, despite everything, still remains the most
advertised and advertisable fact—the biggest “news”—about a book.

The increasing popularity of the “popular” book (or best seller)—like our increasing tendency to motor over the most-traveled roads—re-enforces the mirror effect and makes it increasingly difficult to learn from our literary experience. As James D. Hart shrewdly observes in his study
The Popular Book
, the most popular book in the short run is apt to be that which most effectively tells us what we already know. It is a kind of literary tourist attraction guaranteed to give us an adventure which we know all about in advance: it is nothing but the projection of our own expectations. The reason why Maria Cummins’
The Lamplighter
or T. S. Arthur’s
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
(both best sellers in their day) tell us more about what most Americans were thinking in 1854 than does Thoreau’s
Walden
, or why Gertrude Atherton’s
Black Oxen
tells us more than Wallace Stevens’
Harmonium
about popular feelings in 1923, is precisely that Cummins and Arthur and Atherton reflected, rather than amplified, the experience of their readers. “The book that time judges to be great,” remarks Hart, “is occasionally also the book popular in its own period; but, by and large, the longer-lived work reflects the demands of the moment only in the most general sense. Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. Books of that sort generally are unreadable for succeeding ages.”

The star system thus reaches out into one field after another of American life. What the book trade promotes is, in Van Nostrand’s telling phrase, “not an art form but an artifact.” Reading a book becomes less a way of looking out at the world than a way of looking at ourselves. The best seller may promise to take us to “the mysterious East,” but that also becomes a “fun stop,” and we find ourselves back in the
sanitary, air-conditioned facilities of another Hilton Hotel.

What the entertainment trade sells is not a talent, but a name. The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work. And in some cases, if what there is to become well known is attractive enough, there need be no work at all. For example, the Gabor sisters in the ’fifties became “film personalities” even though they had made almost no films at all. How thoroughly appropriate, too, that one of them should have become “author” of a best selling “book”!

In science, too, the increasing pressures to secure foundation and government support, the increasing unintelligibility of the task, and the widespread pressure to devise news, make us concentrate on big names. This leads to increasing emphasis on all sorts of prizes—Oscars, Nobels, National Book Awards, Critics’ Circle Awards, Pulitzers, and others less known and more factitious. Universities, the traditional refuge of timelessness, nowadays look for big names, and enlarge their public relations and press relations departments to make the university itself a celebrity, known for its well-knownness. National politics (with the full paraphernalia of make-up, rehearsals, and klieg lights) has adopted the star system which dominates it more with every election.

Yet anyone—or almost anyone—can be transformed into a star. Originally a person destined for stardom is chosen less for his intrinsic value than for his capacity to be “built up.” How good a receptacle is he for what the public wants to see in him? A star, then, must allow his personality to dominate his work; he is judged by his personality in place of his achievement. In a world of dissolving moral and artistic forms, man the self-maker displaces them all. But his figure, too, is only a figment.

I
N PAINTING
and sculpture we find similar dissolutions—from our exaggerated expectations of how plastic is our world. A
photograph of the tiny Sumerian cylinder seal makes it appear the same size as an Egyptian colossus. André Malraux, in his
Voices of Silence
, shows how photography tends to destroy our sense of scale. When we can photograph any work and make an accurate reproduction of any size we please, we lose our feeling for the distinctiveness of every work.

Many problems of the modern artist, as Malraux observes, come actually from improvements in techniques of reproduction. In other words, from the Graphic Revolution. When it is so easy mechanically to make a precise color reproduction direct from nature, much of the age-old challenge which nature offered the artist is destroyed. Aggressively “modern” artists insist that only now (when they are finally freed from the need to represent) can their work become truly interesting and expressive. But the force of their argument is reduced by one simple fact. They now have a vested interest in non-representation (much as for centuries they once had a vested interest in representation). Formerly the artist was the only instrument which could make a representation of a man or a landscape. Now the artist is the only instrument which can make a “non-representation.” We need only walk through the Guggenheim Museum or visit the Art Institute of Chicago during its annual exhibit of local artists, to sense the dissolution of forms—the limbo in which the American artist now floats.

Meanwhile, as I have observed, the feeling for any original declines as it becomes easier and cheaper to make color reproductions—of works of art as well as of nature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art sells blurry postage-stamp-sized reproductions of paintings, supposedly to “heighten” our appreciation by allowing us to have them at our fingertips right in our own home. Formerly a competent copy (say of a Giotto by a member of his school) had an authentic and dignified originality all its own. Now, when mechanical reproductions offer items precisely like the original, the uniqueness both of originals and of copies is dissolved. Both move into a limbo something like that between the novelist’s typewriter and the
movie-maker’s camera.

Here is another universal tendency of the graphic age. We have already seen how the pseudo-event derives interest from the process of making it, how citizens become more interested in the performance than in the argument in television debates, how fans enjoy watching the process of celebrity-making. The same is true of works of art. The faithfulness of the reproduction overshadows the quality of what is reproduced. The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good.

Man fulfills his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself. He is impressed, not by what he sees, nor by the forms that can be made or found. Rather by the extreme and ever-growing cleverness of his way of seeing it. Fidgeting with his camera, he becomes less concerned with what is out there. Photography, as practiced by the millions of do-it-yourself photographers, is not, oddly enough, a way of producing images with a life of their own detached from their maker (which, as T. S. Eliot observes, is a true characteristic of a work of art). Instead photography becomes a form of narcissism. “Have you seen
my
snapshots of the Mona Lisa?”

Photography, by enabling any mechanically adept amateur to produce a kind of “original”—that is, a unique view of an unrepeatable moment of what was really out there—confuses our sense of what is original and what is a copy of experience. The moment is gone, yet somehow the photograph still lives. By the almost forgotten axiom which once made (but now dissolves) art, the image is again more vivid than the original. We live willy-nilly in a world where every man is his own artist. Using a camera, every man can feel
somehow that what he has made is “his” image, even though it has almost nothing of him in it.