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Friday Fronts
18 January 2008:
Ursula K LeGuin on Books and Publishing, in Harper's.
The Essay in this month's Harper's* is Ursula K LeGuin's "Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading." Not to worry, is the noted author's diagnosis overall; there have never been, she notes, all that many readers — with the interesting exception, perhaps, of what she calls the century of the book, 1850-1950, a period in which public education sought primarily to channel the benefits of elite schooling to most of the children in the emerging liberal democracies.
To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.
Even during the century of the book, however, reading was not primarily a pastime to be enjoyed — it was work. A great deal of the "material" that was "consumed" during this period, moreover, slipped effortlessly into the visual translation of television; it had never been "literary" to begin with. Nowadays, of course, reading is more elective than ever. With little peer pressure to push people to read, the act has become more sincere and therefore more meaningful. Public education, which since 1950 seems to have metastasized into something self-referential and without utility, could certainly do a better job of introducing students to the pleasures of great literature, just as it once did a fine job of building appreciation for serious music. But readers are not an endangered species.
That funny smell in the land of books isn't the rot of decaying readers but the corrosive acid of profit-and-loss statements, which has dissolved what used to be called the "backlist."
To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off—it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists.
Ms LeGuin goes on to advance an idea that occurred to me some time ago, and that still "makes me wonder." Why, oh why do large corporations that deal in fungible goods** care about book publishing?
I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of the publishers they bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay binders and editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, while plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
The cynics in the back of the room will mutter that what attracts corporate types to book publishing is intellectual property. The rights to turn a manuscript into a book are doubtless less expensive than the rights to turn a book into a movie, but one may doubt that it is cheaper to buy the rights to lots and lots of manuscripts than it is to buy the rights to the one or two two adaptable books that those manuscripts will yield. Prestige seems to have something to do with it: the houses of Alfred A Knopf and Roger Straus remain very distinguished, presumably reflecting credit on their corporate owners. But the attempt to make a big business out of book publishing, with all the reassuring predictability of such enterprise, has not succeeded, and, unlike movies, books are not expensive to produce. There is no need for big-business money.
Indeed, the presence of multinational, highly diversified corporations in the publishing racket is symptomatic of another self-referential metastasis: that of the rational organization of the means of production that we call "business" into a pursuit of profits that is no longer harnessed to actual production at all. Ever since the fateful day that US Steel's executives realized that they could make more money at managing their cash than they could at manufacturing anything, business has been the sport of capitalists, not the commitment. In an economic climate guided by business school scholars who are remarkably innocent of any workplace experience, the man who knows his business — who understands not only his manufacturing processes but also the machinery on which they depend; who not only knows his suppliers and his customers but knows their birthdays and wives' names, too — is alarmingly likely to look like a sentimentalist, too human and too particular. From turning out fungible goods, modern managers have taken to running fungible companies. Sadly, however, the tyranny of the bottom line leads inevitably to disasters like the subprime mortgage meltdown. People who "know better" know too much, and suffer accordingly whenever they try to say "No."
But then, in today's business, even people are fungible. The problem is that readers are not.
* Harper's, February 2008, p. 33.
** It seems useful to make a distinction here between publishers and printers. Publishers produce unique products — no two titles are identical. Printers, however, deal in fungible objects — copies of, say, The Corrections.
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press