Book Business [Paperback]

Epstein gives here a curious insider/outsider account of the book business over the last half century. He was decidedly inside when he began in the fifties, working with Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer to "publish" such legends as Nabokov and Faulkner. His anecdote of Nabokov is a gem. He runs into the author in the bar of the Paris Ritz in the early seventies. Nabokov, in a loud Hawaiian shirt and a loud Midwestern accent, raises a toast to Richard Nixon. Why Nixon? Because he believed Nixon would eventually triumph over the Viet Cong and that would lead, dominolike, to the fall of the Soviet Union, enabling him to return to his beloved homeland.

By the eighties Epstein and his ilk are being overwhelmed by mass market forces. Chain bookstores seem to be taking over the industry and reducing drastically the numbers of titles available for sale (and by extension able to be published). The pressure of real estate costs at the malls steadily reduced the selection at bookstores to a handful of bestsellers, "whose faithful readers are addicted to their formulaic melodramas". Publishers who in Epstein's early years were like intellectual families had by the eighties been reduced to mere distributors and advertisers. Between 1986 and 1996, he relates, "63 of the 100 bestselling titles were written by a mere 6 writers".

By way of hinting at what was to come, Epstein tells of meeting a man who in the 1950s described to Epstein in some detail...the Internet. Epstein liked and respected the man, Norbert Wiener, an engineering prof at MIT, but "dismissed this prophecy as science fiction". Courageously, Epstein admits his failure to take the prophecy 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 Partisan Review or in their dinner party conversation". One sees the limitations of his worldview pop up again when he meets a man named Bezos, who is committed to changing the book business. After a fairly short time, Epstein pronounces Bezos to be "committed to an incorrect business model".

But in spite of revealing himself to be a bit of a mossback, Epstein also gives what I found to be one of the most exhilerating glimpses anywhere of what technology can do for the book business: A kiosk, containing an "ATM machine for books". In it, an integrated set of computer, internet connection, laser printer, and binder. You put your money in, type onto a keyboard what text you want--anything from a transcript of the Nixon tapes to a copy of LOLITA to a handbook of Siberian butterflies--and the computer downloads it, the laser prints it, and the binder binds it. It doesn't matter if it's "out of print". That phrase is obsolescent. It doesn't matter if the book is banned. The newly printed and bound book will fall into a slot like a can of Coke. Your wait will be perhaps 5 minutes in 2005, falling to 5 seconds in 2010.

As you may know, the US was a book-pirate haven in the 19th century, and Harper Bros. grew to be the nation's largest publisher by pirating Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Macauley -- really, the entire roster of bestselling British authors. Macauley's (pirated) History of England sold a remarkable 400,000 copies here.

Charles Dickens, who kept a close eye on revenues, made a trip to the US in the 1840's, to protest the theft of his work. His plea was ignored, and he didn't much like the country, either. He wrote a short, glum account of his visit, _American Notes_, which Harpers promptly pirated.
Dickens recounts a train trip from Washington to Philadelphia through what he thought was a storm of feathers, but which proved to be spittle from passengers in the forward coached. He also reported that US Senators spit so wide of the cuspidors that the carpets were "like swamps".

WH Auden, Epstein reports, had the disconcerting habit of showing up an hour or so early for parties and dinner invitations, so he could be home in bed by 9 PM.

Epstein was the first to publish a line of quality paperbacks (Doubleday Anchor) in 1952, and was a founder of the NY Review of Books. From his memoir, I'd say he had an interesting and fun career in publishing .

Happy reading!
Pete Tillman

The author takes through the journey of publishing and his life, which are tightly intertwined. He starts with the early and maybe exciting years of publishing in the 50's -60's to the movement of paperbacks to quality and outside the drug store.

Along the way he also shares with us his prospective on the current book publishing/selling/writing situation around us. While I don't want to say much about this part, he doesn't paint a good picture of the overall situation.

But then after describing the current situation he takes to his idea, vision, and hope for the future of publishing were authors would sell directly to readers.

This is a fun and educational book to read for any book lover. I high recommend it to everyone.