I knew the jig was up when one day, in the fall of 1995, my boss and publisher Peter Osnos asked me to lunch. I was then editorial director of Times Books, an imprint of Random House. Previously, I had been publisher of Hill & Wang, a nonfiction division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I’d had some success during my years there in the late 1980s, publishing Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, Hill & Wang’s first bestseller since Elie Wiesel’s Night in 1960. Wiesel’s slim and scorching account of his torment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald had been rejected by more than fifteen American publishers before Arthur Wang took it on. It was not an immediate success despite glowing reviews. Over time, however, it would sell more than ten million copies and become a central text in the world’s moral education, such as it is. Paulos’ polemic pressing the case for mathematical literacy was unlikely to find similar favor, especially given the one-hand-clapping review buried in the middle of the New York Times Book Review. Yet to my surprise it vaulted to the upper echelons of bestseller lists all over the country, including the Times, largely, I came to believe, because of its brevity — it was more essay than full-length jeremiad — written with engaging wit, and so it didn’t feel like homework. It did a lot to help many people overcome their allergy to numbers. My phone was soon ringing with offers from other publishers, who perhaps felt I had some mojo, some secret sauce, that might help them out. They offered to double my salary and to give me the keys to their respective bank vaults so that I might dangle larger and more substantial advances to authors whose books might similarly sell well. Plus giving me a larger playing field to run around on, with all the presumed market clout that a larger, more corporate concern might provide. I took the bait. What could go wrong? There I was, on the eve of publishing a revisionist history of the American Revolution by Theodore Draper, one of the most independent and formidable historians in the country, a public intellectual avant la lettre, a man I had long admired and whose defenestration of the Iran-Contra scandal I had published at Hill & Wang. His new book was the work of a lifetime of study, just over five hundred pages of brilliantly argued scholarship, an original account of the causes and nature of the revolutionary process that resulted in the final rupture with England and, as Draper put it, in a struggle for power, whatever its ideological conceits. I rounded up praise — read: blurbs — from a clutch of worthies, including R. R. Palmer, Esmond Wright, Edward Countryman, and even Gore Vidal, who had long ago anointed himself an expert on American history. He called it a book written “with an acuity and balance worthy of the late (and until now unequaled) Richard Hofstadter.” I arranged a paperback edition with the head of Vintage Books at Random House, to follow our hardcover. Our first printing was ten thousand. The pump was primed. I was excited. Osnos waited until dessert to deliver the bad news. He said that we could no longer publish the Drapers of this world. First printings of ten thousand copies were killing us. It was our obligation to find books that could command first printings of forty, fifty, even sixty thousand copies. Only then could profits be had that were large enough to feed the behemoth — or more precisely, the more refined and compelling tastes — that modern mainstream publishing demanded. It was a dark moment, but still I was game, except for the sad fact that almost never had I — or Osnos — acquired books that warranted such large printings. To be sure, we had published books that had “done well,” going back to press, some in numbers that ultimately far exceeded sixty thousand copies sold. But, I pointed out, if such a principle were raised to the level of dogma, none of the several books that were then keeping Random House fiscally afloat — Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (eventually spending a record two hundred and sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, and adapted into a film by Clint Eastwood), and Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (published anonymously and made into a movie by Mike Nichols in 1998) — would ever have been acquired. None had been expected to be a bestseller, and each had started out with a ten-thousand copy first printing. Osnos would soon decamp to start an independent press called PublicAffairs, and I accepted an offer in late 1996 to edit the Los Angeles Times Book Review, one of only three separate Sunday sections devoted to books left at the country’s major metropolitan dailies. Four years later, I organized and published a symposium on the state of American publishing. More than thirty distinguished editors (Robert Gottlieb, Robert Loomis, Jason Epstein, Robert Weil, Marion Wood), publishers (Alberto Vitale, André Schiffrin, Richard Seaver, Roger W. Straus Jr.), literary agents (David Black, Sandra Dijkstra, Morton L. Janklow, Gloria Loomis, Betsy Lerner), and booksellers (Andy Ross, Barbara Meade, Douglas Dutton) participated. They represented both mainstream trade publishers (Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Simon & Schuster) and independent houses and university presses (W. W. Norton, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Seven Stories, Harvard, Oxford, Walker & Co., The Overlook Press, Verso). Today a third of the respondents are no longer with us. The important, and stinging, question remains: Is their publishing world still with us? Or has the business — which, like all cultural enterprises, has effects beyond its own profits or losses — evolved beyond recognition, for better or for worse? When, in that Pleistocene era, I invited a broad spectrum of industry veterans to share their individual and collective wisdom, the twenty-first century had just begun. It was plain
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