Tom Engelhardt: Reading in an Age of Depression

[laststeamtrain]

Reading in an Age of Depression
By Tom Engelhardt

December 18, 2008

Worlds shudder and collapse all the time. There's no news in that. Just ask the Assyrians, the last emperor of the Han Dynasty, the final Romanoff, Napoleon or that Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff. But when it seems to be happening to your world, well, that's a different kettle of fish. When you get the word, the call, the notice that you're a goner, or when your little world shudders, that's something else again.

Even if the call's not for you but for a friend, an acquaintance, someone close enough so you can feel the ripples, that can do the trick. It did for me two weeks ago, when a close friend in my niche world of book publishing (at whose edge I've been perched these last thirty-odd years) called to tell me that an editor we both admire had been perp-walked out of his office and summarily dismissed by the publisher he worked for. That's what now passes for politeness in the once "gentlemanly" world of books.

His fault, the sap, was doing good books. The sort of books that might actually make a modest difference in the universe, but will be read by no less modest audiences--too modest for flailing, failing publishing conglomerates. If you were talking in terms of cars, his books would have been the equivalent of those tiny "smart cars" you see in increasing numbers, tucked into previously nonexistent parking spots on city streets, rather than the SUVs and pickups of the Big Three. It may be part of the future, but who cares? Not now--and too bad for him.

It wasn't really him, of course. He was just a small fry, like most of us, in the bloated universe of entertainment. As with so many workers at the moment--and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the downturn in restaurant hires or the cuts made by that sports titan, the National Football League (about 150 jobs) or the public radio oufit NPR (sixty-four jobs, two shows)--his firing was a byproduct of economic and funding catastrophes elsewhere.

He went down during what publishing people are calling "Black Wednesday." On that day, thirty-five people were axed by publisher Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS), while two key figures at Random House (owned by the German multimedia giant Bertelsmann), who headed two of its largest groups "resigned" as part of a "reorganization"--a vague word that covers a multitude of sins. This will undoubtedly result in further head-rolling in the weeks or months to come.

Then, of course, there was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (The name is a little publishing history lesson, a fusion of two recently conglomerated houses of distinction. It reminds me of newspaper names from my New York City childhood like the World-Telegram and Sun--once the New York World, the Evening Telegram and the New York Sun.) Just the week before Black Wednesday, its owner, the Irish private-equity firm Education Media & Publishing Group Ltd., saddled with an ocean of debt, made publishing history by instituting a "freeze" on the acquisition of new books. If you're not in the tiny world of publishing, that may not ring too weirdly, but what is a publishing house except a staff, a backlist (those books already published and still in circulation), a set of books being published (that is, a catalogue) and those signed on for the future? Without future books, there is no publishing.


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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/engelhardt?rel=hp_currently

[Book Lover]

1. Insightful and well written

I highly recommend the whole thing.

[laststeamtrain]

2. I wished I could have excerpted more. But what can you do?

I 'scout' books to make ends meet.

People don't have money in their pockets. They're interested in things, but they don't have the money to pursue them.
Therefore bookstores don't buy as many books from scouts.

The downturn is hitting every, little niche.

These are the dark times.

[Book Lover]

3. That's part of the business that I know very little about

"Scouting" I mean (I've been in production and editorial for nearly two decades). Do you present independent titles to buyers?

[laststeamtrain]

4. I scout thrift stores, garage & estate sales.

Buy cheap, sell dear. Pretty basic.

It's something I fell into in Berkeley in the '70s, selling to the bookstores along Telegraph Ave.

I do mostly modern lit & the human sciences that feed into lit.

Occasionally someone notices & asks how it's done.

Now that's funny.

I have this amazing memory & mental list of authors & titles that I know will sell because they're good & will always be good.

It's not something that I can explain very well.

I've tried to branch off sometimes into other collectibles, baseball cards, comic books, etc. but I don't have the knack for it. I know books.

I loved Polanski's The Ninth Gate. Johnny Depp played a book scout. Not too bad.

I could tell a few success stories. I once bought a first edition in German of Hermann Hesse's Klein Und Wagner for a buck & sold it for $350.00. Mostly it's buy a book for a buck, sell it for three, the bookstore charges nine.

So it goes.

[Book Lover]

5. Oh I see

Interesting, isn't it, to see just how many different kinds of livings people make off of books. On the side, I do small time repair and rebindings. I could never support myself on it, but there are always musicians who want their music books rebound to lie more flat, that kind of thing.

[laststeamtrain]

6. I'm always learning.

A lot of good books got published in the post WWII paperback era in inexpensive editions. Twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty cents a piece.

I've been collecting some in the general category of western expansion. Good stuff. Lurid titles, but good stuff.
Dodge City, Queen of the Cow Towns! Incredibly detailed illustrations of hand guns. Solid, factual scholarship, Great little book. Spend an hour with that book & you end up knowing some stuff.

Repair & rebinding is noble work. Like a ninth century Irish monk.

Better days ahead. We'll come out of the darkness...I hope.

[Book Lover]

7. How cool is that?

I am sure there are books filled with information like that today, but with cutbacks in copy editors and fact checkers, I wonder how much incorrect information is passed along in fiction?

Thank you for your kind words. There is little that can compare to giving a repaired book back to someone who is going to reread it until it needs fixing in another 20 years :-)

:toast: To better, more literate, days!