The publishing world, which has purred along in a dream-like state of ignorant bliss for many years, has been no less affected by today’s global economic tsumani than banks, auto manufacturers, creators of elevator music or your local copy shop. Big lunches at ridiculously expensive yet desirable-for-hot-publicity reasons restaurants! Corporate offsite meetings! Executive facilitators! Swanky launch parties with exquisite hors d’oeuvres! Platinum level seating upgrades! Car services to go five blocks across town! Sorry–it’s 2009 and now it’s all gone, or should be. Publishing lists are shrinking (even if advances are not). Lunches are out. Suddenly there are no jobs to be had.
In December, after sitting moodily at a memorial service for the great publisher Robert Giroux, who had died at the age of 94, and contemplating the strange turn of events that had brought a delightfully cloud-like but hopelessly antiquated business to a very perilous fork in the road, I wrote a brief essay distilling my dark thoughts, beginning with the death of a legendary man of letters and ending with the death of a great publishing house. The result was published by the Washington Post Book World just before Christmas.
In an ironic turn, not a month later the Washington Post Book World was itself marked for death–or at least, death in its current form, as a stand-alone printed magazine. No longer deemed financially viable, its next life was to be an electronic one; some of the same columnists would appear either in the regular pages of the Washington Post or in its on-line edition. No longer would book coverage be separated from the news of the day.
It took just a few days for the National Book Critics Circle to whip up a petition urging that Book World be saved. The petition was signed by more than 100 authors and critics, and another hundred or so readers: Douglas Brinkley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tim Page, Kit Reed, Roxana Robinson, Peter Straub, Sean Wilentz–and so on, dedicated, distinguished members of the general world of books, all of whom cared enough about good writing and the discovery of new writers, the rediscovery of familiar writers, the importance of a new volume of history or fiction or cooking or detection. And not one book editor or book publisher.
It is a favorite cry, among publishers, that there is not nearly enough book review coverage, that new books by less well-known authors are ignored in favor of the tried and true, that poetry never, ever gets attention in the press. Well, week after week, Book World was there, ferreting out the reissue of an out-of-print gem, highlighting new science fiction in paperback, rounding up mysteries you’d never heard of and were delighted to discover. And poetry! Reviews, excerpts, space! Every week–a column devoted to nothing but poetry! “Poet’s Corner!” A different poet every week! Where were the editors when it came to voicing support for Book World? I’m not naive enough to think your voices would have made the slightest difference, but still–you poetry publishers–where were you?