A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America [1 ed.] 9781469627212, 9780807832851
The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
A History of the Book in America VOLUME 5
The Enduring Book
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Print Culture in Postwar America
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
A History of the Book in America David D. Hall, General Editor . . . VOLUME 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall
VOLUME 2 An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley
VOLUME 3 The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship
VOLUME 4
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway
VOLUME 5 The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson
. . . EDITORIAL BOARD David D. Hall (chair), Hugh Amory, Scott E. Casper, Ellen S. Dunlap, James N. Green, Robert A. Gross, Jeffrey D. Groves, Philip F. Gura, John B. Hench, Carl F. Kaestle, Mary Kelley, Marcus A. McCorison, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, David Paul Nord, Janice A. Radway, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson, Michael Winship
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
A History of the Book in America Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
VOLUME 5
The Enduring Book Print Culture in Postwar America EDITED BY
David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson .
.
.
Published in Association with the American Antiquarian Society by The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust. © 2009 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Bulmer by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Complete cataloging information for this title is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8078-3285-1 (alk. paper) 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
CONTENTS
Contributors · xiii Editors’ and Authors’ Acknowledgments · xv
CHAPTER 1 General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age · 1 Michael Schudson PART I. Technological, Business, and Government Foundations Introduction · 25
CHAPTER 2 The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry · 29 Beth Luey
CHAPTER 3 Book Production Technology since 1945 · 55 Patrick Henry
CHAPTER 4 Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Markets and Audiences · 72 Linda M. Scott
CHAPTER 5 Selling the Product · 91 Laura J. Miller
CHAPTER 6 The Right Niche: Consumer Magazines and Advertisers · 107 David Abrahamson and Carol Polsgrove
CHAPTER 7 Wounded but Not Slain: The Orderly Retreat of the American Newspaper · 119 James L. Baughman
CHAPTER 8 Government Censorship since 1945 · 135 Donald A. Downs
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
CHAPTER 9 American Copyright Law since 1945 · 151 Marshall Leaffer
CHAPTER 10 U.S. Government Publishing in the Postwar Era · 167 David Paul Nord and John V. Richardson Jr. PART II. Forms and Institutions of Mediation and Subsidy Introduction · 181
CHAPTER 11 Building on the 1940s · 186 Section I. A D-Day for American Books in Europe: Overseas Editions, Inc., 1944–1945 · 186 John B. Hench Section II. The American Book Publishers Council · 195 Dan Lacy and Robert W. Frase
CHAPTER 12 Editorial Vision and the Role of the Independent Publisher · 210 Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy
CHAPTER 13 Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Literary Culture, Criticism, and Bibliography · 223 Section I. Cultures of Letters, Cultures of Criticism · 223 David D. Hall Section II. The Critical Climate · 233 Harvey Teres Section III. Bibliography and the Meaning of “Text” · 245 David D. Hall
CHAPTER 14 Magazines and the Making of Authors · 256 Carol Polsgrove
CHAPTER 15 The Oppositional Press · 269 James P. Danky
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
CHAPTER 16 The Black Press and Radical Print Culture · 286 Jane Rhodes
CHAPTER 17 Where the Customer Is King: The Textbook in American Culture · 304 Jonathan Zimmerman
CHAPTER 18 Libraries, Books, and the Information Age · 325 Kenneth Cmiel
CHAPTER 19 Science Books since 1945 · 347 Bruce V. Lewenstein
CHAPTER 20 U.S. Academic Publishing in the Digital Age · 361 John B. Thompson
CHAPTER 21 The Perseverance of Print-Bound Saints: Protestant Book Publishing · 376 Paul C. Gutjahr
CHAPTER 22
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Bilingual Nation: Spanish-Language Books in the United States since the 1960s · 389 Ilan Stavans PART III. Reading, Identity, and Community Introduction · 409
CHAPTER 23 The Enduring Reader · 412 Joan Shelley Rubin
CHAPTER 24 Reading the Language of the Heart: The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous · 432 Trysh Travis
CHAPTER 25 Books and the Media: The Silent Spring Debate · 447 Priscilla Coit Murphy
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
CHAPTER 26 The Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club: African American Women Readers · 459 Elizabeth Long
CHAPTER 27 Book Collecting and the Book as Object · 472 Robert DeMaria Jr.
CHAPTER 28 Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-Typographic World · 485 David Reinking Reading the Data on Books, Newspapers, and Magazines: A Statistical Appendix · 503 Laura J. Miller and David Paul Nord Notes · 519
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Index · 599
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
F I G U R E S & TA B L E S
Figures 1.1. Hollywood writers going to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1950 · 10 1.2. Former Random House offices on Madison Avenue · 18 1.3. New Random House offices in the Bertelsmann Building · 19 2.1. United States publishers exhibit at the London Book Fair · 32 2.2. Shall I Go Back to School? · 39 2.3. Dutch edition of Philip Roth, The Plot against America · 53 3.1. Heidelberg platen press · 56 3.2. CompuWriter II · 57 3.3. Offset lithographic press · 63 3.4. Web press · 64 3.5. Computer-to-plate (CTP) workflow · 65
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3.6. Océ digital press · 67 4.1. Suburban Connecticut living room with bookshelves · 74 4.2. Corky in Orbit · 75 4.3. Perry Mason and The Case of the Velvet Claws · 81 5.1. Department store book labels · 93 5.2. BookWoman, a bookstore in Austin, Texas · 100 5.3. Internet book warehouse · 105 6.1. Esquire, April 1968 · 111 6.2. National Lampoon, January 1973 · 113 7.1. A family divided · 120 7.2. Newspaper delivery, 1963 · 129 7.3. Newsstand, 1966 · 134
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
8.1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of the City Lights Books’ window display of banned books · 139 8.2. Spiro T. Agnew protest poster, 1969 · 142 8.3. “One Book That Can’t Be Burned” · 145 9.1. Margaret Mitchell with Dutch translations of her books, ca. 1940 · 155 9.2. Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain · 157 9.3. Copyleft icon · 161 10.1. GPO Seal of Authenticity · 169 10.2. GPO Access home page · 176 11.1. Overseas editions · 191 11.2. Transatlantic editions · 192 11.3. “You read books, eh?” · 199 11.4. History of Political Theory, Franklin Books Programs Arabic edition · 201 11.5. The Wizard of Oz, Franklin Books Programs Bengali edition · 202 11.6. National Library Week teen activity · 206 12.1. Editor André Schiffrin · 212 12.2. Reading the World Festival poster · 215 12.3. Akashic Books publisher and author · 218
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13.1. New Criticism authors · 225 13.2. Robert Lowell · 226 13.3. “Great Moments in Lit Crit” · 231 13.4. Mary McCarthy and friends in 1947 · 234 13.5. Frederick Morgan, editor of the Hudson Review · 243 13.6. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani · 244 13.7. Bibliographer Fredson Bowers · 247 13.8. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center · 249 13.9. Julian P. Boyd, founding editor of the Jefferson Papers editions · 250 13.10. Linotype machine used to produce Studies in Bibliography · 254 14.1. Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, 1961–1973 · 260 14.2. Journalist Gay Talese · 261
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
14.3. “Dry Gulch Review” · 265 15.1. The clenched fist · 272 15.2. Space City · 274 15.3. San Francisco Oracle · 276 15.4. “Support Your Local Feminist Bookstore” · 278 16.1. Chicago Defender, 31 July 1948 · 288 16.2. Muhammad Speaks, 27 August 1965 · 293 16.3. Black Panther with Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver · 299 16.4. John H. H. Sengstacke and Robert S. Abbott · 302 17.1. Gary Nash · 318 17.2. Kanawha County textbook controversy · 319 17.3. Texas schoolbook crusaders Mel and Norma Gabler · 320 18.1. Television in a public library, 1949 · 328 18.2. Interlibrary loan technology · 334 18.3. Reading the daily newspaper at the library · 342 18.4. Computer work stations in a public library · 344 18.5. Library homework help · 345 19.1. Chemistry: An Experimental Science · 351 19.2. Nobel Prize winner and author James Watson · 353 Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
19.3. Television science personality and author Carl Sagan · 357 20.1. Michigan State University Press exhibit at Frankfurt Book Fair · 363 20.2. Kirtas 2400 book scanner · 369 20.3. Tufts University Library, ca. 1950 · 373 20.4. University of Rochester Library, 2008 · 374 21.1. Women’s Bible study · 378 21.2. Christian bookstore · 382 21.3. Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye · 386 22.1. La Prensa, 1950 · 394 22.2. Public school bilingual education · 395 22.3. Latino Writers Conference poster · 405 23.1. Teaching with Rudolf Flesch phonics method · 416
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
23.2. Student demonstration · 420 23.3. Reading Lenny Bruce · 421 23.4. SDS study group reading assignment · 422 24.1. Annotated pages, AA “Big Book” · 433 24.2. Handmade leather cover, AA “Big Book” · 434 24.3. AA flyer advocating annotation · 444 25.1. Rachel Carson at her microscope · 448 25.2. “Another Use for Silent Spring” · 455 27.1. Mary Hyde Eccles at her desk · 475 27.2. Swann Gallery auction · 480 27.3. Grolier Club library · 482 28.1. Books in the digital age · 487
Tables 1. Book publishing in postwar America, 1947–2002 · 509 2. Concentration in American book publishing by largest firms, 2002 · 510 3. New book titles and prices, 1940–2005 · 511 4. New book titles by category, 1950–2005 · 512 Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
5. Religious book publishing, 1985–2005 · 513 6. Book sales by category, 1985–2005 · 514 7. Bookstores in postwar America, 1954–2002 · 514 8. U.S. paper consumption, 1940–2004 · 515 9. Newspapers and periodicals in postwar America, 1940–2005 · 516 10. Newspaper circulation, 1940–2005 · 516 11. Newspaper audience penetration, 1970–2005 · 517 12. Consumer spending on recreation and for books, magazines, and newspapers, 1940–2005 · 517 13. Expenditures per consumer unit for entertainment and reading, 1980–2005 · 518 14. Media use, 1985–2005 · 518
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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CONTRIBUTORS
DAVID ABRAHAMSON is professor of journalism and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. JAMES L. BAUGHMAN is professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. KENNETH CMIEL was professor of history and American studies at University of Iowa. He died in 2006. JAMES P. DANKY retired from the Wisconsin Historical Society but continues to teach for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. ROBERT DEMARIA JR. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. DONALD A. DOWNS is professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ROBERT W. FRASE was chief economist of the American Book Publishers Council and vice president of the Association of American Publishers. He died in 2003. PAUL C. GUTJAHR is associate professor of English, American studies, and religious studies at Indiana University. DAVID D. HALL, professor emeritus of American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, is general editor of A History of the Book in America. JOHN B. HENCH is the retired vice president for collections and programs at the American Antiquarian Society. PATRICK HENRY is adjunct lecturer in the Department of Advertising Design and Graphic Arts, New York City College of Technology. DAN LACY was managing director of the American Book Publishers Council and senior vice president of the McGraw-Hill Book Company. He died in 2001. MARSHALL LEAFFER is distinguished scholar in intellectual property law and university fellow at the School of Law, Indiana University. BRUCE V. LEWENSTEIN is professor of science communication in the Department of Communication and the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. ELIZABETH LONG is professor and chair in the Department of Sociology, Rice University.
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
BETH LUEY is founding director emerita of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University. TOM MCCARTHY is an editor at ABCNews.com and was formerly an editor at Seven Stories Press in New York City and at the Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon. LAURA J. MILLER is assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis University. PRISCILLA COIT MURPHY, Ph.D., is an independent scholar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. DAVID PAUL NORD is professor of journalism and adjunct professor of history and American studies at Indiana University. CAROL POLSGROVE is professor emerita of journalism at Indiana University. DAVID REINKING is the Eugene T. Moore Professor of Teacher Education at Clemson University. JANE RHODES is dean for the study of race and ethnicity and professor and chair of American studies at Macalester College. JOHN V. RICHARDSON JR. is professor of information studies at University of California-Los Angeles. JOAN SHELLEY RUBIN is professor of history at the University of Rochester. MICHAEL SCHUDSON is distinguished professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, and professor of communication at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. LINDA M. SCOTT is professor of marketing at the Said School of Business, University of Oxford. DAN SIMON is the founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. ILAN STAVANS is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. HARVEY TERES is associate professor of English at Syracuse University. JOHN B. THOMPSON is professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. TRYSH TRAVIS is assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Florida. JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN is professor of education and history at New York University.
xiv
CO N T R I B U TO R S
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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E D I T O R S’ A N D A U T H O R S ’ A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Volume 5 of A History of the Book in America, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, was so long in preparation that it is impossible to remember the names of everyone who contributed to it. The yellowed correspondence and notes from early planning conferences, with their rusting paperclips, have themselves become elusive historical documents. But the gratitude of the editors has not faded. Most of all, we are grateful to the authors of this volume, who offered not only their chapters but also their ideas, suggestions, and patience. Their names are inscribed in the table of contents and in our hearts. We are also grateful to those participants in early planning conferences and discussions who did not contribute chapters. They include Marc Aronson, Paul Boyer, Randall Burkett, Roger Chartier, Paul DiMaggio, Elsa Dixler, Tom Engelhardt, Joel Gardner, Albert Greco, Christine Jenkins, Tanya Luhrman, Geoffrey Nunberg, David Pankow, Philip Pochoda, Richard Randall, Anne Sanow, James West, Christopher Wilson, and Paul Wright. We thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for support of those early organizational conferences. Further financial support has been provided by The Elizabeth Woodburn Fund of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, Inc., American Booksellers’ Association, Inc., the Richard A. Heald Fund, the James J. Colt Foundation, the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. We are most grateful for these contributions. We also thank the skilled and generous staff of the American Antiquarian Society, especially John Hench and Caroline Sloat, who guided the grand project of which The Enduring Book is a part. The members of the editorial board of the History of the Book in America project were wonderful collaborators in the early years; Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway were especially helpful in the planning of this volume. And we are grateful for the steady support and steadfast confidence of our general editor/general mentor, David D. Hall. Finally, we thank each other. Close collaborative work on an editing project over many years can ruin friendships or make friendships stronger. For us, it was the latter. As the three of us have grown gray in the service of the HBA, we have grown only more fond of each other as scholars and as human beings. That friendship has been the most delightful and unexpected reward of our interest in the history of the book in America.
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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Individual contributors wish to add the following particular acknowledgments: David Abrahamson: I would like to express my thanks to Paul Baker, Mark Greer, David Nord, Abe Peck, and Michael Schudson for their advice, assistance, and support, as well as to my coauthor Carol Polsgrove. James L. Baughman: Thanks to Gerald Baldasty, Randal Beam, William B. Blankenburg, James P. Danky, Frank Denton, James Jonas, Steve Lacy, Jack McLeod, David Nord, David Weaver, and the late Steven H. Chaffee for their assistance. James Danky: My thanks to Honor Sachs and Michael Kwas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their contributions and to Paul Hass for various editorial suggestions. Robert DeMaria: I wish to thank the staff of J. N. Bartfield; the staff of James Cummins, Bookseller, Inc.; the late Viscountess Eccles; R. A. Gekoski; Bennett Gilbert; Gerald Goldberg; Thomas A. Goldwasser; Eric Holzenberg; the staff of H. P. Krauss, Inc.; the staff of William Reese, Inc.; Mark Samuels Lasner; Edward Leahy; Charles E. Pierce; Loren Rothschild; Robert Rulon-Miller; and Paul Ruxin. Paul C. Gutjahr: I would like to gratefully acknowledge Allan Fisher for his insight and expertise in the field of modern Christian publishing; and generous fellowship grants from the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (under the directorship of Robert Wuthnow) and the Christian Scholars Foundation (under the directorship of Bernard Draper). John B. Hench: I acknowledge with gratitude the advice and support of Trysh Travis, Robert A. Gross, and Kenneth E. Carpenter. Bruce Lewenstein: I thank undergraduate Diane Renbarger for compiling best-seller and prize statistics; the Chemical Heritage Foundation for its generous support through a Eugene Garfield Fellowship in the History of Science Information; and David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson for their interest, support, and forbearance. David Paul Nord: My thanks to three graduate students who helped with the statistical tables: Wayne Waters, Lanier Holt, and Ben Weller. Harvey Teres: I wish to thank the following friends, colleagues, and librarians at the Syracuse University Bird Library for their generous assistance: Randall Bond, Wendy Bousfield, Steven Cohan, Paul Elitzik, Ken Frieden, Carl Kaestle, Nancy Pitre, Sanford Sternlicht, and Carole Vidali. Jonathan Zimmerman: I would like to thank Michael Schudson and Dave Nord for their good spirit and wise editorial advice. xvi
AC KN OW L E D GM E N T S
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
A History of the Book in America VOLUME 5
The Enduring Book
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Print Culture in Postwar America
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
CHAPTER 1
General Introduction The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age Michael Schudson .
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.
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Is the Book Disappearing? Is the book disappearing? No. Even in an age dazzled by the Internet and distracted by hundreds of television channels, the book endures in something very much like the form it acquired centuries ago. Books produced today, as physical objects, would be easily recognizable to Gutenberg. Books as cultural icons retain a great deal of the magical power they have had for hundreds of years. TV entertainers write books, as do radio talk show hosts, ambitious politicians, billionaire businessmen, and enterprising bloggers. Bookstores populate more communities across the country than ever. Printed matter remains a central resource for formal education, a primary medium of exchange and communication in the arts and sciences, and a focal point for public and political life. Newspapers and magazines, bruised by competition from television and other sources of information and entertainment, persist, although the economic underpinning of the daily newspaper is in jeopardy. Both in the changing world of scientific publishing and in religious and inspirational publishing, print carries on. More books are published than ever. People buy more books, and presumably read them or look at them, than in the past. There has been a rapid growth of what can be termed high-end literacy. In 1940 Harvard’s library held 4.3 million volumes; by 1990 holdings totaled 11.9 million and were 14.4 million in 2000. In the same years, Berkeley’s holdings grew from 1.1 million to 7.5 million to 9.1 million, Illinois from 1.3 to 7.7 to 9.4 million, Columbia from 1.7 to 6.0 to 7.3 million.1 And, of course, people read much else besides books. They read forms and memos and manuals on the job as the economy has shifted to jobs that require reading skills. Reading is presumed by income tax forms, job application forms, voting, prescription medication inserts, bus schedules, selfservice gas stations and bank ATMs, and every use of a personal computer. A measure like the percentage of consumer dollars spent on books systematically
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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underestimates the percentage of time people spend encountering texts because it ignores work, school, and online reading. Yet, alongside reassuring continuity and growth in the production of books and the practices of reading, there is room for doubt about both. Sven Birkerts, in his perfectly titled Gutenberg Elegies, observes of the era of “electronic postmodernity” that it brings individuals growing global awareness, a growing capacity to accommodate multiple stimuli, increasing tolerance, and a willingness to try out what is new. But the cost of this is a fragmented sense of time, reduced patience for sustained inquiry, a shattered faith in institutions and traditions, estrangement from community and from a sense of place, and the loss of a sense of a collective future. These changes erode the conditions for what Birkerts calls “deep reading,” that close and caring reading that takes a text seriously and gives it a chance to touch us. Reading at its best, as Birkerts understands it, is part of a “vestigial order.”2 Among intellectuals, pessimism about reading is widespread, if rarely as thoughtful as in Birkerts. Optimism is rare, but not absent. Social theorist John Keane is cautiously hopeful about our present-day “communicative abundance,” and Richard Lanham sees great opportunity in “the electronic word.” Lanham, even in the early days of computer-based writing and reading, was eager to explore a world with a technology that “volatilized print.”3 Optimism is more frequently to be found in gee-whiz popular writers who are taken with the new electronic possibilities. Journalist Michael Lewis writes with admiration of how text messaging on cell phones is a form of literacy jointly invented by Finnish schoolboys too nervous to ask girls out on dates face-to-face and the Finnish schoolgirls who wanted to share tales of those dates with one another. “They’d proved that if the need to communicate indirectly is sufficiently urgent, words can be typed into a telephone keypad with amazing speed.”4 Though more Americans reported reading at least one book of fiction or poetry in 2002 than in 1982, this is only because the adult population grew by 38 million in those years; the percentage of this population engaged in “literary reading” declined from 57 to 47 percent. The decline was greatest for eighteen- to twentyfour-year-olds, from 60 to 43 percent.5 The percentage of college-educated single women who participate in book clubs and literary discussion groups declined from one-third to one-fourth between 1974 and 1994.6 The number of people who do not read at all has been rising. There are new concerns about “aliteracy” in the many people who are able to read but have chosen not to.7 Is the literary life dispirited, or dying, or dead? At the end of World War II, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux executive editor Jonathan Galassi has said, literature was more at the heart of American life. “A passion for literature was a cultural norm then—now it’s more arcane, eccentric, a specialized passion. Books have 2
GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C TI ON
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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been pushed out of the center of the culture. It’s not that they aren’t still important, but they don’t have the same primacy. At a dinner party, people used to ask, ‘What are you reading?’ Now, it’s ‘What have you seen?’ ”8 But there is reason to believe that this is Manhattan provincialism speaking. In the 1940s, Adolph Kroch, owner of three bookstores in Chicago as well as operator of the book department of a Detroit department store, put his capital into real estate “because he could not find locations where new book stores attempting to sell the whole range of trade books might prosper.”9 Where were those lively book-centered dinner parties that Galassi recalls but Kroch apparently could not locate? Could it be that the book endures but reading is endangered—the deep reading Birkerts admires, or the kind of reading David Bell describes as “surrendering to the organizing logic of a book” rather than the “search-driven” scanning encouraged by reading on the computer screen or reading to pass a high school or college exam?10 Are the least “bitty” forms of “content,” in the language John Thompson uses in his chapter in this volume—those forms of writing that cannot function when chopped into discrete bits—surviving the best in book form or suffering the most? Although the book endures, has the quality of books been reduced or homogenized through the merging of publishers and the shrinking number of independent bookstores? These complaints have been repeated so often through the years as to cast some doubt on their validity or at least on their urgency. In the 1940s, as today, there were “book industry Cassandras” aplenty as a Social Science Research Council inquiry put it at the time.11 James T. Farrell complained in 1945 that the market, newly becoming a “dictator” in publishing, “reduces the significance of the individual consciousnesses of editors and publishers.”12 The book industry was already highly concentrated before World War II, with retailing dominated by department stores (with 38 percent of bookstore sales in 1930–31).13 Recent concerns about mergers in publishing, superstore domination of retail, and anxiety about the demise of the “midlist” book operate with too little historical perspective. While the authors in this volume do not share a uniform sensibility on these issues, each of their chapters adds to a portrait that finds books enduring in a rapidly changing context in the decades since 1945. About this recent history, each has much to say. On our near future, there is disagreement. Some chapters echo the grave concerns just cited that the consolidation of the book business and the preoccupation of publishers with blockbusters will eliminate many good books from the marketplace. Others share the optimism in more or less guarded form of publisher Jason Epstein’s observation that more valuable books are published than ever and more people read them. He attributes this to the distributional power of the chain bookstores.14 This is a key factor (see Laura Miller’s chapter) but it is not the only factor. Linda Scott observes in her GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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chapter that the baby boom generation experienced a distinctive book-oriented socialization, reading more than the generations before or after. The aim of this volume is not to foresee the future but to understand how we arrived at this point—indeed, how to characterize “this point.” One thing is sure: we cannot see the past six decades as nothing but the prefiguring of electronic publishing. Quite apart from personal computers, the Internet, Amazon. com, and the much discussed but so far little used e-book, our age has seen spectacular change. It has been a fabulous era of merger, consolidation, and concentration in the publishing industry (see Beth Luey’s chapter), but there have never been more small specialized publishers.15 It has been an era of lust for the best seller and troubled concern about serious literature, yet more different titles are published annually than ever, and there is a growing diversity in books and other media. It has been an era of fierce commercial competition in publishing, yet never before have governments, universities, foundations, and sundry interest groups subsidized publishing more lavishly. It has been an era when rival media, most notably television, have pressed increasingly on the book, yet the old-fashioned codex book has expanded its reach and is more integrated into more lives and a larger percentage of the population than it was in 1945—even if best sellers are sometimes precisely those written by or about television or movies, sports, or political celebrities. Change, in short, even before the personal computer and the Internet, has been rapid, complex, and wide-ranging. Michael Korda, whose career at Simon & Schuster spans most of the period covered here, looks back to his first days, in the late 1950s, and can scarcely picture that world as continuous with the present. “One’s own photograph from that time now seems to be one of a complete stranger. It is hard to summon up a world so different in so many ways from the present and yet so close, a world where manual typewriters were still in use, in which the orders were counted by a couple of gray-haired ladies, the accountants still used ledgers, and there was a real, live telephone operator with a switchboard on the premises. In the age before the photocopy machine, carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner’s blackened skin.”16 It is tempting to see the period this volume covers as a single unit, but of course more than a half century of rapid change has its own internal periodization. We do not presume that 1945 was a special moment of equilibrium for print; it is simply the moment where this volume picks up a five-volume narrative. Nor can we presume that the first decade of the twenty-first century is a natural end point or turning point; it is simply the moment when we bring this project to a close. 4
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Approaches to the History of Print How can we grasp the complex and contradictory developments that affected the creation, impact, and meanings of the printed word during the past sixty years? One strategy would be to chronicle particular exemplars of print— books, magazines, or newspaper stories—that left their mark. In the past six decades, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), for instance, looms large. Kinsey’s pathbreaking best seller has been described as the work that “made human sexuality a legitimate topic for public discussion.”17 The initial print run of 10,000 was quickly exhausted and the book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-seven weeks in a row; more than 300,000 copies sold in the book’s first five years. The stir it caused reached the cultural heights as well as the popular press. For Columbia literary star Lionel Trilling, the book’s publication and reception, as much as the text itself, was cause for contemplation. It seemed an instance of both the strengths and weaknesses of a democratic culture, one in which social facts have unquestioned authority, in which “science” supersedes or precludes moral judgment—“that all social facts—with the exception of exclusion and economic hardship—must be accepted . . . that is, that no judgment must be passed on them, that any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and consequences will turn out to be ‘undemocratic.’ ”18 We do not often know what seeds a book or article may plant with what consequences, but in the case of the Kinsey report we do know that the idea for the first organization to represent the interests of homosexuals came from Harry Hay, a Hollywood actor and radical activist whose reading of it persuaded him that there was a constituency for such an organization. Hay was the sparkplug among the five Los Angeles men who founded the Mattachine Society in 1951, the first formal association of homosexuals. For Hay and for many others at the time, Kinsey provided the scientific confirmation for what many homosexuals were beginning to feel—“the sense of belonging to a group.” It provided “an added push at a crucial time to the emergence of an urban gay subculture.”19 Other cases in which specific titles helped to inspire powerful social movements of the postwar years come from the political arena. Lee Edwards, a founder of the pioneering right-wing political group, Young Americans for Freedom, recalled, “For us, the ’60s began not with a bang but with a book, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater.” The book was printed (published would be too strong a word) by a small Shepherdsville, Kentucky, printing company—and it made the best-seller lists by the summer of 1960.20 At the same time, Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, saw the left-wing student rebellion also rooted in print; his generation could not GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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“avoid reading criticism of itself and its fathers; indeed, the media have flooded the market with inexpensive paperbacks such as The Lonely Crowd, The Hidden Persuaders, The Organization Man.”21 In this volume, we focus on a different, dramatic example of the way a single title can foster a demand for social change: Priscilla Coit Murphy’s chapter is exclusively devoted to the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on the environmental movement. But an alternative approach to the history of print examines multiple titles—genres of writing—in light of the relationships among publishers, authors, editors, and audiences. We consider science publishing (Bruce Lewenstein’s chapter), textbooks ( Jonathan Zimmerman’s), religious publishing (Paul Gutjahr’s), and Spanish-language publications (Ilan Stavans’s), each of which operates by different business practices, different concepts of authorship, different paths and patterns of distribution, and different uses and gratifications for readers. Furthermore, while most of this volume investigates books, chapters by James Baughman, James Danky, and Jane Rhodes attend to newspapers, David Abrahamson and Carol Polsgrove to magazines. The history of print can also be written as a story of the social trends that expressed themselves in and through publishing practices, as in documenting the relationship of the expansion of formal schooling to publishing or tracing the competitive and anxious environment that the Cold War established for print as for so much else in American life, factors discussed in many of our chapters. That theme intersects with another aspect of our subject: print as it relates to the history of government, law, and public policy, from intellectual property law (as in Marshall Leaffer’s chapter) to government regulation of telecommunications to judicial decisions concerning obscenity (as in Donald Downs’s chapter). The federal government is a producer, regulator, subsidizer, and censor of print, as David Nord and John Richardson show in their chapter. As producer, governments act as their own publishers. As subsidizer, government supports education, science, the arts, and the crucial agents of literacy and literary culture that Kenneth Cmiel discusses in his chapter—libraries. As regulator, government makes the laws concerning copyright and intellectual property as well as legislation to help support failing newspapers or to determine tax regulations on how publishers value their inventory. As a censor, government may formally or clandestinely deny information to the media or prevent its own employees (like those in the CIA) from publishing what they know. In addition, a comprehensive history of print culture must supply a narrative of the technological infrastructure of publishing (see the chapters by Patrick Henry and David Reinking). It must be, as well, the analysis of its economic and organizational underpinnings (see Beth Luey’s chapter and also the case study and memoir by Dan Lacy and Robert Frase of the industry’s own lobby6
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ing efforts). It must examine the changes and variations in the marketplace that buffet or buoy authors, books, and publishers. Publishing is primarily a business, despite the important role of government, universities, foundations, and private patrons who sometimes underwrite it without any prospect of financial return. Publishing operates in a marketplace, and for all the fond affection that people in the print trades have for their occupational world and its products, economic imperatives are strong and threaten (perennially, it seems) to diminish or destroy what writer, editors, and reporters think they are about. Finally, one can approach the history of books, newspapers, and magazines from the perspective of the audiences who receive and respond to them—audiences that consist both of the literary critics and bibliographers David Hall and Harvey Teres discuss in their chapter and of the readers and collectors taken up in the concluding section of this volume. The talk about books that the cultures of criticism and reading have engendered has often been full of ominous warnings. Doomsayers have looked at consolidation in the publishing industry at almost every point in the past sixty years (and before that, as well) and predicted a devastating end to freedom and diversity in publishing. Although that never happened, this does not mean that nothing happened, but documenting the consolidation, diversification, and specialization in publishing is analytically distinguishable from demonstrating its impact on readers or institutions or unmeasured abstractions like freedom, diversity, or quality of thought. Accompanying consolidation there has been an increase in book titles published, improved distribution, wider access, more choice, and new constituencies reached (notably teenagers and children and, through large print books, the growing population of the elderly). Efficiencies in distribution that online bookselling makes possible have even encouraged publication for “niche markets” now that profitability on the basis of modest sales is more and more likely.22 Given the multiple avenues that lead to its multifaceted subject, volume 5 of A History of the Book in America offers broad coverage more than a conceptual apparatus. We are modest not for lack of ambition but in the judgment that grand visions have been repeatedly wrecked on the shoals of the next marketing breakthrough, technological innovation, or original authors’ finding or building a mass audience as they tell old-fashioned stories in new-fangled ways. Thus, this volume is eclectic, the editors insisting only that the chapters be genuinely historical, alert to changes over time and to viewing changes in publishing practices against the backdrop of social, economic, political, and cultural developments in the broader society that they both contribute to and reflect.
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The Changing Social Context of Print: Education Among those historical developments, perhaps the most significant, from the viewpoint of the publishing world, have been the postwar growth of population, educational attainment, and affluence and, with these trends, a growing insistence on the necessity of formal schooling for entrance into adulthood. The growth in elementary and secondary school enrollments was notable. In 1940 just over 28 million children were enrolled in school, representing 95 percent of the elementary-school-age population and 79 percent of the high-schoolage population. In 1950 numbers had climbed only slightly to 28.5 million, but thereafter the baby boom transformed the schools. By 1960 41.8 million students were in school, by 1970 51.3 million before the baby boomers passed on into higher education and adulthood. Not only had the school-age population increased by more than 80 percent between 1950 and 1970, but going to school through high school had become a more standard practice, with 94 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds enrolled by 1970.23 Increasingly, college was an expected stage in life, too. In 1939–40, 9 percent of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds were in college, a figure that reached 14 percent in 1950, 24 percent by 1961, and 40 percent by 1980.24 The college campus became a fountain of cultural production, especially in the sciences, and a primary market for cultural products—both textbooks designed exclusively for classroom use and “quality paperbacks” of more general appeal. The growth of higher education got a boost with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill. More than 2 million veterans took advantage of its provision of free college education. Many colleges saw their enrollments double from prewar levels during the first year or two after the war, thanks in large part to the GI Bill.25 Publishing had adapted during the war to meet the needs and interests of men and women in uniform (see John Hench’s chapter), and it followed the veterans to college, too. Jason Epstein, as a junior editor at Doubleday, launched the Doubleday Anchor series of quality paperbacks in 1951 to serve, among others, the expanding population of college students. “I didn’t think much about politics in those days,” Epstein recalls in his memoir, “but in retrospect it is obvious that the GI Bill was a glorious attempt to fulfill the promise of American democracy.”26 His innovation at Anchor emerged from his own college experience: “I wanted to share with the world the literary euphoria I had enjoyed at Columbia College.”27 The college market grew large and reliable. MIT economist Paul Samuelson’s Economics made him a multimillionaire. First published in 1948, the book has gone through edition after edition, revised generally on a three-year cycle, and 8
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has been translated into more than thirty languages. By 1990 the book had sold more than 3.2 million copies (not to mention untold sales in the used-book market).28 The eighteenth edition appeared in 2004, an 800-page tome with a list price in 2008 of $153. The college market sustained not only textbooks but original intellectual contributions addressed to scholars and the educated public as much as to students. In 1950 the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson published Childhood and Society, with W. W. Norton, after Harper & Row and Alfred A. Knopf turned it down. Norton took it on only because the manuscript impressed a psychiatrist friend of Norton’s president. To start, sales were a modest 1,500 in the first year. But they slowly grew—16,000 altogether after five years, a third of those for course adoptions. Annual sales surged after 1963, when Norton issued a revised paperback edition aimed directly at the college textbook market. Soon the book was selling more than 30,000 copies a year.29 Erikson’s book made the language of “identity” and “identity crisis” part of common parlance and part of American collective self-understanding, even without becoming highly visible beyond the college campus.
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The Mixed Legacy of the Cold War In the 1950s and 1960s, Cold War rhetoric helped overcome the longtime resistance to substantial federal funding of education. The key legislation was the National Defense Education Act, passed in 1958. NDEA provided federal subsidies to libraries and to higher education, particularly in science, mathematics, technology, foreign languages, geography, and area studies. This infusion of support for higher education was a boon for educational and academic publishing and helped make the 1960s “a golden age for publishers of scholarly research.”30 In the NDEA era, university presses multiplied and existing ones expanded. All of them helped support rapidly growing university faculties and a tenure system built increasingly around research published in books and scientific journals. By the 1980s and 1990s, Cold War rhetoric had faded but the increasing globalization of the economy offered a new source of rhetorical power for those who wanted to increase federal investment in education. If Americans no longer felt pressured to beat the Russians, they now had to keep up with the Japanese in cars and electronics and the Scandinavians in mobile phones. If the Cold War encouraged knowledge production in one way, it curtailed it in another. This was especially true in film and television, where Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious attacks on alleged communist influence took their greatest toll (fig. 1.1). In the world of print, the State Department ordered the removal of books by “subversives” from their 150 overseas libraries, dumping works GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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FIGURE 1.1. Hollywood writers walk up the steps of federal court in Washington, D.C., to face trial on charges of contempt of Congress for their defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. From left: Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Herbert Biberman, and Edward Dmytrvk. New York WorldTelegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-119694.
by Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, and Theodore H. White, among others.31 There were scattered instances of schoolhouse or public library censorship, but more efforts at censorship were attempted than succeeded. One historian of the Cold War, Stephen Whitfield, observed that “the publishing industry was largely immune to the intimidation of the Red Scare.”32 To what extent freedom of inquiry and publication was restricted is impossible to say; it is hard to document what people, under pressure, chose not to think or write or publish. Many college professors and schoolteachers feared for their jobs, and some lost their jobs. A 1955 survey found about 25 percent of college professors confessing to a degree of political self-censorship.33 McCarthyism touched newspapers, too. Senator James Eastland’s Internal Security Subcommittee pursued journalists accused of past communist affiliation, and some of them who pled the Fifth Amendment or the First Amendment 10
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were fired.34 Even after the persecutions of the McCarthy era faded, the Cold War legitimated the first peacetime effort in American history to enforce government secrecy on a massive scale. Classification of documents became routine. The Eisenhower administration, while not the first to withhold information from the Congress, laid claim to a specific legal right for doing so, a right it called “executive privilege.”35 In 1955 New York Times correspondent James Reston coined the term “news management” to describe government control over information. Government officials did not just withhold information from the public but covered up and lied. Sometimes the press cooperated with the lying. In 1956 American newspapers refused to send reporters to China, despite an open invitation, because they did not want to embarrass the government. In 1960 the Washington Post and New York Times had both been well aware of U-2 spy flights but printed nothing. In 1962 the Times knew of the planned “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba but, upon request from the White House, toned down its story.36 Even so, the press was uneasy with government information policy and so was a determined Democratic congressman from California, John Moss, who worked hand in glove with some of the journalism professional associations to promote more open information in government. Moss held hearings and needled the Eisenhower administration (and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to follow), ultimately passing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which Lyndon Johnson unenthusiastically signed into law on the Fourth of July, 1966. The Freedom of Information Act, substantially strengthened in 1974 in response to Watergate, was a landmark in the battle between sunshine and secrecy in government. A legislative compromise, FOIA covered federal administration agencies (but neither Congress nor the White House) and carved out nine exemptions (including for “national security” and the personal privacy of federal employees) that FOIA officers are obliged to safeguard. When people or organizations request information that does not fit within one or more of the exemptions, however, the officers are duty-bound to release it to the requester. The FOIA “created a notable challenge to the history of government secrecy; it provided a set of rules and procedures, officials and offices dedicated not to the collection and maintenance of secrets but rather to their release to the public.”37 The act has been widely used by journalists, scholars, political activists, and many others. In fiscal year 2005, there were 2.6 million FOIA requests filed. The government spent $300 million responding to them.38 More than 120 federal agencies employ one or more of the 5,000 FOIA officers.39 The Cold War, then, sent mixed messages. On the one hand, it stimulated government investment in education, subsidy of libraries, and direct underwritGE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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ing of publishers at home and abroad. On the other hand, it legitimated an unprecedented expansion of government classification of information while chilling free expression in the entertainment industry, schools, libraries, colleges, and universities. The Cold War promoted both an intensified concern over national security and an intensified rhetoric of openness. The American effort to promote the “free flow of information” internationally and to sell the virtues of a free press around the globe unintentionally helped arouse more intense criticism of government secrecy at home. The effort to present a morally superior face to the world led Americans to pay new attention to other failings, too. Washington policymakers found new incentive for fighting discrimination against African Americans as they sought to reduce the power of Soviet propaganda about American life. In the world of books as in the culture more broadly, Hitler’s atrocities had already given racism a bad name. The Academy Award winner for “best picture” in 1947, Gentlemen’s Agreement (adapted from a Laura Z. Hobson novel), criticized anti-Semitism. South Pacific, a 1949 Broadway musical adapted from James Michener’s 1946 short-story collection, preached against prejudice in the song, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” and required heroine Nellie Forbush to put her racism behind her to be fulfilled in true love. In 1890, even in 1930, respectable leaders in politics and culture could hold the United States to be an Anglo-Saxon nation. Some sought to exclude minorities from voting or from full acceptance as social equals while others advocated inclusion only on the basis of assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture and principles. It was still possible to hold openly racist views in polite society in 1945, but much more rare by 1965, both in the population at large and in national political and cultural leadership. An inclusionary trend was as notable in publishing as anywhere. In the schoolhouse during the past generation, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Anne Frank’s Diary became curricular stalwarts. The tensions surrounding print in the early years of the Cold War reverberated through the Vietnam era. Publication provided several of the most dramatic moments in that war, itself a decisive national trauma that weakened the American public’s conviction of U.S. moral superiority. Reporters in Vietnam grew increasingly restive with U.S. military and embassy briefings that they knew to be false. In 1969 reporter Seymour Hersh’s revelations that American soldiers had massacred women and children at My Lai demonstrated that Americans were capable of atrocities. In 1971 a Department of Defense insider, Daniel Ellsberg, secretly copied thousands of pages of a confidential internal history of Vietnam war policymaking that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had commissioned. (The photocopier that became standard business equipment in the 1950s and generated independent commercial copy shops in the 1960s 12
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helped make everyone their own publisher much more efficiently than carbon paper or earlier duplication machinery.) Ellsberg turned the documents over to the New York Times and the Times began to publish a long summary of the classified materials. The White House won a court injunction against the Times, but then the materials were surreptitiously passed along, and the next installment was published in the Washington Post; when the government won an injunction against the Post, other newspapers took up the cause.
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The Culture of the Sixties If free expression suffered during the Cold War, it also found new venues and new forums. With respect to freedom of sexual expression, formal censorship and informal restraints declined after World War II, gradually at first and then manically in the sixties. After the war, William Styron, James Jones, and Norman Mailer all were “censored” by their own publishers—something less likely to happen a generation later as the norms of expression about bodily functions and sexual practices shifted. As late as 1960, historian Kenneth Cmiel observed, “civility was, quite literally, the law of the land.” The governing Supreme Court decision of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) excluded “lewd,” “obscene,” and “profane” language from First Amendment protection.40 This changed in the sixties, as did so much else in American culture. Michael Korda recalls that, in publishing, “Sex scenes in fiction became permissible almost overnight, as did the use of obscene expletives. . . . Arguments like those between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins over how to suggest the use of the word fuck in dialogue without actually printing it were no longer necessary or even thinkable.”41 Regulations based on “time, place and manner” of print and its distribution (for instance, in zoning ordinances for adult bookstores) remain, and efforts at censorship continue. There are also customary differences across media. Children can browse through books at Barnes and Noble that use four-letter words and provide explicit descriptions of sex. The same is true on cable television, but general-circulation newspapers and broadcast television are much more constrained. The sixties’ watershed in sexual expression was more than a decline in Victorian copyediting. Larger changes were at work, probably none more important than the women’s movement. In 1969, when the movement was still in its early stage, Nancy Hawley organized a study group at Emmanuel College in Boston to explore issues of women’s health and sexuality. At the time, she later recalled, “there wasn’t a single text written by women about women’s health and sexuality.” The participants named the group the Boston Women’s Health Collective and took it upon themselves to create a course on women’s health. Their own GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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initial research led to a 138-page course booklet, published in 1970 by the New England Free Press. Without advertising, the booklet—priced at thirty cents— quickly sold 150,000 copies. In 1973 the collective turned it into Our Bodies, Ourselves with Simon & Schuster as the publisher. The volume, still in print, kept growing through revised editions–-it has been translated into seventeen languages and Braille and by 2004 had sold over 4 million copies—while the collective became a multimedia and multibook organization.42 At about the same time that Our Bodies, Ourselves was launched, Judy Blume, a divorced New Jersey mother of two young children, “a suburban flop . . . and a failure at golf, tennis and cooking,” as Newsweek later put it in an admiring profile, found she was a success at writing clear, engaging, affecting fiction for teens and preteens with an honesty about once taboo topics. These included menstruation, masturbation, teen sex, bodily embarrassments of puberty like wet dreams, unwanted erections, or breasts too large or too small, too early or too late.43 In Forever, published in 1975, Blume depicted two high school students making love—without punishment, without marrying. By 2004 Blume had published twenty-four books, almost all of them for the juvenile market, and they had sold more than 75 million copies with translations in more than twenty languages.44 Blume has not fared very well with either literary critics or school boards, but she all but invented the “YA problem novel,” fiction for “young adults” about serious matters.45 Blume’s fiction for teens and preteens shared with feminism a belief in a pedagogy of open and guilt-free communication.
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Anxiety and Choice Following an ongoing debate in the late 1940s and early 1950s that was capped by a Senate investigation and report in 1954, community leaders launched efforts to censor comic books. Comic books, dominated by crime and horror themes, were singled out as uniquely dangerous to youth. A leading crusader against them, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, saw greater hope in television than in comics, in large part because adults could see, share, and supervise access to TV. Television would be part of a shared culture across generations, replacing the private underworld that comics helped create for youth culture.46 The comic book crusade was one expression of anxiety over reading, but not all panics about reading centered on the dangers of print. Another fear, linked to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, was that children could not read at all or could not read well. Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read was on the best-seller list in 1955 for thirty weeks and was widely serialized in newspapers. Its critique of schools for abandoning phonics made waves in educational circles and among a wider public.47 It also helped inspire William 14
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Spaulding, the director of Houghton Mifflin’s education division, to sign up Theodore Geisel, a children’s book author writing under the name “Dr. Seuss.” Spaulding engineered an agreement in which Houghton Mifflin would publish a school edition and Geisel’s own publisher, Random House, a trade edition, of The Cat in the Hat (1957). It sold a million copies by 1960, more than 7 million by 2000.48 The Cold War was a component of everything in American culture in the fifties and sixties but by no means a full explanation of everything (The Cat appeared months before Sputnik shocked Americans out of scientific complacency). After all, what people read is a matter of urgent concern in a society that wears its moralism on its sleeve and that takes one’s taste in reading to be a window on a person’s intelligence, character, and soul. How well people read is of equal urgency in a society deeply invested in schooling as the primary pathway to social mobility, a feature of American life more central in the past half century than ever. Other anxious cultural strains arose, particularly from the 1960s on, as religious traditionalism found itself on the defensive in relation to the seemingly inexorable advance of individualistic culture. From the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” on through the “pro-choice” movement in supporting legalized abortion, “choice” has become a cultural and moral ideal. Whether in reference to flexibility in work life or the appeal of abundance in the entertainment marketplace, choosing became a social practice in a variety of areas where it was once relatively rare. In a 1989 survey of American religious views, 16 percent of conservative Protestants, 16 percent of mainline Protestants, and 18 percent of Catholics born between 1926 and 1935 believed church rules on morality to be too strict; for those born between 1955 and 1962, 30 percent of conservative Protestants, 34 percent of mainline Protestants, and 48 percent of Catholics assented to the same proposition.49 “A culture of choice and spiritual exploration prevails—both inside and outside the religious establishments,” sociologist Wade Clark Roof remarks.50 Faith, he holds, is part of a “more deliberate, engaging effort” of people to construct their own spiritual worlds, recognizing that the view they come to is one among a plurality of possibilities.51 In 1955 only 4 percent of adults reported that they had moved from the religion in which they were raised; by 1985 it was 33 percent. Data from the 1970s and 1980s indicates that about 40 percent of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists had switched denominations, and 15 percent of Jews and Catholics had adopted another faith. Twenty percent of Americans have switched two times or more, including a third of those with “some college.”52 With religion increasingly a matter of conscious choice, there has been a growing market for religious and spiritual literature.53 Religious bookstores, “new age” bookstores, GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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and “spirituality” sections of general bookstores have all proliferated, although amid all of this novelty the average American household possesses four Bibles. That figure notwithstanding, publishers sell 25 million Bibles a year.54 Growing numbers of people have taken on the task of inventing themselves, whether in fashioning their own spirituality or gender or ethnic or racial identity or in selecting from myriad features of consumer goods to organize a “lifestyle.” Multiculturalism by the 1970s was not just an academic anthem but a social fact. With changes in immigration patterns after 1965 immigration reform, Latin American and Asian immigrants altered the face of America. In publishing, Jewish American fiction, African American fiction, and Asian American fiction came to all but define the world of serious literature; a novelist like John Updike, late in his career, was seen to be an observer of northeastern white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nature rather than of generically “American” characters. Who was bold enough to claim that there is an “American character”? Consider the fate of the Book-of-the-Month Club, whose membership has dropped precipitously in the past decades. In the age of Amazon.com, the Internet, the greater availability of well-stocked bookstores in small cities and expanding suburbs, the Book-of-the-Month Club’s mail-order business and monthly mailings came to seem “almost quaint,” as the New York Times business reporter David Kirkpatrick put it. Time Inc. bought the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1977, merged with Bertelsmann’s Literary Guild, and created a new mega–book club called Bookspan. While Book-of-the-Month Club still exists, the Bertelsmann group of clubs has grown by creating niche book clubs, thirty of them by 2006, including a gay and lesbian club, a Spanish-language club, an African American club, a Latino club, a large-print club, and a conservative politics club.55 In a liberal, pluralistic society, publishing operates in a marketplace for displaying the wares of a wide range of authorial intentions, capacities, viewpoints, and styles. But publishing is an agency of policing as well as of expressing. It is a vehicle for the reinforcement of social norms, of political or acceptable expression, of a political, cultural, or linguistic censorship. What gets censored changes over time, as Donald Downs’s chapter suggests. In the past sixty years, many restrictions on published speech have weakened—on sex, on self-revelation, on expletives, on medical terms for body parts, on explicit emotional avowal. Meanwhile, they have tightened on racial epithets, on sexist and homophobic language, and, at least in the world of the school textbook, on a wide range of other matters, under the onslaught of criticism from both the religious right and the multicultural left. Dirty words did not disappear but changed, from words of moral travesty to words or ideas of social insult or social harm. Pluralism became not just a pervasive social fact but a cultural sensitivity and sometimes even 16
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a new regime of censorship, now in the name not of religious faith but laissezfaire tolerance whose boundaries, if they exist, are not well marked.56
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Economic Concentration, Cross-Media Competition, and the Infrastructure of Publishing The publishing business did not simply respond to social and political trends. It made its own changes and its own waves. The parallel themes of concentration and diversity in publishing, which run through volume 4, are even more marked for the period since 1945. The postwar years witnessed major consolidation of enterprise in magazines, newspapers, book publishing, and book retailing, accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s. It also has spawned new and influential independent publishers, as Daniel Simon and Tom McCarthy’s chapter shows. Still, it is the consolidation and accounting-driven practices that, more than anything else, have made book publishing today so strange and uncomfortable to many who began in the business half a century ago. The changing economic landscape includes a proliferation of new firms, new products, new audiences; a distribution network that reaches small cities and burgeoning suburbs once without bookstores; and, in the past two decades the emergence of an uncanny new technology that reconfigures what we even mean by author, publisher, and audience. Publishing insiders lament that the life and passion that once animated the business and made it as much a vocation as a livelihood have been wiped out in the new economic environment. Of course, the good old days were a mixed bag, not a halcyon era. Epstein offers a charming portrait of Random House, the publisher he joined in 1958, which he describes as “an unusually happy, second family” both for its editors and for many of its leading authors. It was housed in the former Villard mansion at Madison and 58th Street, giving it the architectural as well as the social feel of home (figs. 1.2 and 1.3). But not every house was Random House.57 Epstein began his career in 1950 at Doubleday, which he remembers as a company driven by book clubs and run by “directmail marketers” who, he writes, “knew nothing about how books were actually conceived, gestated, and born.” He did not see his fellow editors reading manuscripts but talking on the telephone or going to meetings. Doubleday inspires no nostalgia in him: among Doubleday’s editors, he writes, “the more literary ones usually returned from lunch late in the afternoon, drunk.”58 Publishing has operated in relation to schools, libraries, and government but also in relation to the rapidly growing market for entertainment. Leisure or recreational reading has surely been affected by television and later by videos, DVDs, computers and computer games, and of course the Internet. Studies of GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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FIGURE 1.2. Until 2002 the offices of Random House, Inc., were in the landmark 1882 Villard Houses, 451 Madison Avenue, New York, designed by McKim, Mead, and White and now part of the Palace Hotel. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux.
library circulation in the 1950s show a modest decline in towns where television was most widely distributed—and, interestingly, the decline in reading fiction was noticeably greater than the decline in nonfiction.59 Although the proliferation of alternative entertainment forms is recognized as tough competition for books, it also has sometimes been a force for increasing reading. Each new film version of a Jane Austen novel sends viewers back to reading Austen. And there is the force known as Oprah Winfrey, as Joan Shelley Rubin’s chapter indicates in more detail. Oprah’s Book Club has had a remarkable impact in bringing her television audience into bookstores.60 Few features of the commercial landscape are more evident than the proliferation of chain-operated bookstores whose growth Laura Miller documents in her chapter. The well-stocked shelves of Barnes & Noble and Borders that can be found in multiple locations in cities and suburbs across the country are taken for granted now. They have driven many cherished independent bookstores out of business—but most of these existed only in a few major cities and college towns and did not serve the large majority of Americans who lived elsewhere and who now have ready access to buying books. We insist, in the structure of this book, that for all the importance of the intense economic competition in publishing and the central role of capitalist 18
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FIGURE 1.3. In 2002 Random House, Inc., moved its offices into the Bertelsmann Building, 1475 Broadway, New York, four years after having been acquired by the multinational publisher. In the lobby, floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted bookcases filled with books showcase its extensive lists of imprints. Photograph by Rick Stasel.
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enterprise in what gets published, promoted, and distributed, print continues to be a multiply subsidized activity. The federal government (and state and local governments, too) is a publisher. Foundations publish and, even more, underwrite authors with research grants, as does the federal government in grants to artists, authors, and scientists. Public funding of schools, higher education, and libraries has remade the world of print. Through copyright, instituted by government and sustained in the courts, a return on investment is available to authors and their publishers. In this realm, as in so many in American life, we should not mistake the centrality of the marketplace for its autonomy.
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People Reading But what do people do with books and other printed matter? In the late twentieth century, to what extent was an individual’s sense of self dependent on encounters with books generally and with a set of specific texts (e.g., the “classics”)? Has the reliance on print for the formation of identity changed over time? What are the changing functions of a liberal arts education, the nature of the avant-garde, or the why-Johnny-can’t-read anxiety as it relates to the national image of superiority or, at a later stage, as it relates to middle class anxieties in an intensely competitive world of formal education? What has been the role of print in the counterculture and in social movements from feminism to environmentalism? What is the psychological dimension of reading (e.g., identifying with fictional characters) as young people—the astonishing worldwide Harry Potter phenomenon notwithstanding—read less fiction?61 Relating broad economic and institutional trends to social and cultural experience is daunting. It is of some help with this large interpretive quandary to look at specific uses of print by specific individuals and audiences, and so the contributions in the final section of this volume anchor our account in the everyday realities of reading. What print means to people is what matters most in this history—but it is also least accessible. One can find specific groups for whom books are a passion, even an obsession, as with the collectors Robert DeMaria discusses. One may look at the people who reach out of the privacy of their homes and often isolated lives to social ties through or in close relationship to books, as with the reading groups Elizabeth Long examines. Bibles remain terribly important in American life, whether they are the Jewish Old Testament, the Christian Old and New Testaments that are at the heart of thousands of Bible study groups, the Koran for many Muslims, or, as the chapter by Trysh Travis indicates, the 1939 Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” that is the textbook and source of comfort for this remarkable self-help group. Books that the general public knows nothing about, others clutch to their 20
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bosoms. Generations of disgruntled social science students have held to C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination as a lifeline. In the 1970s an adoption rights movement was born, with people who had been adopted seeking to unseal adoption records and to search for their biological mothers or biological children. Florence Fisher, a housewife, began ALMA—Adoptees Liberty Movement Association—in 1971 and published The Search for Anna Fisher in 1974, her personal account. This was one of several books, passed from hand to hand, that in the next few years galvanized this small social movement.62 There are many other examples of print’s instrumental role in building identity and community. The newly politicized, the newly engaged, the newly diagnosed, the newly divorced, bereaved, laid off, relocated, pregnant, miscarried, sleepless with young children, and many more pass on books from friend to friend or browse the self-help sections of libraries and bookstores. People are frequently, and often predictably, immigrants to new places or stages of life. In large numbers, they seek printed instructions on what the customs of the new land are and how to succeed in it.
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Texting Past and Future This volume has been long in the making; the world of print is already different from ten years ago when the editors began to share thoughts with one another. We can look back to news items we clipped eight years ago that wondered if Stephen King’s self-published e-book, The Plant, was the welcome wave of the future or the announcement of doomsday. A few months before that, Arthur C. Clarke published an essay online through a Silicon Valley–based digital publisher named Fatbrain.com. One could download it for a two-dollar fee. Clarke’s essay sold fewer than 500 copies and was already forgotten by the time of Stephen King’s venture. Fatbrain itself was acquired later in 2000 by Barnesandnoble.com. In the Internet’s version of historical record keeping, if you type in www.fatbrain.com you will be taken immediately, and without explanation, to Barnesandnoble.com.63 This is not to deny the obvious: as Anthony Grafton put it, “We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production.” Still, he cautions, the present excitement is “one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.”64 The notion of an “information ecology,” inelegant as the phrase may be, seems useful as we try to conceptually accommodate a vast array of interacting changes at once. GE N E R A L I N T RO D U C T I ON
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I have recently been reading through letters my father sent to my mother from India and China during World War II, particularly letters on a nearly daily basis over several months at war’s end as my father, an officer in air force intelligence, waited for transport home. In 1945 my parents wrote each other daily in long hand, letters whose safe passage they could not be certain about, so they numbered each of their letters to let the recipient know if some were received out of order—or not at all. They insisted that I adopt the same numbering system in 1964 when, as a high school student, I spent a summer in India and wrote to them several times a week on blue aerograms. We don’t do this anymore. Children still learn in school to write longhand, but by middle school they are submitting term papers to their teachers online, doing PowerPoint presentations, and gabbing with friends by cell phone or text message. My father’s letters are a voice from the point where this volume begins, at the end of World War II, when the world was very different and the future anticipated with hope. My teenage daughter’s text messaging sixty years later, though still text centered and literate, is a textual communication that leaves no imprint and no legacy, a textual phone call more than a digital letter. For all that, it is still an encounter with reading and writing and even, after a fashion, spelling. In Japan, teenagers have been writing novels by texting on their cell phones and publishing these works in conventional book form to great acclaim and with great profit. It is a fact of broad significance in the history of the book that “text” has become a verb—an action, a process, a means of interaction, no longer just the noun and the silent, stationary object we once took it to be. And still, the noun endures. The text, in its older usages, persists. Cleaning out her room a few years ago, my daughter put aside various items that represented a childhood now passed. This included a great many children’s books that she had boxed up for storage but refused to give away. These books mean a lot to her, and she has every expectation, and hope, that they will mean something one day to her children.
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PA RT I
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Technological, Business, and Government Foundations
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Introduction
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The last half of the twentieth century was the age of television, computers, and digital information. The new century is the age of the Internet and may yet become a “post-typographic world,” as one of the authors of this volume calls it. So why has the consumption of printing paper risen steadily, decade after decade? (See table 8.) The answer is that the electronic-digital age has also been— and remains—a great age of print on paper. In the postwar era, the business, technological, and legal milieus of publishing were revolutionized, but traditional printed formats and reader habits, though altered, endured. Dramatic change, yet core continuity, is the broad theme of the chapters of part 1 of The Enduring Book. The 1947 Census of Manufactures counted 648 publishing houses putting out 487 million books with an aggregate revenue of $484 million. That same year, R. R. Bowker, the industry’s leading private fact-gatherer, reported that American book publishers had launched 9,182 new book titles.1 Sixty years later Bowker estimated that 282,500 new titles were published in 2005 in the United States by some 81,000 publishers. The Book Industry Study Group, another trade organization, estimated that some 3.1 billion copies were sold in 2005 with revenue of nearly $35 billion.2 This eye-popping growth in book publishing is incredible in both meanings of the word. First, it is unbelievable because the statistics are wrong. For decades the Census Bureau and Bowker routinely undercounted publishers, titles, and sales by neglecting small and part-time book publishers. In recent years, industry trade groups have stepped up efforts to canvass the entire field, including small, nontraditional publishing enterprises.3 But, though vastly overstated, the incredible growth suggested by these statistics is fundamentally true. The last half of the twentieth century—the era of electronic communication—was a heroic age for the printed word. The postwar business history of book publishing, surveyed in chapters 2–4, is a story of both concentration and decentralization, of blockbuster best sellers and obscure specialized tomes. At the top of the industry food chain, as Beth Luey reports in chapter 2, the trend was toward merger and consolidation in pursuit of the big book and the steady seller. In recent years, a single title, such as Harry Potter or The Purpose Driven Life, could boost not just one house but an entire category of book publishing. But, at the same time, new technologies for electronic typesetting and offset printing and new marketing strategies, in-
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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cluding sales on the Internet, encouraged the growth of myriad small publishing houses and part-time publishers, both commercial and not for profit. Media critics have often bemoaned the market concentration in book publishing, and it is true that a handful of houses gradually gained control of much of the market4 (see table 2). Yet thousands of other publishers and quasi publishers were busy as well. In a 2004 survey of small to midsized publishers, the Book Industry Study Group estimated that 62,815 firms, organizations, and self-publishers were actively engaged in book publishing that year. Small and midsized publishers (those with revenues less than $50 million) churned out more than a billion volumes with revenues of $14.2 billion.5 In short, the book business flourished in postwar America and continues to hold its own in the twenty-first century. As Patrick Henry explains in chapter 3, new technology has not so much displaced books as it has made them easier to produce, especially in small press runs. For books, the revolutionary impact of computerization came more quickly and fully in typesetting and printing than in the delivery of text to readers. As we enter a new century, the true electronic book is still in its infancy. Meanwhile, even though book publishers have not been especially adept at marketing their wares, retail booksellers have benefited from the postwar electronic revolution in both inventory control and distribution, which Laura Miller explores in chapter 5. Indeed, the first true Internet business success story was Amazon.com, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, correctly chose books as the ideal online product.6 Yet, though aided by technology, the success of the book in postwar America grew more from demography, economic prosperity, and culture, as Linda Scott argues in chapter 4—and as other authors explore in more detail in later chapters. Newspapers and magazines also prospered in the decades after World War II, and their business histories were similar to—though also different from—the business history of book publishing. On the one hand, as in the book sector, the magazine and newspaper industries were marked by merger and consolidation. In magazines, as David Abrahamson and Carol Polsgrove explain in chapter 6, major media corporations came to dominate the market. In chapter 7, James Baughman describes how large newspaper chains grew to prominence, and newspaper companies increasingly became major publicly traded corporations. On the other hand, despite the consolidation trend, more magazine titles than ever were published at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and even beleaguered newspaper publishers found new niches in ethnic and suburban dailies and weeklies. New technology, however, had a greater and more direct impact on magazines and newspapers than on books. First, television siphoned off advertising 26
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revenue and eventually soaked up enough of Americans’ leisure time to erode circulations. Then came the Internet, which delivered news, information, and classified advertising better than it could deliver book-length texts. Thus, the online revolution hit magazines and especially newspapers harder than it hit books. Tables 9–14 tell the tale. While Americans’ expenditures of money (table 12) and time (table 14) remained fairly steady over the decades for books and even magazines, both measures declined for newspapers. Table 10 shows circulation for morning papers holding steady or even growing in the last decades of the century, but evening circulation plummeted. Perhaps most telling, the proportion of American households taking a daily newspaper fell from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 2005 (see table 11). And while the consumption of printing paper continued to rise, newsprint consumption peaked by 1990 (see table 8). Newspaper companies gradually adapted to the Internet, moving content—both traditional print material and new multimedia content—online. By 2005, as James Baughman puts it, the American newspaper was in retreat. But it was an orderly retreat, with the industry regrouping to meet the challenges of the new century. Though the chapters of part 1 deal mainly with technology, business, and social context, another key player in the business history of postwar publishing was the federal government. As chapters 8 and 9 make clear, publishing exists in a highly specialized and often controversial legal milieu of libel, censorship, copyright, and regulation. Changes in communications technology unsettled traditional law and custom in the second half of the twentieth century and spurred the creation of new legal regimes, although, as in business itself, the forces of culture, politics, and internationalization were more powerful than technology. In the postwar era, the federal government also played an increasingly important role as a publisher and—to borrow a recent coinage—content provider. Chapter 10 describes the explosive growth of government publishing and the massive contribution of federal agencies to the creation of the information age. When Jason Epstein arrived for work at Random House in 1958, Random was a major U.S. book company, yet it had only about a hundred employees, and their relationship with each other and with their authors was more like family than business. Or so Epstein recalled it in his 2001 memoir, Book Business. By 1999 Random House was a diversified group of companies with thousands of employees, though it was itself just a minor property of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. For Epstein, who got his first job in book publishing in 1950, the history of postwar American publishing was a personal biography. It was also a tale of declension from a wonderful cottage industry presided over I N T RO D U C T I O N
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by book lovers to a crass and purely commercial media enterprise.7 Is Epstein’s memory true to history or clouded by nostalgia? As the chapters that follow will show, it is both. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Epstein’s hope for the future of the book lay in the new communications technology. He believed that technology might return the book business to the genial cottage industry that he knew in the 1950s. In 2006 the seventy-eight-year-old Epstein was enthusiastically promoting a company called On Demand Books, which employed a socalled Espresso Book Machine to print and bind one volume at a time—a press run of one.8 This was the future Epstein envisioned in his memoir:
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Books as physical objects will not pass away to be replaced by electronic signals read from glowing, hand-held screens. Nor will bookstores vanish. But they will coexist hereafter with a vast multilingual directory of sources, perhaps “tagged” for easy reference, and distributed electronically. From this directory readers at their home computers may transfer the materials they select to machines capable of printing and binding single copies on demand at innumerable remote sites and perhaps eventually within their own homes. One such location might be a kiosk at the corner of my Manhattan street while readers at the headwaters of the Nile or in the foothills of the Himalayas will have similar access to the world’s wisdom from their own nearby kiosks.9 Will the future of publishing be some version of Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine—that is, print-on-demand—which Patrick Henry explores in chapter 3, or will readers and reading take a “post-typographic” turn, as David Reinking suggests in chapter 28 at the end of this volume? The chapters in part 1 on the postwar business history of American publishing may provide some clues.
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CHAPTER 2
The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry Beth Luey
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World War II interrupted and then transformed the American book publishing industry. During the war, paper rationing, government-mandated melting of plates, and shortages of other materials disrupted production, while the absence of key personnel serving in the military complicated decision making and development. When the war ended, however, fundamental changes had begun in the industry that led to expansion of the domestic and international markets, shifts in the importance of various sectors of the industry, new methods of capitalization to fund expansion, and an increasing tension between consolidation and cultural diversification. Book publishing shared the problems and opportunities of other industries, but its nature as a cultural enterprise often led these changes into novel directions. Nevertheless, the industry’s sense of uniqueness became increasingly difficult to sustain as the century progressed. By 1945 the United States had taken its place as a world power, and U.S. publishing began to take its place in the international market. The domestic market for books flourished as well. (See tables 1–7.) Changes in the nation’s demographic structure—and the democratization and expansion of higher education—enhanced the demand for children’s books and textbooks, as well as scientific, technical, and medical books and journals. The dramatic rise of paperback publishing altered the manner and scale of distribution and reinvigorated trade publishing. The simultaneous growth of both domestic and international publishing created a need for capital that led book publishing, like many other media businesses, to seek solutions in the creation of larger firms; but smaller publishers—including university presses and not-for-profits— also played a vital role in diversifying the industry. As publishing became more visible and attractive in the financial markets, acquisitions by nonpublishing conglomerates advanced. Each of these changes exacerbated tensions between publishers’ perceptions of themselves as cultural conservators on the one hand and as commercial enterprises on the other. By the late twentieth century, the book industry had expanded its output dramatically and had become fully
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integrated into the domestic and global communications industry. In the early twenty-first century, book publishers, like all media businesses, struggled with the challenges of electronic delivery, but the future of the traditional printed book still seemed secure.
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Internationalization U.S. book publishers had participated in international trade from their beginnings, first as importers of English books, but not until the twentieth century did they become full, and eventually dominant, participants in the world book trade. World War II hastened this process. European publishers fleeing Hitler established themselves in the United States, often starting their own firms. Among these were Kurt Enoch, a founding partner of New American Library in 1947; Frederick Ungar; Frederick Praeger; and Kurt and Helen Wolff, who founded Pantheon in 1942.1 Refugees brought European experience and contacts among European and émigré writers; translations often enhanced their lists. Immigration and growing contact with non-U.S. cultures increased the demand for dictionaries and books in languages other than English.2 Editors serving abroad in the military or foreign service grew interested in the literatures of other countries. For example, Knopf ’s Harold Strauss was stationed in Japan and began making editorial trips there soon after the war. Philip Lilienthal, who had worked in China before the war and then served in the Office of War Information, developed an Asian studies list for the University of California Press.3 International exchanges occur in publishing through imports and exports (direct sales of manufactured books) and sales of foreign rights (English-language or translation), both frequently facilitated by opening offices in other countries, and through mergers and acquisitions of firms in more than one country. All of these mechanisms came into play between 1945 and 1990. Before the war, foreign sales represented more than a third of total sales for publishers in England, France, and Germany; the figure for U.S. publishers was only 5 percent.4 The U.S. government began promoting book exports during the war, when Latin American countries were no longer able to acquire British and German textbooks. The State Department organized a publishers’ visit to six Latin American countries in 1942, and in 1945 the Office of War Information and the Book Publishers Bureau sponsored a tour of Australia and New Zealand to promote American books.5 Immediate development was slowed by materials shortages, but after the war, sales of U.S. technical, scientific, and business books expanded dramatically, not only to Latin America and Europe but to Africa and Asia as well.6 The United States Information Agency (later Service) 30
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distributed carefully selected American books abroad to win friends for the United States in its Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.7 The Rockefeller and Ford foundations sponsored trips to Latin America for university presses in the 1950s and 1960s. Private organizations such as the Asia Foundation, sometimes with covert government funding, also began promoting exports of American books, though such programs were usually designed to improve America’s image abroad rather than to increase publishers’ profits.8 Important efforts to increase exports were organized by the American Book Publishers Council, a trade association discussed in chapter 11 in this volume. Soon after the war, many individual U.S. publishers opened international sales departments or divisions or hired international representatives. McGrawHill began its international division in 1946; Doubleday, Macmillan, Viking, Grolier, and Wiley followed suit in the 1950s. Addison-Wesley, Western Publishing, and Harper & Row became active in international sales in the 1960s. Specialty houses also established international connections. For example, Charles E. Tuttle opened a branch in Tokyo in 1948 and began importing and translating Asian books. Companies such as World Book that had established international operations before the war now expanded them.9 Foreign branches allowed U.S. publishers to be closer to foreign markets, to exploit reprint possibilities, and sometimes to take advantage of lower production costs for books to be sold abroad.10 University presses, too, worked together beginning in the 1960s to increase foreign sales by establishing shared sales offices and warehousing abroad or by employing foreign agents. By the late 1960s, 10 to 15 percent of university press sales were made abroad.11 U.S. exports of books exceeded imports for the first time during World War II. By 1990 exports exceeded imports by more than $500 million (fig. 2.1). For some publishers, export sales increased at 15 to more than 20 percent a year in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, led by textbooks and technical titles. Exports continued to grow at rates of more than 10 percent per year until at least 1980.12 With trade and mass-market books, for which large sales are expected, exporting may be impractical. In some countries, too, exports are restricted to protect the national economy or culture. In these cases, publishers can sell the English-language rights in a limited territory to a house in the other country. No industry-wide statistics on rights sales are available, but publishers’ memoirs and lists show that the trade in such rights, particularly between the United States and England, flourished after the war, with the U.S. share of sales increasing. British books had accounted for 40 percent of the general books on the Holt list in the 1920s, and as late as the 1940s half of Harper’s mystery authors were English; by 1964, however, British publishers were buying twice as many books from American publishers as they were selling to them.13 O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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FIGURE 2.1. The 2007 London Book Fair, where the visibility of American publishing firms promoted their participation in the export of books to global markets. Courtesy of Paschal Ssemaganda.
Exports were dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by textbooks and scientific, technical, and medical books, which accounted for approximately 60 percent of the value of book exports as late as 1980. By the 1970s, however, U.S. trade publishers had become active in selling foreign rights. This increased rights activity can be attributed in part to exploiting the market more effectively through foreign offices and agents. It was also assisted by the increased willingness of those abroad to embrace U.S. popular culture. In addition, the trend toward larger author advances and advertising budgets for potential blockbusters and best sellers made the revenues from sales of subsidiary rights crucial to financial success in trade publishing.14 U.S. participation in translation increased dramatically after the 1940s. In 1950 UNESCO reported the number of book translations worldwide as 13,516 titles. This number more than doubled in the next decade, and the number of translations worldwide rose by nearly 10,000 titles every decade thereafter, reaching around 53,000 by 1980. U.S. publishers issued fewer than 500 translations in 1950, but that number more than doubled in each of the following decades, to more than 2,500 in 1970. Many of the translated titles had major cultural influence, including the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Jung, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Piaget, and Carlos Fuentes. Others were popular successes, including many best sellers.15 Several U.S. houses built significant portions of their lists through translations, most notably Knopf and Farrar, Straus.16 University and other nonprofit presses also purchased foreign-language titles for translation into English, as well as copublishing with British publishers.17 During the Cold War, interest in Russian culture and concern about Russian competition led to increases in translations 32
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of fiction, philosophy, and science. The federal government encouraged translation of books from “strategic” languages by underwriting this activity, sometimes through covert funding.18 Translations from English also increased. From war’s end at least through the 1970s, European, Latin American, and Asian nations all increased the number of translations they published. Translations from English increased at least proportionally in these nations, and U.S. titles gradually overtook British titles, especially for recently released books. The favorable “balance of trade” in translations was a result of the success of U.S. textbooks and technical, scientific, and medical books, as well as current fiction and general nonfiction. Wartime efforts to promote these American products to markets formerly served by German and British publishers were clearly successful. The same houses that developed their English-language exports also increased their sale of translation rights. In addition, U.S. and British publishers initiated programs to enable publishers in developing countries to acquire rights at prices they could afford.19 Popular American literature translated abroad included fiction of lasting value, serious nonfiction, detective novels, science fiction, westerns, cookbooks, health and self-help books, and inspirational titles. Children’s books were also frequently translated. Little Golden Books appeared in nearly thirty languages and sold hundreds of millions of copies annually worldwide as early as the 1950s.20 The most comprehensive internationalization occurred through the establishment of houses that operated both in the United States and in other countries. Even before the war, some Dutch and German publishers had begun publishing for an international market. With the growth of English as the universal language of science after the war, this kind of publishing grew rapidly. For publishers in small markets, such as the Netherlands, growth was possible only through international operations.21 Thus, as Europe’s energies shifted from postwar recovery to expansion, English-language markets, especially the United States, became a focus of their attention. Many opened sales (and eventually editorial) offices in the United States. In 1950 Oxford University Press, incorporated under U.S. law as a private company, expanded its operations to include not only religious books, scholarly books, and textbooks but also trade books, children’s books, and paperbacks of all kinds. Cambridge University Press opened its North American Branch in New York in 1949. In 1964 Springer Verlag experimented with publishing scientific titles in both German and English and discovered that the English editions outsold the German. In 1982 Springer published more than 800 titles, 56 percent of them only in English. Other German publishers, as well as several Dutch and Swedish publishers, followed suit. By the 1980s major scientific and scholarly publishers such as RoutO RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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ledge, Elsevier, and Springer had expanded in Europe and were also operating well-established U.S. branches.22 In the 1960s and 1970s, many U.S. publishers transformed their foreign sales offices into independent subsidiaries that published original titles, translations, and paperback reprints, in both English and indigenous languages. Some U.S. corporations purchased foreign houses. By the 1980s, thirty-two U.S. publishers owned eighty-two foreign subsidiaries.23 European publishers also began seeking a strong U.S. presence. In addition to the scientific and scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier, large trade houses acquired U.S. publishing houses, printing facilities, and book clubs. The most visible was the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, which acquired Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell in 1986 and Random House in 1998, becoming one of the largest U.S. publishing houses. The International Thomson Organisation, based in Canada, acquired a number of U.S. houses, including many textbook houses, during the 1970s and 1980s. Pearson, based in the United Kingdom, acquired European and U.S. houses, including textbook operations (Addison-Wesley) as well as the trade houses E. P. Dutton, New American Library, and Viking Press. By 2003 five of the eight largest publishing firms with U.S. operations were owned by foreign conglomerates: Pearson, Thomson, Reed Elsevier, Bertelsmann, and Wolters Kluwer.24 In the postwar era, the definition of “American book publishing” had expanded to include companies owned by American stockholders operating globally as well as companies owned by foreign corporations operating in the United States and abroad. The value of American book exports peaked in the 1990s, both in actual dollar sales and in export revenue as a percentage of total revenue. In 1997 exports contributed 9 percent to industry sales; this proportion had fallen to 6.8 percent by 2005. Perhaps the more interesting development in the late twentieth century was the rising value of books imported into the American market. Until 1978, books had to be manufactured in the United States to obtain a U.S. copyright. After that date, publishers began to take advantage of cheaper overseas manufacturing, so that imports included American books manufactured abroad. As late as 1995 the ratio of exports to imports in the U.S. book industry was a robust 1.50. Over the next decade, however, that ratio slipped to 0.93. As with so many manufactured products, the United States fell into a negative balance of trade in an international market that it had dominated in the decades after World War II. The leading exporter of books—like so much else—to the United States was China.25
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The Domestic Market Rapid growth in population and personal income expanded the market for children’s books, textbooks at all levels, professional and scientific books, and trade books, including religious publications. Title production increased roughly fivefold between the late 1940s and 1990.26 (See tables 3 and 4.) By the early 1950s baby boom children were straining the public schools and increasing the demand for children’s books and elementary textbooks. As they moved into high school, the demand for higher-level textbooks rose. And even before they reached college, their parents—with the help of the GI Bill—were creating an unanticipated demand for college textbooks. Additional government subsidies to higher education for teaching and research stimulated the production of higher-level textbooks and scholarly books and journals, while increased emphasis on research by university faculty led to an expansion of university presses.
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Children’s Books U.S. publishers had begun organizing separate departments for children’s books in 1919, but after World War II the pace of growth picked up rapidly. The most obvious reason was demographics: there were many more children to read and be read to. But politics also played a role. The Cold War, and especially the launching of Sputnik in 1957, spotlighted the importance of education and increased the government’s investment in school and public libraries, most notably through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Educators, librarians, and publishers, worried that television would create generations of nonreaders, banded together in organizations like the Children’s Book Council to promote reading among young people.27 (See chapters 4, 11, 18, and 23.) Soon after the war, the major trade houses—including Atheneum; Crowell; Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; Harcourt Brace; Houghton Mifflin; Little, Brown; Macmillan; Morrow; Scribner; and Viking—launched or greatly expanded separate children’s divisions.28 In the 1950s and 1960s, one of Harper’s fastestgrowing lists was that of its children’s division, founded in 1926 and headed from 1940 to 1973 by Ursula Nordstrom. By the mid-1960s its staff had grown from three people to more than twenty, and sales had grown from a few hundred thousand dollars to about $10 million. Random House found a gold mine in the works of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), whose books illustrate the combination of fun and pedagogic purpose that motivated this sector of the industry. Golden Books, launched with twelve titles in 1942, was selling a hundred million books O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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annually by 1957. By 1962, Golden had issued a thousand titles.29 Industrywide, annual sales of children’s books rose from $50 million or $60 million in the late 1950s to more than $1 billion in 1990. Throughout the 1960s, children’s book sales exceeded adult trade book sales.30 Trade and mass-market children’s series proliferated. Longtime children’s idols such as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins were given new life and, as the years went by, modernized to conform to new social conditions. New series were launched, ranging from Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books to the Goosebumps and Babysitter’s Club books, which first appeared in the 1980s. The great success story of the 1990s and 2000s was the Harry Potter series, whose American publisher, Scholastic, sold 120 million copies from 1998 to 2006. This amazing series sold more than 300 million copies worldwide in its first decade.31 The market for and supply of children’s books also expanded with the introduction of paperback book clubs for children in the late 1940s, school book clubs in the 1950s, and the large-scale production of children’s paperbacks in the 1960s.32 Publishers produced more stiff-page “board books,” popup books, and other types of toy books for very young children in the postwar era. One of the first of these new “sensory books” was Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny (1940), with its fuzzy cotton-ball bunny and a man’s sandpaper beard. It is still in print. Paperbacks were especially important in the development of young adult books, which often focus on social problems and are frequently the targets of censorship campaigns. Their availability in lower-priced mass-market formats allowed them to be purchased directly by their readers, rather than by adults. It also made practical their use in classrooms where teachers wished to deal with sensitive topics.33 The civil rights movement of the 1960s included efforts to produce books specifically for young African American readers as well as books for children of all races that portrayed minority children positively. The Children’s Interracial Book Council was founded in the late 1960s to promote understanding of African American history and identity, and several new publishing houses owned by African Americans began issuing schoolbooks and children’s literature. In 1989 the Harambee Book Club was launched to provide books on African American themes to schoolchildren.34 Throughout the postwar years, children’s publishing was assisted by government grants to school libraries and by nonprofit groups that encourage children’s reading, including the American Library Association and Reading Is Fundamental, founded in 1966. Dramatizations of children’s books and reading programs on public television, such as Reading Rainbow and Wishbone, also promoted both reading and the marketing of children’s books.35 (See chapter 4.) 36
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Elementary and High School Textbooks Birthrates were the most important factor in the growth of textbooks for elementary and high schools, but textbook sales advanced even in the baby bust of the 1970s. High school attendance grew more rapidly than the adolescent population. Compulsory, free high school became universal in the United States in 1960, and urbanization and desegregation increased high school enrollment. Infusions of federal money beginning in the 1950s, as well as a new emphasis on science, increased the demand for textbooks. By the late 1950s, Fortune described textbook publishing as “the fastest-growing, most remunerative, and most freely competitive branch of book publishing.”36 Publishers moved quickly to take advantage of these opportunities. Harper’s, Harcourt Brace, Random House, and Little, Brown all expanded their educational divisions. Harper’s, a preeminent publisher of schoolbooks in the nineteenth century, discontinued its elementary and high school division in 1951. Realizing its mistake, the firm in 1962 merged with Row, Peterson. The new firm, Harper & Row, had a large stake in textbooks. In 1959 Henry Holt, with strong trade and high school lists, acquired Rinehart, with a large college list, and John C. Winston, a publisher of elementary texts. Holt, Rinehart and Winston published textbooks at all levels.37 Other firms enhanced textbook production through mergers and acquisitions. McGraw-Hill’s acquisitions included publishers of business and medical texts, an elementary textbook house, and Harper’s high school list. By 1970 its textbook and educational services divisions constituted half of the corporation. SFN Corporation, formed in 1985, brought together Scott Foresman, a leading publisher of reading and math texts, and Silver Burdett and South Western Publishing, along with religious, medical, and trade houses. The largest concentration of textbook publishers grew up in the Simon & Schuster companies, which by 1986 had acquired Ginn & Co. (1985), Allyn & Bacon (1985), Prentice-Hall (1985), Silver Burdett (1986), the Cambridge Book Co., (1984), and Follett (1984), along with many non–textbook houses.38 New teaching approaches and technologies led textbook publishers to diversify into new media, including filmstrips, laboratory manuals, testing materials, phonograph records, audiotapes, and later videotapes and software.39 The increasing role of technology, and expectations that this trend would accelerate into a convergence of print and video technology in the classroom, created interest in publishing companies among technology firms. Xerox bought American Education Publications in 1965 and Ginn & Co. in 1968. By 1974 the Xerox Educational Group was the nation’s second largest school textbook publisher. Other companies that bought textbook houses during the 1960s included O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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RCA, Bell & Howell, CBS, ITT, Litton Industries, and General Electric and Time (as the joint venture General Learning). Their acquisitions included Random House, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Bobbs-Merrill, Van Nostrand Reinhold, and the American Book Company.40 These mergers, based on faulty predictions about the course of public education, did not all survive: for example, Litton sold its publishing operations to International Thomson in 1981, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich acquired CBS Educational and Professional Publishing in 1987.41 Although digital technology and the Internet invaded schoolrooms everywhere in the 1990s, the printed textbook continued to hold its own in American schools, especially elementary schools, in the new century.42 Beginning in the 1960s, textbook publishers found themselves embroiled in serious conflicts over cultural and educational issues, a story that Jonathan Zimmerman tells in more detail in chapter 17. Battles over how to teach reading and writing, “dumbing down,” the portrayal of U.S. history, the “new social studies” and the “new math,” evolution and creationism, and the content of the literary canon brought publishers into the political spotlight.43 Pressure from women’s groups and organizations of African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics led school boards in some areas of the country to demand increased multicultural content in textbooks, while other state boards demanded an increase in patriotic and conservative content. And even as the textbook industry became increasingly consolidated, new phenomena in education, such as charter schools, home schooling, and strongly ideological and religious schools, provided opportunities for small publishing houses that could meet needs outside the mainstream.44 College Textbooks College textbook sales increased faster between 1940 and 1970 than did lowerlevel textbook sales. In 1958 sales of textbooks for kindergarten though twelfth grade were $149 million, while college text sales were $84 million. By 1990, however, college sales and lower-level text sales were each roughly $2 billion.45 The growth in college sales cannot be explained by birthrates alone. Between 1940 and 1950, college enrollment in the United States increased by 78 percent. Many of these new college students enrolled under the GI Bill of Rights, which Congress had passed in 1944 to provide economic support to veterans who wanted to continue their education. By 1956, when the program expired, 2.8 million veterans had used it to attend college (fig. 2.2).46 The GI Bill was only the beginning of an enormous expansion of federal aid to education. Direct federal student aid increased from $300 million in 1960 to $10 billion in 1980 and to nearly $20 billion in 1990. These funds made it possible for 38
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FIGURE 2.2. The GI Roundtable Series pamphlets were produced by the American Historical Association under the sponsorship of the Division of Information of the U.S. Army between 1943 and 1954. The topics were chosen to help motivate soldiers and officers in wartime to understand various international policy decisions and to look toward their future roles as civilians after the war had ended. The education provisions of the GI Bill of Rights were responsible in part for the increased enrollment in higher education and corresponding growth in the college textbook and academic library markets. U.S. Regional Depository, Library Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
more people to attend college just as social changes enhanced the educational aspirations of the children of GI Bill beneficiaries as well as women and members of minority groups. As the U.S. economy became more sophisticated, more jobs required advanced education. As a result of rising expectations and rising opportunities, the college population grew from 3.7 million in 1960 to 4.8 million in 1969 and 12 million in 1980. By the mid-1960s, postbaccalaureate education was expanding as well.47 Federal aid to education included increased funding for libraries, and institutional sales contributed significantly to publishers’ revenues. University presses especially benefited from library spending.48 Many of the publishers in the K–12 textbook market also invested in college textbooks. Most of the publishers grouped under the Simon & Schuster umbrella, for example, included both K–12 and college divisions. Other publishers, however, focused on the college and professional markets. John Wiley had for many years specialized in scientific and technical books as well as college- and graduate-level textbooks. The house felt the impact of the GI Bill almost instantly: it went from 99 employees in mid-1945 to 229 in 1948. Wiley merged with Interscience in 1961 and began to sell paperback editions of texts and technical books. Wiley also greatly expanded its international activity during the 1960s.49 W. W. Norton had established its college division in 1930 as a natural development of its nonfiction list. Initially, the college division was set up to sell trade books for classroom use. The firm soon began to develop a O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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genuine textbook program, buying the textbook lists of F. S. Crofts, which had acquired the textbook list of Alfred Knopf when that firm left the field in the 1930s. By the late 1950s, the firm’s college text business was flourishing; in fact, it remained the primary source of Norton’s growth throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps its best-known college text is the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which by 1990 had sold more than 20 million copies and had played a significant role in defining the American literary canon.50 In the 1990s and 2000s, the lucrative college textbook business fell on difficult times. As sales grew modestly or even declined, publishers raised prices, and both professors and publishers discovered that students often would simply decline to buy high-priced books for class. Furthermore, a booming national market for used textbooks emerged. The rise of online bookselling was a mixed blessing for publishers. Sites such as Amazon.com helped sell new books but also helped to flood the field with used books. More than in the K–12 sector, instructors in higher education turned to electronic delivery of class material, including electronic reserves and course Web sites. Though college students still seemed to prefer ink on paper for serious reading—often printed from downloaded files—the college “textbook” may go completely digital in the twentyfirst century.51
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Professional and Academic Publishing Fortune’s 1959 opinion notwithstanding, the fastest-growing segment of the publishing industry after World War II was not textbooks but professional and academic publishing, which includes books for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals; scientific, technical, and medical publishing (books and journals); and scholarly publishing. By 1990 sales of professional books were seventy times what they had been in 1960, having grown more than three times as fast as trade and textbook sales. Exports of scientific, technical, and medical books increased at the same rate, twice as fast as exports of textbooks.52 This expansion was based on the growth in higher education, which also underlay the growth in college textbook sales, as well as the emphasis on research, particularly in the sciences, that followed the Second World War. The Manhattan Project demonstrated the success of government-funded scientific research, and the Cold War created a sense of urgency about the nation’s scientific progress. The result was a vast infusion of federal funds into research and the establishment of national laboratories, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The federal government also increased funding of research in universities from $169 million in 1955 to $405 million in 1960, $1.6 billion in 1970, and $4.1 billion in 1980.53 Al40
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though most of this funding went to the sciences and engineering, the federal government also supported research and creative activities in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and other agencies. The professoriate grew in response to increased enrollments, specialization, and the availability of research funding. In 1950 there were roughly 190,000 academics; by 1970, there were 532,000.54 Increasingly, these faculty members were expected to do research and publish the results. Few of the scholarly books that were required for tenure had markets large enough to make them attractive to trade houses, and faculty members placed a high value on the peer review process employed by all university presses. With this pressure from the supply side of the equation, the number of university presses grew. Beginning in 1920, a new university press appeared nearly every year. Ten presses were founded between 1970 and 1974. The output of university presses rose from about 750 books annually in the 1950s to 2,300 annually in the 1960s and 5,600 annually in the mid-1980s.55 Similarly, the number of scholarly journals, the main vehicle for scientific publication, rose from 10,000 serial titles in 1951 to 188,500 in 1991. Many journals increased their frequency of publication or the number of pages per issue.56 Book sales also grew. Sales of professional books increased from $39 million in 1960 to nearly 700 times that in 1990. University press sales for those same years rose from $10 million to $246 million.57 The 1990s and 2000s were difficult years for university presses. The two key problems were declining support from their host institutions and loss of sales to college and university libraries. Academic libraries’ purchases of scholarly monographs fell dramatically as they allocated larger portions of their budgets to increasingly expensive journals and to electronic media. (See chapters 18 and 20.) By the mid-2000s, most university presses had learned to live in the new parsimonious economy of academe, though several venerable presses closed their doors. The central problem of the university press, however, remained. As Donna Shear, director of Northwestern University Press, told the Book Industry Study Group in 2006, “There is a concern that the publication of scholarly monographs, our core business, is not sustainable.”58 Increasingly, publishers of professional and scientific, technical, and medical books and journals were international conglomerates. Elsevier, a Dutch company that established an American branch in 1962, spent several hundred million dollars to acquire American professional, scientific, and academic book and journal publishers, including Congressional Information Service, University Publications of America, Praeger Publishers, medical and physics journals, and other periodicals. The British publisher Pearson acquired Addison-Wesley in 1988. Other international firms active in scientific and professional publishO RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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ing included Springer and Wolters Kluwer, which purchased J. B. Lippincott in 1990. Even university presses were not immune: the Iowa State University Press merged with Blackwell Publishing in 2000 and became a commercial house.59
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Trade Books and Paperbacks In the half century following World War II, all sectors of book publishing expanded, although the balance among them altered. Adult trade publishing was eclipsed in growth and profitability by textbooks and by scientific, technical, and professional books. Nevertheless, trade publishing remained the largest and most visible segment of the industry. In industry nomenclature, trade books include both fiction and nonfiction aimed at ordinary readers. In the lore of the publishing business, the archetypal trade book is a work of serious literature. In their memoirs, book editors and publishers love to reminisce about the small, chummy world of New York publishing in the 1950s, when W. H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, Edmund Wilson, or Vladimir Nabokov dropped off a manuscript or just dropped by for a chat or a drink.60 The book business was indeed an integral part of New York literary culture in the postwar era, as Harvey Teres and David Hall explain in chapter 13. But throughout the period, trade publishing focused much on “big books” by popular novelists—from James A. Michener to Stephen King to Dan Brown—and on a burgeoning array of specialty categories of nonfiction, such as “how to” books, hobby books, and religious books. (On religious publishing, which in some ways has been an industry unto itself, see chapter 21.) The trade sector thus depended on both the best seller and the niche book. In the early 2000s, for example, fiction sales were boosted tremendously by the best-selling Da Vinci Code, while nonfiction sales were plumped up by the inspirational guidebook The Purpose Driven Life, which sold 25 million copies.61 Meanwhile, at the other extreme, thousands of titles sold in the mere hundreds of copies. Despite the growing effort of commercial publishers to make every title profitable, that goal remained elusive throughout the postwar era.62 Book industry analysts Albert Greco, Clara Rodríguez, and Robert Wharton estimate that as late as 2005, seven of every ten front-list hardbound books failed financially.63 Despite advances in market research and management, publishers have never been able to tame an industry of “infinite variance,” where each title is, in some ways, a completely new product line. That is simply the nature of the business. For trade publishing and for what is sometimes called mass-market publishing, strategies for selling books were as important as publishing itself, and these strategies are explored in chapters 4 and 5. But perhaps the most important 42
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story in postwar American commercial publishing was the growth of the paperback, a story that deserves to be told in some detail. In the postwar era, paperback books were not a technological innovation but a marketing and selling revolution. The modern paperback industry in the United States began with the establishment of two companies. In 1939 Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books, with 49 percent of his funding provided by Richard Simon, M. Lincoln Schuster, and Leon Shimkin. This link to Simon & Schuster lent the new house respectability and provided access to a large hardcover list. In the same year Penguin Books, which Allen Lane had founded in England in 1935, opened its New York office, directed by Ian Ballantine.64 Early paperback books were priced at $.25; to succeed they had to be printed and sold in very large numbers. In the late 1940s, for example, Bantam’s smallest initial print run was 150,000 copies, far more than the usual hardcover bestseller sales of 100,000; some first printings ran as high as 500,000, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s mysteries had first printings as large as 1 million copies.65 The paperback houses used the distribution system developed by magazine publishers rather than relying on traditional booksellers. It was not until the late 1950s that bookstores began to stock paperbacks, and as late as 1960, 15 percent of them still did not have paperback departments. Paperbacks instead appeared on newsstands and in drugstores, variety stores, tobacconists, railroad stations, and other locations visited by thousands of people who might never have entered a bookstore. By 1942 Pocket Books sold its paperbacks in more than a thousand outlets nationwide. After the war, the number of outlets rose to more than a hundred thousand.66 The success of Pocket and Penguin encouraged others to enter the paperback business. Avon was launched in 1941 with financial backing from a distributor, the American News Company. Popular Library and Dell published their first paperbacks in 1943. Ian Ballantine left Penguin and founded Bantam in 1945, with the backing of a magazine company (Curtis Publishing) and Grosset & Dunlap; he launched Ballantine Books in 1952. Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright also left Penguin, acquiring the U.S. rights to existing Penguin and Pelican titles, and established New American Library (NAL) and two new imprints, Signet and Mentor, in 1948.67 Because of their visibility (enhanced by their cover art) and their new distribution system beyond traditional bookstores, paperbacks became targets of censorship campaigns launched by church committees, government censors, and the distributors themselves. Church and government censors targeted hardbacks and paperbacks alike, but censorship by the distributors was an unprecedented phenomenon. Certainly, individual booksellers from time to time might O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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decline to stock a book that they found objectionable. The independent news distributors, however, had much broader powers. When they objected to a book on the grounds of frank sexuality, depictions of race relations, or left-leaning politics, paperback publishers had to give serious thought to the viability of publication. Distributors raised objections to works by William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin, among others. The publishers responded with a mixture of self-censorship, deletion of offensive language (sometimes without the author’s knowledge), and reduced print runs.68 (On censorship, see chapters 8 and 17.) The paperback houses experimented with mixtures of original titles and reprints. At first, original titles were for the most part genre fiction—mysteries, science fiction, and westerns—reminiscent of the dime novels and pulp fiction of earlier eras. But the main business of Pocket, Penguin, and their later rivals was reprinting classic and current fiction and nonfiction. The paperback houses generally contracted with hardcover houses rather than with authors. They paid an advance against royalties that was divided equally between the author and the hardcover publisher. If the book sold enough copies, they made additional payments that were based on a percentage of the selling price. In the 1940s, this usually amounted to a penny per copy (4 percent). Paperback rights were sold for a limited period, usually five years.69 Trade publishers were initially leery of paperback publication, fearing that it would cheapen authors’ reputations and cut into revenues. Both authors and hardcover publishers were sometimes reluctant to see their books between the lurid paperback covers in favor in the 1940s and 1950s. Some hardcover houses even included the right to approve paperback covers in their reprint contracts. These objections evaporated as paperback houses issued both classic literature and high-quality contemporary work. A serious novelist might object to seeing her books on a rack next to a pulp western, but sharing a shelf with the Signet Shakespeare, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton was hardly embarrassing. By 1955 NAL was publishing not only Mickey Spillane but Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, and Ralph Ellison. By the late 1950s, having a paperback edition of one’s book had become a source of pride as well as income.70 Authors and publishers were also won over by profitability: although early advances had been in the range of $500 to $2,000, NAL paid a $35,000 advance for paperback rights to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead in 1951 and $101,000 for James Jones’s From Here to Eternity in 1953. Advances for potential best sellers rose rapidly. Mario Puzo received an advance of $410,000 for The Godfather in 1968, and several books broke the million-dollar mark in the early 1970s, including All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.71 44
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Sales of paperback books grew phenomenally. In 1947 approximately 95 million mass-market paperbacks were sold for slightly more than $14 million. Five years later, 270 million copies were sold for $40 million; in 1959 nearly 286 million copies sold for $67 million. At that point, dollar sales of paperbacks exceeded those of hardcover trade books for the first time, even though paperbacks were much cheaper than hardcover books.72 Prices of mass-market paperbacks, too, rose gradually, to $.35 in the mid1950s, to $1.00 in the early 1960s, to $2.00 and $3.00 in the 1970s, and to $4.00 and more in the 1980s.73 Paperback revenues quickly became important—if not essential—to hardcover houses. A 1952 newspaper columnist opined that without paperback royalties most New York trade houses would be operating in the red, and there is evidence that trade editors were consulting paperback publishers about manuscripts before offering contracts to authors. Roger Straus wrote in 1955 that “the difference between profit and loss for trade operations is the subsidiary income flow.”74 By 1956 the paperback business was significant enough for R. R. Bowker to begin issuing a separate Paperbound Books in Print.75 Paperback publishers did not rely completely on acquiring reprint rights. Even in the 1940s, Penguin had collaborated with hardcover publishers, before publication, on a few nonfiction titles. Fawcett’s Gold Medal titles were original books for which it contracted directly with authors, paying advances of $3,000. Hardcover houses objected strongly at the time, but by the late 1950s several paperback houses were signing contracts with authors for all book rights and then selling hardcover rights to trade publishers. Some paperback companies started their own hardcover houses: in 1963 Dell founded Delacorte, and NAL began a hardcover operation. Pocket Books started Trident Press as a joint venture with Simon & Schuster in 1961. Ballantine began its business by obtaining cloth and paperback rights and publishing both editions simultaneously.76 One field in which original paperback publication was critical was romance novels. Paperback publishers had always welcomed the works of well-known romance novelists, but the genre rose to prominence with the creation of formula novels written by unknown, often pseudonymous, writers who were paid a fee for their work rather than a royalty. These books were published monthly, often in series, with easily recognizable covers. The publisher rather than the author was the brand.77 Harlequin, a Canadian trade house, began importing formula romances from England in 1958 and by 1964 published nothing else. Boosted by television advertising and near-monopoly status, Harlequin’s 1979 U.S. sales were estimated at $63 million to $70 million. In 1980 Simon & Schuster launched a competing line, Silhouette Books, and that year Harlequin and Silhouette together pubO RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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lished fifteen titles a month, with an average print run of 120,000 copies. In 1985, when other houses had entered the romance market (most only briefly), the eight major romance lines were issuing 140 titles a month. In 1979 romance novels were estimated to represent 10 percent of the U.S. paperback market; by the late 1980s, the figure usually cited was between 40 and 50 percent of paperback unit sales.78 The balance between original titles and reprints shifted over time. In the late 1950s, about a third of the paperback novels published were new titles, and two-thirds of those were genre fiction. Nonfiction was divided nearly equally between new titles and reprints. By the mid-1970s, however, nearly half of the paperback fiction titles (trade and mass market) were originals, and original nonfiction titles outnumbered reprints by more than two to one.79 While fiction titles had outnumbered nonfiction significantly in the early years, the 1960s witnessed a sudden, dramatic shift. In 1959 publishers issued 1,924 paperback fiction titles and only 1,201 nonfiction titles. In 1962 the figures were 2,807 fiction titles and 6,115 nonfiction titles. The editors of the Bowker Annual speculated that the shift from fiction to nonfiction (in 1966 the figures were 2,987 fiction titles and 8,365 nonfiction) resulted from “increased usage of paperbacks in all levels of education, and the market for educational paperbacks of all kinds.”80 Indeed, one of the testimonials to the quality of paperback titles, and to their improved reputation, was the widespread course adoption of paperback titles, first in the college classroom and then in high schools and elementary schools. Although mass-market (rack-sized) paperback reprints of classic titles had found their way into the classroom fairly easily, it was trade paperbacks (books with larger formats, higher production standards, and higher prices) that made real inroads into the educational market. Trade paperbacks had been published alongside mass-market titles early on, with Penguin’s Pelican series (later NAL’s Mentor books) in the 1940s and the Doubleday Anchor series, which was launched in 1953. Anchor Books were priced at $.75 to $1.25, with print runs around 20,000, and the list was oriented toward college use. Knopf, Dutton, Harper, Oxford, and Viking followed suit with their Vintage, Everyman, Touchstone, Galaxy, and Compass imprints, as did many other publishers in the 1950s and 1960s. Bantam began issuing Pathfinder Editions for junior and senior high school students in 1963, and by the mid-1970s school sales accounted for at least 20 percent of Bantam’s sales.81 By the 1970s university presses were issuing trade paperbacks to encourage classroom adoption of their more accessible titles. Trade paperbacks also opened the doors of bookstores, which had been reluctant to sell mass-market paperbacks. By 1960, 85 percent of booksellers had 46
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paperback departments, but fewer than one-third of these had been in existence for six years or more and a quarter of them were less than two years old. All but 2 percent sold trade paperbacks, and three-quarters of the retailers that sold paperbacks carried only trade paperbacks.82 If paperback publishers were revolutionary in the 1940s, by the mid-1970s it was difficult to distinguish them from the rest of the industry. In 2006 the Book Industry Study Group finally recognized the blurring of publishers and formats and began to lump mass-market paperbacks into the trade book category.83 Paperback and hardcover houses often had common owners; at a minimum they shared directors and investors. Paperbacks were issued by textbook houses as well as trade houses, and many of those published by trade and mass-market divisions were used as texts and sold in college stores or to public schools. University and small presses published their own trade paperbacks or sold rights to trade houses. Most successful hardcover trade books appeared in paper eventually, and paperbacks were sold in virtually every bookstore. In the 2000s, the higher-quality trade paperback began to overtake the traditional mass-market paperback in sales. While mass-market paperback sales slowly declined, quality paperback sales, even for popular fiction titles, rose steadily to more than 400 million copies in 2005.84 But even as publishers moved increasingly toward trade paperbacks, the classic pocket-sized paperback introduced in the 1930s still had life in the new century. “It still is the best way to sell bestselling authors,” David Shanks, CEO of Penguin (USA), told the Book Industry Study Group. “And while we can also sell millions of copies of trade paperbacks, there is still something about the convenience and disposability of the mass market paperback. If you take it to the beach, you don’t care if sand gets into the pages; you can fold it over and jam it in your pocket. All those things are going to make the format stay around.”85 In the late 1940s it was possible to view the audiences for paperbacks and hardcover books as distinct, but after 1990 that was unthinkable. By reaching far greater numbers of readers in every corner of the nation, paperbacks helped to expand the market for all kinds of books, as well as to raise the financial stakes of publishing.
Consolidation Expansion and diversification, both abroad and within the United States, required capital, as did the higher advances and royalties demanded by authors and their agents as competition for best sellers increased.86 To raise this capital, many publishing houses either banded together through mergers or found new investors, often by selling publicly traded shares. Another motivation for O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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the sale of publishing houses was that the heads of the entrepreneurial houses established in the 1920s and 1930s were growing older and often found their children unwilling to take over the companies. Just as publishing houses were seeking new investors, the growth in revenues from expanded markets and subsidiary rights made book publishing more attractive to investors outside book publishing. The story was similar in other print media. (See chapters 6 and 7.) Mergers between publishing houses allowed the participants to expand and diversify. In many instances, despite the sale, the original owners retained editorial control and their own imprint. Examples of such mergers abound: in 1959 Random House sold 30 percent of its stock to the public, using this infusion of capital to buy Knopf in 1960 and Pantheon in 1961. Alfred and Blanche Knopf were approaching retirement, and their son Pat had left the firm in 1959 to form Atheneum. Pantheon’s founders, Kurt and Helen Wolff, had left the firm in 1960. For a time, both Knopf and Pantheon remained independent subsidiaries. Scribner and Atheneum merged in 1979 to expand the companies and raise capital. When Holt expanded its textbook business by acquiring Rinehart & Co. and John C. Winston in 1959, Rinehart’s heirs preferred cash to remaining in the book business. In 1975 the Macrae family sold E. P. Dutton to Elsevier to raise capital needed for growth.87 Other mergers within the industry were designed to ease diversification. Harper’s merged with Row, Peterson in 1967 to reenter the textbook market: buying an established firm was cheaper and faster than starting a new division.88 Several trade publishers purchased or merged with paperback houses rather than start their own divisions. During the 1970s, Random House bought Ballantine; Holt, Rinehart and Winston bought Bantam and Popular Library; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought Jove; Simon & Schuster bought Pocket; and Doubleday bought Dell. In a reverse move, the paperback firm Penguin bought Viking in 1975.89 During the 1960s, the need for capital and the opportunities of a rising stock market led publishing houses to sell stock to the public, as Random House had done. Wiley made its first public stock offering in 1962; Houghton Mifflin and Putnam’s both did so in 1967.90 The perceived desirability of these firms in the financial markets, along with the possibilities of using publishers’ intellectual property in other industries related to information and entertainment, led to a wave of acquisitions of book publishers by corporations that owned newspapers, magazines, and movie studios; by foreign publishers seeking to enter the U.S. market; and (more rarely) by companies outside the sphere of intellectual property pursuing diversification plans. Some mergers and acquisitions took place as straightforward sales of one company to another, but a few publishers experienced hostile takeovers. In 48
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many cases, discrete assets of one company—for example, the textbook division—were sold to another while the rest of the company continued to be held by the previous owners or was sold to other buyers. Alternatively, an entire company might be purchased and then parceled out. One example is Meredith, which purchased Appleton, Century, Crofts and then sold off its trade assets, keeping the educational divisions.91 Some houses were bought by investment bankers or holding companies and were later sold whole or piecemeal. Others, like Simon & Schuster, were bought back by earlier owners. Many companies, or parts of companies, changed hands repeatedly. Despite the confusion, however, some patterns emerge.92 First, with few exceptions, publishers sold their assets willingly. A need for expansion capital, imminent retirement, and uninterested heirs led to the sale of entrepreneurial firms such as Harry N. Abrams (1966) and New American Library (1963) to Times Mirror, the Scribner companies to Macmillan (1984), and Simon & Schuster to Gulf & Western (1975).93 Corporate owners sold publishing assets that did not generate expected profits or that ceased to fit their mission. For example, many of the technology companies that had bought textbook publishers in the 1960s had sold them off twenty years later. Second, although sales of book publishers were no longer limited to the circle of other book publishers, most firms were acquired by companies with related interests. Newspaper and magazine publishers—Times-Mirror, Hearst, Field Enterprises, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Newhouse, Time Inc., the New York Times, and Esquire—were all extremely active in book publishing acquisitions. Entertainment groups (movie studios and television networks) also entered book publishing via acquisitions: MCA-Universal, Gulf & Western (Paramount), ABC, Capital Cities, and Warner Brothers all bought publishing houses. Over time, it became difficult to distinguish between news and entertainment companies as they merged; Time Warner and News Corp. are prime examples. Driving these acquisitions was a perception of synergy: a belief that companies combining book publishing, television, movies, and news could exploit intellectual property more profitably than could separate corporations. The benefits of this strategy remain elusive. According to Jason Epstein, some of the entertainment conglomerates that acquired trade houses in the 1970s and 1980s, “deluded by the false promise of synergy, eventually found them a burden on their balance sheets and disgorged them.”94 Under current accounting methods, a subsidiary’s properties are most profitably sold to the highest bidder, whether within the conglomerate or outside. Thus, for example, the paperback or movie rights to a novel may be put up for auction and end up in the hands of a competitor. This has eased the concerns of authors and agents but has not permitted conglomerates to exploit synergistic possibilities fully.95 O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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Third, foreign companies found that the most efficient way to enter the U.S. publishing market was to acquire American firms. The U.S. offices that European publishers had opened immediately after the war did not expand as rapidly as the parent companies wished. By the 1970s, acquisition seemed a better route. Bertelsmann and the von Holtzbrinck group (Germany), Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer (Netherlands), International Thomson (Canada), and Pearson and Collins (England) became owners of very large trade houses, scholarly and professional firms, textbook companies, and book clubs. Finally, a small but culturally significant segment of U.S. publishing remained independent. (See chapter 12.) Of the large commercial firms, Wiley and McGraw-Hill are family-controlled and W. W. Norton is employee-owned. Many small presses start up every year, and a handful survive and grow (in some cases to be sold to larger houses and conglomerates). The largest group of independent publishers is the nonprofit houses: the university presses, museums, research institutes, historical societies, and academic societies. These publishers grew in number and expanded their output from after the war through the 1960s and, after slowing down in the 1970s, grew rapidly again in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, the Book Industry Study Group decided to track down as many small and part-time publishers as possible. They surveyed more than 85,000 U.S. holders of ISBN numbers and estimated that 62,815 publishers were active. In 2004 75 percent of these had revenues less than $50,000 from publishing, most of them with only a handful of titles in print.96 Although they represent a small economic segment of the industry, small presses win a disproportionate number of awards and are responsible for the dissemination of most of the new knowledge in science, humanities, and the arts. In addition, small publishing houses (both nonprofit and commercial) catering to the tastes of minority groups have prospered in their niche markets. These include Arte Publico and the Bilingual Press, which publish Hispanic literature in English and Spanish, and a variety of African American publishing houses.97 (See chapters 16 and 22.) Although consolidation has put enormous pressure on independent houses, these presses have benefited in some ways from the phenomenon. As university subventions vanished, beginning in the 1970s, university presses began to pay more attention to titles that might appeal to an audience outside the academy. State university presses increased their production of regional titles, and many presses ventured into fiction and popular nonfiction, including books that might once have been snapped up by trade houses. In the 1980s, owing in part to the Supreme Court’s Thor decision about the valuation of inventory, many trade houses allowed slow-selling titles to go out of print.98 These houses also experienced bottom-line pressures to raise the minimum sale expected of each 50
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title. University presses benefited from these moves by acquiring reprint rights to out-of-print books, and they were able to acquire titles that met their standards for quality but sold better than academic monographs. Trade houses see sales of 5,000 copies as inadequate; university presses see them as a godsend. Entering the “low end” of the trade book market has helped offset shrinking sales of monographs. It has also led university presses to venture into developmental editing, with editors and authors working closely to transform manuscripts with narrow scholarly appeal into books that are accessible to larger audiences. By 2005 about 20 to 30 percent of university press titles were trade books, often on regional subjects.99 Three concerns have been raised persistently about consolidation in book publishing. The first is that its products will lose their individuality, the variety of books available to readers will diminish, and the quality of literature will suffer. There is little evidence that this has happened: good books are still being published along with bad, no matter how one defines those adjectives. Using an econometric index of market concentration, Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton found that, even in the consumer sector, the largest book publishers had no monopolistic market power in the 2000s.100 Even within the conglomerates, many smaller imprints retain high editorial standards, and independent houses are prospering. (University press cutbacks in scholarly book publication grew from economic pressures, but not from simple commercialization, as Thompson and Cmiel explain in chapters 20 and 18.) Technology is making it possible to keep books “in print” long after their sales cease to justify warehouse space, and publishers as well as authors are experimenting with electronic books, either downloaded as e-books or printed “on demand.”101 (See chapter 3.) The second concern is that concentration in the media erodes democracy by allowing a small number of corporations to control the dissemination of information and opinion. Although this argument is more frequently and convincingly made in connection with newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting, it is also relevant to book publishing. Books have been rejected because they would offend corporate owners, influential politicians, or major investors. Other books have been accepted as payback for political and corporate favors. It would be difficult to argue that editorial decisions—at least those relating to topical titles—are unaffected by corporate ownership. And critical memoirists such as André Schiffrin tell story after story of the new publishing house owners who invariably prefer schlock to quality literature.102 The third concern relates to the quality of life within publishing houses. Growth and consolidation have indeed had human costs. Jobs have been lost, and the pressure for financial accountability has increased. Discontent among publishing employees uncomfortable with the rapid pace of change is underO RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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standable. It is also rampant among lawyers, doctors, bankers, accountants, and other professionals whose industries have been revolutionized over the course of their careers. Bottom-line pressures exist in independent houses, too, as well as in nonprofits: perhaps economic trends other than consolidation are the culprits. On the other hand, those who have remained in the business often report personal and professional gains: higher salaries and better benefits, as well as access to capital and to corporate marketing, sales, and technological resources.103 Critics of publishing often couch their concerns about the trends of the late twentieth century in terms of a lost golden age, a time (usually between 1920 and 1960) when publishers did not worry about the bottom line, when good books reached an eager public with no obstacles, and when editors did not need to know the meaning of the word “spreadsheet.” There never was such a time. Publishers have always watched the bottom line, even if they feigned indifference. As Cass Canfield explained, “No matter what delight he may take in literature, a publisher is in business to make a profit. The better he is at figures, the more he can indulge his literary tastes.”104 The memoirs of the publishers of this golden age are filled with lavish homes, well-stocked wine cellars, luxury travel, and expensive hobbies. Some of this luxury was accumulated at the expense of employees with low salaries and no retirement plans and of authors whose royalties did not pay their rent.105 Failure to care about the bottom line is not healthy for the publisher, for authors, or for readers: the book that is not sold is not read. Publishing—at both extremes of the cultural range and everywhere in between—has always been a business. Corporate histories dating back as far as the nineteenth century describe partnerships in which one person was the “money man.” One of the Harper brothers was always so designated; Victor Weybright was balanced by Kurt Enoch; Simon and Schuster had Leon Shimkin; and Bennett Cerf (himself keenly aware of the bottom line) was backed up by Donald Klopfer. By the 1950s, publishers were hiring business school graduates or sending their executives off to earn masters of business administration degrees (MBAs) simply because these skills were required to manage the large, expanding enterprises that publishing houses had become. “In order to survive amid change and takeovers, small operations such as Wiley had to jettison their comfortable reserve of established gentility and adopt with considerable speed the ways of entrepreneurial business.”106 Growing awareness of the bottom line was a function of success. The consolidation of publishing may have exaggerated concern about the commercial side of the industry, or at least made it more obvious, but it did not create it. 52
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Publishing Faces the Twenty-first Century
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In the early years of the twenty-first century, U.S. book publishing was adapting to many of the same changes that the rest of the economy had experienced. Publishing had joined other industries in becoming international both in the scope of its enterprises and in its ownership (fig. 2.3). Technological advance had been rapid, leading publishers to explore the uncertain market for electronic books, books printed on demand, electronic journals and magazines, and online reference books. Like other companies, publishers were to a far greater extent owned by large corporations rather than by families or individuals. Most houses published trade, text, and children’s books, rather than specializing. Yet, because publishing is a cultural as well as a commercial enterprise, many of these changes took forms in the book world that were different from those in other industries and raised different concerns. The internationalization of publishing, unlike many other industries, depends upon shared language and cultural assumptions. Thus, foreign acquisition of U.S. publishing houses has raised little concern about cultural domination or influence, and the impact on domestic houses has been mostly financial and managerial rather than editorial. Perhaps because the English language and American culture enjoy worldwide dominance, Americans have experi-
FIGURE 2.3. Philip Roth’s Plot against America in Dutch translation, another aspect of the internationalization of the American book. Courtesy of Milton Glaser. O RGA N I Z AT I O N O F T H E B O O K P U B L I S H I NG I NDU ST RY
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enced little anxiety about foreign influence. Indeed, U.S. cultural critics have welcomed such influence—for example, the increased availability of foreign literature in translation—as a positive force enhancing diversity and enriching American culture. Corporate and conglomerate ownership has had less impact on publishing than on other industries. Most publishing houses are still organized, at the editorial level, as principalities within an empire: the true amalgamation that has taken place in other industries, such as banking, has not yet occurred. The output of the industry as a whole, and of each publishing conglomerate, remains diverse, and smaller houses spring up and prosper by catering to smaller markets. This diversity has flourished despite consolidation in the retail market and has benefited from technological advances in production and marketing. (See chapters 3 and 12.) By the early twenty-first century, more than 200,000 new titles were published annually in the United States, most in minuscule press runs by small publishers, organizations, and even individuals.107 Perhaps most remarkable is the invisibility of the vast changes in the industry to the consumer. Books have not changed in physical form over the past fifty years. Paperbacks and case-bound books resemble one another more closely than they did at midcentury, and the spines of books bear many of the same colophons that readers saw fifty years ago. Readers still have more good books—both fiction and nonfiction—available to them than they can possibly read. Despite the growth of new media, books remain central to education at all levels. Political and cultural debates still rage and are often conducted in competing books. The most serious concerns about the survival of books arise from technological change and changes in reading habits, rather than from changes in the nature of the publishing industry. (See chapter 28.) In this period of rapid growth and structural change, publishing—and the book—have proved remarkably resilient.
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CHAPTER 3
Book Production Technology since 1945 Patrick Henry
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.
.
.
The rise of mass communication in the West began with the mechanical reproduction of books. So pioneering was the work of Johannes Gutenberg that the book manufacturing technologies he devised in the fifteenth century would persist in something very like their original forms for five centuries. Mechanization and other technical improvements would, of course, make the process vastly more productive. But in 1945 the underlying method—the transfer of ink to paper from an image carrier consisting primarily of metal type—was little changed from the technique Gutenberg had used to complete the 180-copy run of his famous “42-Line Bible” in 1455 (fig. 3.1).1 The postwar era, however, saw the introduction of new printing technologies that would escort the legacy of Gutenberg’s workshop into an honored but overdue retirement. Photomechanical typesetting, offset lithography, desktop publishing, automated bookbinding, and digital printing were the key developments that propelled book manufacturing from a lingering past into new technological and market realities of the twenty-first century. Book printing remains what Gutenberg’s genius equipped it to become: an exercise in mass production. Nonetheless, books continue to resist being classified as mass-produced items because of the labor-intensive custom handling that the preparation of each book entails.2 Today, the digitization of the book manufacturing workflow has clarified our understanding of what “mass production” enables us to do. We now see that “1 million copies” of a book—or, for that matter, of any printed piece—does not necessarily mean 1 million copies produced in one massive print run or even in several large runs. Nor does it mean, as it invariably did until recently, that the content of each unit in the run must be identical to that of every other unit. In the early twenty-first century, the individualized reproduction of books is the digital companion of mass manufacturing. As intellectual currents and book market trends require, we can opt for traditional, high-volume output, or we can print 1 million copies in “runs of one.” We can continue to put standardized
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FIGURE 3.1. Of 1957 vintage, the original Heidelberg platen press was a platform for letterpress printing—the same method developed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455. Although letterpress was virtually synonymous with printing for five centuries, it was eclipsed by offset lithography in the years following World War II.
editions of “best sellers” into the hands of as many like-minded readers as we can cater to, or we can treat a book as a template, giving it multiple versions as varied as the needs and tastes of each discriminating purchaser. We can raise “out of print” titles from used-book limbo to new life in the “perpetual backlist” of digital print-on-demand.3 Even with a strong dash of postwar optimism, none of these capabilities would have seemed remotely possible to printers and publishers in 1945. The story of the transformation of book production since then is the story of rapid change in the three fundamental stages of all printing: prepress (preparatory steps, including typography and page creation), press (the deposition of ink onto paper), and postpress (the assembly of finished books in the bindery). This chapter surveys the key events and innovations.
Prepress: Typography In the beginning of modern book history was the word—the typeset word that master compositors assembled, one handpicked letter at a time, until the introduction of the Linotype line-casting machine in 1886. The Linotype was the world’s first commercially successful automated typesetting system. It revolutionized the production of printed matter by finally rendering obsolete a craft that Gutenberg’s compositors would have recognized as their own had they 56
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FIGURE 3.2. The Compugraphic CompuWriter II is representative of the computerized phototypesetters, also known as “cold-type” systems, which came into use in the 1960s and 1970s and became obsolete by the mid-1980s.
been able to glimpse 400 years into the future.4 Quickly establishing itself as the preferred method of text composition for high-volume printing, the Linotype did not surrender the distinction until the last such machine was manufactured in 1977. One reason for the Linotype’s long reign was the fact that its output—lines of type automatically cast from molten or “hot” metal—was perfectly suited to letterpress printing, a process that dominated presswork as completely as the Linotype came to dominate text composition. Around 1950, however, a new technique demonstrated that characters could be formed by projecting beams of light through outlines of letterforms onto negative film or photoreceptive paper. This “cold-type” process replaced the hot-metal Linotype’s brass molds with glass plates, film strips, and discs containing character sets that could be manipulated with lenses, prisms, and other photo-optical components. Cold-type technologies, also known as phototypesetters and photomechanical composition systems, could be operated from typewriter-like keyboards enhanced with auxiliary controls for justification, centering, and other typographic functions. They proved readily adaptable to emerging methods of automated data processing, such as programming by punched cards or perforated tapes.5 By the mid-1960s, electronic systems that formed letters on cathode ray tubes (television screens) had begun to surpass older systems that relied on physical character sets such as film strips or discs. Computerization was to follow: the first microprocessor-controlled photocomposition system appeared in 1975 (fig. 3.2). The advanced phototypesetting systems of the 1970s and 1980s remained in the vanguard of electronic prepress until personal computers (PCs) triggered typography’s next and most dramatic leap forward. Personal computers functioning as typesetting devices were the leading enablers of the desktop publishing “revolution.” As PCs acquired graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which were simplified iconic displays with which ordinary B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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people could interact, they also developed the characteristic dubbed WYSIWYG: “what you see is what you get.” This meant that originators could compose or edit text in the typographic style in which the book would be printed—and see the result in real time on the screen.6 Fonts (type families) and font specifications (point size, face, etc.) could be selected and changed at will. Most significantly, text entry had to be performed only once: no longer was it necessary to rekey in order to turn original content into typeset output. The two phases of composition—the editorial and the typographical—had become one. Early WYSIWYG typesetting on PCs did not offer nearly as fine a degree of typographic control as high-end systems, and the output devices available to the first do-it-yourself typesetters (low-resolution dot-matrix and laser printers) were equally limited. Many professional typographers scoffed at the fledgling technology, insisting that nothing emanating from a PC could be accepted as “real” type. Nevertheless, desktop typesetting was on its way to democratizing the publishing process by making it possible for anyone (in theory, at least) not only to create and compose matter for publication but to format it for output to print—all without the need for specialized, expensive equipment or the expert assistance of professionals.
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Prepress: Page Creation Setting type is but one part of the production phase known as “prepress.” Prepress encompasses all of the steps necessary to prepare books and other publications for printing. In prepress, pages are designed and formatted; illustrations and color are added to the page layouts; impositions (page groupings for the press) are set up; image carriers—graphic arts film and printing plates—are prepared; and proofs are reviewed and approved. Until desktop publishing began to digitize this sequence of events, prepress was an analog process: a traditional workflow in which pages, images, and colors were represented by conventional materials such as paste-ups, mechanicals, tissue overlays, and chips or swatches denoting color.7 Each step was the task of a craftsperson responsible for completing only that step before handing off the job to the next craftsperson in the “production chain.” In a typical analog prepress workflow, a typesetter would prepare galleys— strips of formatted text set in columns—for review by editors and proofreaders. A production artist would then assemble final galleys into a “mechanical,” an art board containing the layout, type elements, rules, borders, picture boxes, and color instructions for the page or page spread being produced. The mechanical, now deemed “camera ready,” then went to the camera department to be photographed for film negatives. 58
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Screening—the conversion of photographic images within the layout into a pattern of printable “halftone” dots on the negatives—also took place in the camera department. Color separation, the breaking down of an original color image into its “process color” components—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—was yet another job for camera operators in the days before electronic prepress.8 Each separation negative corresponded to a separate plate and a color of ink on a printing press, which would recombine the process colors in a lithographic approximation of the color “gamut” (chromatic range) of the original image. The negative of the mechanical, containing the image of a nearly complete page or spread, would then be combined with negatives for photos, advertisements, and other page elements in a process called stripping. Assembled as film “flats,” the pages were imposed, or arranged, in groups called “signatures” that would cause the pages to appear in their correct reading order when the printed signatures were folded, collated with other signatures, and trimmed. After proofing—the preparation and review of facsimiles of the finished product—workers in the plate department transferred the page images from the films to photosensitive plate material using an exposure unit known as a vacuum frame. With plate development and processing, analog prepress was complete. The analog prepress workflow, although it is rarely used now, is worth examining because it illustrates the numerous process steps that can be combined almost completely in the work of a single desktop publisher seated at a PC configured as a graphics workstation.9 The workflow remains, but its former analog components—mechanicals and films—have almost completely disappeared. In the most advanced production scenarios, no part of the job exists in any tangible form whatever until the finished product—the printed and bound book— emerges from the end of a computer-controlled, push-button, on-demand book assembly line. In prepress, almost nothing is as it was before the dividing line in print history known as the “desktop publishing revolution” of the 1980s.
Digital Prepress Personal computers are the fundamental tools of electronic publishing. Before PCs came into universal use, however, electronic page creation was the province of a technology called CEPS: color electronic prepress systems. A CEPS device was a computerized platform for assembling page elements, color-correcting digitized images, and outputting the resulting data file to a film recorder (a unit to generate the film from which the printing plates would be made). The first CEPS was demonstrated in 1979, and although the technology initially was well B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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received, adoption of the complex, costly devices would be limited to large printing and publishing companies with high-end requirements.10 Digital prepress thus remained beyond the reach of most originators and producers of print. But by the early 1980s, the features that had permitted “microcomputers,” as small computing platforms then were called, to penetrate consumer markets also were helping PCs to converge with several other emerging technologies for digital print workflows. A GUI-enhanced personal computer running print production software and driving a laser-powered output device was no longer a generic home or office PC but a “dedicated” desktop publishing workstation—a do-it-yourself substitute for a CEPS. With the aid of a special computer language enabling workstations and output devices to share digital pages freely, desktop publishing began to win acceptance as a viable alternative to, if not yet as a wholesale replacement for, the analog methods that had defined prepress for decades. Generally accepted as the birth year for desktop publishing, 1985 was a year of confluence for several independently developed desktop publishing technologies: the graphical PC, then represented by the Apple Macintosh; page layout software for PCs, with Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker in the vanguard; the first output devices for pages composed on PCs, specifically Apple’s LaserWriter laser printer and Linotype-Hell’s Linotronic L100 film imagesetter; and PostScript, a device-independent computer language that formatted pages for desktop production and acted as a kind of universal translator for their exchange among PostScript-compatible systems.11 What it all meant was that anyone with access to these tools could now learn to create and output pages without professional assistance.12 After 1985, printing presses, bindery equipment, and other kinds of manufacturing support still would be needed to mass-produce books and other printed matter. But page creation had moved irrevocably to the personal computer, challenging and ultimately supplanting nearly everything that did not fit the newly minted definition of “desktop publishing.” The most radical innovation of desktop publishing was the “electronic mechanical”—a digital file incorporating all of the design elements contained in a traditional paste-up. Now all page components could be contained as digital files on diskettes and other storage media. Eventually, high-speed data telecommunications would eliminate the need for physical media of any kind, breaking the mechanical free of the final link to its analog past. Three basic kinds of software are needed to generate electronic mechanicals. Page layout applications give the document its “geometry” or dimensional structure, including number of columns per page, column width and depth, formats for repeating elements such as running heads and folio numbers, posi60
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tioning of illustrations, and measurements for trim and bleed. (“Bleed” is edgeto-edge sheet inking, as seen in paperback book covers and in color ads in magazines.) These applications are also powerful tools for setting and manipulating type, offering in their menus and toolbars all of the capabilities of what was once known as “high end” typography. Aldus PageMaker, the breakthrough page layout application of 1985, has been supplanted by QuarkXPress (1987) and Adobe InDesign (2000) for professional publishing. Creative graphic software enables page designers to “paint” with pixels (picture elements) and “draw” with vectors (mathematical equations describing points, curves, outlines, and fills). With the help of illustration software, an artist tracing a design on a digitizing tablet with a touch-sensitive electronic pen can turn a computer monitor into a “canvas” for giving shape and color to almost any aesthetic inspiration. Computer art created in this way can be saved in file formats that permit the art to be imported into digital page layouts. The leading software packages in the “paint” category are Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW Graphics Suite are the products of choice among “draw” applications. When image-editing software first appeared, the traditional roles of the darkroom specialist, the photo retoucher, and the color separator almost immediately began to fade. Image-editing applications can repair, alter, color-correct, and reformat scanned photographs and other digital artwork to be incorporated into page layouts. The desktop software, which can also display and output color images as separations, is universally used to prepare photos for printing in books and magazines. Adobe Photoshop, introduced in 1990, is preeminent among image-editing applications and generally is regarded as the standard for professional publishing. In digital prepress workflows, every component of the page either originates as a data file or becomes one. Hard copy, if present at all, exists only to be digitized with the help of a transformative device called a scanner. A scanner measures image densities on the surfaces of photographs, transparencies, and other hard-copy originals with a high-intensity beam of light that is directed by prisms and lenses onto electronic sensors within the scanning unit. The light, having passed through red, green, and blue (RGB) filters that separate the scanned image into its printable color components, is converted by the sensors into digital data that can be color-corrected, resized, and screened for halftone output. The scanned image then is ready to be modified with image-editing software or imported straight into a page layout. Electronic scanners began to emerge in the late 1940s, and by 1949 Fortune magazine had printed the first commercially scanned and color-separated photo in one of its issues.13 The first scanners, analog devices designed to conB O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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vert optical information into electrical signals that could be used to drive film exposure units, were in general use by the late 1960s. The first examples of the next generation of scanners appeared in 1982 and were equipped with microcomputers and image-processing software. These devices converted the optical information directly into digital data that could be stored and manipulated or exchanged with other prepress systems. Today all scanning is digital, and many desktop scanners—the first of which appeared in 1989—are powerful enough to rival the capabilities of their much larger and more expensive predecessors. In the days before desktop, files were generated in equipment-specific “proprietary” formats that could be processed only by the systems that created them. Missing was a way to homogenize digital publishing workflows so that the content of a job, not the platform of its origin, would be the paramount consideration. Leading a consortium of developers, Adobe Systems granted publishers this boon with its introduction of PostScript in 1984. PostScript is a “page description language” (PDL), a coding scheme that expresses page elements including layouts, text, and images in universally computable form. When publishing software containing PostScript “drivers” sends pages to a PostScript-compatible output device, the pages will be imaged correctly whether the device is a low-resolution desktop laser printer or a high-resolution digital platesetter.14 Software and hardware manufacturers, seeing device-independent file structuring as the key to a dramatic expansion of the market for desktop publishing, eagerly licensed Adobe’s groundbreaking PDL technology and soon made it the standard for digital production workflows. Adobe leapfrogged its own milestone in 1993 by publishing the first specifications for a new PostScript-based file structure called Portable Document Format (PDF). Originally conceived as a tool for reducing paper clutter in office environments, PDF makes it possible to produce and share exact digital replicas of any page created on any computer.15 An application called Adobe Acrobat “distills” pages from PostScript created by other software into PDF files that can be opened and read by anyone with a copy of Adobe Reader, a free utility that resides on nearly every personal computer. Printers and desktop publishers alike found PDF to be a significant improvement over PostScript because PDF files are smaller, more predictable, and more manipulable than those generated in the original PDL. Today PDF, which also can serve as a platform for multimedia production, is the basis of the most widely used workflows for professional publishing.
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Press: Presswork for Book Printing
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Digital workflows take tangible form in the pressroom, where the process that once dominated all forms of printing has passed almost entirely into antiquity. Today, letterpress printing is but rarely called upon to render the service that it provided without competition for more than 500 years: the reproduction of typeset pages. By 1945 it was apparent to many in the printing industry that an alternative technique, offset lithography, had the potential to rival if not displace letterpress (fig. 3.3). Offset lithography has deep historical roots of its own. Alois Senefelder, credited with inventing lithography in 1798, found that a planographic (flat) printing surface—initially, a smooth piece of limestone sketched upon with a greasy crayon—could be treated with a solution of water and chemicals to make the surface receptive to ink in image areas only. Pressing a sheet of paper to the inked stone transferred the crayoned image cleanly to the paper in a process that could be repeated as often as desired by renewing the solution and the ink. “Direct lithography” from stone image carriers grew in popularity throughout the nineteenth century because richly colored prints could be made by successive “pulls” from the stone in different colors of ink. In offset lithography, introduced in 1906, the first impression of the image was made on a rubber blanket and then transferred, or “offset,” from the blanket to the paper. The result was clear, sharp print produced with considerably less wear and tear on the image carrier than in the direct method.16 Metal plates eventually replaced the stone, and by the 1930s offset lithography—originally known as photolithography because its photosensitive plates
FIGURE 3.3. A sheetfed offset lithographic press such as this Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105 prints multiple images of pages on precut sheets of paper. Each tower or printing unit lays down a different ink or coating on the substrate. B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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FIGURE 3.4. For high-volume production, an offset press printing a continuous web or roll of paper at very high speeds—up to 3,000 feet per minute—is the most cost-effective solution. This MAN Roland Rotoman S web press is equipped with a hot-air oven (dark structure at right) to set the wet ink after the web emerges from the printing units.
were exposed and developed like camera prints—had established the process as a viable alternative to letterpress. Newspaper printers began to adopt offset lithography in the 1940s, setting the stage for their subsequent embrace of photocomposition—a typesetting method ideally mated with offset lithography because of their common photographic nature. As other printers followed suit, the two processes started to outpace the combination of hot-metal typesetting and letterpress printing that had dominated print production for centuries. Accelerating the evolution of offset lithography was the introduction in 1951 of the presensitized plate, an improvement that greatly simplified the task of preparing image carriers for printing. A breakthrough application in book publishing involving both offset lithography and photocomposition took place in 1957 with the publication of The Wonderful World of Insects, the first offset-printed book in which the complete text was typeset photographically.17 Offset lithography may be sheetfed, printing on sheets of paper cut to standard sizes, or web, running continuous rolls (webs) of paper at high speeds (fig. 3.4). “Heatset” web presses incorporate hot-air dryers and “chill rollers” to set the wet inks. If the printing is done on a “perfecting” press, both sides of the sheet or web will be printed in a single pass through the machine. Signatures printed “straight” (one surface at a time) are allowed to dry before being turned and sent through the press again with another set of plates for the second side. In either case, printing from plates mounted on cylinders is the most common method, although “belt presses”—machines that print two sides from plates mounted on a moving belt—still are used for short-run, single-color book work.18 64
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Conventional or “wet” offset lithography requires the segregation of image areas from nonimage areas on the printing plate so that the ink adheres to the former while being repelled from the latter. The separation is maintained with “fountain solution,” a mixture of water and chemicals used to dampen the plate. Because of the unique chemical nature of the process, lithographic printing could be unstable and unpredictable during the press run. After World War II, however, significant improvements in fountain chemistry, plate construction, and press design eliminated many of the variables. An alternative approach, “waterless” lithography, became possible in the early 1960s with the introduction of specially designed printing plates that did not need fountain chemistry to control the dispersion of ink on the plate surface. Offset lithography went on to show that it could easily accommodate the electronic and digital advances that would complete printing’s transformation from an art to a science. Nothing better epitomizes offset lithography’s digital adaptability than its integration with computer-to-plate (CTP) technology (fig. 3.5).19 CTP made its first appearance in 1981 as a black-and-white process for newspapers. By 1990 the technology had improved to a point where it was suitable for fine printing and four-color presswork. The process sends page files created on the desktop to devices that expose them onto the surfaces of plates responsive to laser energy. In a CTP workflow, the high-end output device—a freestanding exposure unit known as a platesetter—becomes almost as accessible to the desktop publisher as her personal laser printer or her inkjet color proofer. Because they eliminate all film from prepress, CTP workflows also accelerate press makereadies by delivering ready-to-run plates in a fraction of the time required by analog (film-based) platemaking routines. A CTP-served press at the “back end” of a digital prepress workflow represents the current technical zenith of offset lithography but not its final applica-
FIGURE 3.5. In a computer-to-plate (CTP) workflow, page images are exposed onto metal plates directly from digital data. The plates then are mounted on an offset lithographic press for printing. Beginning in the 1990s, CTP made it possible to eliminate analog film from image reproduction. Following the introduction of CTP devices that use thermal plate setting, film was fast disappearing from publication and commercial printing. B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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tion. Plateless litho cylinders with reimageable, “spray on” printing surfaces, electrocoagulative imaging, and rewritable “e-inks” are among the emerging technologies that will help to refit the process for its next century of service to the published word.
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Postpress: Bindery Techniques Printing’s clearest remaining links to its predigital past are seen in the bindery: the “postpress” environment where ink-covered sheets of paper become books, magazines, catalogs, and other products. Although digital workflows have begun to encompass some bindery procedures, the basic techniques for the final assembly of printed pieces remain mechanical processes. Sheets from the press must be folded into signatures and trimmed to size, collated with or inserted into other signatures in the proper order, and fastened together. Bookbinding techniques are many and varied, but three general methods are most commonly used: case binding for hardcover books, perfect binding for softcover books, and mechanical binding, which uses metal or plastic hardware to assemble books with rigid or flexible covers. To make a case-bound book, trimmed and gathered signatures are “rounded and backed”—flexed for proper alignment and fit—and glued to gauze and backing paper attached to the fabric and board that form the hard cover. Signatures in a case-bound book may be sewn together to give the volume greater durability and a longer shelf life. Perfect binding for softcover books is simpler: the gathered signatures are roughened on the folded edge and pressed against the inner surface of the cover spine, to which adhesive has been applied. In mechanical binding, wire loops, plastic combs, or other hardware pass through holes drilled in pages and cover materials, creating easy-to-handle books that can lie flat when opened. Once regarded as automation resistant, postpress is losing its traditional dependence upon manual labor.20 The key to postpress automation is the disposition of the equipment, which determines whether “finishing”—the assembly of book components—will be done off-line or in-line. Finishing takes place “offline” when the bindery equipment is not connected to the press. In an off-line finishing operation, workers must transport printed sheets from the press to the bindery and then from station to station within the bindery. Off-line finishing is the norm in printing plants where the pressroom and the bindery are separate departments. It also is the method used when the printed job is sent out to be finished by an external service provider known as a trade bindery. In-line finishing, the most automated form of postpress, is a natural extension of web offset printing, in which signatures are folded and cut automatically by attachments to the press. Digital printing also lends itself to in-line finishing 66
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FIGURE 3.6. The Océ VarioStream 7000 family is part of a digital book publishing platform that has transformed the business model for book publishing today. Courtesy of Océ North America, Inc.
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with chains of computer-controlled devices that can make the production of books almost as simple as pressing a button.21 In a digitally integrated production line, “book blocks”—stacks of pages from the delivery end of the digital press—proceed to a binding unit, thence to a trimmer, and finally to equipment for packing, wrapping, and shipping or mailing the finished pieces (fig. 3.6). In 2004, at a trade exhibition for digital printing in New York City, seven manufacturers collaborated in the presentation of a fully integrated, 100 percent automated book-manufacturing line that could produce one 200-page softcover book every five seconds, from blank paper to printing and binding. By reducing the labor-intensiveness of bindery operations and accelerating their output, inline finishing has brought new efficiency and profitability to postpress for book publishing.
Digitally Manufactured Books The pressman’s ink-stained apron met the lab technician’s spotless white coat with the introduction of the first practical digital printing presses in the early 1990s. Since then, the most successful of these devices for book publishing have been based on either of two imaging processes: electrophotography, also known as xerography; and ink-jet printing. Electrophotography is an elaboration of the original electrostatic copying technology patented by Chester Carlson in 1942 and commercialized by Xerox in the 1960s.22 An electrophotographic printing system transfers charged particles of dry or liquid toner to a substrate (a printing surface, usually paper) and fuses the image with heat. First applied to black-and-white copiers, the technology is now used with color as well. Among the most groundbreaking of these systems are the Xerox DocuTech document production system, introduced in B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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1990, and the Indigo e-Print 1000 digital offset press, which came three years later. The Xerox iGen3 digital production press, launched in 2002, is the core component of the Xerox Manual + Book Factory: a fully integrated production line that can deliver pretrimmed, perfect bound books on demand with the oversight of just one operator. Ink-jet, which emerged in the mid-1960s as a low-end imprinting technique for bar codes and mailing labels, came into its own about twenty years later as a technique for the production of large-format color posters, signage, manuals, and books.23 Steady improvements in inks and ink-jet print heads—the components that disperse droplets of ink onto paper—made the process economically attractive for printing books in smaller quantities. Among the most notable recent implementations of ink-jet for book publishing are the Kodak Versamark V-Series Printing Systems: digital presses for high-speed printing in both blackand-white and color. The introduction of digital presses has upset many long-held assumptions about the technical nature, end uses, and market economics of printing as a whole. Before they appeared, printing was defined as much by the limitations as by the capabilities of its premier process, offset lithography. Printing with offset lithography assured high productivity and consistent quality, but it also forced publishers to abide by a set of process-driven rules about quantity, price, and production scheduling. Moreover, offset lithography could build no bridges to the printed page from publishers’ rapidly expanding databases. These digital repositories contained not only the words and images of editorial content but also the demographic traits and personal preferences of the consumers of that content. Offset lithography did many things well, but not the kinds of things that advances in IT (information technology) and telecommunications were starting to encourage publishers to dream of doing: tailoring the content of printed output to different audience segments, or even to individuals, within the same press run; printing color in small quantities at acceptable cost; and printing at the point of consumption, anywhere in the Internet-connected world, on a moment’s notice or close to it. Such feats are beyond the powers of offset lithography because its static image carriers—its unchangeable printing plates—equip the process only for the relatively large-scale reproduction of fixed-page images. A digital press, on the other hand, prints not from plates but from a “virtual printing form”—a kind of digital metaphor for a plate—that can be reimaged from impression to impression. Called variable-data printing, or simply variable printing, the process streams digital page content from a database, local or remote, to the marking engine of the press at very high speeds. This makes it possible to reimage the 68
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form and change the content of each page as it is printed, so that no page carries the same information as the page that precedes or follows it.24
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Short Runs and “Print on Demand” The elimination of static plates frees digital printing from another limitation of offset lithography: its commercial unsuitability for very short-run printing.25 An offset press can print 100 sheets if that is what the customer wants, but the perunit cost of those sheets will be exorbitant. This is because, in a conventional print run, the unit cost is calculated by dividing the number of sheets printed into the cost of making the plates, mounting them, and performing the other steps of makeready (preparing the press to print). As a result, the unit cost of an offset press run is inversely proportional to the size of the run: the unit cost declines as the run grows larger but increases as the run length decreases. Offset printers try to ameliorate the situation by setting minimum quantities for run lengths and offering progressive discounts for higher volumes. Reasonable and well intentioned though this policy may be, it can force customers to protect unit cost by buying more printed product than they actually need, at least for initial sales and distribution. Run-length minimums and short-run cost penalties are antithetical to the concept of print-on-demand, a production model that aims at delivering printed product in the location, at the time, and in the quantity specified by the customer.26 Because plateless digital printing systems have none of the makeready costs of conventional lithography, the cost per page of a digital print run stays the same regardless of length. For high-volume printing, offset remains the more economical method. But for runs of a few hundred copies—an ideal range for the production of many kinds of books—digital printing usually holds the price advantage.27 The digital book printing company Lightning Source, having produced more than 40 million books from a database of half a million titles, has demonstrated that digital printing can be feasible in even the smallest quantities. Although Lightning Source manufactures about 1.2 million books per month, the average print run is just 1.8 copies per title.28 Digital printing satisfies the “where” and “when” requirements of print-ondemand by making it possible to “distribute” production to any site equipped with high-speed digital output equipment. Thanks to advances in data telecommunications, publishers can transmit jobs to far-flung digital presses almost as easily as the writer of this chapter can send the manuscript to a desktop laser printer reposing less than three feet from the keyboard. Jobs arrive at their output points containing not only words and images but complete instructions for printing and binding the jobs on fully automated production lines. Printing can B O O K P RO D U C T I O N T E C H N O L O GY S I NCE 1945
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be almost instantaneous, and when the run is complete, it will not have to be shipped over long distances—it already has reached, or at least is very close to, the locations where the books are needed. Thus does digital printing replace conventional printing’s paradigm of “print-and-distribute”—printing at a central location, then delivering the product to end-users based elsewhere—with one of “distribute-and-print,” wherein the data are sent for output to production sites within convenient reach of the customer. The printing may even take place in the retail outlet where the books will be made available—a scheme that has been tested by several bookstore chains wishing to bridge the final gap between production and sale.29 Book lovers do not like to wait for the titles they want, and even if a book can be produced on demand at a nearby digital printing house, at least 24 hours will elapse before it arrives at the bookstore for delivery to the customer—hence the market potential of solutions such as The PSik 1Book in-store book printing system, reported to be capable of producing a 300-page book in about five minutes at a unit cost of less than three dollars.30 Other devices for manufacturing books at point of sale are InstaBook, BookMachine, and Espresso Book Machine. The latter is the centerpiece of a digital book publishing venture cofounded by Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House.31 The broad adoption of digital print-on-demand will have major consequences for the future of book publishing. It has already changed the concept of document creation from manual cut-and-paste to online electronic assembly. It is replacing the physical storage of obsolete documents with electronic libraries of ready-to-print information of every kind. Instead of absorbing large runs from offset presses to satisfy printers’ minimums, publishers now have the option of printing only the quantities needed on digital presses and document production systems. When books can be printed on demand in an all-digital production workflow, many of the givens of traditional book publishing begin to fade. Inventory and storage costs vanish because there is little or no inventory to manage. Books with “obsolescent” content can be renewed with relative ease by updating their information and streaming the files to a waiting digital press. There no longer is such a thing as an “out-of-print book” because there no longer are any economic barriers to going back on press in very small quantities. The “evergreen backlist” from which no book need ever be dropped then becomes a reality. Digital print-on-demand also makes it possible to presell books and then quickly print them to order, thereby eliminating the guesswork of setting print runs and precluding the waste of incomplete sell-throughs. This one-off printing capability means that any book, no matter how specialized its subject matter 70
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or how limited its audience, can be published profitably, because there is no risk of unsold product. No longer obliged to stockpile inventories of books that may not be sold, publishers can take full advantage of a sales model in which the transaction precedes the manufacturing—an approach reminiscent of book publishing by subscription in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Free of the constraints of conventional printing, they can introduce new authors to new audiences in an almost endlessly segmentable marketplace where each reader constitutes a readership and every printing betokens a sellout. In a sense, advances in production since 1945 have returned book production to the manufacturing metrics of Gutenberg’s day, when a 180-copy run of a Bible was enormous beyond precedent. In the twenty-first century, an order for a digital run of that number of copies is also something that defies precedent, but only in light of the old high-volume production norms that postwar technology has enabled today’s book printers to set aside when necessary. Like the Father of Printing, contemporary masters of the craft are using all of the tools at their disposal to deliver whatever the reading market requires, regardless of run length. The quality of the finished product, not the quantity of its manufacture, remains the ultimate measure of success.
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CHAPTER 4
Markets and Audiences Linda M. Scott
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In 2005 each American bought on average ten books, which was more than double the per capita purchase rate of fifty years before. In the postwar era, the book-buying habit showed remarkable strength, growing steadily through recessions and inflation as well as major shifts in consumer behavior, even as the price of books consistently outstripped the Consumer Price Index. (See tables 1, 3, and 6.) Furthermore, while the real disposable income of Americans rose, the percentage of household income allocated to books remained steady, indicating that an increasing amount of real income went to their purchase over five decades.1 (See tables 12–14.) This solid upward trend in the consumption of books contradicts popular wisdom, in which Americans are said to be reading less, having fallen prey to the intellectually debilitating effects of “easier” media such as television and film. A corollary to the received view is that publishers themselves became too much like the market-driven media and their corporate keepers, the consumer marketing companies. By focusing excessively on bankable best sellers and blockbuster movie tie-ins, publishers pandered to the lowest common denominator, it is said, thus failing to support deserving authors or to offer a real choice of titles. The evidence does not support this folk theory. Not only did Americans buy more books in the late twentieth century than ever, but their purchase habits were quite different from those implied by the picture of decline. (“Literary” reading for pleasure, however, did seem to decline in the last decades of the twentieth century, as Joan Shelley Rubin explains in chapter 23.) Furthermore, the demographic and market profile of book buying in the United States showed the brushstrokes of larger sociohistorical forces much more distinctly than those of publishing house marketers. Finally, the marketing practices of the book industry tracked substantially behind those of either culture-production industries such as film or the makers of manufactured consumer goods. In fact, publishing was so resistant to adopting the techniques of modern marketing that it ceded much control to book distributors. Nevertheless, the historical, social, and economic forces pushing Americans to buy more books were so
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powerful that, even without sophisticated marketing, the publishing industry sold ever-increasing numbers of books—and reaped the profits.
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Influences on Book Buying The broad social and historical factors that contributed to the increase in book buying provide the groundwork on which to build an interpretation of both industry practices and reader behavior. During World War II, for example, many soldiers acquired the habit of reading books overseas when the military supplied them with popular paperbacks. Book publishers used what production capacity they had remaining to market similar books to civilians, thus encouraging reading on the home front as well. (See chapter 11.) A study done at the end of the conflict showed that the war generation was significantly more inclined to read books than its parents’ generation, which had been more likely to read magazines.2 This combination of historical circumstances, governmental action, and industrial opportunity is typical of the multiple forces interacting to produce reader habits during the next sixty years. In the postwar period, the national imperative to maintain a scientific advantage over the Soviet Union led to a number of initiatives—from university research grants to children’s library programs to literacy initiatives—that rippled across the society in the form of books. Organized groups of librarians and teachers, as well as institutions such as universities and government agencies, had a significant hand in creating the environment that produced so much book buying. (See chapters 17–20.) With the Cold War under way and with numerous supports for educating former fighting men, the war cohort was pushed toward more schooling and, thus, more reading. Historically, the purchase of books is more solidly linked to educational attainment than any other population factor. Thus, the most salient contribution to the “book boom” was the higher education achieved by this generation—and then by the generations that followed it. In 1940 only 24.1 percent of the population had completed high school; by 1990 nearly 85 percent had graduated. Between 1940 and 1995, the number of Americans with four years of college multiplied five times.3 The GI generation also had society’s support in its family life. The return of marriageable men from the front in 1945 added to the number of couples who normally would have tied the knot in the next decade. Efforts to build affordable housing for these families, such as in the Levittown project, contributed to the book-buying trend. Over the next forty years, the percentage of housing units occupied by owners would rise from 43.6 percent in 1940 to 67.4 percent in 2000. The new households formed created a booming market for furniture, apM A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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pliances, and other related products, including new book genres, such as “howto” books on home repair. Gardening, for instance, increased substantially after World War II, and today 69 percent of Americans garden. Gardening books, in the same period, have become a $200 million a year category. The most important effect of home ownership, however, may have been storage space (fig. 4.1). With an ever-increasing dollar figure available to buy reading material each year, the number of books at home was stacking up. (Buyers intend to keep about half of the books they purchase.) So, the mere availability of space for a home library probably encouraged the trend to buy more books.4 The steadily rising standard of living that created and supported the growth in young households contributed to book buying through the end of the century. Income is hard to disentangle from education when analyzing book consumption, but the regular purchase of books appears to occur only after a certain level of material comfort has been achieved. Postwar prosperity affected communities at different paces: the poorer states of the South continued to lag, while California shot ahead, for instance. Book sales followed these trends, finally emerging among populations where book ownership had not previously been common. Living standards can be seen also in the types of books purchased. Certain categories, such as travel books or books on hobbies, grew dramatically. (See table 4.) The activities that supported such sales required disposable income as well as leisure time. Thus, evidence for the influence of
FIGURE 4.1. Living room interior, Kensington, Connecticut, 1948, with the space for books that the suburban housing boom of the postwar period offered families. Gottscho-Schliesner Inc., Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-G612-T-53637 DLC. 74
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FIGURE 4.2. Corky and his friends enlisted books in the American effort to compete against Soviet advances in science after the 1957 Sputnik launch. Cover photograph courtesy of Mathematics Collections, Information Technology and Communications, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
higher incomes is visible in both the geographic pattern of purchases and the distribution across genres.5 American anxiety about world science dominance during the Cold War intensified when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. The U.S. government increased investment in research and education, which resulted in a publishing explosion in textbooks and books for professional and technical use. The publication of academic books in science, engineering, and medicine increased from 1,576 in 1940 to 4,933 in 1965. (See table 4.) The new interest in science probably also spurred the growth in general-interest books on science and science fiction. (See chapter 19.) The need to record and disseminate information also stimulated reference books.6 The Cold War concern over education as a long-term defense issue put particular pressure on elementary education (fig. 4.2). Efforts to increase literacy among the next generation assumed a new urgency. This concern over child literacy was magnified in its impact on book buying by the rise in fertility rates that created the baby boom. This generation’s first impact on book habits was the runaway success of Dr. Spock’s best-selling paperback—but the boomers would continue to have a profound influence on book sales throughout their lives. Early in the life of the baby boom, for instance, the children’s book category exploded, transformed overnight from an unprofitable “carriage trade” to a publishing staple. (See chapter 2.) Many government programs focused on training children to read, particularly those aimed at extending the library system, causing an increase in purchases for elementary and secondary school libraries. One of the most important of these programs in the 1960s and early 1970s was Title II of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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provided funding for school libraries. (See chapters 17 and 18.) When the baby boom generation went to college, “trade paperbacks” were developed to meet its need for inexpensive but high-quality books, especially fiction, in the classroom. Ultimately, this cohort would go to work in a different kind of economy, one based more on information than craft. This, too, affected its book habits.7 Although the “Sputnik factor” contributed to an increase in professional and technical employment in the immediate postwar period, the larger and longer-term phenomenon, conversion to a service and information economy, supported continued growth in sales of books related to work. (See tables 4 and 6.) The United States was the first among world economies to make this conversion and, though it produced painful dislocations between 1970 and 1990, the effect on book buying was positive. In 1990 professional book sales were seventy times what they had been in 1960. (See chapter 2.) Two other trends moving in opposite directions also stimulated book purchase on the per capita level. On the one hand, book distribution went from being an exclusively urban (and mostly northeastern) system toward a more geographically dispersed system that reached even small towns. At the same time, however, the long-term shift of the population from rural to urban continued: in 1940, 57 percent of the population was urban, rising to 79 percent by 2000.8 Thus, as book distribution moved toward smaller settlements, the population came to meet it by moving to urban areas where books were more readily available. (See chapter 5.) Contrary to conventional wisdom, the increase in popularity of nonprint media has probably contributed to the consumption of books. Publishing industry lore is full of stories about television shows—the series about Davy Crockett, the musical Peter Pan, the television airing of The Wizard of Oz—that caused runs on bookstores. Various genres have been simultaneously popular in both media (westerns in the late 1950s and spy stories in the mid-1960s). Importantly, movies stimulate book purchase on the margin: seeing a movie and then buying the book is one of the few ways that habitual nonreaders enter the market. Finally, the impact of Internet-based selling was first felt most dramatically in the distribution of books, with Amazon.com becoming the Web’s first consumer goods behemoth, based initially on the sales of books.9 The purchase preferences and habits of readers since 1950 reflect the confluence of readers’ own interests and those of institutions engaged in the promotion of reading. For instance, the impact of Cold War literacy programs aimed at children seems to have been important and long-lasting: to this day, baby boomers buy books in greater proportions than the rest of the population. However, boomers are also inclined to buy books for professional development, which seems to mirror the emphasis on knowledge dissemination so intense during 76
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their childhood, as well as the increasingly information-intensive nature of employment during their adulthood. By comparison, the cohorts who preceded them and who followed show distinctly different preferences and, again, those practices reflect the different conditions under which their reading habits were formed. (See chapter 23.)
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Publishing Industry Marketing Practice The top ten publishing companies, which control more than 50 percent of adult trade book production, spent a combined total of $23 million in 1999 to advertise all their books. (See table 2.) By comparison, Procter & Gamble put $91 million behind a single brand of laundry detergent the same year. The automobile industry spent more than $10 billion a year in advertising. The promotion of single products such as Crest or Coke cost between $35 million and $350 million each.10 Thus, when the book publishing industry puts a few hundred thousand dollars behind a “big” book, the impact is that of a whisper in a roaring crowd. Most books, though, appear without even that whisper. Publishers have often used a single ad to sell a whole list and have placed most of their ads in the trade press. The only advertising aimed at consumers has tended to appear in limitedcirculation publications like the New York Times Review of Books or the New Yorker—and even then is probably aimed at the trade as much as the market. This is a long-standing practice. A 1947 study of the industry noted: “Though all new books issued by regular trade publishers are said to be advertised, for most of them this means only a line or two in publishers’ announcements to the booksellers, mainly in Publishers Weekly. Others, in groups of five or six or ten or more, may simply be listed once or twice in advertisements in the daily and especially the Sunday book editions of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune.”11 Instead of advertising, the publishing industry has relied on publicity—unpaid media exposure—to sell books to consumers. Publicity, often known in marketing circles as “the poor man’s advertising,” has the advantage of low cost but also many disadvantages. The main problem is that publicity is completely outside the control of the manufacturer. You can, in various ways, coax and cajole the media to cover a book, but ultimately the timing, amount, and quality of exposure is completely in their hands. It is an unpleasant fact of postindustrial society that the most common form of leverage other companies use to get positive media exposure for their products is the promise of an advertising expenditure (or the threat of withholding it). Because book publishers have not advertised in any appreciable measure, they do not have this tool available M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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to them. It is probably no coincidence that the number of magazines and television shows that do book reviews or author interviews declined in the 1990s. This happened despite the industry’s long experience with the power of national media exposure. In the 1960s, publishers learned that when an articulate, attractive author—Ayn Rand, Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susann—appeared with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson, books sales responded. A review or an excerpt in a major national magazine had the same effect. Instead of supporting such windfalls with planned advertising insertions in the same vehicles—as other consumer companies did—publishing became dependent on the free exposure. The potential impact of broad-based media coverage on book sales was dramatically demonstrated once again at the beginning of the twenty-first century by Oprah’s Book Club.12 By then, however, the publishing industry’s cost structure was such that significant funds to support books other than proven best sellers still were not made available. Although it is common to bewail the excessive attention best-selling authors get from publishing houses, such books in fact accounted for less than 3 percent of bookstore sales in 2000.13 Meanwhile, other kinds of books got little real marketing support, largely because of the huge cost of distribution. If it were like other consumer goods industries, the “trade” would be given various financial incentives to display and promote books at the retail level—to “push” the product through the system, as the terminology goes. However, those other manufacturers balance the power with wholesalers and retailers by developing consumer demand, mostly through advertising. If advertising seems likely to bring customers into a store asking for an item, those in the trade are unlikely to hurt themselves by refusing to stock it. Thus, the promise of an ad campaign that will “pull” the product through the system from the consumer end helps to keep the financial incentives for distribution under control by giving the manufacturer leverage over the trade. In many industries, particularly those with sales concentrated in grocery and drugstore outlets, independent market research firms also keep track of inventory movement through the distribution channels, so that the manufacturers know which brokers are supporting and moving their products. All of this combines to balance the influence of manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers. Book publishers, however, seemed almost not to notice when booksellers took over their business. (See chapter 5.) The first information that the publishing industry gathered about distribution came in a study done in the 1930s. At a time when other manufacturing industries had already developed fine webs of distribution through drug and grocery outlets in virtually every settlement in America, publishers were amazed to find out that bookstores were concentrated almost exclusively in the big cities of the Northeast. Many large populations 78
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elsewhere in the country—Kansas City or Peoria, for instance—had only one bookstore. Medium-sized towns usually had none. Consequently, the successful reintroduction of paperbacks just as the war started had more to do with a distribution accident than with the product itself.14 Though paperbacks had previously made their appearance in America with limited effects, this time the cheaper form of book met with unparalleled success. Because paperbacks had always been inexpensive, their popularity in the postwar era cannot be explained by price. Paperbacks were brought to market by two new companies—Pocket and Penguin—who could not get access to the traditional distribution system (not unlike the publishing industry itself, booksellers were concentrated in New York and Boston and were a fairly closed social circle). So, instead, the new paperback houses decided to make use of the national magazine distribution system. Thus, the first popular paperbacks did not appear in traditional bookstores but in drugstores, on newsstands, in train stations, and other places often frequented by Americans but never before used to sell books. Enormous swaths of the country acquired book distribution overnight—and in retail venues comfortable for ordinary Americans.15 (See chapter 2.) The first paperbacks included many “good” titles (reprints already dignified by a run in hardcover), a fair number of classics, and a respectable group of nonfiction works. Some titles were even issued simultaneously in both forms. This could happen because the distribution channels were mutually exclusive: at this time a consumer was unlikely to see a paperback version of the same title next to the hardbound version on the shelf. The most visible paperbacks, however, were produced by companies such as Dell and Fawcett, which already had established readerships for mysteries and romances in fiction magazines for those genres. The covers of the new books were often designed by the same artists who did the magazine covers, which then appeared side by side at retail. Thus, the most salient paperbacks available at this time had “trashy” covers and “sensational” topics like their magazine counterparts. This similarity in cover design, genre, and placement probably contributed substantially to “crossover” readership from magazines. However, it also helped to support publishing snobbery toward paperback books.16 The major houses resisted producing paperbacks for a long time. When the baby boomers went to college, however, the industry capitulated to market opportunity and began producing what it called the “trade paperback.” Importantly, trade paperbacks were indistinguishable from most paperback books of the midcentury (again, predominantly reprints and classics with conservative covers) but were held up as a contrast to the more culturally salient “cheap” paperbacks. M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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The initial success of paperbacks was also reinforced by the war. When the government contracted for cheap paper books to ease boredom among the troops, it provided the industry with reason and means to “tool up” for largescale paperback production. Thus, they were poised to sell this popular product to a huge audience in substantial numbers once the war was over. (See chapter 11.) Publishers also learned through their war experience that quick publications of books related to current events could result in substantial sales. In the 1990s events such as the O. J. Simpson trial put “instant books” on the shelves that sold rapidly, probably often to people who would not otherwise buy a book.17 Unfortunately, “accidental” discoveries of viable genres and fortuitous collaborations with other institutions continued to mark industry practice into the postwar era. The selection of new titles or creation of new genres often had an offhand quality. Charles Scribner recounts:
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Our editorial meetings were held around a table, each editor suggesting and criticizing freely. As I think of those discussions now, I am bound to admit that publishers are hapless victims to the know-it-all attitude—myself not the least opinionated. At one meeting, Elinor Parker mentioned a book on crewel embroidery by one Erica Wilson. We didn’t know anything about it or her. We had never done a book on embroidery, and it seemed a remote domain. I said, “Do you really think you would sell any of those?” She replied, “Yes. Erica Wilson gives a course on needlework and canvas work in New York. Her students would buy it. There’s a good deal of general interest, and an advertisement for the course appeared in The New Yorker.” Grudgingly, I said, “Go ahead, then.” We produced a gorgeous book with full-color plates from Princeton Polychrome and the book was a smash hit. We sold that very expensive book in the tens of thousands, and it kept on selling indefinitely. What is more, it generated a whole line of books in the field, as well as in beadwork and other crafts. Produced with an eye to artistic presentation, all of them became a major part of our publishing output. When other publishers clambered aboard this bandwagon, it amounted to a literary revolution in this particular range of hobbies. The experience also taught us a lesson. It showed that publishing was not a trade limited to novels and biographies. The idea of publishing— especially of our publishing—had to be broadened to take in all other subjects of public interest. We were at last weaned away from our exclu80
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sive devotion to fiction. Weren’t we terribly smart to get into this world of needlework? No! We had to be dragged into it. We were only smart enough to see success when it came and hit us in the eye.
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Once it became clear that television content had an effect on book sales, book and television series were successfully tied together (e.g., Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock) (fig. 4.3). Note that this practice allowed the book industry to take advantage of the free media exposure provided by the TV series itself, again avoiding doing either direct promotion or consumer research itself.18 The industry also took advantage of other institutions’ efforts to encourage reading, including social efforts to stimulate literacy among children. Particularly in cooperation with trade groups like the American Book Publishers Council, the publishing industry would hold a conference and then publish a book on topics like library support or teaching children to read. These publications would be cosponsored with respected organizations and positioned as publicinterest works but would invariably contain recommendations that would benefit book sales. For instance, the purpose of Jean Grambs’s The Development of Lifetime Reading Habits was to advocate more public investment in school libraries. Nevertheless, a chapter is included about the happy consequences of taking schoolchildren on field trips to bookstores, inviting booksellers in to visit, offering book fairs at school, and even selling books in the school cafeteria. The National Book Committee, a creation of the American Book Publishers
FIGURE 4.3. Tie-ins between books and television programs, such the popular Perry Mason series, earned publishers increased sales without incurring advertising costs. University of Texas Law School Library. M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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Council and the American Library Association, included representatives from Boy Scouts, Boys’ Clubs, Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, 4-H, and several other “brand name” organizations. One of their projects, a book called A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading by Nancy Larrick, sold a half-million copies in its first (1958) printing. This guide was essentially a promotional piece for current children’s books. Specific books are recommended for purchase on nearly every page, along with liberal reprints of illustrations. The author also suggests various consumer strategies for instilling a love of reading, including giving books as presents, frequent trips to the bookstore, and a special library shelf for the children’s collection at home.19 (See chapter 11.) Some publishers cashed in on the boom in elementary education by bringing out children’s books with “limited vocabularies,” which had been developed by researchers in reading instruction. In 1957 Harper’s launched its “I Can Read” series with the now-classic Little Bear by Elsa Holmeland Minarik illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Random House’s The Cat in the Hat, based on a 225-word vocabulary and aimed at six- and seven-year-olds, made even more of a splash in 1957 and sold more than a million copies in three years. Random House launched its own “Beginner Books” imprint with four titles in 1958.20 Publishers also tapped the children’s market through school-based book clubs. The most successful of these were the Scholastic Book Clubs, which built upon the marketing network of Scholastic’s school magazines, Junior Scholastic and Senior Scholastic. The first of these was the Teen-Age Book Club, which was started by Pocket Books and which Scholastic picked up in 1948. Working with schoolteachers, the company launched many more classroom-based book clubs throughout the postwar era. One of these club-distributed books, Clifford: The Big Red Dog by Norman Bridwell (1962), launched one of the bestselling children’s book series of all time, with 120 different titles and 95 million copies sold by 2005. By 2005 Scholastic was selling 350 million copies of its books annually through its school-based book clubs.21 Other alliances with related institutions also produced important advantages. Being chosen as the selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, for instance, virtually “guaranteed” substantial sales. Other book clubs, like the Literary Guild, and organizations, such as Reader’s Digest, could produce similar results. Unlike the publishing houses themselves, these groups made substantial use of market research, allowing them to accurately predict interest and consistently place books in the hands of readers.22 Instead of developing consumer expertise, the publishing industry continued to rely exclusively on editor judgment. Unfortunately, as the costs of paper, ink, and distribution climbed, the potential damage caused by a failed book escalated. Instead of developing more methods to help in selection, the industry ap82
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parently attempted to reduce the risk of loss by spreading it across more titles. New titles rose from 11,000 in 1950 to nearly 50,000 in 1990, a rate of increase that many in the industry excoriated as showing an irrational pursuit of novelty. (See table 3.) By the mid-1970s, industry experts were warning that production had “outpaced demand to an alarming degree” and had “dangerously overcrowded distribution facilities.” Yet, little hard information about where and how book gluts occurred was available because, in contrast to drug and grocery outlets, no independent information-gathering system was in place.23 While publishers continued to resist using the practices that had revolutionized consumer goods marketing in other businesses, the booksellers took a turn in the opposite direction. In the 1970s B. Dalton and Waldenbooks began opening stores in shopping malls. Influenced heavily by their origins in department store marketing, the new retailers designed environments considerably less dignified than was traditional: bright lights and colors, end-of-aisle displays, “dump bins,” discount tables, and other forms of in-store promotion typical of the drug and grocery trade.24 Mall chains eventually gave way to the standalone superstores of the 1990s, especially Borders and Barnes & Noble. (See chapter 5.) The superstores quickly gained the upper hand in book distribution. By the late 1990s, publishers, who allocated only $5,000 total marketing budget for most books, were expected to pay that much or more just to have a superstore display their book in a prominent place or to stock large quantities. Most of the “marketing” budget for any new book went to what is more properly called “sales costs”—that is, payments to retailers for advantageous display or special promotional support.25 As a consequence, little or nothing was left with which to market a new author’s fledgling effort directly to consumers. Instead, marketing efforts at both the retail and manufacturing levels went to authors with proven sales records. The heavy “upfront” sales costs, along with the economies of scale in manufacturing, made the cost structure one in which high initial costs were quickly covered by sales volume, leading to large profits once a certain level of sales had been achieved. Despite frequent and public complaints to the contrary, publishers continued to turn a profit even though the cost structure of a “typical” book had little room for marketing investment and a very small margin. Such “typical” book examples were, in fact, rather misleading. Focused as they were on the front end of any venture, these examples failed to show the point at which this industry made its money, contributing to the myth that their marketing costs were too high, when in fact it was sales costs that were out of control. Overproduction and insufficient inventory management also added costs, while contributing to the continued decline in the influence of the major pubM A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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lishing houses. The overproduction that was endemic by the 1970s led to high levels of returned merchandise from bookstores, which further tilted the balance of power. Out of this developed the “bargain book” phenomenon of the early 1980s. New businesses gathered up unsold merchandise and resold it, and “bargain tables” appeared in bookstores and other outlets, such as the big discount stores. At a lower price, the books could be sold. “Remainderers” expanded their practices to include resale of damaged merchandise, reprints of older titles, and “promotional books” produced especially for the bargain market. Bargain book sales reached between 20 and 30 percent of the total in general bookstores within a few years.26 By the 2000s returned merchandise from bookstores had reached more than 40 percent of mass paperbacks and 33 percent of hardcovers.27 Bookstores have long been allowed to return unsold hardcover books and the covers of unsold paperbacks for a full refund—the coverless books were simply thrown away. This situation reveals much about both control and cost structure: clearly, paper and ink cannot be at such a premium if publishers can afford to waste so much of both; equally evident is that the inventory controls that make such waste unconscionable for other industries have not yet appeared in book publishing. In any other business, the physical waste of 30 to 40 percent of production would cause outrage among shareholders. Publishing, however, claims special status. Even as the unsold books piled up, the industry found ways to justify its seemingly irrational economic behavior. In the mid-1970s, sources who spoke to sociologist Paul Hirsch insisted that the industry’s structure and practices reflected the kind of product being made—a cultural, aesthetic container of ideas rather than a mere object. The hiring of professionals (agents and editors) who selected books for publication on the basis of their own judgment rather than that of potential readers, the attempt then to reduce uncertainty by simply producing more titles, and the overreliance on the free services of mass media “gatekeepers” to promote most books, it was argued, were all a function of the type of business in which publishing was engaged.28 Much of this situation developed, however, because the publishing industry resisted exactly the kinds of practices that its critics today claimed had corrupted it: publishers seem to have felt that they were above ordinary consumer marketing because they produced a special kind of product. Yet organizations such as Reader’s Digest and Book-of-the-Month Club and TimeLife books showed that consumer research could be used effectively to smooth away the very risks and waste that publishing has long experienced.29 Over the same period, industries producing other kinds of cultural products managed to avoid the overproduction-underpromotion trap. The movie industry, for instance, produced fewer films, tested them at various points in 84
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the production and distribution sequence, and spent heavily to advertise those that finally made it to theatrical release. Videocassette technology, initially seen as a threat to the studios, was used to produce a lucrative aftermarket for those films that did not make big money at the box office. Today the movie industry is not nearly as reliant on either the goodwill of critics or the marketing efforts of their retailers as is book publishing. The economic nature of any industry is subject to the behavior of the players. Although the players may act rationally given the way they see the structure of the system they are in, continued behavior of the same sort reproduces the limits of that system. The way the book publishing industry imagined itself— and therefore organized its operations and promoted its products—led it to take a role that was less directive than was typical of other industries marketing to a consumer audience. They not only failed to engage in direct-to-consumer promotion on the scale typical of producers of other consumer goods but also did little market research to learn about the tastes and habits of their customers. The book distribution phenomenon of the Internet provides a case in point. By the time Amazon.com appeared on the American scene, retail booksellers had pushed publishers into a tight cost structure. This happened, to a large degree, because publishers had failed to invest in the marketing capabilities that help other consumer goods companies “pull” products through the distribution system by stimulating consumer demand. Yet, presented with an opportunity to escape the situation by making a run around retailers to sell directly to consumers, publishers held back. As a result, the big Internet booksellers became Barnes & Noble and Borders rather than Random House or Simon & Schuster. This kind of market conservatism is typical of the attitude that has caused the book business to be increasingly dominated by chain retailers rather than publishing houses. (See chapter 5.) Nowhere is the myopia of publishing more evident than in its industry-wide information gathering. Very few broad consumer studies have ever been done, and none of the usual suppliers of independent market information have worked closely with book publishing. The public information on consumer habits that is normally available for everything from computers to candy is spotty for books. Still, we can use these data to make a few tentative inferences about book-buying audiences, and we can see the clear imprint of history and the sketchy outlines of publisher activity in the profiles.30
Audience Characteristics Probably the most important audience characteristic is that the generation so carefully inculcated with the reading habit remained committed. To this day, M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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the baby boomers are the biggest book-buying age cohort even though previous demographic trends would have predicted a decline in this activity as they aged. Their parents and grandparents, as well as their children, show different patterns, which in turn reflect their own historical circumstances. The first consumer study by the industry was conducted before the end of the war and published in 1946. Several generalizations were consistent with observations already made here. Education and income, in that order, were the most important factors discriminating “active” from “inactive” readers. Younger people read books more than older people (attributed to the higher educational attainment already characteristic of the generation then under twenty). “Inactive readers” of books read other materials; newspaper reading was high across the board. Movie and radio consumption occurred across groups and did not appear to cut into time spent reading. Hobbies, book buying, and “upscale” status were all shown to be related. Active readers were more likely to have accumulated large numbers of books—and to have the storage space in which to put them. The only book titles read in significant numbers by “inactive readers” had already been made into movies (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gone with the Wind). Book reviews were read mostly by people who already were frequent readers. Lower-income respondents were more likely to buy the new twenty-five-cent paperbacks and to purchase their books from drugstores or newsstands. Those reporting a preference for more expensive hardcover books explained that “good books” came only in hardcover or that they “didn’t like the kind of book” that came in paperback. Those who preferred the paperbacks justified their choice by saying the texts were the same and the books were cheaper.31 By the late 1970s, when the next industry study of reading habits was conducted, 94 percent of Americans reported that they read books, magazines, or newspapers on a regular basis. Within that large group of readers, however, are two distinct breaks. One occurred between readers of all kinds of printed materials and those who did not read at all. The 6 percent of Americans who said they did not read anything in 1978 showed all the earmarks of disadvantage: poverty, lack of education, racial discrimination, and social isolation. The other, much larger grouping separated readers of books from readers of periodicals. In 1978 frequent book readers represented 50 percent of the population, while readers of other materials were 44 percent.32 The demographic distinctions between these two audiences are enlightening. Middle-income readers and high school graduates in 1978 consumed both books and periodicals at proportions consistent with their representation in the population. The upper and lower tiers skewed in opposite directions: at the top, people read more books; at the bottom, they read more magazines. However, despite predictable skews in these segments, overall book reading was well dis86
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persed throughout the population. Fully 57 percent of book readers did not go to college. The lowest income and education groups still represented 25 percent of all book reading. Because the “downscale” segments dramatically outstripped college grads in their reading of periodicals, we cannot infer that the difference resulted from an aversion to reading. Age breaks were particularly interesting, given what we know about the earlier and later patterns of these cohorts. The middle-aged group here was the youngest at the time of the 1946 study. Its members were still active readers compared to those in the older cohort, but by the 1970s they were vastly overshadowed by the book habits of their children, the baby boomers. In contrast, though, the boomers, along with the highest education and income cohorts, were low on periodical reading. The differences, therefore, are not about reading as such but about the media in which one reads. Previous research was not able to establish whether the reading habits that characterize an age cohort were a function of age, education, or history. Were the older respondents less inclined to read books for some age-related reason, or because they were less educated than subsequent generations, or because at the time their own tastes were formed books were expensive and hard to get?33 These data suggest that the historical experience of early reading enculturation is more important than aging or even education. A 1985 Gallup study questioned respondents on the history of their reading habits and concluded that, “in general, reading histories of adults provide little evidence of any large proportion who either re-enter or leave the ‘reading’ market on a permanent basis.” The fact that readers tend to have consistent lifelong patterns can be added to demographic data to analyze this question: in the 1985 and 1994 Simmons reports, the by-now-middle-aged boomers continued to be the heaviest readers in the population. Older segments showed the same pattern they had in previous years—those who were under twenty before World War II bought books, but those in the oldest cohort bought fewer than their numbers in the population would predict.34 Importantly, in 1994 younger adults did not buy more books than the boomers. Consider that the education attained by this most recent cohort is higher than the boomers; more of these eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds went to college. Also, the probability of the younger group having graduate education is higher, and graduate training will likely continue before this cohort moves into middle age. Therefore, the theory that educational attainment is the most predictive factor in book-buying behavior has not, so far, held up for this generation. There are at least two possible explanations. One is that the intense reading enculturation of the baby boomers magnified the effect that years in school, as such, had on them. Another is that new forms (such as computers) are taking M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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younger people away from books. Consider, for example, that much of the growth in book reading since the 1950s has been associated with research and reference books. With reference books shifting to online forms and the rapid pace of technical change making print a slow medium, it makes sense that such reading would shift away from books, yet would not necessarily imply lower intellectual development on the part of this particular cohort. The importance of childhood socialization can also be suggested using data about readers of one of the largest and most controversial of genres: romances. In the 1990s romance readers were most likely to be between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four, while the age groups on either side of this “middle age”—either younger or older—were underrepresented. Because the typical romance reader buys her first romance at seventeen, the middle-aged readers who make up the bulk of the market probably started in the 1970s, about the time Harlequin novels were introduced, often in supermarkets, which started selling them like soap. A pattern seems to have been set—or a taste cultivated—that endured through the lifetime of this group but was not replicated in those who followed.35 Besides the marketing activity that may have influenced boomer generation college girls to buy romances, there is also evidence of enculturation effects. The teach-your-children-to-read organizations of the 1950s held that book selection should be gendered. It was said that little boys liked stories with masculine heroes, exotic settings, expansive time spans, and large casts of characters— and that they would not read books for little girls. Little girls supposedly liked stories with small casts of characters, domestic settings, limited time spans, and either heroes or heroines—and they would read stories for little boys, too. In early adolescence, according to the author of Books and the Teen-Age Reader, girls loved books with a “romanticized picture of family relationships” and “books that have a thin veil of history.” By middle adolescence, girls already were supposed to have a taste for historical and romance novels, especially those where “a love story takes place between strangely intense people under rather unusual circumstances.” Some genres were said to be enjoyed by both sexes, however, including animal stories, ghost stories, and mysteries.36 So perhaps romance readers were also led to their habit by early childhood socialization as the upwardly mobile female children of 1950s parents and teachers. If so, it would suggest that the mushrooming of romance consumption in the second half of the twentieth century may have been historically specific. That is, romance was a taste acquired by a particular group under distinctive conditions and, therefore, may not continue to be popular as the population ages further. Indeed, the romance category, though still strong, was already showing signs of decline by the late 1990s.37 Detailed demographic information by genre is available in the Mediamark 88
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Research and Intelligence data for 1998, but it is limited to mystery, romance, cookbooks, children’s books, science fiction, travel, westerns, religious books, the Bible, and a combination category of “personal, business, and self-help books.” The highest proportion of women appeared under the category of religious books. This market was also one of only two categories in which people sixty-five and older bought books in proportion to their representation in the population; the other was westerns, which is also the genre with the highest proportion of men. In addition, the western was a popular genre among readers in the lowest-income tier (less than $10,000 a year) and among readers who had not graduated from high school. In contrast, the genre with the strongest “upscale” class bias (as indicated by education, income, and nature of employment) was travel books, with college graduates buying at a percentage more than twice their population representation. Travel books are also purchased dramatically more often in households with incomes more than $75,000 and with professionals in residence.38 The combination “personal, business, and self-help” was strongly skewed toward professional workers and college graduates, who are mostly middleincome. What we may be seeing there is the effect of the conversion to the service and information economy. In a consumer study done by the industry ten years earlier, readers reported knowledge, work, and education as motives for reading more often than pleasure. This finding was consistent with overall industry trends in professional and technical book sales, as well as the profile of book buyers in the mid-1980s. The 1985 Simmons survey showed book buying overall to be considerably stronger among service or information-economy workers (professional, managerial, technical, sales, or clerical workers) than among craftsmen or other employed persons. The same effect appeared in the 1994 Simmons report.39 Late century data showed that the practice of reading books continued to have remarkable vitality overall, even though recent studies by the National Endowment for the Arts indicate diminished “literary” reading. For instance, in the 1998 Mediamark study, 26.7 percent of all adults reported reading a book in the previous week, the highest of four leisure activities listed (playing a musical instrument, 4.1 percent; playing trivia, 1.7 percent; playing video games, 5.7 percent). The college-educated group outnumbered the less-educated respondents on all of these activities, including both book reading and playing video games. When asked which among thirty-eight leisure activities they had participated in during the previous year, 40.3 percent of all respondents listed reading books; only dining out (48.8 percent) and entertaining at home (43.5 percent) ranked higher. Book reading was also the leisure activity engaged in most often, with 23.1 percent of Americans reading at least twice a week.40 M A R KE T S A N D AU D I E N C ES
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By 2005 Americans were spending more than ever—$42 billion—on books. This represented about 5.6 percent of their total expenditures on recreation. That proportion had remained fairly steady since 1940. Meanwhile, the proportion they spent on magazines and newspapers had slipped steadily after 1980. (See table 12.) Per capita expenditures on reading in general began to fall after 1995, though total entertainment expenditures continued to rise, as Americans spent more money and time on new electronic media. (See tables 13 and 14.) In other words, the electronic age had finally begun to sap the strength of some print media, but books were still holding their own.
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Conclusion In the data describing audiences over the last fifty years of the twentieth century, we can see history at work. The increased emphasis on education, having its impact both in schools and at work, fueled book reading and buying throughout the period. Though income had an effect that was in some ways secondary to education, postindustrial abundance seemed to have had a specific impact of its own in terms of genres such as hobbies and travel, as well as providing private space to support the accumulation of books. The effects of marketing were primarily related to distribution, use of television or movies for either source material or promotional venues, and the introduction of paperbacks, which have made books accessible, affordable, and known to an increasing proportion of Americans. The apparent importance of cohort effects is something that needs more research. Whether we are looking at the effect of Depressionera book availability on the reading habits of today’s eighty-year-olds, at the effect of Sputnik-era enculturation on baby boomers, or at the possible effect of Internet-era leisure habits on today’s young adults, there is evidence that the historical peculiarities of one’s early childhood experience may be more important than anything else in forming an orientation to books. In all, therefore, the many diverse factors that made Americans a nation of book readers were manifest in consumer habits at the opening of the twenty-first century.
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CHAPTER 5
Selling the Product Laura J. Miller
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In the half century following World War II, book retailing in the United States was transformed in significant ways. Although the precise nature of this transformation was rarely foreseen by prognosticators, the seeds of change lay in developments whose impact was first apparent in publishing. The discovery of books by outside investors, the expansion of the reading public to include an increasingly diverse and less elite audience, and the application of new kinds of information technology affected book retailing as much as publishing. Other social and cultural trends, not new to the postwar era but encompassing an everwider swath of society, were equally important for reshaping the retail sector. The flood of Americans to automobile-oriented suburbs, the spread of a culture of informality, Americans’ self-conscious conflation of consumption with leisure, and the prominence given to marketing as a strategy for both personal and organizational success affected retailers in a wide variety of fields. This included what had long been viewed as the rarefied arena of bookselling, a field that had once seemed immune from the innovations adopted by other types of retailers. The changes seen within bookselling in those decades have had a profound impact on the entire American book industry. Developments in retailing have also affected how the American population understands books and print culture. It is not always apparent that booksellers mediate between readers and books (and the books’ authors) in important ways. Of course, booksellers are not the only ones to stand between the book and its reception. Libraries, educational institutions, review organs, and talk show hosts, among others, influence the likelihood of particular people encountering particular books. But retailers play an especially important gatekeeping role in that their decisions about which books to carry and market determine what reading material consumers will have ready access to. Furthermore, as Elizabeth Long has noted, by establishing a face-to-face relationship with readers, booksellers can mediate between readers and other cultural authorities (such as critics and teachers) and thus influence readers’ selection decisions in very personal ways.1 The book retailer, however, is more than just a gatekeeper. Through the way
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they present their stores and the items they carry, booksellers help shape how individuals perceive books. Thus, as retailers have become less inclined to treat books as lofty and remote objects and have moved more in the direction of treating them as one of many equivalent media of entertainment, consumers have reacted in kind. Whether it be the proprietor of a traditional shop, or the mailorder and Internet booksellers without physical storefronts, the techniques retailers employ for display and promotion and the rhetoric they use to describe their products are important for instructing us about what a book is, who books are for, and how we should incorporate books into our lives. This chapter examines some of the more significant developments that illustrate these various processes. Included is a discussion of the growth of chain booksellers and the subsequent consolidation of the bookselling market; the increasing importance of bookselling through nontraditional retailers, especially mass merchandisers and Internet booksellers; and the new emphasis placed on the marketing of books and of the bookstores themselves.
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The Rise of the Modern Chain Bookstore Perhaps no other development in postwar book retailing was as significant as the rise to dominance of the large bookstore chains. These organizations changed the balance of power in the book industry, not only in terms of increasing their own clout and market share at the expense of independent booksellers but also through the way in which publishers became dependent on, and therefore often deferred to, the chains. The chains’ ascendance was accompanied by the importation into book retailing of sophisticated methods of management and marketing, as well as a more explicit and disciplined approach to achieving profitability than had previously been typical in bookselling. The chains were also instrumental in encouraging a shift toward viewing the bookstore as a culturally accessible place. At the start of the postwar era, however, the book trade looked quite different. Book retailing in the United States had long been criticized on a number of counts, and observers were not optimistic that matters were changing. Bookselling was frequently characterized as inefficient and wedded to archaic methods of doing business. Indeed, this was one reason given for why so many people who went into the business found it difficult to keep their stores afloat. Bookstores remained few and far between for most of the country’s history, and this situation did not improve much in the first couple of decades after the war. By the late 1940s, one report estimated that there were 3,041 book outlets plus another 5,000 drug and variety chain stores and 60,000 magazine outlets that carried some books.2 (See Appendix, especially table 7.) By 1957, when the 92
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baby boom, the expansion of higher education, and economic prosperity were supposed to be producing a new generation of eager and affluent readers, the number of outlets that did a significant proportion of their business in books had grown to only 8,360.3 Bookstores were especially scarce outside of major cities. For a large proportion of the country’s population, access to books for purchase remained extremely limited. Critics of bookselling also deplored the poor selection available in most outlets. Discount and drug stores tended to restrict themselves to carrying the most popular titles, and the majority of shops calling themselves bookstores were considered to be only slightly better. There was but a small number of bookstores along with some department stores that were known for carrying an extensive array of new books. Despite the continuation of these long-standing problems, there were indications that the retail situation was shifting. The fate of the department store book department was one manifestation of this. Department stores had been major sources of books since the end of the nineteenth century and, in 1951, were estimated to represent 40 to 60 percent of all retail trade book sales (fig. 5.1).4 But though they were to remain an important channel of book distribution for some time, the department stores were already showing signs of their coming decline in the early 1950s. After World War II, department stores were increasingly not making money off of their book departments, and managers were less willing to
FIGURE 5.1. Department store book labels are symbols of the widespread distribution of books by those retail outlets. Book departments began to decline in the 1950s as suburbanization made them less profitable. Courtesy of Greg Kindal, Seven Roads Gallery of Book Trade Labels. S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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retain a book department simply for its prestige value.5 Book departments were expensive because they took up a lot of space and required a highly trained sales force. In the new suburban branches, space was limited and salespeople, who were often required to serve more than one department, could not be expected to be book specialists. Moreover, the customers for these suburban outlets, a large proportion of whom were housewives and children, were assumed to prefer a small range of best sellers, cookbooks, bibles, and juvenile titles. Suburban branch stores were thus opening with minimal book sections or even no book departments at all. At the same time, urban book departments were scaled back or moved to less desirable locations on upper floors. Gradually, the department stores lost their prominence in the industry. In this context, a new breed of chain bookstores evolved. These booksellers figured out how to turn the same features that made suburban department store book departments so forgettable—small spaces, nonelite shoppers, limited selection—into a highly profitable, and controversial, formula. Of course, the concept of a bookstore chain was hardly unprecedented in the United States. The national chains, Doubleday and Brentano’s, along with a few regional chains, had constituted a major presence in bookselling for decades. Yet before the 1960s, the scope of bookstore chains was relatively modest. In 1960 Doubleday could boast only thirty-three outlets, while Brentano’s had but fourteen stores to its name.6 Consequently, their impact was far more muted than that of the next generation of chains would be. The new chains not only became more numerous than the old. Their style and methods set them apart from any class of bookshop that had appeared before. One notable aspect of these stores was that they deliberately blurred the distinction between bookstores and other kinds of retail establishments, distinctions that booksellers had formerly seen as very important to maintain. Furthermore, the new chains applied their merchandising and planning techniques in a highly systematic and rational fashion, and borrowed new technology in order to accomplish this. Finally (and not coincidentally), the chains grew as offshoots of much larger organizations whose primary businesses were not in books. Although in later years the major chains reemerged as self-contained bookselling companies, the fifteen- or twenty-year period that saw their rise to prominence happened under the tutelage of diversified retail corporations, well versed in the ways of modern management, finance, and mass merchandising. The histories of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton are most illustrative of the transition to the modern chain era. The Walden Book Co. was founded in 1933 by Lawrence Hoyt, a former sales manager for the publisher Simon & Schuster. Hoyt and a partner decided to establish a chain of rental library franchises in department stores, hoping to capitalize on both the popularity of rental libraries 94
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and the successful marketing of department stores as sites for obtaining books. Starting with a franchise in D. M. Read of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the firm prospered and by 1945 had grown to approximately 200 leased rental libraries in department stores around the United States.7 Following World War II, rental libraries began to wane in popularity. Hoyt and his son decided to shift the focus of their enterprise to book retailing, and noting new population patterns, they determined to look to suburban shopping centers rather than traditional urban downtown sites as locations for their stores. In 1962 Walden Book Store opened its first retail outlet in a suburban Pittsburgh mall. This original store included both sales and rental library components, but as the Hoyts opened additional branches, they concentrated more on retailing and by 1964 phased out rental libraries completely. By 1969 Walden had fifty-nine stores in nineteen states and was clearly proving that bookselling on a mass scale could be quite profitable, something that would have seemed a highly doubtful proposition ten or twenty years earlier. But perhaps even more startling than Waldenbooks’ growth was its sale that year to a nonbook enterprise. Walden’s new owner was the department store chain, Broadway Hale Stores. Broadway Hale believed that there were substantial opportunities to improve its bottom line through introducing bookstores to the shopping centers that were springing up all over the country. With Broadway Hale’s capital at its disposal, Walden embarked on an aggressive expansion program. By the early 1980s, Walden was opening 80 to 90 stores a year; in 1981, with 704 branches, it became the first bookstore chain to have outlets in all fifty states. In 1983 Waldenbooks acquired Brentano’s, which had been having financial difficulties for a number of years. The following year, Walden itself was the object of acquisition. As part of a strategy to avert a hostile takeover bid, Carter Hawley Hale (as Broadway Hale had become) sold the bookstore chain to Kmart, a general retailer. Kmart continued Walden’s course of expansion, opening new outlets and, in 1987, acquiring the fifty U.S. stores of Coles, a large Canadian chain. There appeared to be no end to Waldenbooks’ growth in sight.8 Waldenbooks’ principal rival, B. Dalton, Bookseller, also had strong ties to a retailer with interests in nonbook products. B. Dalton was founded by the Dayton Company (later renamed the Dayton Hudson Corporation), a Minneapolis-based department store firm. Dayton started the venture after conducting studies that indicated unmet market potential in the book field. According to the company’s original announcement, it planned to construct fine bookshops that would stress good service. The name B. Dalton was selected because it sounded English and connoted “quality, dependability and authority.” The first outlet was inaugurated with great fanfare in August 1966 in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Dayton’s home territory, Minneapolis. The next store opened S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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the following February in a St. Louis suburb, and by the end of its second year, there were a dozen B. Daltons selling books. Despite Dayton’s original intention to open stores in downtown locations as well as in suburban areas, just about all of these first outlets were situated in suburban shopping centers, and it was indeed there that B. Dalton found a key to success.9 In 1968 Dayton acquired Pickwick Book Shops, a seven-store regional chain based in southern California. After that, Dayton concentrated on building new Dalton outlets rapidly. By the mid-1970s, it was opening around 50 stores a year, and in 1981, the chain could claim 526 branches. While still below Walden in number of outlets, Dalton matched its rival in terms of revenue. For the next five years, the two chains remained in close competition for market share, prime mall locations, and the loyalty of book buyers.10 Despite Dalton’s strong market position, Dayton Hudson eventually determined that bookselling did not fit into its “strategic direction.” In 1986, following a difficult year when discounting by competitors caused Dalton’s profits to fall, Dayton decided to sell the chain. Speculation about possible buyers included such mass merchandisers as Sears, Woolworth’s, and Wal-Mart. However, in the end, Dalton was not purchased by a company in the mold of Kmart, but by another bookseller. B. Dalton’s new parent was a group composed of Barnes & Noble, a large regional and college bookstore chain, and Barnes & Noble’s principal owners, Leonard Riggio and Vendamerica, the American subsidiary of the Dutch corporation Vendex International. The reconstituted company (named BDB Corp. from 1986 to 1991) continued to expand both B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble outlets while making some additional acquisitions. These included two older majors of American bookselling: the 1989 acquisition of the Scribner’s Bookstore name plus one Scribner’s bookstore, and the purchase of Doubleday Book Shops in 1990. Another important acquisition at this same time was the regional chain Bookstop. But going into the 1990s, it was still B. Dalton that was the company’s most visible, ubiquitous, and profitable chain of stores.11
Bookselling, Chain Style In a relatively short period of time, the bookstore chains dramatically altered what had formerly been a highly decentralized industry. (See tables 6 and 7.) A number of elements contributed to their growth. Among the most important was the chains’ tendency to locate in suburban shopping centers and malls, a move booksellers had previously been slow to make. Booksellers had long been accustomed to looking to urban, downtown locations in order to attract both the sophisticated individual who was thought to be interested in patronizing a 96
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bookstore and the necessary amount of foot traffic to keep a business going. In contrast, Walden and Dalton realized that in a changed urban and social landscape, locating where parking facilities were available could be more important than being in the heart of the city. Especially when trying to attract women, who were now better educated than ever before, and who were also the caretakers of a massive new generation of potential readers, a suburban locale made a good deal of sense. The placement of bookstores in suburban shopping centers served another important purpose. It lessened the elite aura that had formerly encircled the bookshop by bringing the bookstore down to the level of the supermarket across the parking lot or the teen jeans outlet next door. This association with the other consumer-friendly businesses of the shopping center, strengthened by an architectural design that allowed the bookstore to blend into its surroundings, helped to make the chain bookstore appear to be just another place to shop. Similarly, the decor and atmosphere inside the chains were very different from that of the traditional bookstore. The old-fashioned bookshop had gained a reputation for being either dark and musty or patrician and clubby, and almost always characterized by narrow aisles and a confusing jumble of books whose logic was known only to the bookseller. The bookstore was thus assumed to be a serious place for serious and/or affluent individuals. Not long after their establishment, the modern chains renounced this old appeal to class and intellect by constructing bright, clean, open interiors. Books were organized and signage was clear, so that a customer could bypass asking for help from a bookseller who might disapprove of her taste or ignorance. Other aspects of the chains also communicated that they were informal places welcome to all. For instance, their promotion of paperbacks at a time when some booksellers still had disdain for the softcovers had this effect. In this, the chains were following the lead of all-paperback bookstores, popular during the 1960s, and known for their casual atmosphere. Additionally, the interiors of chain stores tended to be standardized from one outlet to another. Such standardization not only was cheaper and allowed new outlets to be constructed quickly, but could also be reassuring to some book buyers, promising that a Waldenbooks anywhere would be familiar terrain. Along with standardization, the chains adopted other techniques of mass merchandising. Distressed critics accused them of selling books like they were so many cans of soup. But some chain executives agreed that when it came to marketing, books should be treated like soup, toothpaste, or any other commodity. To accomplish this, books were displayed in such a manner as to grab the customer’s attention. Volumes were stacked up in huge piles (calling up the soup can analogy), or when on the shelves, frequently displayed face out. The S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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chains also invested heavily in advertising, on both a national and a regional basis, with ads tending to highlight popular books and their availability at the nearest chain outlet. The practice of discounting was another important factor that contributed to the book chains’ success. However, this was not part of the original strategy of either B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. Price cutting has always been a highly controversial practice in the American book trade as most booksellers, which operate on very thin profit margins, can rarely afford to match discounters’ prices. In fact, in the decades preceding the 1970s, discounting was largely the province of variety and department stores. Only after Crown Books, with its highly aggressive discount policies, burst on the scene in 1977 did bookstore discounting take off. For a few years after Crown’s birth, the other two major chains resisted price cutting. But Crown’s popularity proved to be too much for them. After some short-lived ventures with an all-discount format, selective discounting, especially of best sellers, became an integral part of Dalton’s and Walden’s strategy. When sold in very high volume, a discounted title could still reap large profits, and at the same time bring customers into the store where they might make other purchases. Leaving their initial reluctance to discount far behind, both Walden and Dalton used their promotional machinery to create an image of being “value” (i.e., low-priced) retailers and, in the process, encouraged consumers to expect a discount as a matter of course.12 Finally, the chains’ early adoption of computer technology proved to be a considerable asset to them. Computers were mainly used for inventory control, that is, keeping track of titles in stock and books sold. The computer could be used to compile data from each of the chain’s outlets and produce reports based on past sales that were used to guide decisions on when to return a title or how many of a certain book to place in an outlet. Computers contributed greatly to rationalizing the bookselling enterprise, as they took the guesswork out of many decisions. They also made it much easier for the chains to run their far-flung outlets. With such up-to-date and detailed information on what was happening in each branch, a chain could exercise control over daily operations from a central headquarters.13 Not surprisingly, it is this element of centralization that has been among the most controversial aspects of the chains.
The Independents Come Back The various innovations put in place by the chains, the substantial resources that their parent institutions made available, and the economies of scale that they could take advantage of helped them to capture a substantial share of the 98
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bookselling market. According to U.S. government figures, in 1963 singleestablishment bookstores accounted for 67.9 percent of bookstore sales, while the five existing chains with eleven or more establishments took 7.9 percent of sales. By 1972 single-establishment firms had 58.4 percent of bookstore sales, while the four chains with more than fifty branches a piece accounted for 11.6 percent of such sales.14 By 1982 Waldenbooks and B. Dalton alone accounted for approximately 24 percent of all bookstore sales.15 During this period, independent booksellers found the familiar problems associated with keeping a bookstore viable exacerbated by chain competition. As a result, many independents went out of business. By the 1980s, however, some independents were making a comeback by reinforcing and highlighting their differences from the chains. In contrast to the minimalist service offered by most chain outlets, enterprising independents touted the plethora of extras they provided to customers. Gift-wrapping, charge accounts, personalized attention, and author autographing parties were among those features meant to draw in readers disenchanted with the self-service chains. Many of the most successful independents followed one of two different strategies, both of which led to the spread of bookstores that were quite different from either the traditional independent or the typical chain outlet. On the one hand, some booksellers noted that the chains, limited in selection and short on ambience, were not places that invited lingering. These independents then offered enhanced services and extensive selections meant to keep customers browsing for hours. Trying to leave behind their elitist image, they also now described themselves as community centers; to bolster this claim, some established adjoining cafés, while others arranged for the premises to be used as performance spaces.16 Such stores did especially well in large cities or college towns. Along with the growth of large, general independents, the 1970s and 1980s saw the appearance of many specialized bookstores. Specialized booksellers, especially religious bookstores, were not unheard of before then, but they became much more common in these years as booksellers realized that they could attract customers by maintaining great depth in a single subject area. This development also corresponded to the segmented or niche marketing that was characterizing commerce more generally at this time.17 Religious and children’s bookstores were the most numerous,18 but several other types, based on particular tastes or identities, also multiplied. (See table 5.) For instance, some bookshops specialized in mystery or travel books, while others promoted themselves as women’s, gay and lesbian, or black bookstores. The case of the women’s bookstore is one example of how bookselling in these years frequently grew out of a commitment to political ideals (fig. 5.2). Women’s bookstores, often operating as collectives, opened in large numbers S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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FIGURE 5.2. Susan Post, founder and owner of BookWoman, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas, in 2008. The feminist bookstore was established in 1974 as a collective called the Common Woman Bookstore (based on the Judy Grahn poem). In order to survive, the business made a series of moves, including operating for a period from Post’s house. In addition to offering books for sale and supporting Austin’s women writers, the store offered an active calendar of events including regular meetings of book clubs, one targeted to “the act of feminist mothering.” Photograph courtesy of Kay Keys.
during the 1970s. These bookstores not only offered a selection of books that were then very hard for most readers to find but also often became important participants in building local feminist movements. They disseminated information about organizations and activities, provided meeting spaces for women’s groups, and were visible establishments where unconnected women could discover like-minded activists. As this suggests, the specialized bookstore could thus operate as an adjunct to the process of defining a social identity.
From Mall Store to Superstore By the end of the 1980s, independents and chains had appeared to have found a way to coexist. The chains were still opening small stores that emphasized popular titles, minimal service, and heavily advertised discounts. The independents, with their diverse selections and extended services, seemed to occupy a niche to which the big chains were indifferent. But a closer look showed that all was not well with the chains’ old mall-based formula and that they had been 100
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taking quite an interest in the other styles of bookselling that had developed during the past decade. Already by the early 1980s, there was a slowdown in the construction of new malls, and this only grew more pronounced as the decade progressed. Not only were there fewer new mall locations to move into, but it seemed that many of the smaller and less glamorous malls were losing their appeal for consumers. Then, in 1990, the superstores were unveiled. Superstore was the name given to a new format of chain bookstore, one with several times the number of titles and amount of floor space as to be found in the typical chain outlet. These stores were a hybrid of the large independent bookstores that developed in the 1980s and the “category killers” that had developed in several other consumer goods fields, the prototype being Toys ’R’ Us. One precedent for the superstore was the Texas chain Bookstop, founded by Gary Hoover in 1982. Consciously modeled after the Toys ’R’ Us format, Bookstop outlets combined discounting with very wide selection, careful attention to display, and a reliance on sophisticated information systems in order to build a book chain that would appeal to affluent, educated readers.19 After BDB bought the company in 1989–90, Bookstop became a key part of Barnes & Noble’s early superstore effort. Another model for a large-store book chain was provided by the Michigan bookseller Borders. The Borders brothers, Louis and Thomas, went from selling antiquarian books to running a general bookshop in Ann Arbor in 1973. Originally catering to a college audience, they created a well-respected store with an extensive selection. In 1985 a second store was added and the chain slowly began to grow. In 1989 a new manager was hired to modernize and expand the chain, and there was a new emphasis on marketing and centralized management. Then in 1992, with nineteen stores in fourteen states, Borders was acquired by Kmart (parent of Waldenbooks), which hoped to give its own superstore efforts a boost.20 Over the course of the 1990s, the superstores grew steadily larger. They also began to provide similar amenities, services, and events to those in which the independents had specialized. Yet with far greater capital at their disposal, the superstores’ cafés, programs, and comfortable chairs were usually more numerous, elaborate, and better publicized than what independents had been offering. At the same time, the superstores retained most of the elements that had benefited the chains previously, such as a centralized management structure and selective discounts. At first, the major chains promulgated a dual strategy—the continuation of mall stores, such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and a separate emphasis on superstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. But as the superstores proved to be extremely popular, within a very short amount of time, they started S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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to overshadow the once-invincible mall stores. The chains invested tremendous resources in building new superstores wherever they could find the space, while unprofitable mall stores were suddenly being closed. This frenzied construction of new superstores was very expensive. In order to raise more capital for its expansion, Barnes & Noble went public in 1993. Meanwhile, in reaction to financial and shareholder difficulties, Kmart decided to sell some of its subsidiaries and, by 1995, had spun off Borders (with its subsidiary Waldenbooks) completely. At this point, each of the four largest bookstore chains was a publicly traded corporation.21 The effect of the superstore strategy was to decisively give the chains dominance in the bookstore market. Even following the successes of the mall chains, independents still sold more books than did chains. But this pattern was reversed in the early 1990s as the superstores settled in both suburban and urban territory and appealed to the same customers who had formerly favored independents. In 1991 bookstore chains were responsible for 22 percent of adult books sold, while independents had a 32.5 percent share. By 1997 the chains’ share of such sales had risen to 25 percent, while independents’ market share plummeted to 17 percent.22 The two largest companies by themselves controlled nearly half of the bookstore market: in 1997 Barnes & Noble and the Borders Group accounted for 43.3 percent of bookstore sales.23 Large numbers of independents were forced out of business, including some of the country’s best-known stores. This was reflected in the bookstore failure rate, which rose sharply during the 1990s.24 At first, general independents were primarily the ones closing, but by the mid-1990s even specialized bookstores saw their customers abandon them for the superstores. The consolidation of the bookselling market not only affected independent booksellers but also altered the balance of power between producer and retailer in the book industry. Whereas previously booksellers had only minimal input into the publishing process, the emergence of a handful of retail clients that were responsible for a significant portion of publisher sales led publishers to consult with those clients about acquisition, print run, and marketing plans. And with so much potential revenue at stake, publishers found themselves in the uncomfortable position of acceding to the large retailers’ demands for favorable terms of sale.25 The retailers had clearly become a driving force in the industry.
Book Sales Leave the Bookstore: Nonbook and Online Retailers By 2002 the share of adult books sold at both chain bookstores (22 percent) and independents (15.4 percent) had declined.26 What this highlights is that books are not invariably or even predominantly purchased from bookstores. Indeed, 102
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this has always been the case in the United States; the scarcity of shops that exclusively sold books for most of the country’s history made that a necessity. But what did change in the second half of the twentieth century was the growth in variety and sheer number of different establishments that routinely sold books. Whereas department stores and newsstands declined as significant sources for books (reflecting the decline of the urban locales in which they were generally based), grocery stores, mass merchandisers, gift shops, specialty boutiques, nonprofit organizations, broadcasters from public radio stations to cable shopping channels, and Internet sites all discovered that books could complement just about any other product. This process reflected the growth of new types of retailers, the long-standing prestige that came through an association with books, and organizational developments in the book industry. Beginning in the 1940s, with the emergence of the independent distributor, who efficiently serviced newsstands with the new pocket-sized paperbacks, various specialized distributors made it feasible for retailers who knew little about books to sell them. For instance, starting with children’s titles and then branching out to paperbacks, supermarkets added books to their product mix in the years immediately following World War II. They could do this because the rack jobber regularly came by to weed out old titles and supply the merchant with new ones.27 The decision to carry books helped bolster the supermarket’s claim to provide economical one-stop shopping. Other models of retailing that became important in the postwar years were similarly premised on offering a large assortment of products along with low prices, and books, believed to radiate a certain amount of class, became a standard part of the inventory. Discount variety houses such as Korvette flourished in the 1950s and liked to use books as “loss leaders,” goods sold below cost in order to bring people into the store where they could be lured to more profitable items. The variety stores’ descendants, mass merchandisers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, continued to sell some discounted books. The growing popularity of these stores among book buyers was matched by that of the warehouse clubs, which expanded rapidly in the 1980s. With their focus on discounted best sellers and remainders, the warehouse clubs both stimulated impulse buys and attracted readers who purposefully sought out these retailers’ low prices. By the end of the twentieth century, a new kind of merchant entered bookselling: the Internet retailer. Online bookselling was among the first types of consumer e-commerce to be done on a grand scale. The pioneering organization was Amazon.com, which started up in 1995. Amazon’s initial appeal to consumers (beyond the novelty factor) was to combine the convenience of mail order with the convenience of consulting an electronic version of Books in Print S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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from the consumer’s own home. But soon, Amazon and the other online bookstores that set up shop introduced features that made them much more active as booksellers. Like their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, Internet booksellers employed promotional techniques that could shape the book-buying patterns of readers and induce them to buy more books. For instance, customers were encouraged to purchase the most popular titles through the showcasing of best-seller lists and Oprah Winfrey’s book club choices. Such practices were quite similar to the marketing efforts of physical bookstores, as were the online newsletters, discounting, and rewards to frequent buyers, which many Internet booksellers provided. Putting a high-tech spin on the conventional bookseller’s practice of recommending specific titles, the online bookstores also established recommendation centers. These sites would suggest books after an analysis of a reader’s stated interests or prior purchases. When Amazon went public in 1997, it became a stock market wonder, attracting investors’ enthusiasm even though the company showed no signs of making a profit. Eager to ride the e-commerce momentum, the major chain booksellers, independents, and e-tailers with no prior bookselling experience quickly established online bookstores of their own. Within a few years, there were myriad sites selling books both new and used; there were sites that specialized in specific categories and others that claimed to sell any title in print. In 1998 textbook sites proliferated as entrepreneurs hoped to capitalize on college students’ enthusiasm for the Internet.28 Books seemed to be a logical product to sell online as readers were often willing to buy without first handling an item, and as books were easy to ship through mail or similar carrier (fig. 5.3). Nevertheless, all of these Internet booksellers found it difficult to make their enterprises profitable as they confronted the same problems of supply, distribution, and marketing that bricks-and-mortar book retailers were accustomed to. Initially, Amazon relied on wholesalers and publishers to fulfill orders. But once sales increased, this became a slow and complicated method for delivering books to customers. Amazon then invested in building a distribution infrastructure to match that which its principal competitors, the major chain booksellers, already had in place. At the same time, Amazon began to deemphasize bookselling. It expanded its product lines to include music, gift items, pharmaceuticals, hardware, and more. Thus, the trend for books to be integrated with other goods in bricks-and-mortar retailing was replicated on the Internet. By 2002 Internet sales represented 8.1 percent of adult books purchased.29 This was still a small portion of total book sales, but it represented rapid growth from online bookselling’s origins just a few years earlier. Perhaps more significant than absolute sales, however, was the way in which the Internet further severed the link between book buying and geography. Of course, there had 104
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FIGURE 5.3. Seattle Internet Warehouse stock of new, used, and rare books. Remainders, overstocks, closeouts, and used books all might end up in a book warehouse for sale to retail and wholesale customers and, in some instances, for shipping overseas. Warehouses replace bookstores for the online customer. Photograph courtesy of arundel.books.
long been bookstores that acted as magnets for out-of-town visitors or that cultivated a substantial mail-order clientele. But Internet bookselling was making even national borders irrelevant as users could easily peruse the wares of and make purchases from retailers around the world. This had potentially destabilizing effects on publishers who were supposed to be guaranteed the exclusive right to publish foreign titles for sale within particular countries. Once again, developments in retailing were shaking up the field of publishing.
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The Marketing of Books, Retailers, and Print Culture One reason why the major Internet booksellers were consistently unprofitable was because they put an enormous amount of money into marketing, ranging from television advertisements to affiliations with other Web sites. While Internet booksellers vastly outspent conventional retailers in this regard,30 marketing grew in importance throughout the book trade. The activity of promotion has always been part of the bookseller’s repertoire, but one effect of the postwar climate of heightened competition was to elevate marketing in terms of the time and resources booksellers devote to it. This has been encouraged by publishers who themselves are channeling increased resources to marketing, and who know that without complementary efforts by retailers, publisher promotion and media publicity often result in unrealized potential. Indeed, publishers actually subsidize much bookseller marketing in the form of cooperative advertising dollars, funds publishers make available to retailers to share in promoting specific books. These funds are channeled into a large variety of promotional activities, from newspaper advertisements to store newsletters, from giveaway S E L L I N G T H E P RO D U C T
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t-shirts to special in-store events, from window displays to prominently placed floor racks. Both the style and substance of retail marketing campaigns have been influential in shaping the way Americans think about books and the organizations that sell them. This can be seen with the chains’ incorporation of massmerchandising techniques that helped to diminish (though not extinguish) the aura of high culture that has tended to surround books at the same time as it contributed to the chains’ appeal. In a similar fashion, online booksellers tried to present themselves as populist heroes by making an explicit link between their marketing efforts and democracy. Amazon.com claimed to have leveled the economic and cultural hierarchy through such practices as posting customer assessments of books along with its own book reviews. Online booksellers employ several variations on this theme of facilitating communication between readers, such as displaying the number of copies a title has sold and using software that informs a customer about what additional books were bought by people who purchased a selected title. According to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, “while in the old world, companies—by advertising and other means—told customers what to think, in the new world, customers tell other customers what to think.”31 As the accounts of literary culture (chapter 13) and reading (chapter 23) show in greater detail, the Amazon phenomenon was part of a reconfiguration of the role of the critic in the late twentieth century; defining the contours of print culture is no longer the job of experts alone. What is often overlooked, however, is that, like advertising, this kind of communication contains mostly “good news” about books and is meant to stimulate further purchases. The development of the large independents and the superstores has additionally helped to create an equation between books and fun. Many bookstores have expanded to become a combination retail space and entertainment center. The talks given by authors and the themed events (murder-mystery nights, Star Trek parties, etc.) lend a festive air to the book-buying experience, while the cafés are meant to promote a relaxed atmosphere and help turn a trip to the bookstore into a real outing. By the end of the twentieth century, shopping for books had become one of the quintessential expressions of consumption as a leisure activity. As Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s former chief executive officer, stated, “Surely it is clear by now that book shopping and book owning have become important lifestyle choices.”32 Perhaps they had always been thus. But the meaning of those choices had evolved in some unforeseen ways.
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CHAPTER 6
The Right Niche Consumer Magazines and Advertisers David Abrahamson and Carol Polsgrove
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The most notable feature of the narrative arc of the American magazine in the two decades following World War II was a major discontinuity. After more than a half century of ascendance dating back to its commercial origins in the national advertising model in the 1890s, the large general-interest magazine lost its dominant position. The late 1950s and 1960s saw a major transformation of the American consumer magazine publishing industry with the emergence of a wide variety of smaller “special-interest” magazines focused on specific leisure and recreational subjects and aimed at specialized audiences. Competition from television, apparent mismanagement, and higher postal rates played a role in the demise of general-interest magazines, while new publishing technology and a major shift in national advertising toward segmented marketing favored the development of smaller, more specialized magazines. Magazine publishers who understood these developments and focused their efforts on special-interest magazines in the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed significant advantages in both circulation and advertising income that resulted in commercial success. As a point of departure, a key turning point in the evolution of the twentiethcentury media was the rise of television in the 1950s. By 1961 television would reign supreme as the primary source of information for Americans about the world, and as a result, by that decade’s end, the character and structure of the U.S. magazine publishing industry would be effectively transformed. By the late 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post (1821–1969), a common item on coffee tables across the nation, had lost to television significant portions of its national advertising income and its audience’s loyalty and was forced to cease publication. A 1970 law stripping publications of their long-standing postal subsidy struck the final blow for two other once dominant titles, the photomagazines Life (1936– 72) and Look (1937–71).1 Even before their demise, a different genre of magazine was already flourishing. Special-interest magazines were not new to America—in fact, as magazine
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historian Theodore Peterson has pointed out, magazines, unlike newspapers, have been historically aimed at “homogeneous groups of readers.”2 In the nineteenth century, Frank Leslie, publisher of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1821–80), built a small magazine empire by publishing magazines targeted to an array of specific audiences, including children and fashionable women.3 Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, a category of magazines aimed at a broad readership began to account for an outsized percentage of both magazine readers and advertising. Advertising played a key role in creating national, mass-circulation general-interest magazines in the 1890s. Retail advertising had been largely the province of newspapers, but with the rise of nationally branded consumer goods advertised by manufacturers, national advertising quickly became an essential source of revenue for consumer magazines. Drawing significant revenue from advertisers allowed publishers of general audience magazines like McClure’s (1893–1933) and Munsey’s (1889–1929) to lower costs to their readers, whose numbers swelled into the hundreds of thousands. Inherent in the triumph of the magazine as a large-scale commercial enterprise was the widespread validation of the advertising-based model of magazine publishing. Some members of that first generation of general-interest magazines closed in the 1920s, but the Saturday Evening Post, passing the circulation mark of a million subscribers early in the new century, lived on and was joined in the brief span of fifteen years between 1922 and 1937 by a variety of significant new general-interest magazines, including Reader’s Digest (1922), Time (1923), Liberty (1924–50), the New Yorker (1925), Esquire (1933), Newsweek (1933), U.S. News (1933), Life (1936–72), and Look (1937–71). Their postwar prospects seemed bright. In the fifteen years following World War II, America’s gross national product increased by 250 percent; consumption of personal services by 300 percent; and new construction by 900 percent. By 1960 per capita income was more than one-third higher than even the boom year of 1945. The American magazine industry’s mass-market flagships, Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, reflected the growing material assurance, in their contents, their circulations, and their advertising revenue. By 1961, Life magazine claimed to reach one in four of American adults.4 Then, abruptly, magazines that had seemed an integral part of the nation’s cultural life disappeared from America’s coffee tables. Of the nine prominent mass magazines—Collier’s (started in 1905), Ladies’ Home Journal (1883), Liberty, Life, Look, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Woman’s Home Companion (1873)—all but three had ceased publication by the early 1970s (Ladies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, and Time). Of the three principal causes that led to these failures—competition from television, mismanagement by publishing companies, and rising postal rates—the emergence of television 108
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made the most dramatic difference. Scurrying to keep up with television, magazines cut subscription prices in an effort to match television’s audience size. But because television could expand an audience at no cost while every additional copy added to magazines’ production costs, many magazines soon found their profit margins threatened. By the 1960s it was clear that television had become a preferred medium for advertising agencies. For mass marketers, television held a promise even the largest magazine could not match: the power to create a nation of buyers. With only three networks dominating programming, everyone, it seemed, was watching the same thing. Even worse for magazines during this time, there were rapid improvements in broadcasting technology and reception quality. The advent of color television in the early 1960s meant that TV could present vivid images. Magazines now lost what appeared to be their last advantage as an advertising medium. But the biggest trouble many mass magazines faced in the 1950s and 1960s came not from television but from their own mistakes. The principal miscalculation in their management strategy in the 1950s and 1960s was an unrestrained belief in the wisdom of ever-increasing circulation. This unspoken business understanding, rather than any actual demand from the public, helped drive the postwar circulation growth of the mass magazines. For a time, selling advertising space to national manufacturers in order to promote the postwar expansion of the consumer economy had proved extremely profitable to magazine publishers. The large advertising volumes had allowed the mass magazines to make a profit from every additional unit of circulation, no matter what additional readers cost them to acquire and renew.5 Driven by competition not only with television but also with each other, the big magazines used cut-rate offers to push their circulations higher and higher. To bolster their circulation claims, many publishers also began including their magazines’ pass-along readership to come up with “total readership,” a number that assumed that as many as three or four readers saw every copy of the publication. The basis of the claim was something called “syndicated research.” Conducted by third-party firms hired by the magazine companies, these commercial surveys had as an unspoken but obvious objective the inflation of magazine readership numbers by including calculations for “pass-along” circulation. Still, no matter what claims magazines made for their circulation, during the 1960s television’s share of national advertising expenditures more than doubled.6 Meanwhile, the drive for artificially high circulations crippled the big generalinterest magazines. Few observers at the time understood the degree to which their publishers had leveraged themselves to obtain these large circulations. The reason for this was that the fundamental economics of publishing rewarded the CO N S U M E R M AGA Z I N E S A N D A DVERTI SERS
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raising of a magazine’s circulation and severely penalized its lowering. In the calculus of matching circulation guarantees to advertising rates, a decrease in circulation not only meant lost circulation revenue but also required publishers to pay back a portion of the advertising income to compensate advertisers for the smaller audience for their ads. Publishers likely considered reducing circulation as nothing other than the very last resort because dropping a magazine’s circulation guaranteed lower advertiser confidence in the magazine as an advertising vehicle. Thus, publishers were slow to question the prevailing gospel of ever-increasing circulation. For example, in 1969 Look’s circulation briefly overtook Life’s. To celebrate its accomplishment, Look placed an advertisement in the New York Times; the headline read: “Look is bigger than Life.” Stung and eager to regain its former status, Life quickly bought the subscriber list of the Saturday Evening Post when it folded later that year. Months later, it was clear that former Post readers were not renewing subscriptions to Life, so the magazine had to spend more money to find new readers to maintain its enlarged rate base. In addition to increasing circulation by any means possible, mass magazines raised the prices they charged advertisers. Before long, the number of advertising pages in the mass magazines suffered a marked decline while the fundamental problem of artificially inflated circulation remained. Perhaps by that time it was far too late for most general-interest magazine executives to change course.7 Look closed its doors in 1971, Life the following year. As the mass-circulation publications suffered, magazines addressing the interests of specific readers prospered. In the booming postwar economy of the 1950s and early 1960s, many Americans found themselves newly empowered by affluence, education, and the possibility of social mobility. Increasingly cut off from traditional communal sources of identity, many turned to active leisure pursuits to add coherence, status, and meaning to their lives. Specialized magazines reflected and shaped these new interests. Edited for smaller audiences and addressing reader interests related to specific leisure activities, special-interest magazines with titles as diverse as the nation’s avocational pursuits began to appear—Cycle (1950–91), Popular Electronics (1954–82), Popular Photography (1955–2002), Golf (1959–63), Skiing (1958), Car and Driver (1961). Unlike their general-audience brethren, they were not in competition with television for mass-market advertising dollars. Blossoming in the 1960s, they were joined by other life-style magazines, from Tennis (1965) to Rolling Stone (1967). These specialized magazines represented a “core buy” for certain advertisers, who could assume that most readers of the magazine would be interested in the product advertised. Some large-circulation women’s magazines survived because they were “core buys” for products like mascara, while men’s magazines 110
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FIGURE 6.1. Covers designed by George Lois for Esquire and frequently photographed by Carl Fischer captured memorable moments, such as Mohammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam, which led to his being banned from boxing and ordered to jail. Esquire, April 1968. Design by George Lois. Photograph copyright Carl Fischer Photography, Inc. By permission of Esquire magazine © The Hearst Corporation. Esquire is the trademark of the Hearst Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
like the venerable Esquire and the newcomer Playboy (1953) held their attraction for liquor and automobile advertisers (fig. 6.1). Between 1955 and 1965, the circulations of a wide variety of targeted publications enjoyed significant growth. While the American magazine field had featured specialized magazines for more than a century, several factors may have contributed to their increasing numbers in the mid-twentieth century. Major advances in printing technology lowered costs. The computerization of typesetting and color-separation processes reduced per-copy manufacturing costs. Large print runs were no longer necessary to keep the cost per issue down; small print runs became economical, so small-circulation magazines for specialized audiences suddenly became more profitable. The total number of periodicals rose in the 1960s from 5,693 to 6,170 titles, and expenditures on periodicals increased from $2.2 billion to $4.1 billion.8 (See tables 9 and 12.) A pair of additional factors assisted special-interest magazine publishers in the late 1950s and 1960s. First, although the loyalty of readers to newspapers had been declining since the 1950s, magazine readership, especially among the young, continued to climb steadily.(See table 14.) Second, rather than compete with the time individuals spent reading, leisure activities appeared to whet the appetite of many for more printed information about their avocational pursuits. Moreover, these special-interest magazines held the two requirements that continue to be essential for long-term success in magazine publishing: specific information in a specific form that can be expected to appeal to a definable segCO N S U M E R M AGA Z I N E S A N D A DVERTI SERS
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ment of readers; and a group of manufacturers or distributors with the means and willingness to advertise their products and services to those readers. Because they dealt with a single product or activity that was fundamental not only to the editorial material but also to the bulk of advertising, specialized magazines could deliver a specific, highly defined audience to their advertisers. Most successful special-interest magazines relied on a simple editorial formula that supported these requirements. The basic tenets concerning editorial content included an unremitting focus on nonfiction rather than fiction; a participatory rather than vicarious approach to all subjects; and a relatively high degree of technical complexity. The new watchword was “service” to the reader. All of this was designed to attract the specific kinds of committed readers that potential advertisers would find attractive. The unique capacity of special-interest magazines to deliver finely targeted audiences to advertisers coincided with two major transformations in consumer marketing. First, many postwar brands of consumer goods had become well established by 1960. As a result, the goal of much national advertising began to shift from image creation and brand recognition to more closely fought contests of market share. One implication of this was that advertising had to appeal to more knowledgeable customers than in the immediate postwar years. At the same time, advances in computer technology, as well as reductions in price, led to a second trend: the evolution of proprietary research in market segmentation by life-style, attitudes, and behavior. The result of this coincidence was a revolutionary shift in magazines’ marketing psychology: from inventing an editorial product and then finding customers for it, to first studying one’s customers and then making what they wanted. Soon new research techniques were developed to study not just the demographics of audiences but their psychographics. By using more-revealing variables such as education level, residential zip code, and occupational status, magazines could define customer characteristics far more sharply. Mass magazines themselves began offering specialized editions offering different content and advertisements to high-income readers, but new specialized magazines could define their readership from the start. Special-interest magazines used an identifiable editorial formula to attract the definable segments of the population that would be potential readers. All magazines attempt to create an editorial persona or personality, but the persona of special-interest magazines was more particular. Manifest throughout the magazine was an essential enthusiasm for its subject matter (fig. 6.2). Readers had to feel that their devotion to and reverence for a specific avocation was reflected in the magazine’s perspective. Because one of the central motivations for readership was the audience’s need for advice, assistance, and instruction, it was essential that the editorial persona 112
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FIGURE 6.2. National Lampoon ( January 1973) illustrating the development of specialized audiences— in this case, the market for humor. Art direction by Michael Gross. By permission of National Lampoon.
of each special-interest magazine be a practical authority on the publication’s subject. Furthermore, it was important that the magazine be able to offer advice in a tutorial manner. The preferred approach was to offer sophisticated treatments of complex subjects aimed at the expert enthusiasts who represented the publication’s core readership, while at the same time including a few articles that would meet the needs of entry-level readers. The goal was to assist in the education of the novices so that, through their loyal long-term relationship with the magazine, they too would become experts. Compared to its average reader, the magazine’s persona was older, better educated, more affluent, more widely traveled, and more sophisticated. Thus, the editorial persona was ideally suited for the role of guide, counselor, friend, and adviser—the essence of its function. The second major concept used to define the character of specialized magazines was editorial structure. Most editors believed that the most effective way to organize the editorial contents of their magazines was a blend of the expected (that which would remain constant and could be looked forward to by the readers) and the unexpected (that which extended the readers’ knowledge or exceeded their expectations). Thus, the organization of the magazines served as a constant for readers. The actual articles themselves were the unexpected surprise. As a result, although there were different stories in each issue, the kinds of articles, reflective of the underlying editorial structure, varied little.9 With these editorial strategies, special-interest magazines could offer a hospiCO N S U M E R M AGA Z I N E S A N D A DVERTI SERS
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table advertising environment to manufacturers and distributors of products directly related to the publications’ area of interest. As a measure of their success, these magazines could typically charge advertising rates higher than rates of general-interest publications, television, or radio. The price of advertising is expressed in terms of “cost per thousand” (cpm) readers. For magazines, the cost is that of a black-and-white advertisement, one full page in size; for television, a thirty-second commercial. At the beginning of the 1960s, the cpm’s of the special-interest magazines, though three times higher than network TV’s, were still below those of newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek. By the end of the decade, their cpm advertising rates were twice those of the newsweeklies, and eight times the size of television’s.10 Advertisers realized that their ads would be viewed by a concentrated group of potential customers and therefore regarded the special-interest magazines as a core buy. The rapid increases in the cpm of special-interest magazines illustrate the dramatic transformation of the consumer magazine industry, which was virtually complete by the end of the 1960s: while some of the largest general-interest magazines failed, a variety of specialized magazines flourished. But not all general-interest magazines failed. In addition to Reader’s Digest and large-circulation women’s magazines, one general-interest magazine targeted to a particular segment of the audience watched its revenues climb in the 1960s: Ebony (1945), a magazine for middle-class African Americans. In 1970, when Life and Look were in their last days, the New York Times reported Ebony “Fat on Ads,” with revenues of nearly $10 million in 1969. The Times attributed Ebony’s success not only to its regional editions but also to its appeal to department stores that had watched their white customers flee to the suburbs and needed a way to reach the African American populations that remained.11 In 1970 a new women’s magazine for black audiences, Essence (1970), circulation 450,000, was one of only a handful of magazines to post increases in advertising pages in the preceding year.12 The fact that network television was still paying little attention to black audiences left the field open for magazines. Then, in the early 1980s, the television scene changed, and specialized magazines faced new competition: cable television.13 Shifts in the federal government’s policies on cable had unleashed rapid development of cable systems, which undermined magazines’ hold on targeted audiences. Competition from cable would continue to worry magazine publishers into the twenty-first century.14 Fighting for a place in a more crowded media field, magazine companies tried different strategies (not all of them new in the magazine world) to produce varied revenue streams. Like Frank Leslie more than a century before, they multiplied the value of their magazine brand by publishing spin-off magazines, expanding their reach into new niches. Reporting on this trend in 1993, the 114
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New York Times noted that Weider Publications, publisher of the fitness magazine Shape (1981), had published a spin-off called Shape’s Guide to a Fit Pregnancy and introduced videos and a Shape clothing line. The company’s chief executive, Michael T. Carr, told the New York Times, “The bottom line is anywhere our readers consume information, we will supply it—interactive software, videos, magazines, specials and clothing.”15 A decade later, another company, Meredith Corporation, was pursuing this approach with energy. “We’ve taken our core businesses and pressed them into as many different models and channels as we could, and that’s how we’ve expanded our footprint,” Meredith’s president, Steve Lacy, told the Omaha World Herald, “We have tremendous knowledge around food, decorating and remodeling. It’s service journalism. We’re always looking for new distribution channels.”16 By the early years of the twenty-first century, the Meredith Publishing Group was producing more than 170 special-interest publications (SIPs), on subjects like gardening and cooking. SIPs were usually sold on newsstands, but unlike magazines, they came out only once, twice, or four times a year. In addition, Meredith produced custom magazines for other companies, such as cruise lines or automobile companies. To promote Meredith’s magazines and products and offer advertisers additional outlets, the company also established Web sites devoted to home and family.17 Meredith’s Web sites were a tacit acknowledgment of a competitor potentially more formidable than cable television: the Internet and, more specifically, the World Wide Web. Making its appearance as a commercial medium in the 1990s, the World Wide Web could offer an apparently unlimited number of sites devoted to specialized interests. The speed with which a Web site devoted to these interests could build audiences, at relatively little expense, was breathtaking; so was the speed with which an Internet user with a specific interest could roam from site to site, collecting information. Would the Internet replace specialinterest magazines in Americans’ lives?18 As the new century began, magazine executives considered that possibility. They responded in various ways. First, recognizing the Web’s ability to build audiences, magazines set up Web sites to lure subscribers to their printed versions, a useful strategy at a time when direct mail was proving less effective, as well as more costly because of rising paper costs and postal rates. Some magazines went further and offered their contents on the Web for those willing to pay for them: to get past the Web version’s table of contents, users had to pay a subscription fee. Some that initially offered their contents free pulled back and began charging a fee. Some new magazines appeared on the Web without a paper counterpart—webzines, like Salon.com (1995). While Salon.com began as a free service relying on advertising revenue, it had lost $40 million by 2001, when it began charging subscription fees CO N S U M E R M AGA Z I N E S A N D A DVERTI SERS
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for access.19 Some noncommercial magazines, like the Progressive (1929), more interested in changing minds than in making money, did offer their contents, past and present, free on the Web. But for-profit magazines guarded the value of their paper products by giving only subscribers full access to contents or selling separate Web subscriptions. Whether these strategies would succeed in maintaining audiences for magazines was an open question. Young users were turning to the Internet in droves, but they were often drawn to interactive, doit-yourself sites—shared diaries or dating and friendship services. Meanwhile, the threat of the Web as a competitor for advertising was becoming ever more clear. The Web’s appeal as an advertising medium had not been apparent at first. In the 1990s, the Web appeared to be far better at attracting audiences than displaying advertising. It took Web developers a few years to find ways to display ads effectively. It also took advertisers a few years to recognize the advantages of the Web as an advertising venue: the ease with which they could determine what eyes and how many saw their ads, the advantage of click-throughs to the advertiser’s own site, the possibility even of direct purchase of products. Between 2002 and 2003, advertisers’ expenditures on the Internet rose a dramatic 15.7 percent ( just above cable television’s 15.4 percent) to account for 2.3 percent of total advertising. Expenditures on consumer magazines rose a modest 4 percent and accounted for 4.7 percent of advertising—behind direct mail (19.7 percent), newspapers (18.3 percent), broadcast television (17.1 percent), radio (7.8 percent), cable television (7.7 percent), and the Yellow Pages (5.7 percent).20 When search engines like Google began selling ads linked to search terms, the Web’s potential for targeted advertising became strikingly clear.21 By 2004 there were ominous predictions that marketers would spend more on interactive media than on magazines within just a few years.22 The rise of this new competitor for ad revenue came at a time when magazines, like other ad-based media, were already struggling to maintain ad revenues in an economy that had slowed to a crawl after September 11, 2001. The search for lucrative niches in the overpopulated magazine field could become frantic. New York Times writer David Carr described the new frenzy in the magazine business in a December 2002 article: The pace of the publishing business has revved up to the point that the victories are now going to the swift, organizations that see an opportunity and pounce. Two of the biggest success stories in terms of circulation and advertising—O, the Oprah Magazine [2000], and Maxim [1997]—did not even exist six years ago, and many of the business’s once hardy perennials, Mademoiselle [1935–2001] and McCall’s [1921–2001] among them, have been sent to that great pulp factory in the sky. 116
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The increasingly rapid metabolism of the magazine business dictates that publishers conduct themselves more like television executives, finding hot niches and introducing quickly developed magazines.23 It was not surprising that magazine executives were thinking more like television executives; the most successful consumer magazines were part of multimedia corporations that had been expanding their holdings for the preceding half century.24 This arrangement had a number of advantages. By increasing the diversity of their holdings, big media corporations could expand while avoiding antitrust actions by the government and evading Federal Communication Commission rules designed to avoid media monopolies. They could also hedge their bets, providing themselves with various revenue streams—if one medium faltered, they had others that might do better. In addition, advertising sales staffs of multimedia companies could offer advertisers packages to induce them to advertise in various magazines in the company’s magazine group; they could also offer space in other media. Bigger companies could cut better deals with the large companies they depended on—paper companies, retailers, and distributors. The rise of large retail chains like Wal-Mart had forced concentration of distribution: the chains did not want to deal with a host of local or regional suppliers. Thus, the distribution system that delivered magazines to the newsstand had undergone a dramatic shakeout, leaving only a handful of companies in control.25 With fewer distributors and new magazines appearing all the time, the competition for newsstand space—a perennial challenge for magazines—heated up; smaller specialized magazines were likely to find themselves squeezed out. Given the challenges of distribution, would the day come when media companies might abandon their paper magazines?26 There were good reasons to contemplate that prospect. Paper costs and postal rates were rising, and newsstand sales had been falling for the past twenty-five years.27 However, despite the obstacles facing distribution and production costs of paper magazines, magazine executives did not yet consider the Web as a substitute mode of delivery for magazine content. In trade publications and pitches to advertisers, they still insisted on the significance of the paper magazine and on its utility in reaching readers whose engagement provided a responsive environment for advertisers.28 Among the editorial and commercial advantages that seasoned editors claimed for paper magazines was the fact that a subscriber had to make a commitment only once to receive the magazine regularly for a succession of months, while each visit to a Web site required a new determination to go there. For another, paper magazines still offered the advantage of portability; though devices for accessing the Web became increasingly portable, their screens were small. Even CO N S U M E R M AGA Z I N E S A N D A DVERTI SERS
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computers with larger screens could not offer the physical richness of color and detail provided by slick consumer magazines. Paper remained the best medium for displaying rich visual elements of fashion, food, and household furnishings. So strong is the lure of print that some webzines have eventually felt the need of a print presence. While the industry was not yet ready to cede the field to the new medium, observers were predicting that subscribers would need to pick up more of the cost of magazines, as advertising revenue dropped. The loss of advertising revenue could lead to less lavish production values, but it could also lighten the weight of advertisers’ efforts to erode the line between editorial content and advertising, a problem that appeared to be worsening in the new century. While new shopping magazines devoted their pages entirely to selling products, magazines that still claimed to be independent editorial products felt pressure to mention brand names in their articles and blur the differentiation between advertisements disguised as articles and other articles in the magazine.29 As changes roiled the magazine industry in the United States, a wider opportunity for commercial activity had appeared on the horizon. Ever since World War II, American magazine companies had looked overseas for new markets, either selling their editions on foreign stands or publishing foreign editions under their brand name. Similarly, foreign companies like Gruner + Jahr and Hachette had seen opportunity in America and purchased American magazines. The magazine business had become increasingly internationalized. As the century turned, media companies saw vast new opportunities in Asia, particularly in China. There, an expanding consumer economy and middle class offered potential audiences and advertisers for an industry that, over two centuries, had demonstrated its adaptability to changing circumstances.30
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CHAPTER 7
Wounded but Not Slain The Orderly Retreat of the American Newspaper James L. Baughman
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In the years immediately after World War II, the typical American family took one, sometimes two, daily papers. Except for more remote rural areas, where delivery could be problematic, and parts of the South, newspaper reading was a routine. Children attended to the comics, men more often to the sports section than the society page. Yet most Americans consumed newspapers, some while commuting to and from work on the bus or subway, others at breakfast or after dinner. Many families understood the drill. Father would sit in “his” overstuffed chair and read the paper. He was not to be interrupted (fig. 7.1).1 Although radio had supplanted newspapers as the most popular mass medium, surveys repeatedly indicated that most Americans received most of their news from newspapers.2 Nationally, newspaper circulation per household had remained relatively constant between 1923 and 1953.3 (See tables 9–11.) Such seemingly inelastic demand rendered the newspaper industry very tradition bound. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect to the late 1940s newspaper is how little it had changed over previous twenty or forty years, and how challenging it was, by later-day standards, to read. Information was rigidly presented across eight or seven narrow columns. With few exceptions, often on the sports page, the writing was a struggle. Following established practice and the dictates of the wire services, story construction followed several conventions, none of which prized readability. Reporting tended to be stenographic. Newsmakers were quoted, not scrutinized. Certain other “rules” to the newspaper game had developed since the late nineteenth century. Publishers relied on advertisers for the bulk of their papers’ income, and the newspaper deferred to the community’s dominant economic elite. Editors and publishers were—or imagined themselves—part of the city’s power structure and were loath to annoy their peers. A miscreant politician might be skewered but not most elected officials and almost never a major retailer or factory owner.4 Still another rule called for an emphasis on local news. Editors believed that
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FIGURE 7.1. A family divided, New York City, 1950, with reading the newspaper the father’s activity of choice. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, LC-G613T01-57609. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
readers were most curious about occurrences in their communities. Mark Ethridge, managing editor of the Louisville Courier Journal, declared in 1960, “People are still more interested in schools, sewers, local tax rates, juvenile delinquency and other community problems than in the Middle East, or German unification.”5 For many readers came the vanity of recognition, or an everpresent fascination with friends and neighbors that big-city dailies deemed too trivial. Mrs. Clark Bradshaw won the flower show blue ribbon in the carnation class; Elvin McIntyre went hunting despite a broken leg; Mrs. Shaw’s brother in Spokane passed away.6 Throughout his public life, including his presidency, Gerald R. Ford read his hometown paper, the Grand Rapids Press. “A hometown newspaper, one you have read all your life,” he wrote, “prints the news of people you know.”7 Not every citizen netted space. Most American dailies in the late 1940s and early 1950s ignored black Americans. Southern papers denied African Americans courtesy titles (“Mr.” and “Mrs.”) awarded local whites and carefully designated blacks in their stories as Negroes. Most northern dailies, with a few exceptions, failed to include African Americans in their society pages. Those that reported on the black community jammed accounts into segregated columns placed toward the back of the paper. African American journalist Simeon Booker’s hometown paper in Ohio included daily “Negro news notes,” Booker suspected, to “enable an employer to see whether the maid or chauffeur was attending gospel meetings.”8 Some southern papers actually ran separate “black star” editions, carrying news about area African Americans for exclusive distribution in their neighborhoods.9 More often, the African American was invisible. Not surprisingly, African Americans read newspapers less frequently than their white counterparts. “One out of every ten Americans is a Negro,” 120
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Booker wrote in 1955, “but certainly not one of every ten daily newspaper readers is a Negro.”10 African Americans had alternatives: weekly papers, based in cities like Chicago, Norfolk, Pittsburgh, and New York, that covered the black community. (See chapter 16). The large city black weeklies, notably the Chicago Defender, were available throughout much of the country. Owned and assembled by African Americans, these newspapers championed black achievement and civil rights. They provided the coverage of individual African Americans and groups not found in most daily papers. These were newspapers, recalled the African American columnist Carl Rowan, “that black Americans counted on to tell them what was going on that affected the lives of black people.”11 Circulations, even when controlling for population, were low, and many blacks regarded the African American weeklies as supplements to local dailies. But the black weeklies had high “pass-along” rates. That is, they were shared with friends and neighbors in barbershops, churches, and pool halls. “Everybody read the Defender,” recalled one black Chicagoan. “Every copy was read four or five times. People who didn’t get it would ask others to let them see it.”12 At mainstream dailies, the typical postwar newsroom possessed a fairly rigid racial and organizational hierarchy. Over their smoky domain, littered with copy paper, editors reigned. Reporters who wished to advance quickly—or merely retain employment—understood their superiors’ expectations, as well as those of their publisher-owners. Self-censorship prevailed.13 Newsrooms also reflected the white male dominance seen in other fields. African Americans were absent. The Baltimore Sun, Russell Baker recalled of his first employer, “was an all-white newspaper. It hired no blacks except for housekeeping jobs.”14 (In early 1955, Booker estimated that the number of black reporters at the nation’s dailies numbered two dozen.)15 The small number of female writers covered society news. In other ways, however, reporting staffs were more diverse. Journalists did not have to possess college degrees to gain employment or advance in their field. Most had lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds. In that regard, many better-educated and ambitious young men had no desire to remain in the field. For them, reporting represented a stepping-stone. John F. Kennedy, plotting a career in politics in 1945, was a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. He soon quit to run for Congress. Upon graduating from Johns Hopkins two years later, Russell Baker intended to be a novelist. But he had to support himself and had to choose between working in a paperbox factory or writing for the Baltimore Sun. The choice left him disconsolate. Baker was “not really interested in newspaper work but even less interested in making paper boxes,” he wrote. “Novelists could become artists, while newspaper people could never be much better than hacks.”16 T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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The publishers who hired men like Baker had little cause for complaint. Most newspapers had survived the competition earlier in the century as either the sole paper or only morning or afternoon daily. Newspaper owners had sidestepped the threat of radio. Some indeed had profited immensely from the new medium by operating stations in their hometowns.17 Nor did most fear television. Long forecast, television suddenly attracted consumer interest in the late 1940s. As in the case of radio a generation earlier, many papers started television stations. Of the ninety-seven television stations operating in January 1950, newspapers owned forty-one or 42 percent.18 Publishers, publicly at least, regarded television as a new revenue source. They envisioned synergies achieved by placing editorial personnel on the air. The newest medium would promote the daily. Remarked the manager of the Detroit News’s TV station in 1948, “Television offers a rich field for newspaper promotion.”19 The nation’s newspaper publishers regarded television much as they had radio. It would eventually prove popular but never really compete with newspapers. The newspaper habit was too ingrained, they assumed, to be upset by another broadcast medium. Radio listening had not, in fact, distracted most readers from their papers. They had too much information to be forsaken. “Sure, TV can do some things which the newspapers envy,” a Virginia editor observed in 1955, “but we have certainly found that TV can never replace us.”20
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Over the next half century, newspapers changed dramatically. They took on a new appearance. Innovations in printing technology permitted much more flexibility in design. Rigid columns were broken; more photographs, some of them in color, appeared. In many localities, delivery times shifted as well. In 1950 most daily papers (81.8 percent) were published in the afternoon; by 2002 morning editions outnumbered evening dailies.21 Perhaps the greatest industry transformation involved the decline of—indeed, the near disappearance of—local competition. Although the trend to one-newspaper towns had actually been most pronounced in the decades before World War II—the number of communities with rival papers had fallen from 502 in 1923 to 137 in 1943—it continued unabated after the war. Between 1948 and 1978, cities with competing dailies fell from 109 to 35; that figure continued to drop for the remainder of the century.22 Each of Texas’s six largest metropolitan areas had two papers in 1975; with the closing of the Houston Post in 1995, each had become a one-newspaper town.23 Accelerating a development that had begun earlier in the century, most papers had become parts of newspaper chains or “groups.” At the end of World War II, just over 40 percent of the daily circulation was controlled by chain newspapers. 122
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In 1976 chains accounted for 71 percent of the daily circulation. “Chain ownership is no longer a drift,” cried a Tennessee editor in 1978, “it is a tide.”24 In the 1980s and 1990s, family-owned papers that had become regional leaders in journalism, notably the Boston Globe, Louisville Courier Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Raleigh News & Observer, had all been sold to media holding companies.25 Ironically, the historian Elizabeth MacIver Neiva concluded, many publishers were paying a penalty for improving their operations. As newspapers invested in more efficient technologies and contained labor costs, the Internal Revenue Service in the early 1960s began setting higher appraisal values on newspapers. The heirs to deceased publishers faced far higher estate taxes, high enough to prompt the sale of many papers. Remarked an Ohio publisher in 1979, “if you do not sell prior to death to put your estate in order, your heirs will be forced to sell after your death to pay the taxes.”26 Whatever the cause, the consolidation of newspaper ownership raised a serious question. A locally owned paper, in theory, would care more about and invest more in the community. Although this often was the case, hometown owners did not always best serve their readers. Locally owned dailies could be dreadful hobby horses for their publishers. They might know their community too well—that is, be too tied to area business and political elites. As one industry monitor remarked in 1986, “Poor newspapers have always been with us regardless of the nature of ownership.”27 That said, there were unmistakable signs in the late twentieth century that many newspaper groups were diminishing their product. Most conglomerateowned newspapers treated their holdings like cash cows. Pressures to maintain or increase profit margins intensified, often at the expense of content.28 As the cost of paper rose in the 1990s, most dailies shrank their page size and began jettisoning such traditional features as the stock tables and the comics section. (See table 8.) Worse was the tendency of certain newspaper groups to slash labor costs by reducing local reportage. For example, soon after purchasing the Asbury Park News in New Jersey, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, cut the reporting staff from 240 to 185 and reduced the paper’s news hole.29 Overattending to corporate formulas, chain management could blur the property’s identity with the community. The Middletown Press in Connecticut had changed hands and lost its way, the former mayor complained in 1996. “The Middletown Press no longer feels like a hometown paper, and that, to me, has been a loss.”30 By the end of the century, even some long-admired chains took up, to various degrees, the cost-cutting mentality of Gannett and others. For years, observers regarded Knight Ridder, the nation’s second-largest newspaper group, as a T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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“good” chain, that is, one that improved the quality of the dailies it acquired.31 Such dedication, however, proved hard to sustain after John S. Knight’s death in 1981. Wall Street pressed Knight’s successors to maintain or increase profit margins, regardless of the cost to the editorial product. When a Knight Ridder executive asked a Merrill Lynch analyst in 1990 why the company’s stock was so flat, he was told “You’re winning too many Pulitzer Prizes.” Gradually, Knight Ridder managers took such admonitions to heart. Journalists, Russell Baker wrote, “have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition—or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as the old gospel has it—but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report every three months or, in plainer English, to comfort the comfortable.”32 At about the same time, newspapers became less serious—and more provincial. Through the first forty-odd years after 1945, America’s newspapers, despite their bias toward local news, had to award some space to foreign affairs. The United States engaged in a grave rivalry with the Soviet Union that more than once threatened to erupt into a third world war. America fought in limited if painful conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Although the concession to globalism varied from paper to paper, with the New York Times far and away the most ambitious, few editors ignored events abroad. “Certainly the growth of foreign news coverage by the American press is one of the wonderful things that has happened in our times,” a North Carolina editor extolled in 1955. “Foreign news is local news. It is as close as every boy’s draft board.”33 With the end of the Cold War, however, many dailies reduced their overseas reportage. In his 1995 study of international news, Stephen Hess wrote, “Although newsrooms around the country are receiving a great many foreign dateline stories, they are using very few.”34 Several years later, three dour monitors concluded, “most of the nation’s dailies—perhaps 95 percent—practice journalistic isolationism. They devote twice the space to comics as they do to international news. They take the weather almost as seriously as momentous events from abroad.”35 A new isolationism could be seen, though it did not result in greater space to domestic political and governmental news. Instead, papers emphasized features.36 Many dailies rededicated resources to monitoring ever-expanding suburbs at the expense of national and international reportage. Although education coverage rose, most newspapers cut their reportage of state and local government.37 The Chicago Tribune provided possibly the most shortsighted example when, in order to boost suburban coverage, it cut the size of its Washington bureau. The Tribune ceased assigning a correspondent at the Pentagon just before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the building.38 The newsroom was transformed as well. Gone was the tobacco smoke, if 124
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not the litter. With computers replacing typewriters and teletype machines, it became a relatively quiet place. The demographics of those who presented the news had changed as well. Many more women and African Americans staffed the nation’s dailies. The vast majority of reporters had college degrees. Late in his life, the veteran Chicago columnist Mike Royko observed, “Today’s reporters and young editors are better educated and far more professional than the hell-raisers and brawlers who were around when [in the mid-1950s] I accidentally stumbled into this trade. Newsrooms are serious and businesslike. You can’t even smoke in most of them.”39 This healthy new professionalism brought a less stenographic approach to reportage. This partly resulted from the growing autonomy of reporters at most papers.40 Then, too, journalism began to share in and perpetuate a growing dissatisfaction with the established political order. After two decades of deference to successive presidential administrations, some large dailies began fostering investigative journalism that in various ways undercut those in power. The trend peaked between 1972 and 1974 with the Washington Post’s reporting of the wrongdoing and cover-ups by the Nixon administration.41 Newspaper writing also became more analytical, at least at the major dailies. Although this tendency could first be seen earlier, it accelerated during the 1950s. With more education and greater self-esteem, many reporters spurned the role of mere notetaker. They were also increasingly mindful that objective reportage empowered those leaders, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who willfully twisted the truth. Unsupported allegations about Communists in government in the 1950s, or military gains in Vietnam fifteen years later, had to be, under the rules of objective journalism, reported without comment. At the same time, editors increasingly believed more analytical coverage gave newspapers an edge over television news.42 More-interpretive news reportage came at a price. Fewer lines went to what a newsmaker said or did. Instead, reporters assessed the address or action. By the end of the century, some critics felt the press’s enthusiasm for explaining the news had become “judgmental reporting.” Opinion was masquerading as information, even though, as one Washington Post reporter contended, “Readers do deserve one clean shot at the facts.”43 .
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There were, in relative terms, fewer readers to worry about. At the end of the twentieth century, a smaller percentage of Americans read papers every day; those who did on average spent less time doing so. By 2005 the estimated total daily readership had dropped to 51.6 percent; Sunday readership had declined from 68.2 percent of all adults in 1998 to 59.6 percent seven years later.44 (See T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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table 11.) Whereas newspaper reading had once been a ritual for many adults, it was now done almost casually. Regular churchgoers had become Easter Christians. “Things are so bad,” wrote the Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, “we’re thinking that instead of running the presses, it might be cheaper to call our subscribers individually and read them the parts of the paper they’re interested in.”45 Competition had eaten away at the newspapers’ authority. Television stations and networks, notably local TV newscasts, had become serious rivals for consumers’ attention. In many communities, alternative weeklies and radio talk shows challenged dailies’ monopoly on opinion-leadership.46 Television news, advertising, and other programming became increasingly important to voters. “Without TV,” three scholars found in their analysis of the 1992 electorate, “we would have had much less to study in the 1992 campaign, but more important, voters would probably have had less information.”47 Black newspapers similarly declined. Desegregation of the newsroom—and news agenda—made the daily paper attractive to more members of the black middle class, who had constituted the largest share of the African American papers’ audience. The nation’s dailies ceased ignoring or, albeit with exceptions, rigidly stereotyping African Americans. Then, too, as middle-class and many working-class blacks moved to suburbs, African American communities became more diffuse and harder for a black newspaper to cover. Observing the decline of the Chicago Defender, whose circulation had fallen from 50,000 in the mid-1950s to 17,000 forty years later, the black journalist Brent Staples wrote, “Integration was a blessing and curse. It broadened opportunity and dismantled American apartheid. But it swept away some of the most substantial institutions that African-Americans had ever controlled.”48 Competition within the African American community added to the woes of the established black newspaper. Middle-class African Americans found periodicals like Ebony more appealing. Those remaining in the urban core often preferred new publications, many free, that targeted specific neighborhoods or political agendas. Perhaps the greatest blow came from black-owned radio stations. Chicago’s four black stations, an African American editor complained, “reach more listeners in an hour than the black newspaper has readers in a month.”49 Nevertheless, the late twentieth-century newspaper was wounded but not slain. Publishing a daily continued to be very profitable. And not all the circulation trends were dispiriting. At least some of the drop-off could be explained by the declining number of families that took more than one paper, caused in part by the closing of competing dailies in some communities. Between 1970 and 1987, the percentage of Americans who read more than one paper fell from 33 to 23 percent.50 Then, too, television news’s eclipse of the daily paper was 126
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anything but complete. More than half the adult population still read newspapers. Over the broadcast news media, daily papers continued to have great advantages. They offered a completeness in reportage, especially regarding local government, that no commercial television or radio outlet could match.51 More debatable was why newspapers had fallen from grace. The most obvious explanation would appear to be television. Sales of TV sets took off in 1948; a decade later, just over 80 percent of all households had one or more televisions. More homes had TV sets than toasters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or clocks.52 However, early studies tended to confirm the forecasts of many newspaper publishers. Television had a much greater initial impact on the consumption of mass media other than newspapers. A 1952 survey of New York City residents indicated that TV set owners devoted less time to newspaper reading compared to those sampled sans televisions, but the declines were small when contrasted to reductions in radio listening and moviegoing. The percentage reporting reading a paper fell only slightly among those owning sets.53 All in all, the postwar publishers appeared justified in not regarding television as a threat. If Americans in the 1950s and 1960s spent slightly less time with their papers, they remained part of their world. Why did television not have a more immediate impact on newspaper circulation? One probable factor was generational. Americans in their twenties and older in the 1950s had already developed a newspaper reading habit that the “home screen” could not break. Then, too, television programming initially if unintentionally fostered newspaper consumption. Notwithstanding some exceptional initiatives, TV did not take its informational role terribly seriously in the 1950s.54 Network and local newscasts were fifteen minutes long, often crudely assembled. Moreover, much of the late afternoon and early evening schedules went to programming targeted at children and adolescents. Denver residents had four channels in April 1955 showing children’s programs or old movies. Atlanta set owners had similar choices. Denver’s KBTV was the most kid-friendly, airing an hour-long children’s program, Corky’s Club, from 5:00 to 6:00, then reruns of Hopalong Cassidy until 7:00. None of the four Denver channels carried an early evening newscast.55 In early 1957 Philadelphia’s WFIL aired a teen dance program, Bandstand, from 2:30 to 5:00, followed by ABC’s children’s show, The Mickey Mouse Club.56 An adult who wanted to watch television was all but discouraged from doing so. Not surprisingly, a 1961 Gallup Poll found that 41 percent of those surveyed read their papers in the late afternoon or early evening.57 In time, television proved to be more of a temptation for more Americans. Stations, under pressure from advertisers, began concentrating more on the adult viewer. Shows for teenagers were cut back, and ones aimed at children T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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relegated to the weekends.58 Late afternoon celebrity interview programs gained prominence. Networks and stations expanded their early evening newscasts and, especially at the local level, worked harder to make their productions more appealing to more viewers. By 1991 most of Denver’s and Atlanta’s leading stations commenced their early evening newscasts at 5:00 P.M. Once 15 minutes long, they now ran 90 to 120 minutes.59 This more inclusive strategy had paid off. Nielsen diaries indicated that the percentage of viewers watching television from 5:00 to 6:00. increased from 16 percent in 1960 to 36 percent in 1980. The percentage from 6:00 to 7:00. rose from 35 percent in 1960 to 57 percent twenty years later. Between 1960 and 1980, total household viewing had grown from 5.03 to 6.26 hours. 60 And time devoted to newspaper reading, based on timebudget diaries in 1965 and 1975, fell dramatically.61 (See also table 14.) Still, TV’s effects can be misrepresented. The real threat to newspaperconsumption was not television news programs—the audiences for which have been grossly exaggerated over the years62—but TV entertainment. Many Americans did not consider TV an informational medium. Rather than view a local, network, or cable newscast, they preferred reruns of network situation comedies or talk shows. Those who regularly viewed TV newscasts often also read daily papers. Indeed, “the people who watch TV news are, in fact, the best readers of newspapers,” a Utah newspaper editor remarked in 1982. “The people we’re losing are the ones that turn the news off and watch The Beverly Hillbillies or something.”63 Other factors enhanced television’s capacity to distract. Many families started purchasing second, even third, receivers. By 1980 60 percent of all homes had more than one TV.64 That second set gave some the chance to view something they preferred rather than read (or read attentively).65 The number of stations serving individual markets increased, as did viewers’ programming choices. In 1955 Denver set owners had four channels, whereas in 1991 they had seven. Atlanta’s on-air stations had increased from three to ten. Cable television provided even more options for viewers. Denver cable subscribers had twenty-five programs from which to chose in 1991.66 Television’s great attraction to advertisers had serious, long-term consequences in those remaining communities with competing dailies. Although total advertising expenditures on newspapers rose steadily after 1945, the shift of national and regional advertising to TV lessened the rate of increase. Raising rates to recover this loss in turn upset those advertisers, notably area retailers, who remained reliant on newspapers. Forced to pay higher charges, many advertisers became more selective. More and more ran ads only in the circulation leader. Coveting the same upper-middle-class readership, the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune fought hard for advertising. An NBC executive 128
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could not decide in late 1960 where to place his network’s advertising. “Don’t bring me dilemmas,” his superior replied, “bring me decisions.” NBC went with the circulation leader, the Times. The Herald Tribune ceased publication in 1966.67 Shortly before its demise in 1981, the Washington Star had 34 percent of the city’s daily circulation yet only 15 percent of the advertising revenue. “The disease that kills off competing newspapers is not lack of readers,” Leo Bogart, a longtime analyst for the industry, concluded, “it is lack of advertising.”68 Another factor accounting for the newspaper’s declension was generational. Until the mid-1970s, newspaper readership was fairly constant (fig. 7.2). Although Americans might allocate less time to newspapers, they were still looking at them. The habit remained. Yet those born after World War II, the baby boomers, were not displaying the same behavior. John P. Robinson’s analysis of reading patterns showed a sharp drop in newspaper reading in the 1970s, and most evident among those in the age group between twenty and twenty-nine. “Something happened to our generation where we were not raised to do something that our parents did every day,” a Philadelphia journalist born in the mid-
FIGURE 7.2. Standing on the sidewalk, a news carrier delivers the Washington Star by tossing it toward the subscriber’s front door, 1963. Home delivery was a facet of the newspaperreading habit, which remained stable until the mid-1970s. U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, LC-G613-7-57609. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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1960s observed. “I have friends here who are smart people, who are very well informed, but they don’t feel the need to get a paper.”69 (See tables 12 and 14.) Boomer children proved even less likely to read newspapers. A 1998 Pew survey indicated that 26 percent of those eighteen to twenty-four years old reported reading a paper the previous day compared to 69 percent of those sixtyfive and older. Age similarly predicted the amount of time individuals spent with their papers. Young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-four) polled in 1998 devoted the fewest minutes (nine) compared to sixteen for those ages thirtyfive to forty-nine and twenty-one for those ages fifty to sixty-four. “You’re dealing with generations who have not developed the regular newspaper habit,” the prominent industry consultant Ruth Clark explained, “I don’t see any sign that they ever will read papers as regularly as their elders do.”70 “Our readers are going to die,” a Chicago editor wailed, “and we won’t have any to replace them.”71 The boomers’ disaffection had several explanations. The first is that they grew up with television. This did not, as some might infer, make them TV addicts. Indeed, baby boomers actually watched less television as adolescents than their parents. The transistor and car radio had been the boomers’ entertainment medium.72 Nonetheless, the presence of television sets in their homes gradually lessened the importance of newspapers in their lives. The paper’s arrival was not quite the same event in 1975 that it had been in 1955. “We have now got for the first time,” the writer Tom Wolfe remarked in 1966, “a whole generation of people 25 and under—a very large segment of the population— brought up to get their information primarily through the ear; that is, by radio and television, the printed word becomes really a secondary source of information for them.”73 Perhaps more significant was the fixation of boomers and their children on their own world. In many ways, teenagers became a distinct age cohort in the 1950s when music companies and advertising companies began targeting adolescents.74 But in the late 1950s and early 1960s teens intended to grow up, in contrast to their younger brothers and sisters a decade later. Studies began to show a growing indifference to news consumption among younger Americans. Teenagers and young adults were not likely to read a newspaper or view a television newscast. And in the 2000s they often avoided news on the Internet as well.75 Tom Wolfe observed the “the second generation teenager” in 1966. “The component parts of the paper don’t interest kids at all,” he commented. “It is really only us,” he told a group of editors, “who feel any longer that politics is the most important subject in this country.”76 This generational identity, cemented by popular culture and mass advertising, only became more pronounced with each new wave of adolescents. Complained Judith Martin of the 130
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Washington Post in 1985, “We have, as a society, informed teen-agers not only that they are entitled to have their own culture, but that we don’t expect them to aspire to any other.”77 Publishers came to believe that a much more diverse news agenda—increasing their coverage of such areas as health, food, and science—would hold readers and win new ones. Even the good gray New York Times introduced special sections in the 1970s that contrasted sharply with its very traditional agenda of national and international news. The “new” New York Times did appeal to upscale retailers, causing some wags at the paper to wonder if the paper would introduce, along with its new “Living” section, a “Dying” section replete with undertaker ads.78 Newspapers were acknowledging how much the audience had been transformed since the 1950s. Much as some publishers wanted to blame television for their woes, the greater problem related to changes in the ways Americans worked and played. Simply put, America went from being a nation of villagers to a nation of hobbyists. In 1950 Americans had a fairly narrow range of concerns involving family and community, politics and baseball. Over time, however, more and more Americans developed specialized tastes and retreated from the larger community. After overseeing a survey of 1,500 adults, a Chicago Tribune marketing specialist commented that “people are placing the chief emphasis on self, the home, and family.”79 “Many of our readers, and some former readers, perhaps, have less interest these days in public affairs,” a Knight Ridder executive remarked in 1979. “There is the feeling that Mr. Jefferson’s notion of an actively engaged citizenry is somehow outmoded.”80 Consumers, Ruth Clark declared, “are not going to read [the paper] out of a sense of duty.”81 The best evidence of this trend can be seen in the magazine industry. Since the 1960s, periodical publishers enjoyed the greatest success playing to subgroups of readers with specific, sometimes very specific, tastes. (See chapter 6). Not only were specialty periodicals succeeding over mass magazines, many of which ceased operations, but they fared well compared to newspapers. Studies of leisure time suggested that, notwithstanding the presence of television, younger Americans, the cohort most likely to abandon newspaper reading, had not reduced their time to magazine reading.82 Newspaper editors thought otherwise. Television, they averred, had shortened the national attention span; newspaper stories must be shortened and not jump to another page. Time itself had become too precious for newspaper reading. A Dayton editor warned in 1978, “The real competition is going to be time.”83 (See table 14.) Newspapers tried to cater to more specialized tastes, but at a cost. By carrying more material on show business personalities and the latest diets, many dailies surrendered space that had gone to a certain type of local news. This is what some editors dubbed the “refrigerator medal” stories, small items about T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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individuals that readers clipped and saved. Most dailies had once considered such pieces to be their staple. The 1964 papers that Carl Sessions Stepp studied “were jam-packed with short items, overflowing with local names, places and activities.”84 Consultants, however, had admonished them to drop the practice and cease being a bulletin board. No longer, an Advertising Age writer explained in 1983, would dailies cover “the minutiae of local life.”85 Individual distinctions were less likely to be listed, obituaries in many papers became small death notices. By 1999, Stepp found, “social and personal items have almost vanished from the paper.” Many dailies had begun charging families for obits. Some editors realized they had gone too far. Newspapers, one Indiana editor admitted, had become “too important to put in their engagement announcements, or when the community group is going to meet, or other things people want to read. We sort of lost that homey touch.”86 Newspapers also lost many of their working-class readers. In 2002 47 percent of households with incomes of less than $40,000 read the paper daily compared to 64 percent of the homes with incomes of $75,000 or more.87 Newspapers bore some of the responsibility for the loss of less well-to-do readers. One study suggested that two prestige papers, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, by adopting the language of newsmakers and experts, became increasingly difficult to comprehend. Comparing the two papers over time, three scholars concluded, “The unfortunate truth is that a substantial proportion of American citizens who in earlier times could turn to their daily newspaper and easily read the news can no longer do so.”88 In other ways, newspapers disenfranchised working-class readers. Fewer dailies assigned reporters to cover organized labor. A few admitted their bias. The New Haven Register sought “quality circulation,” a publisher confessed. “We want the right people reading it, . . . people who have got the disposable income to shop.”89 .
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At the end of the twentieth century, newspapers had a profitable business model. If no longer the “mass” medium they had been two generations earlier, newspapers made good money. But many publishers turned ashen faced as circulations began falling sharply in the early 2000s. During a six-month period in 2005, only two of the nation’s biggest twenty enjoyed circulation gains. And those gains, a New York Times reporter commented, “were extremely modest.”90 (See table 10.) The decline in circulation had several causes. Those entering adulthood in the new millennium were proving even less inclined to take up the newspaper habit than their baby boomer parents. Consumers born in the 1980s and 1990s, dubbed “millennials,” likely grew up with cable television and its attrac132
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tive menu of niche programming. The swift diffusion of the Internet in the late 1990s fostered a host of specialized Web sites. Why depend on a newspaper’s sports section or gossip column when one could view ESPN or E! or craft one’s own “newspaper” on the Web.91 Adults suspicious of reporters’ prejudices convinced themselves that ideologically committed radio talk show hosts or Web bloggers substituted for reading a daily paper.92 All in all, the Internet loomed as the greatest threat. Newspapers labored to stay ahead of the curve by launching their own Web sites, which proved popular. Cheerier industry executives spoke of the larger “total audience” newspapers commanded when combining print circulation and online visits. “If you count Web traffic,” wrote an Editor & Publisher reporter, “newspapers are actually more popular than ever.”93 Yet the economics of online journalism remained uncertain. “Nobody knows,” a reporter confessed, “whether the industry is going to find a way to pay for itself on the Internet.” Very few newspapers charged for access. And Internet advertising, which was heavily discounted, was not covering reporting costs. Perhaps most important, nonnewspaper sites competed with newspapers for classified advertising. More broadly, the growing popularity of the Internet diminished the newspaper industry’s status within the financial community. Wall Street increasingly questioned the future of newspaper publishing, and major shareholders forced newspaper companies to cut costs and to harvest as much profit from their properties as possible while they could. It was a pathetic scene. Profit margins held steady or even swelled, but share prices continued to fall. Even as the markets recovered from the post-9/11 downturn, newspaper stocks continued to decline. In 2005 share prices dropped 20 percent industry-wide.94 Might the newspaper business be the equivalent of typewriter manufacturing in the 1980s? Many Wall Streeters thought so. But Wall Street could be mistaken. While some owners sold their papers in the 2000s, others expanded their holdings. The McClatchy family, which purchased Knight Ridder in 2006, gambled that the chain’s papers in prosperous markets would hold value; the rest were sold. McClatchy’s Dean Singleton believed, with many others, that a new business model that invested more in online journalism would save the industry.95 Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper company, agreed. In 2006 Gannett set out to remake the industry by proclaiming that the Web would come first, newsprint second. The company pressed its newspaper managers to focus more intently on local news on their Web sites and to use more content supplied by readers. These two new trends—often dubbed “hyperlocalism” and “citizen journalism”—were the hot topics everywhere in the newspaper business by the mid-2000s.96 In some ways, these trends were as old-fashioned as they were novel. From its birth T HE O R DE R LY R E T R E AT O F T H E A M E RI CA N NEWSPAP ER
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FIGURE 7.3. Newsstand, Union Station, Washington, D.C., 1966, a means of newspaper distribution challenged by the Internet. U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
in 1704, the American newspaper had often relied on hyperlocal or citizengenerated news or both. But the delivery system now really was new (fig. 7.3). Meanwhile, as newsroom layoffs continued, many industry observers lamented the decline in high-quality professional journalism, especially investigative reporting. To save the newspaper as a carrier of serious journalism, some critics proposed a variety of new business models, including taking public companies private or even making them into not-for-profit corporations.97 By 2005 it was clear that the newspaper industry would be radically transformed in the new century. Could a “print culture” medium that had lived as ink-on-paper in America for 300 years move entirely and successfully into cyberspace? And if it could, would traditional journalism be able to move with it? These questions became even more pressing as the broader economy slid into recession in 2008–9. With major newspaper companies falling into bankruptcy, it seemed possible that the orderly retreat of the American newspaper might become a rout.
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CHAPTER 8
Government Censorship since 1945 Donald A. Downs
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When America emerged from World War II, the status of intellectual freedom seemed more secure than it had been in the 1930s. After the Ulysses decisions in 1933 and 1934, the Customs Bureau’s seizures of books under the Tariff Act had “diminished considerably,” and in 1940 the American Library Association displayed its growing sense of professional mission by adopting the Library Bill of Rights, a declaration of its responsibility to intellectual freedom in a pluralist democracy, and its answer to the widespread banning that greeted the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.1 But liberalism was hardly triumphant. The Postal Service continued to declare such works as Tobacco Road and Appointment at Samarra unmailable, and state and city film review boards wielded broad censorial power. In order to ward off national censorship, Hollywood bound itself to the 1934 Production Code, which obligated film makers to steer clear of affronting conventional morality. “The combination of governmental censorship and industry selfregulation threatened to suffocate American movie creativity.”2 Despite some libertarian influences, First Amendment jurisprudence was still beholden to the “bad tendency” test: the government could proscribe expression that had a “natural tendency” to endanger the security of the state or society, or to undermine moral virtue. Judicial doctrine mirrored the traditional Victorianism that stressed the development of good character and reason’s priority over the emotions.3 A key 1942 case epitomized free speech doctrine’s commitment to reasoned order as America entered the postwar era. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court ruled that the “lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or ‘fighting words’ . . . are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”4 By the end of the 1960s, this constitutional landscape would no longer be recognizable, as what Richard S. Randall portrays as the “free speech society” supplanted Chaplinsky’s assumptions about the nature of the mind and the moral order. Nonetheless, censorship continued to struggle with freedom for reasons
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that are as old as organized society. Governments appear congenitally protective of their interests, and political groups of various stripes can gain advantage by silencing or chilling the speech of their foes. Furthermore, some expression naturally evokes revulsion, such as the snuff films that appeared in the mid-70s, various forms of hard-core pornography, and pornography made with children. The onset of new technologies also provokes censorial inclinations. At one time movies were feared, whereas today the Internet poses challenges to deeply held societal norms. Furthermore, in matters of sex, human beings are often ambivalent about unfettered expression because of the complex psychology of sexual maturation in any social order. As Randall remarks, the “paradox of eroticism” seems part of the human condition. “We cannot be characteristically human without both the pornographic and the impulse to control it. In our eroticized sexual nature many territories are forbidden; they are closed not over our protests but with our complicity.”5 Despite these seemingly universal tensions, four factors distinguish the post– World War II era: the exponential growth of socially challenging expression in a variety of media; the widespread institutionalization of a free-speech ideology accompanied by an organized support system; the continued growth of cultural and ethnic pluralism; and the eventual development of countermovements on the left as well as the right. This essay covers three historical periods, each representing a different complexion of competing cultural and political values. In the first period, 1945–57, McCarthyism reigned, casting a censorious pall over the nation. The second period, 1958–1980, witnessed the ascendance of the “free-speech society” and the modern doctrine of speech in constitutional jurisprudence. From 1980 to the present, the free-speech society has remained entrenched, though beset by the renewal of conservative attacks and the appearance of a new foe: the procensorship Left, bearing the banner of “progressive censorship.” I deal mainly with moral issues and political heresy and sedition, as the most important censorship issues have arisen in these domains.
1945–1957: Traditional Values in a Climate of Fear The prewar trend toward liberalization was abruptly halted by the onset of the Cold War, as Stalin-inspired communist governments took power across Eastern Europe. Several events then sparked fear for the future of liberal democracy: the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, followed by the blockade of Berlin; the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atom bomb, and Mao’s communist takeover of China in 1949; and the communist invasion of South Korea in 1950. As tension mounted, governments in the United States began to investigate and prosecute 136
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members of the Communist Party and its sympathizers. American Communists, following Moscow’s orders, were indeed engaged in espionage and infiltration of American groups. But freedom of speech and thought was a major casualty of the way in which the government acted, as Richard M. Fried relates:
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The mid-century Red Scare targeted ideas as well as people. Critics feared that it had spawned “thought control” and conformity and fed deep springs of anti-intellectualism. Commentator Elmer Davis warned that many “local movements” constituted a nationwide “general attack not only on schools and colleges and libraries, on teachers and textbooks, but on people who think and write . . . in short on freedom of the mind.”6 In 1947 President Truman inaugurated the federal loyalty program with Executive Order 9835, sparking the formation of national, state, and local boards dedicated to determining the loyalty of citizens in positions of public trust. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations ( Joseph McCarthy’s bailiwick) became household words. Congress and such states as California, Washington, and New York conducted investigations of academics and mandated loyalty oaths that courts upheld more often than not. Targets were pressured to “name names” and interrogated about their political views and reading material, ranging from Marxist literature to such mainstream publications as the New Republic and the Nation. At least 100 professors lost their jobs for the way they dealt with questions at hearings, and probably several times this many lost the opportunity to be hired in the first place. Self-censorship had as big an impact as outright government censorship in the movie industry (which was riveted by the Hollywood 10 hearings of HUAC in 1947), the academic world, and other institutions. Forty percent of faculty members surveyed in one major study worried about the status of their jobs in the event a student misinterpreted a political statement in class, and 22 percent self-censored themselves to avoid embarrassing their institution.7 Nearly all members of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers agreed that actual communists should not hold teaching positions, regardless of how they conducted themselves in the classroom. Ellen W. Schrecker pinpoints the betrayal of liberty on America’s campuses: “Open criticism of the political status quo disappeared. . . . [T]eachers, as Lazarfeld and Thielens so devastatingly reveal in The Academic Mind, played it equally safe, pruning their syllabi and avoiding controversial topics. . . . The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.”8 Book banning also took place, especially at local levels. Meanwhile, Joseph McCarthy undertook national action by targeting the International Information GOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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Agency’s selections of books for its overseas libraries. Evidence of book banning is mixed, for citizens and librarians did often resist absurd claims, such as that of a woman who sought to remove The Adventures of Robin Hood because of its alleged subversive effect. An Ohio study found that only four libraries out of sixty surveyed experienced pressure to remove books. Nonetheless, censorship was widespread, as government and private groups from the American Legion to the Daughters of the American Revolution sought to save the country by determining what was fit to read (fig. 8.1).9 In 1959 Marjorie Fiske published a long-anticipated report sponsored by the California Library Association that exposed the fearful state of librarians in the years immediately following McCarthyism. Although most librarians identified with the freedom mission of the ALA, nearly two-thirds reported cases of selfcensorship in selecting controversial books, and one-fifth “habitually avoid[ed] buying” controversial material.10 In Sapulpa, Oklahoma, the school board reenacted an ancient ritual by burning several books it considered socialistic; and the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, public library board, in cahoots with the American Legion, fired librarian Ruth Brown despite her thirty years of service because of her involvement in the fledgling civil rights movement (a cause often linked with communism at the time) and for carrying the New Republic, the Nation, and Negro Digest.11 Finally, the federal government launched an effort that contributed to the evisceration of the Communist Party in America. The McCarran and McCarranWalter Acts (1950 and 1952) empowered the government to deny visas to foreigners considered fascist, communist, or simply un-American, leading to dramatic increases in denials.12 More important, in 1948 the government began its successful prosecution of eleven Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act for conspiring to form a group to advocate the overthrow of the government.13 Employing a revamped version of the bad tendency test, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in Dennis v. United States (1951), declaring that the First Amendment protects only the teaching of abstract doctrine, not the advocacy of actual revolution or violence.14 Following Dennis, the Justice Department prosecuted more than 100 secondtier party leaders, winning convictions in almost all cases. By the time appeals reached the Supreme Court in 1957 in Yates v. United States, however, times had begun to change. Television was now prevalent, and the inhibitions of the McCarthy era were waning. President Eisenhower had denounced library censorship in a major speech in 1953, and the Senate had censured McCarthy for his excesses. The Communist Party was moribund, and the Supreme Court, now under the leadership of Earl Warren, had issued its monumental decision against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, signaling the birth 138
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FIGURE 8.1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of City Lights Books’ window display of banned books, including Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl. The San Francisco bookstore, which Ferlinghetti cofounded in 1953, was also a publisher and major site for Beat poetry readings in the 1950s. It continues to symbolize protest against censorship. Courtesy of Harry Redl.
of a new regime of law dedicated to civil rights and liberties. The Yates Court revised Dennis’s doctrine in a libertarian direction by distinguishing the advocacy of ideas or doctrine from the advocacy of illegal action.15 After Yates, the government abandoned its prosecutions of the Communist Party. Though McCarthyism focused on political dissent, it also had an effect on moralistic censorship, for “sexual unorthodoxy was associated with left-wing politics.” For example, the Food and Drug Administration hounded radical sex theorist Wilhelm Reich throughout the 1950s, and in 1957 a court ordered the seizure of six tons of his writings. In addition, comic book publishers promulgated a self-censorship code in reaction to several congressional hearings about the corruptive influence of violent and subversive comics.16 Nonetheless, signs of the renewal of liberalization appeared as McCarthyism peaked. Hugh Hefner published the first edition of Playboy in 1953, launching the movement that would soon make pornography widely available in the mass market. And a year earlier, a unanimous Supreme Court dealt with the First Amendment status of blasphemy (speech hostile to religion) for the first time. Burstyn v. Wilson dealt with the movie The Miracle, a Roberto Rossellini proGOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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duction depicting the story of a peasant woman who believes that the child she has borne after being seduced is Christ incarnate. The New York review board withdrew the license for the film after the Legion of Decency (the Catholic Church organization founded in 1934 to pressure the film industry to avoid sacrilegious themes and to honor the Production Code) and patriotic groups protested against the film’s sacrilege and alleged communist inspiration. Acknowledging intellectual and cultural pluralism, Burstyn extended First Amendment protection to films for the first time and placed blasphemy within the ambit of First Amendment protection. New York’s definition of “sacrilegious” was
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so broad and all-inclusive that the censor is left adrift upon a boundless sea amid a myriad of conflicting currents of religious views, with no charts but those provided by the most vocal and powerful orthodoxies. . . . It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or film.17 Burstyn was a harbinger of the course of constitutional law. It also had a more immediate effect, as courts began to veto censorship board decisions in cases involving Anatomy of a Murder (not licensed because it used the words “rape” and “contraceptive”) and La Ronde (not licensed because it was deemed immoral), and other works. In 1953 and 1955, producer Otto Preminger released The Moon Is Blue and The Man with the Golden Arm without the approval of the Production Code. Another 1957 case involving obscenity also signaled a new direction for constitutional law. The Supreme Court had never even explicitly addressed the First Amendment status of obscenity law before Roth v. United States—an indication of the staying power of traditional morality and the undeveloped imagination of First Amendment jurisprudence. Justice Brennan held that the First Amendment protects all literature about sex possessing literary or intellectual merit but not obscenity, which is “prurient according to contemporary community standards”—appealing to sex for sex’s sake. Though the Court refused to extend First Amendment protection to obscenity, Roth was a further step toward the protection of art and literature dealing with sexual themes.18 Indeed, after Roth obscenity convictions became increasingly difficult to secure, almost disappearing in the ensuing decade.
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1958–1980: The Era of Constitutionalization—Liberalism Predominant “In 1961, the United States Supreme Court pondered if D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lewd or literary. By 1969, the novel was required reading in college literature courses,” observes a coauthor of 100 Banned Books.19 During the 1960s, liberalism emerged as the dominant force—however challenged— among cultural elites and in free-speech jurisprudence. By the early 1970s, film censorship boards had died of old age, and the Production Code had given way to the industry’s rating system, leaving viewing decisions to consumers. Violence, nudity, and profanity stalked the silver screen. Only obscenity law posed a serious legal deterrent to sexual content in films and books, but it would prove to be largely unenforceable in a libertarian age. By the middle 1970s, millions of Americans were piling into movie houses to watch such hard-core pornographic films as Deep Throat and Beyond the Green Door, films whose public display had been unimaginable a mere few years before. Such hard-core sex magazines as Hustler and Penthouse rivaled Playboy in popularity. Nonetheless, censorship of books persisted at local levels as the gap between national constitutional standards and local values widened. On the legal front, the Supreme Court and Congress began the historic process of revolutionizing civil liberty and civil rights law by expanding the scope of equal protection, the voting franchise, and the rights of criminal suspects, and by completing the process of applying the Bill of Rights to the states and local governments. These egalitarian changes opened up the prospects of participation and active citizenship, fueling the growth of political and cultural pluralism. In First Amendment law, the Court drastically narrowed Chaplinsky’s “exceptions” to speech, tightened the procedural standards for the issuance of demonstration permits and movie licenses, and severely limited proscribable political heresy and sedition. The modern liberalization of First Amendment jurisprudence is predicated upon the cardinal liberal principles of antipaternalism and government neutrality concerning the viewpoint of expression. Government may not restrict speech because it disagrees with its point of view or because of a vague fear that speech will cause harm. Public opinion surveys since World War II have consistently shown that legal elites favor protecting civil liberties more than does the general public, so the liberalization of freespeech policy is, in effect, a system of elite checking of democratic will.20 Broader social forces were also at work, including the expansion of secularism, science, and a mass consumer culture; the sexual revolution; the growth of cultural and political pluralism; an explosion in the availability of materials and new technologies (cable television, mass paperback books, etc.); the wideGOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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FIGURE 8.2. “Spiro T. Agnew Overpowering the Statue of Liberty,” a protest poster created in 1969 in response to Vice President Agnew’s speech charging the news media with practicing liberal censorship. Art by Bob Dara. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-1109632.
spread emergence of a “support structure” for legal mobilization of civil rights and liberties, consisting of rights-advocacy organizations and lawyers, and new sources of financing by government and foundations to support such enterprises; and the linkage of professional and commercial interests with the ideology of free speech (e.g., American Library Association; Association of American Publishers; American Booksellers Association). These forces “produced a powerful vested interest in the free speech norm, particularly against local interference. . . . Media interests with formidable financial means and an external base were far better situated to defend the free speech interests and resist local authority and pressures.”21 Though groups defending traditional values also mobilized and assisted in litigation, they were outnumbered and outmatched by groups on the other side during this period (fig. 8.2). Before the 1970s, procensorship arguments emanated almost exclusively from the right. In the moral realm, the Warren Court came close to granting full constitutional protection to obscenity by the end of the tumultuous 1960s. In a series of cases in mid-decade involving such works as the movie The Lovers, John Cleland’s classic pornographic novel Fanny Hill, and Henry Miller’s The Tropics of Cancer, the Court liberalized the test for obscenity in a manner that made prosecution extremely difficult. In response, the irrepressible Grove Press (which had been under FBI and CIA surveillance at the time) and other publishers began mass-producing paperback editions of such pornographic classics as the works 142
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of de Sade and The Pearl, and publishers pushed hard-core materials, creating the first open mass market for pornography in the nation’s history. “Books that no one had dared bring to trial before were discovered not to be ‘utterly worthless,’ ” and, therefore, protected by the First Amendment. At the end of the decade, the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography encapsulated the liberal Weltanschauung by concluding that obscenity should be decriminalized, except for exposure to minors and unwilling adults.22 It was liberalism’s high tide. But conservatives fought back. Groups such as Charles Keating Jr.’s Citizens for Decency through Law challenged the commission’s conclusions and marshaled moral campaigns against offending materials. In 1968 Richard Nixon won the White House after waging a campaign that included attacks on judicial liberalism and smut, and by 1971 the Warren Court had given way to the Burger Court, which would have four Nixon appointees. In Miller v. California (1973), the Burger Court promulgated a new obscenity test that was designed to make prosecutions easier to win. But the new test has failed to make an appreciable difference in enforcement.23 In Cohen v. California (1971), the Supreme Court pushed First Amendment jurisprudence in an opposite direction from Chaplinsky. In overturning Robert Paul Cohen’s conviction for disturbing the peace by wearing a jacket with “Fuck the Draft” scrawled on its back, the Court (per Justice Harlan) narrowed Chaplinsky and expanded the First Amendment’s coverage to profanity and offensive speech. Cohen captured the underlying shift away from a more traditional consensus on public decorum in favor of a more relativistic or pluralistic ethos, at least in the domain of free-speech jurisprudence and practice. “[It] is often true that one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric . . . much linguistic expression serves a dual communicative function: it conveys not only ideas capable of relatively precise, detached explication, but otherwise inexpressible emotions as well.”24 The Court’s libertarian ethic also stretched the boundaries of legal political dissent. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the Warren Court ruled unanimously that “public officials” may not recover damages for being libeled unless they can prove that the libel was made either knowingly or with reckless disregard of the truth. The decision was designed to protect the press’s role in promoting the “central meaning” of the First Amendment—criticism of the government. Justice Brennan emphasized that the doctrine of seditious libel has no place in the American regime. Though the Burger Court later drew more restrictive lines in cases involving the libel of “private figures” (those who do not hold public office or have public prominence), the Sullivan doctrine remains strong. And in 1971, a majority of the Burger Court reinforced this logic GOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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by ruling against the federal government’s attempt to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers, holding that the government had not demonstrated that publication of the work exposing the American buildup in Vietnam would harm national security.25 Throughout the 1960s, the Court issued rulings that expanded the rights of dissenters to hold controversial demonstrations in the public forum. The liberal trend culminated in the uniquely protective 1969 Brandenburg incitement test. Ohio Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg would surely have gone to prison under the Yates “advocacy of action” standard for his advocacy of race war; but the Court unanimously reversed his conviction, holding that the First Amendment protects even the advocacy of lawless action “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”26 The Burger Court, however, was noted for its belief in a strong executive branch, and it sanctioned another form of government censorship that some commentators consider “the new seditious libel”: allowing the government to seize the profits of former agents who wrote books dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency that were not presented to the agency for prescreening. In the name of protecting the national security and interest, the Court agreed with the CIA that this omission violated the “constructive trust” that the agent had agreed to upon accepting employment.27 The famous case of the Progressive magazine article that reported the ingredients of the hydrogen bomb in 1979 concerned a different aspect of national interest. Though the article used only publicly available information, a federal judge issued a restraining order against publication because he worried that the article might contribute to nuclear proliferation—exactly the type of argument Brandenburg ostensibly disavowed. Regardless, the case became moot when a Milwaukee newspaper published the article on its own.28 Meanwhile, censorship marched on at the local level. A review of major surveys of censorship in the 1960s and 1970s concluded that “censorship in America is not primarily aimed at hardcore pornography, or, for that matter, soft core pornography, but most often against school library books, particularly young adult and classic literature.” A columnist for the American Library Association Bulletin wrote that “school librarians were having as hard a time of it as they had in the McCarthy era,” with such works as Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, 1984, and Brave New World under attack by such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution and America’s Future. A similar controversy concerned state laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The “free speech society” was thriving for the most part, but it enjoyed less allegiance in local areas less influenced by national norms (fig. 8.3).29 144
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FIGURE 8.3. “One Book That Can’t Be Burned,” a cartoon by Edwin Marcus. Drawn shortly after President Eisenhower deplored book burning and censorship in a speech at Dartmouth College on 14 June 1953, this cartoon linked the Cold War practice of Communist countries that censored and controlled information to American efforts during the McCarthy era to remove books from libraries and censor free inquiry. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-US Z62119705. Used by permission of the Marcus Family.
Trends contrary to liberalism prevailed in other contexts as well. For example, the “children’s rights” movement that grew out of the broader rights movement of the 1960s was devoted to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation. (This effort was part of a broader movement to combat domestic abuse in America.)30 In reaction, Congress passed the Mondale Act in 1974 (with amendments in the 1980s), pressuring states to prosecute child abuse and to pass mandatory reporting laws. In the realm of free speech, governments passed new laws against making, distributing, and using child pornography (pornography with actual minors as models); and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) embarked on a crusade to limit the exposure of minors to nonobscene but indecent expression in broadcasting. Broadcasting has traditionally enjoyed less First Amendment protection than books and the press because of its alleged intrusiveness and because of the relative scarcity of space on the spectrum. Beset by political pressures, the FCC broadened its regulatory reach during the 1970s by promulgating a new standard of indecency: “the exposure of children to language that describes in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary standards for the broadcast medium, sexual and execratory actions and organs.”31 The Supreme Court approved of this standard in 1978, when it upheld the FCC’s power to restrict (but not completely ban) the radio airing of comedian George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue to nighttime hours.32
1980–2000: The Extension of Free Speech amid New Challenges The censorship wars of the last two decades of the century were fought on a progressively confusing terrain. Cultural and ethnic pluralism exploded with the GOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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further enfranchisement of minorities and new immigration from non-European countries. Some groups on the right became champions of free speech, such as antiabortion demonstrators and conservative activists on campus, while a new call for censorship emanated from some groups on the left. Meanwhile, new technologies expanded access to material. Cable television became commonplace, with the Supreme Court extending this medium more First Amendment protection than traditional broadcasters, though less than the press.33 The Court accorded fuller First Amendment protection to the Internet, which emerged as a major force in communications. Consumption of pornography continued to mushroom with the advent of videos and the Internet. In 1996, for example, Americans spent more than $8 billion on hard-core material (videos, adult cable programs, computer porn, sex magazines, peep shows and live sex acts, etc.). In 1985 they rented 75 million hard-core videos, a number that increased to 490 million in 1992 (from 25,000 stores). And a 1997 study located approximately 34,000 pornographic Web sites.34 The right of political dissent remained strong compared to the McCarthy era, but there were exceptions. On the right, for example, the Reagan administration issued National Security Directive 84 in 1983 requiring all government employees with access to classified information to sign lifetime censorship review agreements and to take lie detector tests (previously, only CIA employees were so obligated). That year, federal employees submitted over 28,000 books, articles, and speeches for review. After public reaction, the administration slowly backed off the directive.35 On the left, the Clinton administration targeted individuals and groups in the 1990s in a manner that punished citizens for opposing certain progressive causes (a form of “progressive censorship”). In the early 1990s, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged a small group of residents of Berkeley, California, with violating the Fair Housing Act because the group spoke out in public against the placing of a homeless shelter in their neighborhood. HUD dropped the case in the wake of negative publicity, and the “Berkeley Three” later recovered damages from HUD agents. Enforcement actions of other bureaucracies have also provoked claims of censorship. Some commentators maintain that the overzealous enforcement of antiharassment laws (especially on grounds of “hostile environment”) by the Office of Civil Rights and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission has led to a similar stifling of speech in the workplace. Thus far, courts have not developed the First Amendment implications of such restrictions.36 At the end of the decade, courts wrestled with an unusual series of cases dealing with illegal advocacy that cut across the ideological spectrum. In one case, a federal appeals court upheld a large civil damage award against a coalition of 146
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antiabortion activists after readers of the group’s Web page (which posted the names and addresses of abortion doctors) murdered three abortionists. Another federal court allowed a judgment against Paladin Publishers after three people were murdered by a man who had followed the recommendations of Hit Man, a Paladin manual of how to get away with murder. Meanwhile, after much legal jockeying, a court in Louisiana threw out a civil suit against the makers of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers. The plaintiffs claimed that the film inspired the disabling shooting of a family member.37 On the moral front, the rise of conservatism inspired religious and traditional groups to intensify their attacks on books deemed immoral. As often, most censorship was directed at nonpornographic books in schools and libraries. In spring 1981, for example, the Moral Majority of North Carolina launched a crusade against school textbooks and library materials that dealt with sexual themes, and Concerned Women for America and the Christian Broadcasting Network declared war on allegedly secular textbooks in Tennessee, Alabama. Commentators have designated the 1980s (and the 1990s, for that matter) the “Judy Blume Decade” because of the number of campaigns directed at her works dealing with teenage sexual exploration. However, surveys conducted by library groups revealed that such censorship then retreated significantly after having surged in the early 1980s. One major survey found that while “at least” 365 sources reported censorship in 1981, the average number reported annually in the remaining Reagan years was 252.38 Child pornography continued to be a major concern during this period, especially on the Internet. In an uncontroversial 1982 opinion, the Supreme Court upheld laws against the making, distribution, and consuming of pornography with actual children as subjects.39 Then in 1996 Congress forbade “virtual” child pornography (computer simulations made to look like minors, usually on the Internet). The Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitutionally overbroad in 2002.40 In an important decision in 1997, the Supreme Court struck down two provisions of the Communications Decency Act on the grounds that the law’s prohibition of “indecent” and “patently offensive” messages was too vague and restrictive of adult’s access. In so holding, the Court declared that the Internet should receive the highest level of First Amendment protection.41 On a related front, new battles are now being fought over laws requiring libraries to provide filtering devices for minors on their computers.42 In addition, the Bush administration has been surprisingly successful in its efforts to subdue pornographic Web sites, though courts will no doubt weigh in on the validity of these efforts.43 Beginning in the 1980s, a new phenomenon arose: censorship from the left. A godfather of this movement was the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who arGOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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gued in an influential 1965 essay (“Repressive Tolerance”) that censorship of conservative and reactionary speech is necessary for the realization of social progress and justice.44 Marcuse’s logic of “progressive censorship” was ignored for more than a decade until new movements associated with postliberal feminist and civil rights ideologies questioned the legitimacy of liberal speech doctrine. The Skokie free-speech case of 1977–78 was a watershed, as legions of progressives wondered just how social justice was served by courts compelling a Chicago suburb with many Holocaust survivors to open its doors to a Nazi demonstration that brought nightmares back to life. Thousands of members resigned from the American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully litigated the case for the Nazis, and many reconsidered their commitments to free speech, creating a split within liberalism. By the 1980s, new theories coined by some feminists, critical race theorists, and other identity groups promoted progressive censorship as a way to effectuate civil rights and equality. In the eyes of these advocates, pornography and hate speech constitute acts of discrimination in their own rights. Words wound.45 In a similar vein, books such as Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and many others became targets of library and school censorship during this period because of their use of words or portrayal of minorities.46 In the mid-1980s, feminist authors Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin created an antipornography ordinance that defined pornography as the sexually explicit subordination of women and provided a “civil rights” method of enforcement through civil authorities. Federal courts ruled the ordinance unconstitutional because its expansive definitions of pornography could have been applied much more broadly than established obscenity doctrine allows. The new pornography wars often united conservative and procensorship feminist activists, most prominently in Indianapolis and in the Final Report of the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, which concluded (unlike the 1970 commission) that violent and “demeaning” pornography is associated with physical harm to women.47 As Jonathan Zimmerman demonstrates in chapter 17, Right and Left have joined hands in the realm of public primary and secondary education, where political groups have pressured school officials and textbook makers into banning books and words deemed insensitive or otherwise politically incorrect. According to education historian Diane Ravitch, “education materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what students learn in school.”48 148
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The ideology of progressive censorship also had an impact on the nation’s universities. In the name of promoting racial and gender justice, in the later 1980s and into the 1990s, hundreds of schools adopted speech codes prohibiting various forms of “demeaning” expression. Though such efforts were often well intentioned, scholars reported many cases in which campus authorities punished or persecuted students and faculty for simply expressing thoughts deemed “politically incorrect.” In addition, many reports emerged during the 1990s and into the 2000s of activists shouting down conservative speakers on campus and stealing runs of student newspapers that included politically incorrect content. Critics claim that these trends have compromised genuine freedom of thought on many campuses, thereby seriously harming higher education across the land.49 However successful progressive censorship may have been in certain quarters, the fact remains that unfettered discourse has continued its steady historical expansion in the broader national arena. Internet sites and “blogs” of both the Left and the Right have proliferated in recent years, and television and film presentations now deal with subjects once considered beyond the public discussion pale, including sexuality, sexual orientation, and a host of illnesses, such as mental illness, breast cancer, and sexual impotence. For better or worse, the number of pornographic Web sites around the globe has mushroomed. And, for the most part, courts have remained strongly protective of free-speech principles across the First Amendment spectrum. At the same time, strong social and commercial pressures are often exerted against public figures who make remarks deemed racially or sexually insensitive. A famous example in 2007 was radio host Don Imus, who lost his job after the National Association of Black Journalists and others rebuked him for saying degrading things about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.50 Tellingly, the social, political, and judicial reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11 provide further evidence that the liberal model of free speech is faring well, despite the pressures to which it is subjected. To be sure, the controversial USA PATRIOT Act passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks gives substantially greater power to the national government to monitor individuals and groups suspected of being linked to terrorist activities.51 In particular, Section 215 of the act (“Business Records”) broadens the government’s power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain records and other tangible items related to terrorism, including lists of books rented or purchased by library and bookstore patrons. The American Library Association and many other groups have consistently opposed this and other provisions of the act.52 In conjunction with preexisting law, the USA PATRIOT Act also provides for “gag orders” that prohibit custodians who receive FBI orders to supply such GOVE R N M E N T C E N S O R S H I P S I NC E 1945
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information (in the form of National Security Letters) from disclosing this fact to anyone else. A federal district court ruled in September 2007 that substantial parts of this law and its revisions violate the First and Fifth Amendments. The government has appealed as of this writing.53 Despite these challenges to speech, debate about the government’s policies has been robust, and there is no dearth of books and articles critical of the government’s ways. In a similar vein, the American Association of University Professors concluded in a thorough 2003 study that the status of academic freedom at American universities in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks has been surprisingly secure.54 Several reasons can account for this state of freedom, one of which is that the jurisprudence of free speech is now much more developed and settled than it was at the onset of the McCarthy period.55 .
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Contemporary battles over free speech represent primary examples of what some commentators have labeled the “culture wars” in the United States.56 But this short essay has also shown that the politics of free speech are more complex than a simple dichotomy indicates. Both the Left and the Right present their own distinctive claims for and against free speech, and a great deal of disagreement prevails even within these respective camps over the proper scope and limit of free speech. Meanwhile, freedom of speech and expression continues its ineluctable march on a societal level, regardless of whatever procensorship causes emerge to challenge it along the way.
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CHAPTER 9
American Copyright Law since 1945 Marshall Leaffer
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The new technologies and global communication markets that emerged in the decades after World War II dramatically extended the reach of traditional media enterprises and gave birth to entirely new information industries, such as computer software. As the United States evolved from an industrial to an information-and-services-based economy, information products—often broadly termed “intellectual property”—became vastly more valuable while at the same time vastly more vulnerable to copying at zero cost. Not surprisingly, the growing gap between the increasing value of information products and the decreasing cost of copying and disseminating them produced economic and cultural conflict between the owners and the users of information. Much of that conflict played out in the realm of government and law, especially the law of copyright. The term “copyright” originated in England with the Statute of Anne (1710), which protected against unauthorized reproduction of a work—usually by printing or reprinting it—and vending of the copies so made. American copyright law grew from these English roots and from the patent and copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, which empowered Congress “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Today copyright protects books and other printed material but also nonprint works such as motion pictures, sound recordings, and computer programs, whose future existence was not even imagined in earlier copyright statutes. Just as significant, today’s copyright goes much farther than the traditional book-centered, printand-publication model of copyright. Much of what we protect in copyright law today—through derivative rights and performance rights—is really the right to use or authorize the use of copyrighted works in a variety of ways.1 In the 1990s with the full blossoming of the digital revolution—that is, the dissemination of copyrighted works in digital networks—copyright law wandered even farther from its early modern origins. In a digital environment, copyright owners are concerned not only to prevent misuse of their works but also to impede any unauthorized access to those works. With today’s digital tech-
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nologies, perfect, nondegradable copies of printed material, recorded music, computer software, and movies can be disseminated effortlessly and infinitely. Thus, once a work is accessed and copied, the copyright owner tends to lose all control over its use and exploitation. One of the most striking developments over the last half of the twentieth century has been the growing economic importance of the copyright industries to the U.S. economy. The numbers are staggering. In 2002 the core copyright industries (including prerecorded music, TV programs, motion pictures, home videos, books, periodicals, newspapers, and computer software) accounted for 5.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product or $348.4 billion. Between 1977 and 2001, the core copyright industries grew more than twice as fast as the rest of the U.S economy (7.0 percent compared to 3.0 percent) and created jobs three times as fast as the economy as a whole (4.93 percent compared to 1.50 percent). The increase in their share of international trade has been similarly dramatic. In 2001 the core copyright industries achieved foreign sales and exports of $88.97 billion, surpassing all other sectors, including agriculture, chemicals, aircraft, and automobiles. Today American-produced software alone constitutes more than half of the world market. As exports increased, American copyright owners became increasingly vulnerable to piracy abroad. Such developments indicate clearly the growing international importance of copyright law, an importance reflected in all copyright legislation passed since World War II.2 During the past fifty-plus years the law of copyright has proved to be an exceptionally dynamic body of law. Copyright is a form of legal adaptation to new technologies in the reproduction and distribution of human expression—or, more precisely, to the social, cultural, and economic trends unleashed by those technologies. We can observe the beginnings of this process in the prestatutory antecedents of the law in the sixteenth century. It is still ongoing. The changes wrought in our society by digital technology are forcing us to confront, once again, the most basic of questions. Should the law confer property rights in products of the mind? If so, to what extent? And how should private intangible property rights be balanced against the public interest in access to knowledge? These questions continue to perplex new generations of legislators and judges, philosophers and economists, private entrepreneurs and public-interest activists. This chapter on the history of copyright since 1945 divides the story into three interrelated periods that reflect changing trends in U.S. copyright law during the postwar era. These trends are revision, harmonization, and digitization. Revision refers to the process of overhauling the Copyright Act of 1909, roughly during the years from 1945 to 1976. The official revision process began in 1955, peaked with the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, and then con152
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tinued into the 1980s with several important amendments. Although the revision process was most intense between 1955 and 1988, retooling copyright to new realities of global markets and new digital technologies continues to this day. The harmonization trend marks the period from 1988 to 1996 and refers to the amendments necessary for the United States to comply with international conventions and treaties on copyright. The third trend, digitization, began in the early 1990s, came to fruition in 1998 with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and continues in full bloom today. These three loosely defined periods of revision, harmonization, and digitization overlap and interrelate. The comprehensive revision of the copyright act was prompted by a recognition that the copyright industries were mainstays of the American economy and that the 1909 Copyright Act was unsuited to a world of rapid globalization and burgeoning new technologies. Copyright owners, whose software, music, and video markets are increasingly global in scope, have been highly effective in arguing for the harmonization of U.S. law with other countries and for the protection of their works against the challenges of digital age. Meanwhile, activists have continued to lobby for the preservation of an open public domain, where works of the mind are made freely accessible through the same technologies of the digital age.
Revision: 1945–1976
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The 1909 Act Background At the end of World War II, the Copyright Act of 1909 still governed copyright matters in the United States. Outmoded almost from the start, it remained in force until Congress enacted a general revision of copyright law in 1976. Similar to most copyright legislation, the 1909 act was an attempt to adjust to the climate of technological change. Though President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 had called for a complete revision of the copyright law to meet modern conditions, the resulting act was not a model of lucidity, consistency, or precision. In its final form, the Copyright Act of 1909 was a compromise measure, a composite of bills and proposals embodying conflicting policy goals and protecting various vested interests. The act’s inconsistencies and ambiguities required extensive judicial interpretation, and during the sixty-eight years of its existence the courts stretched the limits of its statutory language. By the time Congress replaced the 1909 act, the courts had embroidered the old statute with a welter of common-law interpretations, and these common-law doctrines were often contradictory. The 1909 act retained key elements of previous laws, including the formaliA M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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ties of copyright notice and the requirement of deposit and registration of works with the U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright notice consisted of the symbol © along with the name of the copyright owner and the date of first publication of the work. Failure to include the notice on all copies could inject the work into the public domain. The 1909 act set the term of copyright at twenty-eight years from the time of registration. At the end of that term, copyright could be renewed for another twenty-eight years. The 1909 act also contained curiosities carried over from previous acts. The “manufacturing clause” was one such provision. To placate the American printing trades, which feared their employment might be lost to low-cost printers abroad, the act required that typesetting, printing, and binding of books, pamphlets, and periodicals in the English language be done in the United States. A book, pamphlet, or periodical in English (foreign language materials were excluded) first published abroad was given ad interim copyright protection for five years so long as a copy was deposited and the copyright registered in the U.S. Copyright Office within six months of its publication. While a book had ad interim copyright protection, it had to be reprinted in this country, and the copyright owner had to register the American edition in the U.S. Copyright Office. Protectionist legislation par excellence, the manufacturing clause was a bone of contention with U.S. trading partners and an impediment to U.S. entry into the International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Property— commonly called the Berne Convention—which had come into force in 1887. Under the Berne Convention, citizens of member countries were to be treated equally, without discrimination, under the laws of other member countries (called “national treatment”). Berne also required a minimum copyright term of at least the life of the author plus fifty years, and it disallowed the formalities of notice and registration as prerequisites for copyright protection. In all of these areas—manufacturing requirements, duration of term, and registration formalities—the United States marched out of step with world practice and the Berne Convention. Indeed, the United States deliberately remained outside the international copyright community for a century until March 1989, when it finally entered into the Berne Convention (fig. 9.1).3 In the decades before that moment, various halfway measures were tried, including the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) of 1954, a multilateral treaty instigated by the Americans and signed by forty nations. The UCC required national treatment of copyright holders but, unlike Berne, did not require significant substantive rights, such as a minimum term. It was not until 1989, the year before the bicentennial of the first American copyright law, that the United States abandoned its international copyright isolationism and signed onto Berne. 154
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FIGURE 9.1. Author Margaret Mitchell with Dutch translations of her books, ca. 1940. These translations were made as a protest against the nonparticipation of the United States in the Berne Convention. The United States resisted taking part, claiming that it would require substantial changes to U.S. copyright law. Accommodation was made in 1952 with the Universal Copyright Convention and ultimately the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988. Photofest, Inc.
Over the course of the twentieth century, copyright owners and industries affected by new economic realities and technologies at home and abroad persuaded Congress to amend the 1909 act in major ways, a task Congress carried out in piecemeal fashion. For example, motion pictures were added as a subject matter category in 1912, and in 1952 the right to authorize performance for profit was provided for nondramatic literary works. In 1971 Congress added sound recordings as copyrightable subject matter. Despite a string of amendments, many stakeholders believed by the 1950s that the 1909 act was beyond repair and should be replaced by new legislation. Technological advances during World War II and the postwar era made apparent the necessity for a general revision. The Revision Process: 1955–1976 In 1955 Congress authorized a copyright revision process to bring U.S. copyright in conformity with current needs.4 The register of copyrights, Arthur Fisher, initially conceived a three-year revision project. Instead, what followed was twenty years of reports and hearings leading up to the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976. This act differed radically from the 1909 act, which had simply brought together a hodgepodge of scattered statutory provisions and had introA M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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duced few innovations. The 1976 act was a completely new statute, not so much a general revision as a sweeping departure from past practice, comparable to the first U.S. copyright statute in 1790. The 1976 act is a comprehensive code, replete with specific, heavily negotiated compromises. Some of the 1976 act’s provisions purport to adopt common-law doctrine; others abrogate it. The statute’s provisions and language constitute a complex and delicate compromise among stakeholders, including authors, publishers, and other parties with economic interests in the property rights that the statute defines. The official legislative history of the act is long, comprising more than thirty studies, three reports issued by the register of copyrights, four panel discussions issued as committee prints, six series of subcommittee hearings, eighteen committee reports, and the introduction of at least nineteen general revision bills over a period of more than twenty years.5
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The 1976 Act’s Innovative Changes The Copyright Act of 1976, which became effective on 1 January 1978, altered the basic concepts of copyright in the United States and took a giant step toward harmonizing U.S. copyright law with the rest of the developed world. The act fixed many of the anomalies of the 1909 act and provided a framework for the explosive expansion of copyright during the rest of the twentieth century. The act had four key provisions. A single national copyright system. Until the passage of the 1976 act, the United States was unique in the world in having a dual system of copyright protection. Under the old regime, federal statutory protection could be obtained only when a work was published. Unpublished works were protected under state common-law copyright. This antique distinction was replaced by a single system of protection where federal copyright protection begins when a work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, whether published or unpublished. Statutory subject matter. The 1976 act established broad subject matter categories called “works of authorship.” By this approach, Congress tried to avoid the archaic definitional rigidities of the 1909 act, which confused the copyrighted work with the material object in which it was embodied. For example, the 1909 act listed “books” and “periodicals” as copyrightable subject matter, vestiges of copyright’s print publication heritage. As the legislative history of the 1976 act reveals, copyright actually protects not objects such as books or newspapers but intangible products of the mind, which may be contained in books or newspapers or other media. The 1976 act defines eight categories of “works of authorship” as copyrightable subject matter. For example, the act protects “literary works,” a category that includes any work written in symbolic 156
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form, whether a conventional work of literature, a computer software program, or a database, regardless of whether the words or symbols expressing the work are printed on paper, burned onto a CD-ROM, or saved to a computer chip. A single unitary term. The 1976 act eliminated the two sequential twentyeight-year terms for copyright and replaced them with a single unitary term defined by the life of the author plus fifty years. The 1909 act’s durational mechanism frequently caused inadvertent loss of copyright protection for those who failed to renew for the second twenty-eight term of copyright. Moreover, the insistence on renewal formalities precluded U.S. entry into the Berne Convention. The 1976 act’s single term of protection brought the United States into harmony with the rest of world, facilitating entry into the worldwide copyright community. Fair use codified. The doctrine of “fair use” is a judicially created defense to copyright infringement that allows anyone to use a copyrighted work in a reasonable manner without the copyright owner’s consent (fig. 9.2). Although first articulated in case law in the mid-nineteenth century, fair use was not given statutory recognition until the 1976 act. Much uncertainty remains about the contours of fair use, but the 1976 act established guidelines for its application. This codification led to changes, developed in case law, that allowed certain
FIGURE 9.2. James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, with drawings by Keith Aoki. Three intellectual property experts used the comic book format to inform film makers about the impact of copyright law on documentary film. Their goal was to separate fair-use fact from myth, review copyright terms and benefits, explain the importance of a rich public domain to creation, and pose provocative questions about the effect of a rampant “permissions culture” on creative endeavors. Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University School of Law. A M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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uses of copyrighted works that previously would have been infringements.6 Before passage of the 1976 act, for example, it was thought that use of an entire work without permission could not constitute fair use. That view changed in 1984 when the Supreme Court held that the making of a video copy from the public airways of even an entire motion picture for time-shifting home use was a fair use.7 Systematic copying and sales of books or excerpts of books, even for education purposes, was another matter: a 1996 ruling against Michigan Document Services in favor of book publishers established that photocopying and selling such documents to college students was not fair use and constituted copyright infringement.8 Today many public-domain advocates argue that any nonsystematic copying of all or substantially all of an entire work for nonprofit home use is fair use. This expansive view of fair use, however, has had few adherents, either in the courts or in Congress.
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Post-1976 Amendments: 1978–1988 Despite its omnibus approach, the 1976 act left some issues unanswered, and many more issues were created in the following years by technological change. Congress amended the act several times between 1980 and 1988, responding to industry group pressures and adapting the act to new technologies, including computer software, semiconductor chips, communication satellites, and record rental. The issue of computer program copyright was much debated during the revision process in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in 1964, the Copyright Office accepted registration of computer software as “books.” During the revision process, Congress did not resolve the issue in express statutory terms but created a commission, the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, to examine several unresolved issues created by the new technologies of photocopying and computers. Congress then passed the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980 to affirm that computer programs (to the extent that they embody an author’s original expression) are the proper subject of copyright. Curiously, this critically important addition to copyright law was passed without hearings and little debate. The absence of legislative history and the generality of the statutory language left much discretion to the federal courts, which construed the act to extend copyright protection to all embodiments of computer software and all varieties of programs. In addition to computer software, Congress turned its attention to digital-age hardware in the Semiconductor Chip Act of 1984. With this act, Congress conferred sui generis protection, outside the traditional patent and copyright laws, to semiconductor chips. Tailored to the unique needs of both the semiconduc158
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tor lobby and the public, the act conferred ten years’ protection to the design of semiconductor chips. In 1984 Congress also enacted the Record Rental Act, prohibiting the commercial rental of a record, disk, or cassette without the permission of the copyright owner. This act was processed by Congress without extensive hearings, study commissions, or special reports. Industry groups, notably the Recording Industry of America, were successful in convincing Congress of the immediate danger of lost compensation and reduced creativity.
Harmonization: 1988–1996
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Background to Berne Entry For most of its history, the United States took an insular approach to the multilateral protection of copyright works. The United States signed the Mexico City Convention of 1902 and the Buenos Aires Convention of 1910, which required national treatment for copyright holders in all the signatory American states, pursuant to limited formalities. These Latin American conventions, however, were of little economic significance. This realization led to U.S. promotion of the Universal Copyright Convention of 1954. By that treaty, the works of authors in the United States and other member states were granted national treatment, provided that copyright notice appeared with the publication of their work. The UCC enlarged the scope of protection for U.S. authors, but American insistence on formalities such as notice, registration, and renewal precluded U.S. entry into the largest, oldest, and most important multilateral convention: Berne. As the value of U.S. exports of copyrighted works, especially movies, recorded music, and computer software, became more significant and as the piracy of those products increased, it became apparent that the United States could no longer spurn more universal copyright relations. By the late 1980s many U.S. officials and copyright proprietors concluded that remaining outside the Berne Union was detrimental to U.S. copyright interests. Nonmembership was inconvenient because the commonly used indirect method of achieving Berne protection was costly and onerous. This method involved manipulating the work’s country of origin through simultaneous publication in a Berne country (usually Canada). American resort to this back-door ploy to receive Berne protection produced considerable resentment abroad and even threats of retaliation. Furthermore, though occasionally benefiting from Berne, the United States had no role in the evolution and management of the convention.9 Other considerations enhanced the attractions of Berne adherence. The UCC A M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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of 1954, once championed as the Berne alternative, was less protective than Berne and was administered by UNESCO, an international agency from which the United States withdrew in 1984. Moreover, adherence to Berne would secure copyright relations with twenty-four additional nations not signatory to the UCC and would bolster American efforts to include intellectual property in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). With this backdrop, the Department of State convened an Ad Hoc Working Group on U.S. Adherence to the Berne Convention to report on the necessary changes in U.S. law that would be required.10 The group’s final report in 1986 took a “minimalist” approach in proposing legislation, calling for only those changes in U.S. law essential to achieve a plausible level of Berne compliance. This minimalist approach was dictated by practical politics; special interests could block legislation in Congress. In the end, major commercial interests, particularly the film and computer industries and parts of the publishing industry, supported the legislation, but the result was a legislative agenda that fell short of fully embracing the goal of Berne, which was to protect authors’ rights without any formal restraints.
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Changes in U.S. Law for Entry into the Berne Convention In 1988 Congress passed the Berne Implementation Act, which was designed to put the United States into compliance with the Berne Convention. This act modified the 1976 Copyright Act in several important ways, the most important of which was the easing of registration formalities. The act abolished the mandatory notice requirement for published works. It also established a two-tier system for mandatory registration, in which the authors of works originating from Berne countries (other than the United States) would no longer be required to bring a suit for infringement. Despite important changes in the 1976 law, the 1988 amendments left several aspects of U.S. law untouched. They made no provisions explicitly protecting the “moral rights” of authors or protecting architectural works, both required by Berne. “Moral rights” include the “right of paternity,” which means the right of an author to be identified as the author of a work, and the “right of integrity,” which protects against the distortion or intentional destruction of a work. These omissions were partially remedied by further amendments. In 1990, for example, Congress conferred full copyright protection on works of architecture and limited moral rights protection on certain works of visual arts. Of these two 1990 amendments, the moral rights provision was by far the most controversial and politically charged. The Berne Convention required that all signatories protect authors’ rights of paternity and integrity. Moral rights place restraints on the changes that a copyright owner can impose on a work 160
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even after the author has assigned all economic rights to it. Europeans, in particular, tend to draw a clear distinction between rights that can be sold (economic) and rights that cannot be sold (moral). In France, moral rights are perpetual. By contrast, the U.S. copyright system has always had an uneasy relationship with the moral rights concept and has viewed copyright as a utilitarian or economic institution rather than as a method of protecting the personality rights of authors. Thus, when authors assign all rights to copyright, the subsequent copyright owners can generally exploit the work in any way they choose. Publishers and movie studios have long resisted the adoption of moral rights in U.S. law, fearing that moral rights protection would curtail the use of copyrighted works and frustrate economic expectations. But for Americans the issue is not simply about economic self-interest and private property. User groups, free-speech advocates, copyright libertarians, and promoters of an open public domain in intellectual property have also been suspicious of the moral rights concept. Going even further, literary scholars have questioned the concept of authorship altogether, locating its origin in eighteenth-century romanticism and rejecting the construct of the individual creative act on which it rests. Such scholars regard copyright law as a barrier to the recognition of the collaborative sources of knowledge (fig. 9.3). On the issue of moral rights, domestic political realities largely won the day. Rather than embracing full moral rights protection, the United States again took a minimalist approach, opting for a limited recognition of the right of paternity and integrity for certain works of visual arts. To mollify the Europeans, Congress argued that the United States provided sufficient moral rights protection when the full extent of U.S. law, such as defamation, unfair competition, and contract law, are taken into account.
FIGURE 9.3. Copyleft icon, a symbol of the movement to lessen the restrictions on using, copying, and distributing intellectual property. Created by users boris 23 and Zscout 370 and released into the public domain. 〈www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image: Copyleft_svg〉. Accessed 15 April 2008. A M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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From Berne to TRIPS and Beyond Despite American entry into the Berne Convention, organized and systematic piracy of American intellectual property continued unabated. Traditional international conventions, including Berne, have no enforcement mechanisms and have little effect on countries that condone acts of piracy within their borders. Alarm over the ever-increasing piracy of American intellectual property became a major focus in U.S. trade negotiations in the 1970s and led to the passage of new and amended federal legislation. The major thrust of legislation such as the Generalized System of Preferences (1974) and the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (1983) was to use economic reward and punishment to encourage other countries to provide adequate protection to American intellectual property rights. The 1988 amendments to the Trade Act of 1974 set up a procedure for the United States to bring sanctions against foreign countries that deny effective protection to intellectual property rights. The 1988 amendments to the Trade Act provided U.S. negotiators with a strong bargaining chip in bilateral dealings with other countries. These efforts, however, had inherent limitations: the problem of organized piracy was simply too large and too diverse for one country to solve alone. Industry groups looked to other approaches, including the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which included provisions to harmonize Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. standards on the entire range of intellectual property. Seeking to harmonize intellectual property on a broader international basis, industry groups turned to GATT as the mechanism to resolve the worldwide piracy problem. The GATT, renamed and reformulated in 1995 as the World Trade Organization (WTO), incorporated intellectual property provisions into its basic framework.11 Known as Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), these provisions took a Berne-plus approach to copyright protection, incorporating Articles 1–21 of the Berne Convention but also exceeding Berne by explicitly requiring protection for computer programs and compilations of data. TRIPS enforcement provisions are perhaps its principal innovative feature. They require contracting parties to provide civil and administrative procedures for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. When a member state does not comply with substantive or enforcement provisions, WTO dispute resolution procedures are triggered, which may eventually result in sanctions against the offending party. Although the United States was a prime mover of the WTO and TRIPS, it has lost several cases, and dispute resolution panels have declared certain provisions of U.S. law in violation of the TRIPS agreement. In addition to international agreements, European legislation in the field of copyright also affected copyright policy in the United States. For example, one 162
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reason the U.S. term of copyright was lengthened in 1998 from life of the author plus fifty years to life plus seventy was the adoption of the longer term by the European Union. Industry groups such as Disney and other motion picture studios made their case before Congress that American works, such as Snow White and older versions of Mickey Mouse, would no longer be protected in Europe after they had entered the public domain in the United States. Freespeech and public-domain advocates denounced the lengthening of the copyright term as a congressional payoff to big media corporations. They argued that it violated the constitutional stipulation that copyright terms be “limited” and that the chief purpose of copyright was to promote the public interest, not to protect private property. In Eldred v. Ashcroft,12 the Supreme Court upheld the new term of life of the author plus seventy years, affirming the broad powers of Congress to make copyright law, whether good public policy or bad. In the early twenty-first century, the perennial debate over the proper balance between private right and public interest in copyright law continued unabated.
Digitization: 1996–2004
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Emergence of Digital Revolution Over its several centuries of existence, copyright law has negotiated many “crises” precipitated by changes in communication technology. A recent development—the digitization of information—may have as much potential for social transformation as did movable type 500 years ago. The so-called digital revolution, which permits the storage, manipulation, and transmission of data in ways that greatly transcend previous technologies, has led some observers to question the continued relevance of traditional copyright law.13 The digital revolution has called into question the individualistic model of creation on which so much of copyright law is based. A new copyright paradigm may be needed to meet the digital challenge. In particular, corporate providers of copyrighted content, the so-called copyright industries that produce motion pictures, make sound recordings, publish books, and distribute software, may have little incentive to disseminate work in a freewheeling digital and networked environment without new legal and technological safeguards.14 Digital issues first made their way into the copyright arena with the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA). The act came about because the recording industry feared that digital audiotape, with a near-perfect fidelity of multigenerational digital copies, presented a major threat to the industry. The recording companies argued that if digital audiotape became widely available to American consumers, the resultant increase in home copying would undermine the marA M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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ket for prerecorded CDs. The AHRA broke new ground in U.S. copyright law. It created not only a new compulsory license but a new cause of action apart from copyright infringement. It imposed legal limitations on the technology itself, rather than simply limiting the uses to which that technology may be put. Specifically, it forced manufacturers to put physical controls on tape players that prohibited serial (multiple) copying.
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act In August 1995 a Clinton administration working group issued a report titled White Paper on Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.15 Although many of the white paper’s proposals proved too controversial for legislative approval, its provisions against the circumvention of technological protection systems became the focus of a diplomatic conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The treaties that flowed from that conference required member states to adopt legal measures to prevent the circumvention of technological controls. In 1998 President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which implemented the WIPO copyright treaties. As its centerpiece, the DMCA provided sanctions, civil and criminal, against those who tamper with copyright management information or circumvent technological safeguards that control access to copyrighted works. The overarching goal was to provide copyright owners the ability to control access to works that are, with increasing frequency, disseminated in digital form on networks such as the Internet. Though the act’s supporters won the day, the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA caused much controversy and were opposed by computer manufacturers, software developers, and educational organizations. Many people in the scientific and academic communities feared that equating technical circumvention with copyright infringement would carry copyright into a new realm, upsetting the delicate balance of limitations and exceptions to exclusive rights traditionally recognized as fundamental to sound copyright policy.16 In the future, the extent of “fair use” of a copyrighted work may be determined by the technological sophistication of private manufacturers rather than by the political and legal decisions of Congress and the courts. Furthermore, digital networking allows producers to lean more easily on contract law, rather than copyright law, to protect their works. Consumers are increasingly required to agree online to specific conditions of use before they can even access a digital product. Whatever position one takes on the virtues of the DMCA, the act did differ significantly from traditional copyright legislation in that it created a new kind of 164
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regulation of the use of copyrighted works. This new approach might be called “paracopyright” legislation, superimposed on copyright law but not operating within the delicate balance of rights and limitations fundamental to copyright law. Its prohibitions on unauthorized access stood in stark contrast to the print or reproduction model of copyright. From its origins in the early eighteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth century, copyright law was a means by which owners of intellectual property were granted the power to curtail unauthorized reproduction and other uses of their works, but access to those works, once published, played no role in the copyright regime. Under traditional principles of copyright, one can legally browse the shelves of a bookstore or library, read a book or play a CD in one’s home, or even loan it to a friend, so long as that book or CD is not improperly reproduced in tangible form. Today, however, books and library shelves may reside in digitized networks whose access is governed by encryption technologies and by contract law as well as by copyright.
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Conclusion In the early twenty-first century, copyright law has entered a new era. Policy makers today face issues far beyond those which arose in the past in connection with new information technologies. At the end of World War II, when the idea of a general revision of copyright came into being, it was enough to ask how traditional copyright principles applied to new media. In a digital networked world, policy makers must undertake a more fundamental inquiry. With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law of copyright is being remade more radically than at any point in its history. In retrospect, we can see that the process of law revision that began in the early 1960s and culminated in the 1976 act was crucial to the modern transformation of copyright, paving the way for future efforts at harmonization and the development of international norms. But if the 1976 act represented a critical reconsideration of historic theory and practice of copyright law, events since the act took effect in 1978 have been even more dramatic. Today copyright law is under extraordinary new pressures. As never before, the globalization of information commerce has subjected U.S. copyright law to powerful external forces, including international legal norms and the ideological influences of foreign laws of literary and artistic property. Whatever form copyright and related bodies of law will take in the future, the historic isolation of U.S. copyright law is a thing of the past. The United States is thoroughly enmeshed with the larger world. In the years to come, we will hear even more calls to modernize copyright in the cause of “harmonization” with the intellectual property norms of other countries. A M E R I CA N CO P Y R I GH T L AW S I NC E 1945
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The last half century has also seen the end of copyright law as isolated from the other bodies of law. In the twenty-first century, various state law doctrines, such as contract law, increasingly inhabit the space once owned by copyright law. There may come a time when digital “click on” licenses, enforceable under state laws, will have reduced the norms of copyright to an easily overridden “default setting.” In the wake of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the use of digital information will be regulated by ever more elaborate systems of “technological safeguards” (paracopyright) backed up by civil and criminal penalties, in which information consumers may be required to secure licenses for all uses of proprietary content. The traditional balance between private ownership and public access, for centuries the hallmark of copyright law, may be tipping, though it is too early to tell for sure.
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C H A P T E R 10
U. S. Government Publishing in the Postwar Era David Paul Nord and John V. Richardson Jr.
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During World War II, cellulose fiber was needed for the manufacture of both smokeless gunpowder and printing paper, and some government officials believed the latter was as vital as the former to winning the war. As the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) put it in its official centennial history: “Every war activity required printing to keep it going.” For the armed forces, the GPO and its contractors printed millions of maps, manuals, forms, instruction sheets, labels, regulations, and orders—often overnight. For the home front, the GPO produced myriad posters, flyers, and booklets, along with 73 billion ration stamps. During the war, the federal government consumed 1.4 billion pounds of printing paper (27,000 railroad carloads), some 40 percent of total U.S. paper production. If there was any doubt before the war, none existed by 1945: the U.S. Government was the largest printer and publisher in the world.1 In the century before World War II, the federal government had tried sporadically to make its printing work more efficient and businesslike. The U.S. Government Printing Office was established in 1860, and its authority over both legislative and executive printing was affirmed and extended by the new Printing Act of 1895, which codified federal printing laws and established the Office of the Superintendent of Documents within the GPO.2 In the early decades of the twentieth century, Congress worked to further centralize government printing in the GPO and to direct the distribution of government publications through the Office of the Superintendent of Documents. But, ultimately, it was a hopeless cause. The history of government printing and publishing in the twentieth century is a history of proliferation and fragmentation. In the decades after the war, the U.S. government was not only the world’s largest but its most complex publisher. In 1955—long before the age of desktop publishing and Internet Web sites—a special commission on federal government organization identified 327 departmental printing and duplicating plants, some 200 of which were operated by the military. The commission estimated that less than 20 percent
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of expenditures on government printing was routed through the Government Printing Office.3 This chapter tells the story of the spectacular growth and accompanying fragmentation of U.S. government publishing in the postwar era. It is partly a story of changing content. The Cold War and the expansion of federal authority in the decades after 1945 turned government publishing efforts increasingly toward scientific, technical, and educational information. It is also a story of changing media in government publishing, from paper to microform, from CD-ROM to Internet. And, finally, it is a story of changing methods of public dissemination, from depository library distribution and sales handled through the Superintendent of Documents to new clearinghouse institutions in other government agencies to a proliferation of federal Web sites by the end of the century. Though these rapid and substantial changes in the world of government publishing in America made government information vastly more available, they also raised new problems of access, preservation, and authentication.
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In the immediate postwar decades—and to some extent even into the twentyfirst century—the U.S. Government Printing Office remained at the center of federal government publishing (fig. 10.1). The GPO was a legislative-branch agency, overseen by a Congressional Joint Committee on Printing, whose roots reached back to 1846. Through most of its career, the GPO was first and foremost a large printshop. For most of the postwar era, the chief work of the GPO was printing the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and other routine publications of Congress and the executive branch. By 1970, for example, the GPO was printing 50,000 copies of the Congressional Record, averaging between 200 and 300 pages per issue, every day that Congress was in session. Add to this output the routine printing of bills, reports, patents, documents, and even postal cards and envelopes, and the GPO in its heyday was one of the major printing establishments in the country, with a full panoply of flatbed and rotary presses, both letterpress and offset, and the latest mechanical and computerized typesetting equipment.4 But the Government Printing Office was much more than a job printer. Throughout the postwar era, the GPO held supervisory authority over printing for all federal agencies other than the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the Superintendent of Documents was the chief cataloger and public distributor of U.S. government publications. This office opened a bookstore in Washington in 1921 and added regional stores in several cities after 1967, though most of its sales were handled by mail order and through agents in other federal bureaus. The Superintendent of Documents’ own publication, the Monthly Catalog of United 168
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FIGURE 10.1. As the official disseminator of government documents, the Government Printing Office (GPO) has a new challenge in the digital era because digital technology makes documents easy to alter or copy, leading to multiple nonidentical versions that can be used in unauthorized or illegitimate ways. The GPO has implemented “digital signatures” for certain online PDF documents on GPO Access. The visible signature, the GPO Seal of Authenticity, verifies “the authentic nature of a particular document, ensuring that the content has remained unchanged since GPO first authenticated it.” The Seal of Authenticity is a Registered Trademark.
States Government Publications, served as the central list and index of government publications from 1895 until the 1990s.5 As its contribution to the Online Computer Library Center, which was a cooperative venture launched by university libraries in 1967, the GPO began online cataloging of government publications in 1976. Perhaps the most important institution for promoting public access and long-term preservation of government documents was the GPO’s Federal Depository Library Program, which dated to the mid-nineteenth century. This program was greatly expanded by the Depository Library Act of 1962, and in 2000 it was distributing documents to some 1,328 libraries, including 53 “regional” depository libraries. The large regional libraries were charged with preserving comprehensive collections of all titles that the GPO made available.6 Such a tidy system of centralized printing, distribution, preservation, and bibliographical control—always more ideal than reality—unraveled in the postwar era. To some extent, the monopoly status of the Government Printing Office was eroded by the rising influence—bureaucratic and constitutional— of the executive branch. During the war, the military constantly groused about GPO oversight of its printing operations, and after the war the burgeoning Department of Defense, along with other new executive departments, continued to press for control of its own printing and publishing activities. Most of this pressure was political and bureaucratic, but in 1983 the executive branch won an important constitutional claim of independence from congressional oversight in the Chadha decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. This decision limited Congress’s power to supervise executive activities through administrative entities U.S . GOVE R N M E N T P U B L I S H I N G I N TH E P OSTWAR ERA
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such as the Joint Committee on Printing and the GPO.7 After 1983, the executive branch and Congress continued to joust over how government publishing could and should be controlled in the post-Chadha era. By the late 1990s, the claim of Congress (through the Joint Committee on Printing) to supervisory authority over government printing and publishing had lost much of its constitutional force, although the organizational structure of the GPO, the Superintendent of Documents, and the Federal Depository Library Program remained intact.8 These constitutional and bureaucratic challenges made it increasingly difficult for the Government Printing Office to acquire and distribute (much less print and publish) U.S. government documents. In 1996 the GPO estimated that about half of all government documents published that year were not indexed, cataloged, or distributed to the depository libraries.9 But the more important causes of the proliferation and fragmentation of government publishing were practical, not constitutional. They involved dramatic changes in content, in media, and in modes of distribution.
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In the decades after World War II, the federal government steadily increased its support for military, scientific, technical, medical, and educational research, and those efforts generated hundreds of thousands of publications. One medium of publication that proliferated in the postwar era was the federal-agency periodical, hundreds of which were distributed through the GPO and the Office of the Superintendent of Documents. These ran the alphabetical and informational gamut from the AgExporter to the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. (A new periodical added to the Superintendent of Documents’ catalog in 2003 was Environmental Health Perspectives: Toxicogenomics).10 The flow of research was so deep and swift, however, that only a fraction of government-sponsored research reports found their way into periodicals or to the Superintendent of Documents. Perhaps the most important clearinghouse for scientific and technical reports in the postwar era was the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), located in the Department of Commerce. Initially called the Office of the Publication Board, the NTIS was launched by presidential order in 1945 and charged with collecting, declassifying, and disseminating World War II technical data to industry, government, and the public. The NTIS gradually evolved into the chief distributor of information that grew from research sponsored by the Departments of Defense and Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and other executive agencies. By the late 1990s, the NTIS maintained for sale in printed form a collection of more than 3 million scientific and technical reports, while adding 100,000 annually in electronic form.11 170
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Although the NTIS emerged as perhaps the chief competitor to the GPO in the realm of government publishing, it was not the only one. In the postwar era, another major disseminator of federal documents (and of many state government and private-sector documents as well) was the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), established in 1966 and later located in the Department of Education. Like NTIS, ERIC operated as a clearinghouse for an enormous variety of materials, and like the Office of the Superintendent of Documents, ERIC served as an indexer and bibliographer as well, with its Resources in Education and its Current Index to Journals in Education. Overwhelmed by the flood of scientific, technical, and educational research reports associated with federal government activities, other departments and agencies also set up clearinghouse services, which became de facto publishers of government documents. These included the Defense Technical Information Center, the National Library of Medicine, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information in the Department of Energy, and so on.12 In every case, the trend toward proliferation and fragmentation of the U.S. government publishing enterprise was driven by the change in content of government publishing from the routine documents of governance (bills, proceedings, regulations, official reports, etc.) to information generated by scientific, technical, and educational research. Changes in the media of publication in the decades after World War II also had a dramatic impact on federal government publishing. From the beginning of the twentieth century, mimeograph and other cheap duplicating technologies had made quasi publication ubiquitous in federal agencies and had guaranteed that many “fugitive” documents would never find their way to the Superintendent of Documents or the depository libraries. The development of photocopy machines and small-scale offset printing in the 1960s and 1970s and of computer desktop publishing in the 1980s further accelerated the centrifugal trend. New paperless media technologies also had an enormous impact throughout the government, including within the Government Printing Office itself. In 1977 the Office of the Superintendent of Documents began to distribute documents to depository libraries in microform, mainly fiche. In the 1980s the GPO turned to the production of CD-ROMs. In the 1990s the move was to the Internet. These changes in the media of publication transformed the way the GPO did business. They also diminished the centralized control of the GPO and the Joint Committee on Printing. For example, the Bureau of the Census continued to channel its paper publications through the GPO and the Superintendent of Documents in the traditional way, while handling its own sales of diskettes, magnetic tapes, and CD-ROMs.13 In the age of paper and microfilm, the Government Printing Office and the Superintendent of Documents continued to hold key positions in the realm of U.S . GOVE R N M E N T P U B L I S H I N G I N TH E P OSTWAR ERA
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U.S. Government publication. In the decade 1981–91, more than half a million separate titles were distributed to the depository libraries, mainly in paper or microfiche. By the early 1990s, the Superintendent of Documents was distributing about 110 million publication copies annually, around 30 million to libraries. With the publication of the 1990 decennial census, the year 1992 marked the peak of paper and microfiche distribution by the GPO, with 118.5 million publications distributed by the Superintendent of Documents. As late as 1994, about 41 percent of the depository library copies was still in paper, 58 percent was still in microfiche, and only 1 percent was in electronic format, such as CD-ROM. But 1992 turned out to be the high point for paper and fiche, and even CD-ROM copies fell off after 1997. In the late 1990s, GPO distribution of government documents—including paper, microfiche, and CD-ROM—fell steadily to 12.7 million copies by 2000.14 Lying behind the decline of “tangible” government publications was the Internet and, more specifically, the World Wide Web. After 1993 the Internet revolutionized government publishing in several ways. In the long historical perspective, the most important impact of the Internet may have been its power to blur the definition of “publication,” a definition that had shaped government policy since the Printing Act of 1895. According to Title 44 of the U.S. Code, “government publication” meant “information matter which is published as an individual document at Government expense, or as required by law.”15 While the GPO had authority over “publications,” other government information lay outside its purview. The Internet allowed—indeed, because of its low cost, encouraged—the “publication” of information that was not in the form of “an individual document.” For example, even before the Internet, the dissemination of statistics in electronic form (computer tapes, disks, and CD-ROMs) had begun to shift publication away from the tangible, individual document and, consequently, away from the GPO. The Internet sped up this transformation. By the end of the twentieth century, the federal government had more than seventy agencies that each spent at least $500,000 annually on collecting and disseminating statistical data; and statistics were the main business of eleven of them. All of these agencies—including major enterprises such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Health Statistics— “published” most of their data on agency Web sites.16 Although electronic distribution of information by individual bureaus and centers undermined the central publishing role of the Government Printing Office, it did not destroy it. Indeed, the GPO was an early adopter of Web technology for its own publishing and for its handling of other agencies’ materials. In 1991 GPO officials predicted that within ten years the office would be “transformed from an environment dedicated to traditional print technologies to an 172
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integrated information-processing operation distinguished by the electronic creation, replication, and dissemination of information.”17 This prediction came true. In 1994 the GPO began to distribute its major publications, including the Congressional Record and the Federal Register, on its new Web site, GPO Access, which was mandated by the GPO Electronic Information Enhancement Act of 1993. In the late 1990s the Federal Depository Library Program became increasingly electronic and online, with 57 percent of FDLP titles available on GPO Access by 2000. But perhaps even more significant, the GPO sought to retain its centralizing influence by making GPO Access a leading federal Internet archive and portal.18 During the Clinton presidency (1993–2001), “e-government” became the watchword in Washington. In 1993 a task force headed by Vice President Al Gore conducted a National Performance Review that laid out more than 300 initiatives designed to move the government away from paper and into the Internet age. Most of these proposals concerned the government’s internal information structure and its interaction with individual citizens and organizations, but some initiatives encouraged the growth of Web publishing by government agencies. With more than 22,000 Web sites delivering more than 35 million Web pages at the click of a mouse, the U.S. government carried into the new century its long-held status as the largest and most complex publisher in the world.19
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The rise of the Internet and the sprawling system of agency-based Web publishing vastly expanded the availability of government information but also exacerbated problems of access to government documents as well as problems of preservation and authentication. The Internet did not create these problems, however. They had been growing throughout the postwar era, as government publishing accelerated and passed through several permutations of new media technology. Public access to government documents had always been a major problem, long before the digital age. The Government Printing Office’s monopoly control over government printing, the Superintendent of Documents’ sales program and Monthly Catalog, and the Federal Depository Library Program were all designed in part to make scattered government information more available to the public. But the GPO never saw a large proportion of government documents, and vast numbers of ephemeral publications never found their way into the Monthly Catalog or the depository libraries.20 Even documents that had come through the GPO were often hard to find and use. The turn to microfiche in the 1970s made the problem of public access for ordinary people even worse than it had been in the age of paper. U.S . GOVE R N M E N T P U B L I S H I N G I N TH E P OSTWAR ERA
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In some categories of government publications, private enterprise made important contributions to public access. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, the West Publishing Company played a major role in annotating, indexing, and republishing federal court opinions.21 In 1970 another private commercial venture, the Congressional Information Service (CIS), began indexing bills, committee prints, hearings, and other congressional documents. Later CIS launched the American Statistics Index and other services, including its own microfiche editions of documents and statistical tables. In the Internet age, CIS (later a subsidiary of LexisNexis, itself a division of Reed Elsevier) continued to offer excellent indexing and full-text access to government information through its online databases and search engines: Congressional Universe, Statistical Universe, and Government Periodicals Universe. CIS and other private indexing and retrieval services were technically sophisticated and increasingly user-friendly, but they were available only to subscribers at considerable cost. Though the Internet greatly expanded the available stock of government information, practical use of that information often came at a price, via giant commercial indexers and vendors.22 The e-government movement of the 1990s promoted efforts by government itself to make its expanding universe of Web information freely accessible and searchable. FirstGov, a government-wide portal site with a powerful search engine, was launched in 2000, and by 2003 it could search more than 51 million federal Web pages. FirstGov (later renamed USA.gov) had enormous search power, but no archival capacity; it was only as good as the sites it searched.23 Thus, while free public access began to improve in the age of the Internet, preservation and permanence of documents remained a serious, even growing, concern. Like public access, preservation had always been a problem in the realm of government publications, even though publication was itself a standard method of preservation. The printing of important documents in multiple copies had for centuries been a hedge against loss by fire, flood, or bureaucratic carelessness. In the federal government, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), organized in 1934, was responsible for the preservation of the records of federal agencies, and publication was part of its mandate from the early 1950s onward. The Federal Register Division managed the publication of federal regulations and statutes and launched the documentary series Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, all printed by the GPO. Through the National Historical Publications Commission, the National Archives was a key supporter of the publication of a wide variety of documentary materials in the postwar era.24 The NARA was also an early promoter of microfilm publication of documents, and in the digital age its Center for Electronic Records 174
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sought to collect and organize federal records and data files that existed only in machine-readable form, making them easily accessible and—it was hoped— permanently preserved.25 Permanent preservation, however, was an elusive goal, regardless of the medium of publication. Throughout the twentieth-century, fugitive documents that were never collected and cataloged by the Office of the Superintendent of Documents often disappeared forever. Much government printing was done on acidic paper that deteriorated over time. Most of the microfiche used by the GPO in the 1970s was made with diazo film, which is not an archivally permanent photographic process. Web publishing was even less archivally permanent, especially in its early years. Information posted on Web sites was often altered or deleted; URLs were changed and pages relocated; and many entire Web sites disappeared entirely, as offices were revamped and projects discontinued. In 2001 the General Accounting Office lamented that “there is no explicit legal requirement for the Superintendent of Documents or any other federal entity to permanently maintain online electronic versions of government documents.”26 To deal with this problem, the Government Printing Office in 1999 organized the Permanent Public Access Working Group, a multiagency effort to ensure the preservation of electronic information on the GPO Access Web site (fig. 10.2). By 2001 GPO Access handled 2,200 databases on its own servers and had established partnerships with several other large federal information providers to assure that the content of their Web sites would be preserved and kept permanently available. In 2003 the GPO entered into a major collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve permanently and to make available on GPO Access many federal documents that had been archived by NARA. Another feature of GPO Access was the “Cybercemetery of Former Federal Web Sites,” which in 2003 included the entire Web sites of fourteen defunct offices and commissions. Yet, despite these efforts, the permanence of most federal documents and records in the electronic era was far from guaranteed.27 The third major problem in the age of electronic publishing was the authentication of official government documents that were never printed except by the end user. In the parlance of the GPO, they were “born digital and published to the Web.” In 2005 the GPO began to develop a system of “digital signatures” that validated a PDF document’s authenticity through a “certification path” on the Internet. In 2008 the GPO launched the digital publication of authenticated Public and Private Laws for the 110th Congress as well as the Federal Budget for fiscal year 2009. Though print copies were produced as well, this was the first time the official version of the Federal Budget was published in digital, not printed, form.28 Of course, much federal information has never been accessible to the public U.S . GOVE R N M E N T P U B L I S H I N G I N TH E P OSTWAR ERA
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FIGURE 10.2. GPO Access, a Web service of the Government Printing Office established by the GPO Electronic Information Enhancement Act of 1993, provides free electronic access to information products produced by the federal government. The information provided on this site offers the official, published version of federal documents. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recognized GPO as an official archival affiliate for the electronic content on GPO Access. Signed in 2003, a NARA-GPO agreement provides for permanent preservation and access to the online versions of the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and other official publications. The URL for the GPO Access home page is 〈http://www .gpoaccess.gov/index.html〉.
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because the government has classified it as secret. In the postwar era—an era of perpetual international intrigue and burgeoning executive power—a “culture of secrecy” pervaded the government of the United States. With the coming of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966 many of the secret recesses of government were pried open, usually in spite of considerable foot-dragging by presidents and bureaucrats. The FOIA allowed anyone to seek access to any identifiable government record. Agencies could withhold the release of information for a variety of specified reasons, but the burden of proof supposedly lay with the agency, not the seeker of the information. The Electronic Freedom of Information Amendments of 1996 confirmed that electronic records also were subject to FOIA guidelines, and federal agencies were required to set up “electronic reading rooms” to provide online access to important agency records. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order in 1995 requiring the automatic declassification of most classified information more than twenty-five years old. Under both President Clinton and President George W. Bush, deadlines were extended, but the general principle of automatic declassification was not abandoned.29 Thus, by the 1990s a bit of a trend toward more openness in government seemed to be emerging. Still, as late as 2001 one historian estimated that if all the documents still classified as secret were stacked up, they would make a pile three times the height of the Washington Monument.30 If the trend in the 1990s was toward greater openness in government, the new age of terrorism after September 11, 2001, may have reversed that trend. New executive policies and new legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 gave federal agencies more authority to remove sensitive information from public access, including federal Web sites, in the name of homeland security. In one widely reported case, the government ordered GPO depository libraries to destroy a CD-ROM that contained information on public water supplies.31 It seems certain that government policies, more than the technological characteristics of the media, will shape both access and permanency of government information in the twenty-first century. .
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In the midst of World War II, Congress passed the Federal Reports Act of 1942, the purpose of which was to stem the rising tide of paperwork required of citizens and to streamline the flow of information in government. Throughout the postwar era, the federal government sought ways to cope with the deluge of paper and print, including the adoption of a series of acts with the phrase “paperwork reduction” in their titles. In a bold, wishful embrace of the new electronic technologies of the 1990s, Congress titled a 1998 revision of the paperwork reduction legislation the “Government Paperwork Elimination Act.”32 And yet at the U.S . GOVE R N M E N T P U B L I S H I N G I N TH E P OSTWAR ERA
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beginning of the twenty-first century, as in World War II, paper was still a strategic resource. Electronic publishing had indeed eliminated paper from many forms of government information, and the various e-government projects had finally begun to reduce the paperwork required of citizens and other clients of government. Yet for some purposes paper and print still reigned supreme. In 1996 the Office of the Superintendent of Documents identified a list of fortytwo “Essential Titles for Public Use in Paper Format,” including a wide variety of federal codes, handbooks, serials, and statistical reports. Most of these publications were also available online, but the Superintendent of Documents concluded that only traditional publication could guarantee that they would be accessible in perpetuity. Even in an electronic age, some government documents must remain ink-on-paper simply because they are “essential to the conduct of government.”33
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PA RT II
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Forms and Institutions of Mediation and Subsidy
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Introduction
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In the book world they have a word for it: subvention. A subvention is a publishing subsidy. It means to bring financial support into the process at the bottom to help raise a book into print. Although formal subventions are still rare in book publishing, myriad forms of subsidy have underlain the industry from the beginning. No manufactured product has been as shaped and subsidized by noncommercial forces as the book—except, perhaps, some other printed media, such as little magazines and organizational newspapers. Across the spectrum of publishing, surprisingly little has been left to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Organizations and individuals who care about art, politics, racial and ethnic solidarity, minority languages, the sciences and humanities, education, and religion have always subsidized the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers with their money and time, their labor and love. The last half of the twentieth century was an especially fertile time for the luxuriant growth of subsidy and noncommercial support for publishing. The chapters of part 2 tell some of that rich and important story. The most fundamental subsidy to publishing, of course, is the enormous public investment in literacy education. Printed material comes into the hands of consumers in code, and it costs a society billions to train its citizens to be code breakers—that is, readers. But schools are just one of many “sponsors of literacy,” to borrow Deborah Brandt’s useful term. In a study of how Americans in the twentieth century learned to read and write, Brandt found many more agents involved than just schools and teachers. In gaining literacy, the people in her sample recalled the assistance or inspiration of parents and relatives, ministers, military officers, employers, private and public programs, and even favorite authors.1 The acquisition of literacy was considered so vital by so many people and institutions that it was heavily subsidized in too many ways to count. So it has been with another broad category of “sponsors of literacy”: publishing itself. Readers had to be taught what to read as well as how to read. Subsidizing and guiding ideas into print has long been the essence of cultural politics. The most significant trend in mainstream trade book publishing in the postwar era was the intensification of commercialism, a story told in part 1 of this volume. The chapters of part 2 tell a more complicated story. In the opening two-part chapter, John Hench, Dan Lacy, and Robert Frase offer case studies of how commercial publishing in the United States was revived after World War II
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through cooperative ventures between publishers and government and publishers and professional associations. Building on the 1940s, postwar book publishers forged lasting partnerships that helped to carry their product into every corner of American life. In chapter 12 Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy describe the continuing influence of independent publishing efforts in the face of what they call a “vast corporatization of the publishing industry.” Concentration and conglomeration actually opened up new opportunities for independents in the many niches and margins of the book business. For book lovers who cared about bringing good books to life, the great age of the independent publisher was not over. Nor were serious authorship and literary criticism eclipsed by commercialism. In chapter 13, Harvey Teres and David Hall explore the postwar literary culture in America, which depended heavily on not-for-profit mediating institutions such as the small literary magazine, the independent bookstore, and the university. Even commercial magazines such as the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire helped to nurture struggling authors of serious novels and nonfiction books, a story told by Carol Polsgrove in chapter 14. Another field of publishing that has always been heavily subsidized by the labor and love of its partisans is the alternative newspaper. The fragmentation of political authority in the 1960s, coupled with the falling costs of offset lithographic printing, made the last half of the twentieth century a golden age of the special-interest press. Chapter 15 by James Danky surveys the wide variety of small political papers that sprang up in the 1960s and ranged from hippie, counterculture, leftist sheets to the John Birch Society’s American Opinion. In chapter 16 Jane Rhodes examines one segment of alternative journalism: the black press. The first African American newspaper appeared in the United States in 1827, and the field has been amazingly varied since then. In the twentieth century, some African American–oriented publications were successful commercial businesses, including the Chicago Defender newspaper and Ebony magazine, but many were operated at a loss by political movements with small staffs of committed activists. Two vast and crucial institutions for the support of reading and publishing in the postwar era were the public school and the public library. Because both money and cultural values were at stake, school textbook selection was a major battleground for political interest-group activity in the postwar era. In chapter 2, Beth Luey describes the handful of commercial publishers in the United States that dominated the textbook sector. But these powerful publishers were often manipulated by political interests that controlled the textbook selection process, especially in a handful of key states. This noncommercial side of the textbook business, told by Jonathan Zimmerman in chapter 17, is a story of political pressure, cajolery, and censorship. Like schools, libraries were publicly 182
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supported institutions whose purpose was the sponsorship of literacy. Librarians saw books as public goods that should be made available freely to everyone at taxpayer expense. In chapter 18 Kenneth Cmiel discusses the politics of libraries in the postwar era. What role should books and information play in public life? What form of information deserves public subsidy? As Cmiel says, public debates over the proper role of libraries were often framed as “books versus computers” but the key issues really were “how we read, how we learn, and how we live together.” Another realm of subsidy where billions of dollars were at stake was science and academic publishing. Indeed, the impact of university-based research on postwar publishing in America can scarcely be overstated. Bruce Lewenstein in chapter 19 and John Thompson in chapter 20 trace the growth of both commercial and noncommercial publishers in the academic realm. Large commercial publishers rose to prominence in the so-called STM (scientific, technical, and medical) category of publishing, especially scientific journals. In 2005 John Thompson counted some 12,000 scientific journals with international reach, and nearly 2,000 were published by one giant global conglomerate: Reed Elsevier.2 The lure for commercial publishers was the lavish public funding of scientific research in the Cold War era and beyond. At the other extreme, many small, not-for-profit university presses were launched in the postwar era with the mission of bringing into print scholarly books that were not heavily subsidized and could not possibly succeed in the commercial marketplace. But, as Thompson explains in chapter 20, support from their universities and from academic library purchasing declined in the digital age, and many university presses struggled in the 1990s and 2000s. In key ways, all academic publishing was subsidized. Governments and foundations provided direct research grants, especially for science, medicine, and technology. But even in the most obscure precincts of the humanities, the labor of authorship was subsidized by the salary of the university professor. In a “publish or perish” environment that grew more relentless in the last decades of the century, producing books and articles was part of the job. And in many fields the entire process—from research to authorship to peer review to scholarly journal or university press to college library—unfolded entirely outside the commercial market. As a result, tens of thousands of scholarly titles were produced each year, many with only a handful of readers.3 As university presses and academic libraries came under increasing financial pressures in the 2000s, scholars called for even more subsidy, including more formal subventions of university press books, especially for junior faculty who needed books for tenure and promotion.4 No sector of publishing has been more influenced by noncommercial forces I N T RO D U C T I O N
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than religious books and periodicals, the subject of chapter 21 by Paul Gutjahr. Since long before Gutenberg set the Bible into type, religious institutions have subsidized the production of the Word. In the United States the first true mass media were the enormous press runs of Bibles and tracts produced by religious publishing societies in the early nineteenth century—all subsidized, many given away for free. The flood of freely distributed religious materials only increased in the decades after World War II. Several of the early nineteenth-century societies, including the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society, were still at work in the twenty-first century. In 2002 the Tract Society declared that it had published more than 10 billion tracts, books, and CD-ROMs since its founding in 1825.5 A more recently founded society, the Gideons, gave away more than 250 million Bibles and testaments in the last half of the twentieth century. But chapter 21 tells a story more subtle than the free distribution of Bibles and tracts. Religious publishing in America in the postwar era became an increasingly attractive site for commercial as well as noncommercial enterprises, as American religiosity continued to soar. Finally, part 2 touches on the astonishingly diverse realm of non-English language publishing, which, like religious publishing, has been an intricate mixture of commercial and noncommercial activity. In chapter 22, Ilan Stavans explores the most important subset of this sector, Spanish-language publishing. Spanish is not a foreign language in America; it has been here since the beginnings of European settlement, and so has Spanish-language publishing. But Spanish publishing changed in the postwar era as Latino immigration patterns changed, and in the last decade of the twentieth century, Spanish publishing prospered. Indeed, a publishing field that had long been supported and subsidized as a labor of love became a lucrative field for commercial houses. By 2005 about 80,000 Spanish books were published annually in the United States, and several large commercial publishers—including the trade house HarperCollins and the religious house Thomas Nelson—were aggressively expanding their Spanish marketing efforts and developing new Spanish imprints.6 From time to time in the age of television, computers, and the Internet, a dire prediction has appeared: the death of the book. But it has not happened. In the twenty-first century, books are alive and well, with sales holding steady or even increasing across nearly all commercial categories. The story of part 2, however, is not about commerce. Much of the staying power of books and periodicals has derived from noncommercial support. Across an enormous range of political movements, institutions, and cultural groupings, Americans have devoted their time and their money to putting words on the page. Perhaps the most telling example of the enduring significance of the book in American life has been the spike in self-publishing since the 1990s. In 2004 the Book Industry 184
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Study Group attempted to survey all publishers in the United States, no matter how small, and they estimated that about 36 percent of some 62,000 active publishers were self-publishing individuals. In other words, some 23,000 mostly ordinary people were bringing out books.7 Far from marking the death of the book, the twenty-first century, with its print-on-demand technology, may witness a new renaissance of the book, with everyone an author/publisher.
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CHAPTER 11
Building on the 1940s Section I A D-Day for American Books in Europe: Overseas Editions, Inc., 1944–1945
John B. Hench
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For American book publishers, the Second World War was the worst and best of times. It was the worst, because many valued staff members, from top management on down to copyeditors and office clerks, were away serving in the armed forces or in civilian jobs in Washington, but mainly because wartime rationing by 1944 had cut the supply of paper available to book publishers to 75 percent of the prewar level. But scarcity ironically made it a fine time to be a publisher. Put simply, in wartime demand for books grew, while the paper supply and the number of titles published decreased, so, in a striking if temporary reversal of the usual economics of the trade, publishers were able to sell out almost anything they issued.1 One executive serving in the military was Donald S. Klopfer, cofounder of Random House, who maintained a steady correspondence with his stay-athome partner, Bennett Cerf. When Klopfer worried about going broke, Cerf told him, “You are making more money every day than you ever dreamed you would have in a lifetime.” For Cerf, wartime provided an excellent opportunity to plan the postwar future of the firm. He used the time and the profits to position the firm’s Modern Library series for the anticipated postwar boom by replacing “bad translations with good new ones” and by making new stereotype plates for dozens of the series’ titles. From his army post in California, Klopfer dreamed of starting a college textbook department “with the gov’t paying practically the whole bill and ready to really operate when the colleges go back to normal in a couple of years.”2 Similar problems dogged the publishing trades in Britain, where paper
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rationing was more severe than in the United States. Still, British publishers, like their American counterparts, found that they could sell out almost any title they produced. But British publishing’s future was less rosy than its wartime present. For one thing, the Luftwaffe had destroyed much of the back stock of many firms.3 For another, British books faced an uncertain future in their traditional zones of influence, such as Europe and, especially, the Empire and Commonwealth, where American publishers were beginning to sense future growth opportunities. A confidential December 1942 Book Publishers Bureau memorandum noted wariness and resentment among British publishers over “various even rather small actions on the part of American publishers which seem designed to grab while the grabbing is good.”4 For the publishing business in countries occupied by German troops and under the sway of Nazi propaganda and censorship, the situation was truly bleak—“shot to pieces,” in the words of a memorandum produced by the U.S. government’s principal propaganda agency, the Office of War Information (OWI).5 There, the hunger for books was almost as powerful as the hunger for food.6 In short, American propaganda officers and publishers alike contemplated a great demand in Europe for books once those lands were free of Nazi rule. Klopfer and Cerf were hardly the only publishers to plan for the postwar future. Nor did publishers limit their planning only to their domestic markets. The straitened circumstances of the British and European book trades, compared to which the American situation looked healthy, got them thinking about expanding their foreign markets as well. As it happened, a greater postwar presence for American books abroad also became an important goal of American propaganda and diplomacy, to the benefit of both parties. It took some time and much effort, but the fruits of American writers and publishers were far more available in Europe after the war than before it. The spread of American books abroad had both economic and cultural consequences. Publishers achieved a beachhead for their products in 1944–45 largely through cooperative ventures, among themselves and in partnership with the government. Later growth came primarily when most publishers chose to compete for foreign markets individually rather than collectively. .
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Like their counterparts in other businesses and industries, U.S. publishers were eager to “do their bit” to help win the war. To focus their collective efforts, they established a nonprofit corporation, the Council on Books in Wartime, in the spring of 1942. According to historian Trysh Travis, the council gave the industry a forum to reexamine its own professional identity, with eyes on what it could accomplish not only during wartime but afterward as well. In this, the B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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council ensured, in Travis’s words, that “bookmen could simultaneously work for the public good as well as the bottom line.”7 The council’s programs were aimed at building and maintaining morale among the civilians at home and the troops abroad as well as increasing awareness of the issues brought on by the war—issues that books, the publishers argued, were uniquely suited to illuminate. By adopting the slogan apparently suggested by the publisher W. Warder Norton and later adopted by President Roosevelt, “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas,” the group ensured that propaganda in some form or other was ever present in its activities.8 The council’s largest undertaking by far was its deservedly celebrated program of Armed Services Editions, which were published by Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., a specially incorporated subsidiary of the council. From the fall of 1943 until the fall of 1947, the organization issued nearly 123 million copies of 1,322 titles for distribution to the military forces abroad during the war and the period of postwar Allied occupation. These oblong, lightweight paperback titles satisfied virtually every reading taste and style, from classics to mysteries and westerns and books about sports and the peacetime world to follow.9 In serving the war effort, the council allied itself with the Office of War Information. Numerous problems and crises, mostly politically inspired, dogged the agency’s brief existence. Organized into domestic and overseas branches, OWI was frequently rent internally along lines of ideology and policy, producing differing views of the objectives and conduct of American wartime propaganda. A more idealistic viewpoint, grounded in staunch antifascism, lost out to a more pragmatic approach within the agency as a whole, but survived within the Book Division of the Overseas Branch. There it fostered the major, and in some respects the only, long-term piece of strategy for what was called the “consolidation phase” of World War II propaganda, during which the United States set out to win the hearts and minds of the people liberated from the Axis powers.10 That strategy called for putting millions of American books into the hands of the liberated populations as quickly as possible, a goal U.S. book publishers found entirely congenial. Several figures on both sides of the Atlantic sowed the seeds of the program, including Rebecca West, who called for an Anglo-American book program for the overrun nations under Britain’s leadership in late 1943.11 Around the same time, the American publisher Stanley M. Rinehart Jr. suggested that OWI prepare a number of translations of “worthwhile” American books for publication by European publishing houses as soon as their countries were freed.12 Largely responsible for linking the strategic aims of post-D-Day American propaganda with the long-term interests of American book publishers was Chester Kerr, a man with feet planted squarely in both worlds. A Yale graduate, Kerr entered 188
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trade publishing in 1936 but was best known for his long and distinguished postwar association with Yale University Press. When the war came, he joined the Office of Facts and Figures, which became OWI in June 1942. Kerr had been present at the creation of the Council on Books in Wartime, and subsequently acted as the principal liaison between it and OWI.13 Speaking at its organizational luncheon, he predicted that the council’s wartime work would influence the postwar direction of the trade. “If enough Americans are given an opportunity to learn what a book can do for them in wartime,” he said, “they will have a new appreciation for its value and uses in peacetime. You can create habits today which will carry over into tomorrow.”14 In the early spring of 1944, Kerr was posted to midtown Manhattan as special assistant to the chief of OWI’s Overseas Publications Bureau to work on the agency’s stockpiling of American books in London and elsewhere, to be rushed to the continent as soon after D-Day as possible. The United States was to supply readers with books, in English and in translations into several other languages, but only on an “emergency” basis, that is, only until the publishing industries in the overrun nations were back on their feet and ready to fill the vacuum themselves.15 Justification for the program stemmed from OWI’s conviction that, after several years during which scarcely anything but heavily censored printed materials and Nazi propaganda had been available to the reading public in occupied Europe, “American books can serve a very vital function as information and propaganda . . . [and] are one of the most useful mediums available for helping the people of liberated areas to rehabilitate themselves.”16 As a senior OWI official saw it, “The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all.”17 The U.S. stockpiling program was part of a larger, Anglo-American effort. The British propaganda agencies were also assembling publications for distribution to the liberated territories. Their program was, in fact, ahead of the Americans’. Harold K. Guinzburg, who was in charge of the American side of the stockpiling program from London, told stateside officials how important it was for the United States to step up its efforts. The British planned larger edition sizes—up to 40,000 copies per title—than the United States was then producing or even contemplating. This competitive pressure in time led to a proposal for a significantly revised and expanded program of stockpiling. Guinzburg may have been the first person to bring the matter to the council, but it was Kerr who submitted a formal plan to Norton, the council’s chairman, in April 1944.18 Although the British and Americans were clearly competing for future markets in liberated Europe, their joint efforts were to be coordinated with the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower.19 B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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The supply of American stockpiled books came from various sources, including publishers’ current stock, but attendant shortcomings prompted OWI to see the need for books published explicitly for the purpose. Thus was created Overseas Editions, a second subsidiary of the Council on Books in Wartime, which was to publish, from New York, a series of books drawn mainly from titles in the current and backlists of major American publishers that were “intended to reacquaint Europeans with the heritage, history, and fundamental makeup of the USA, plus a picture of our role in the war” (fig. 11.1). Thirty-six titles were published in a total of seventy-two separate English, Italian, French, and German editions “to prime the pump” for some three to twelve months, until European publishers could start meeting demand on their own. Books were to be sold or rented, not to make a profit but, as Kerr put it, “to avoid handouts and avoid devaluing book markets for rehabilitated local publishers who will follow with their own products.” The books produced would be kept out of the domestic market. OWI would choose the titles in consultation with the council, following similar procedures to those used in selecting the Armed Services Editions titles. Significantly, participating in the Overseas Editions program would not compromise publishers’ own supplies of rationed paper.20 Kerr’s proposal came less than six weeks before 6 June, D-Day. As it happened, the publishers’ D-Day—the anticipated waves of American books onto the European continent—was vexingly, frustratingly more distant than Kerr and his co-workers expected at the time. As Guinzburg wrote Kerr from London, “We find ourselves presumably on the eve of the big show with so little printed material on hand that we blush for America’s vaunted ability at salesmanship.”21 Several factors contributed to the delays. One was financing the project, which was made more difficult by OWI’s unpopularity with congressional Republicans and southern Democrats.22 Another was the glacial pace with which the titles for the series were selected. Gaining approval for the titles involved many layers of administration, in New York and Washington, as well as abroad, a gauntlet that Kerr described as a “painful process, . . . with everyone but the janitor taking a hand.”23 As late as October 1944, it seemed that the delays in selecting, translating, financing, and producing the Overseas Editions might force the abandonment of the program, but by November the logjams had been cleared.24 The stockpiling program included another, smaller series besides the Overseas Editions, which have remained almost wholly unknown to historians: ten books in French called Les Éditions Transatlantique and ten in Dutch under the imprint Uitgave “Transatlantic.” Comprising sixteen different titles, these Transatlantic Editions were manufactured in the United Kingdom under the management of OWI’s London office.25 Although “the Editions Transatlantique 190
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FIGURE 11.1. Examples of the Overseas Editions, in the four languages of the series. Collection of John B. Hench.
and the Overseas Editions were two parts of the same publishing plan,” the former’s specific origins are murky.26 Because it was one activity of London OWI’s Publications Division, which “was established to eliminate the time lag involved in getting publications from the New York office to the continent,” the Transatlantic Editions series was partly a response to the delays in the production of Overseas Editions at home.27 It also offered a second means of financing. The cost of producing Transatlantic Editions in Britain was assisted by Reverse Lend-Lease funds, which augmented the agency’s budget for producing American books for the postliberation European market.28 Transatlantic Editions also provided a certain flexibility that the Overseas Editions could not. The latter had to be published in editions of no less than 50,000 copies each if the unit cost was to comply with the government’s contract with the corporation. In contrast, the Transatlantic Editions could be printed economically in smaller editions, making them more appropriate for certain titles to be published in French and, especially, in Dutch.29 In charge of the London project was Guinzburg, whose publishing credentials were even more stellar than the younger Kerr’s. When he joined OWI in January 1942, Guinzburg was president of Viking Press, which he and a HarB U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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FIGURE 11.2. Examples of the Transatlantic Editions, in the two languages of the series. Collection of John B. Hench.
vard friend had founded in 1925. Guinzburg was a strong pre–Pearl Harbor advocate for U.S. intervention in the war against Germany and is alleged to have been an active recruiter for British intelligence services in the United States, which were headed by William Stephenson, the “man called Intrepid.”30 Concerned that the “emergency period” might end before the books reached their customers, Guinzburg was one of the most vociferous critics of the delays.31 The Transatlantic Editions gave him something constructive to do while seething over the painfully slow progress of the Overseas Editions back home. Transatlantic Editions bore the same general appearance as Overseas Editions (fig. 11.2). Both were vertically oriented paperbacks, of similar trim sizes, for, in designing the Overseas Editions, OWI had purposely rejected the oblong format of the Armed Services Editions because they would appear alien to readers in France or Holland.32 The covers of the Overseas Editions were almost entirely typographical, with no graphic devices except for the publisher’s colophon, a rendering of the Statue of Liberty (along with the author’s name and a box rule) in red. A Frenchman would have felt comfortable holding one in his hands, because its spare design resembled that of the books he was accustomed to find in the bookstalls along the Seine. But there were also subtle differences. The covers of the Transatlantic Editions omitted the Statue of Liberty. Still, Transatlantic Editions trumped the Overseas Editions in elegance in every aspect, even to the point of using a finer-grade American-made paper than that employed for the Overseas Editions. How ironic it was that the books printed in war-torn Britain outshone those produced in the United States, where the industry’s infrastructure had been far less compromised by the conflict. The fine look of Guinzburg’s London books was not lost on OWI officials, who, while ad192
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miring of them, were concerned that the books’ appearance conflicted with the principles of wartime austerity.33 It is hard to know whether the physical distinctions between the books produced in the United States and those printed in the United Kingdom warranted using different names for each series, or whether the choice of a different name dictated a different look. The latter seems more likely. Regardless of whether name or design came first, the two imprints conveyed different attitudes toward their imagined audiences. The name Overseas Editions assumed a center-toperiphery relationship between publisher and audience, almost an imperialist stance, especially considering the presence of the Statue of Liberty logo on the covers and the rendering of the imprint in English even on the foreignlanguage editions. In contrast, the Transatlantic Editions bore imprints in either the French or the Dutch language, rather than in English, and sported no recognizably American graphic symbol on the front cover. Its name suggested a relationship of equality and reciprocity. The London series of Transatlantic Editions beat the Overseas Editions to market, the first books reaching Paris in mid-January 1945.34 In contrast, the first Overseas Editions titles were not even shipped by the printer in Chicago to OWI’s New York warehouse until the middle of February, with the others expected to come off the press over the following three months.35 Despite the many delays and frustrations endured by key players, more than 4 million contemporary, mostly middlebrow American books were published as either Overseas Editions or Transatlantic Editions and distributed in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Pacific, and Asia and sold briskly.36 Untold numbers of other American books and pamphlets also helped meet the pent-up demand of the liberated populace abroad. Operatives of OWI and the United States Information Service (as OWI was known abroad) provided vital liaison services between American publishers, who had rights to sell, and European publishers, who were eager to buy them.37 These projects not only met important propaganda goals for the United States but also helped transform the American publishing industry for the first time into a major exporter of books and, even more important, of intellectual properties the rights to which could be sold to publishers abroad. .
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By linking up with the Office of War Information, American book publishers managed “to do well by doing good.” Doing good, in their case, meant patriotically supporting their country’s effort during history’s greatest war by playing a significant role in the critically important consolidation phase of American propaganda aimed at de-Nazifying European thought and, during the ensuing B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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Cold War, by providing a foil to the spread of communist propaganda. They did well because “doing good” in this fashion gave them an opportunity to establish a beachhead for their literary properties in Europe and elsewhere around the world. During this time, the government proved to be a useful ally for the publishers, by endorsing their professional ideology that books had the power to do important cultural and political work and by helping them establish business relations with the international community of publishers that were vital to building their franchise into the future. This they did intentionally. As a key OWI memorandum stated, “The opportunity exists as it never may again for American books to have an inside track to the world’s bookshelves.”38 All this the publishers achieved at little or no cost to themselves. Early in the consolidation phase, the government purchased books from the publishers and distributed them abroad, providing them with income and exposure. In setting up Overseas Editions, the government established a coherent system for getting mainstream American books into Europe. The beauty of this scheme was that it did not require the publishers to dip into their own limited paper rations. This left them free to use that precious commodity to begin to meet the demands of the domestic postwar reading public, which included the hordes of returning servicemen and women who went to college, read textbooks and supplementary materials (like Klopfer and Cerf ’s Modern Library books and Guinzberg’s Viking Portables) that were paid for under the GI Bill, and, in time, no doubt helped swell the membership ranks of such middlebrow institutions as the Book-of-the-Month Club. Following the liberation of Europe, American publishers paid more attention than ever before to cultivating international markets. Their efforts to sell and acquire literary rights abroad, aided at no cost to them by the mediation of OWI/U.S. Information Service field personnel, amounted to a virtual frenzy of activity, as “one after another the European markets [were] coming to life.”39 These developments, which helped define the immediate postwar American publishing scene, were the result of thought, planning, and cooperation on the part of both the publishers and the government information services. Like the military D-Day, the invasion of American books set the stage for important long-term changes in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. The robust presence of American publishers in international markets, begun as Allied armies liberated Europe country by country, continues to the present. (See chapter 2.) The strong publisher-government partnership forged during World War II reappeared from time to time as an element of U.S. Cold War strategy, though, for publishers, the biggest financial benefits and increased worldwide visibility came from their individual entrepreneurial efforts in the commercial markets.40 With or without the government as partner, American 194
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publishers’ efforts to secure and develop new markets abroad may be read as one of a number of ways in which American culture came to predominate in the world during the last half of the twentieth century. Like U.S. political power and military might, American cultural influence has been respected, envied, and reviled, leaving ambiguities and tensions that are still very much with us today.
Section II The American Book Publishers Council
Dan Lacy and Robert W. Frase .
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Editor’s Note: This section of chapter 11 is a personal memoir written by two of the early leaders of the American Book Publishers Council.
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The American Book Publishers Council was an unusual trade association that existed from 1945 to 1970. It was as devoted to books themselves as to the businesses that published them. This chapter is a personal reflection on the council’s efforts to protect and enlarge the role of books in America and of American books abroad. The authors were the principal executives of the council. Dan Lacy was managing director from 1953 to 1966; Robert W. Frase, under varying titles, was the head of the council’s Washington office and its chief economist from 1950 until its merger into the Association of American Publishers in 1970. He remained with that successor organization until 1972. Theodore Waller, who was managing director of the council from 1950 to 1953 and who initiated many of the strategies and projects we recount, also contributed to this essay. There had been two previous associations of American book publishers, both rather passive organizations. The American Publishers Association, founded in 1900 and devoted largely to maintaining retail prices, went bankrupt in 1914. The National Association of Book Publishers, founded in 1920, disappeared in 1937 in the midst of the Great Depression. It is remembered primarily for sponsoring the Cheney report, the first comprehensive economic study of United States book publishing.41 Two contemporary organizations, the American TextB U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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book Publishers Institute and the American Association of University Presses, had large overlapping memberships with the council. Each served the special needs of its members well, but none of the past or contemporary organizations had the broad sense of mission concerning the general role of books that the American Book Publishers council came to have. At the end of World War II thoughtful publishers could view the future with both apprehension and hope. They had been exhilarated to work together on the Council on Books in Wartime to produce and distribute millions of paperback books to the armed services and had seen the potential of the paperback and of collaboration with the government. In the early postwar years the burgeoning baby boom clearly foretold an enormous increase in school and later in college enrollments. The educational provisions of the GI Bill of Rights meant an immediate increase in higher education and, one could hope, in a future generation of readers. But threats loomed as well. Radio and cinema had multiplied their audiences during the war; television threatened an even greater competition for readers’ time.42 The traditional book publishing industry was ill prepared to meet these competitors or seize these opportunities. It was made up of small, largely family owned, poorly capitalized firms. It was dependent for the distribution of books almost entirely on an inadequate number of small bookstores, almost all of them in cities and larger towns. It had no organized voice to deal with Washington, with educational and library interests, or with the media. Although the issues were not yet fully defined in the minds of publishers, the need for an organization to deal with this emerging postwar future was clear and led to the creation of the council. Even so, the first few years were a somewhat aimless effort to define a mission and a program. A new burst of energy and purpose came in 1950 under the leadership of Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers, who served as chairman of a new Committee on Reading Development. Canfield was convinced of the need for a broad program to enhance the role of reading and of books in America, and he engaged Theodore Waller as secretary of the committee, outside the council’s regular staff. Though not yet a bookman, Waller was a young man with experience in the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and a UN mission to Belarus. He had tremendous energy, a keen strategic sense, and an engaging personality. At the end of the year, he won approval to bring onto the council staff Robert W. Frase, a political economist with Wisconsin and Harvard degrees who had extensive Washington experience, starting in 1935 as special assistant to the chairman of the newly created Social Security Board and going on to positions in the Labor Department, the Department of Agriculture, the War Relocation Authority, the Military Intelligence Service, and the Department of Commerce. Waller and Frase had known each other in the WRA and the army during the war. 196
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In a whirlwind of activity, Waller and Frase set up a strong joint committee with the American Library Association (ALA); convened a conference of distinguished practitioners of mass-media research; defeated an attempt to end the favorable flat postal rate on the mailing of books; set up close relations with the Library of Congress, the Information Center Service of the Department of State, and other federal agencies concerned with books; and collaborated with the Department of Agriculture to sponsor a national conference on rural reading that led to the publication of The Wonderful World of Books.43 This series of successes led the council, under the leadership of its president, John O’Connor of Bantam and Grosset & Dunlap, to engage Waller as managing director, Frase as economic consultant and head of a new Washington office, and, a bit later, Charles Bolte as assistant managing director, and to increase dues and budget to support a major national program. The council continued to perform standard trade association services to its members: providing information on retail bookstore credit, offering a group insurance program, collecting and providing statistics, dealing with postal rates, offering training seminars, and the like. But this chapter deals with its most important efforts to promote not just the economic interests of book publishing but the whole system of producing books and distributing them to readers and protecting and enhancing the role of the book in America and of American books abroad. This enlarged program was not launched full blown but grew gradually to include five major components: to protect the freedom of books and readers from a wave of censorship; to achieve modernization of the copyright system; to support a growing role for American books abroad; to work with libraries and the book trade to improve technical aspects of book distribution; and to enlarge the availability and use of books in this country and their role in American life. Waller’s resignation in 1953 and the appointment of Dan Lacy as his successor caused no break in these activities. Lacy, a former instructor in history at the University of North Carolina, had held positions in the Historical Records Survey, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Information Center Service of the Department of State. He had already been working closely with Waller and Frase, especially on the promotion of American books abroad.
Freedom and Rights The freedom to read faced a crisis in the spring of 1953 when Senator Joseph McCarthy began a slashing attack on State Department libraries abroad, an attack that threatened to extend to libraries and schools at home (fig. 11.3). (See chapter 8.) The motion picture and broadcasting industries had cowered, supB U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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pressing programs and blacklisting actors and scriptwriters. The book world’s response was different. In cooperation with the American Library Association, the council convened a conference on the Freedom to Read in May 1953. It was chaired by Luther Evans, the librarian of Congress, and composed of senior librarians, publishers, and public leaders. The conference drew up a Declaration on the Freedom to Read, which was adopted by the council and, dramatically, by the ALA at its June 1953 meeting in Los Angeles. The declaration attracted immediate nationwide attention. The New York Times published its full text, as did dozens of other newspapers, and hailed it as “a great state paper.” Many other national organizations also adopted it, and it remains a foundation statement of intellectual freedom. Thereafter, the McCarthyite attacks were largely contained, but a widespread wave of censorship continued, primarily on sexual grounds aimed particularly at mass-market paperbacks and at the collections of school and public libraries. Censorship took several forms: criminal prosecutions of publishers and booksellers, pressure from police and prosecutors on news dealers and bookstores, and local interest-group pressure on schools and libraries to withdraw books, usually because of their sexual candor but sometimes because of their treatment of race or evolution. The council supported publishers, booksellers, librarians, educators, and readers involved in these struggles. Through its general counsel, Horace S. Manges, it filed amicus briefs in appropriate cases, including cases to enjoin police or prosecutors from issuing proscribed lists of books. At the height of the censorship wave, it issued a regular bulletin on censorship attacks and employed a staff member to devote full time to efforts to mobilize media support for schools and libraries under attack. Council officials testified before congressional committees and coordinated their efforts closely with the intellectual freedom committee of the ALA.44 The council retained three distinguished scholars, Walter Gellhorn, Richard McKeon, and Robert Merton, to conduct a major study of the freedom to read, which was published in 1957.45 A special effort was made to win liberal religious support, and an article by Lacy in Christian Century was distributed in many thousands of copies by the National Council of Churches and the Unitarian-Universalist Church as well as by the council.46 In all of these efforts, the basic theme was not the freedom of the author or publisher but the freedom of the reader. Copyright engaged an inordinate amount of the time of the council throughout its existence. As Marshall Leaffer describes in chapter 9, in the early postwar period the United States adhered to no general international copyright treaty. The council took the lead in organizing a Committee for the Universal Copyright Convention. The council also worked on efforts to draft a new copy198
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FIGURE 11.3. This Herblock cartoon of 1949 highlighted the danger that the Cold War hunt for subversives posed to American schools and libraries. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1953 attack on State Department libraries abroad further threatened the freedom to read in the United States. Copyright © by The Herb Block Foundation.
right statute to replace the 1909 act, acquiescing for the sake of compromise on the long-standing but vague judicial doctrine of “fair use.”
American Books Abroad Increasing the export of American books was a goal shared by book publishers, who were hungry for new markets, and the U.S. government, which was eager to increase the spread of American ideas and culture, especially in Third World countries, which were, in the rhetoric of the time, suspended between B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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the communist and free worlds. Active publishers needed little help from the government or the council to sell books and rights in the hard-currency markets of Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and much of Latin America. And they were further encouraged by the ratification of the Universal Copyright Convention. But there was little incentive to try to reach softcurrency countries, especially in South and Southeast Asia, where there were few dollars with which to buy American books. In those countries, the federal government developed three programs to make American books available. One was the system of American libraries administered by the Information Center Service of the State Department (later transferred to the United States Information Agency), which at best was effective in reaching only the small Englishreading elites in capital cities. A second was the Informational Media Guarantee Program (IMG), administered by the Agency for International Development, which bought for dollars soft currencies received by exporters of American books, magazines, and films. The third program sought to reach a larger population by subsidizing the local publication of translations of American books selected by embassy officials. This program was very unsuccessful because the titles chosen were generally of little interest to local residents and the publishers involved were too often concerned only with the government subsidy and not with any effective distribution of the titles published.47 At this stage, in 1951, Lacy, then deputy chief assistant librarian of Congress, was lent to the State Department with an assignment to reorganize the Information Center Service. He realized immediately that the publishing industry, with some public assistance when necessary, could be far more effective than government programs in reaching the general population and at far less cost. Lacy established a relationship with Waller and Frase to achieve the necessary cooperation. Working with Robert Beers, the examiner in the Budget Bureau responsible for IMG, Waller and Frase arranged to have the program transferred to the State Department, where Lacy agreed to administer it in the Information Center Service. Though the program was ultimately phased out, the interest of the council and the support of Congress kept it alive for years and encouraged the sale of hundreds of thousands of American books in countries they would not otherwise have reached. Dealing with subsidized publication in Third World countries was more difficult. Responding to a suggestion from Waller, Lacy proposed to a number of leading publishers that if they would form a strong not-for-profit company for the purpose, he would seek to provide financial assistance from the State Department. After months of intense discussion with publishers, with the State Department, and with the Appropriations Committee of the House of Repre200
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sentatives, the corporation was formed and named Franklin Book Programs. Malcolm Johnson of D. Van Nostrand was its first chairman, and Datus Smith, the director of Princeton University Press, its president. The House of Representatives approval of $5 million to provide capital funding for Franklin was lost in the Senate, but Lacy was able to transfer $250,000 from other sources in the Information Center Service as the first in a series of annual grants to enable Franklin to begin operations. Set up initially in Cairo, Franklin expanded quickly to other Arab countries and then into the rest of the Muslim world, with especially important operations in Indonesia and Iran. Later attempts to expand into Nigeria and Latin America were less successful (figs. 11.4 and 11.5). Franklin itself did not publish books but acquired relevant foreign-language rights from American publishers for nominal sums, arranged and paid for translations, and then placed them with selected local publishers who were given professional advice and assistance. Titles were selected on the basis of quality and local interest, not propaganda value. Franklin received a small percentage
FIGURE 11.4. Tataawwur al-fikr al-siyassi: al-kitab al-awal, an Arabic edition of George Sabine, History of Political Theory, was published in Cairo in 1954 under the Franklin Book Programs. Franklin Book Programs Records, 1920–78, box 288, no. 11. With permission of the Princeton University Library. B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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FIGURE 11.5. The Wizard of Oz in Bengali was one of the books for children included among the publications of the Franklin Book Programs. Franklin Book Programs Records, box 283, no. 8. With permission of the Princeton University Library.
of the revenue, which met most of its operating costs, though continued federal subsidy was still needed. Franklin achieved the effective, professional publication of many thousands of translations of American books that otherwise would never have been available in the Muslim world. The council continued to work closely on other undertakings with the State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Agency for International Development, and other agencies interested in a greater role for American books and ideas abroad. A special effort was devoted to the ratification of the UNESCO Agreement on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials (generally known as the Florence Agreement), which would eliminate tariffs and trade barriers on books and similar materials. Although the United States along with many other countries had signed the agreement when it was drafted in 1950, Frase learned that the State Department had no intention of submitting it for ratification until there was action on the Universal Copyright Convention, fearing opposition from book manufacturers and printing trade unions to the elimination of the already very low American import duties on books. After the convention came into force there was a further delay to monitor whether there would be any significant increase in book imports. Because American publishers were little concerned about book imports and would benefit by the elimination of tariffs on American books in other countries, Frase persistently nagged the State Department to submit the treaty to the Senate. It was finally persuaded to do so, and the Senate promptly ratified 202
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the agreement in 1960. After six more years of persistent effort, implementing legislation passed both houses in 1966 and was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. This gave American books free access to markets of signatory countries throughout the world.48 The National Book Committee, supported by the council, held two major national conferences, one on American books abroad generally and one on specific problems in the Near East, Africa, and Asia.49 At the urging of the council, an official Government Advisory Commission on International Book Programs was created in 1962 to bring these efforts together. Curtis G. Benjamin of McGraw-Hill was chairman. This commission served a useful coordinating purpose until its termination during the Carter administration. The growing American interest in the overseas market for books was reflected in increased attendance at the Frankfurt Book Fair and other international book exhibitions and by the council’s participation in the International Publishers Association (IPA), previously an exclusively European organization. In 1965 the council hosted the quadrennial conference of IPA, bringing nearly one thousand publishers to Washington. This was the first time IPA had met outside Europe and the first time that there had been significant attendance from Asian and Latin American publishers. It was a significant step in the globalization of book publishing.
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Technical Improvements Working with librarians, booksellers, and others, Frase spent a good deal of his time in the 1950s on technical improvements in book distribution. One such improvement was to get publishers to include the Library of Congress catalog card number in the book itself, because it would be cheaper and faster for the Library of Congress to fill orders from libraries for its catalog cards if they were ordered by card number rather than by author and title. Publishers were strongly urged to participate, and Ann Heidbreder of the council’s New York office was assigned the task of arranging to get galleys of new books to the Library of Congress so that expedited catalog copy could be rushed back to the publisher for inclusion in the printed book. After some experimentation, this proved to be practicable and useful and became a regular part of the library’s and the publishers’ routines.
Reading Development “Reading development” was the term the council used to describe its major effort to achieve wider availability and more abundant use of books in America. B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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This program, conceived by Cass Canfield and his Committee on Reading Development, was developed by Waller, through his joint committee with ALA and his work with communication research scholars and the Conference on Rural Reading in America. That conference, its report, and the book that grew from it, The Wonderful World of Reading, were vitally important in achieving federal funding to assist states in extending library service into rural areas. Under Waller’s leadership, the council also convened a Conference on the Development of Lifetime Reading Habits, composed of leading educators, librarians, and publishers, to survey what was known about the best methods to encourage lifelong reading.50 When Lacy succeeded Waller as managing director of the council in 1953, he extended the initiatives in this area. A crucial step was the creation of the National Book Committee, jointly sponsored by the council and the American Library Association, but operating from the council offices. It was made up of distinguished citizens, very few of them publishers, but all of them deeply committed to books and reading. Its first chairman was Gilbert Chapman, an industrialist who later became chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Public Library. Subsequent chairmen were Whitney North Seymour, Emerson Greenaway, Norman Strouse, Donald McGannon, William Nichols, Mason Gross, and Roger Stevens. The National Book Committee was launched in 1954, and the council entrusted to it the principal efforts in the field of reading development. As a notfor-profit organization, the committee could receive foundation grants in support of its projects. Perhaps the most effective strategy of the National Book Committee was to assemble a two- or three-day conference of national leaders to discuss commissioned papers by leading experts dealing with specific problem relating to books and reading and to prepare a report of recommendations. The reports and the supporting research papers would then be published. Two of the conferences and their follow-up reports relating to American books abroad have already been referred to. Three others of importance deserve mention. One, held at the University of Michigan in 1958, was a Conference on the Undergraduate and Lifetime Reading Interest. It resulted in a report by Jacob Price that attracted much attention and went through two editions. Another conference, held in 1963 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a Symposium on Library Functions in the Changing Metropolis. Though it dealt especially with the problem of providing adequate library service to immigrant groups often deficient in English, the symposium attempted to cover the general range of urban library problems. The third was a Conference on Books in the Schools, with special attention to school libraries.51 Two other books sponsored by the committee, though not resulting from any 204
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conference, were significant. One had very special importance: Nancy Larrick’s A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading, which was conceived and planned by the committee and the council staff and written by the distinguished children’s book editor. It was published on a nonprofit basis by Doubleday and Pocket Books, went through several editions, and sold more than a million copies. For a whole generation of parents it offered advice on children’s reading similar to the guidance Dr. Spock offered on health care. A later book by G. Robert Carlsen dealing with teenage reading reached a much smaller audience but was also significant.52 The Book Committee itself produced some important studies for federal agencies, including a background study of social changes affecting library needs and services done for the National Advisory Commission on Libraries.53 Another major project of the National Book Committee involved taking over the management of the National Book Awards, which had previously been administered by a consortium of the council, the American Booksellers Association, and the Book Manufacturers Institute. Over the decades the awards grew in critical prestige, and the week of the awards came to be an important occasion when book reviewers and editors from around the country came to New York for conferences and interviews. The largest and perhaps the most important program of the National Book Committee, with the council’s support, was National Library Week. This was begun in 1957 at the initiative of Harold Guinzburg of Viking, the president of the council at the time, with the cooperation of ALA. The first year’s program was a major public relations effort. Many national magazines ran articles on libraries, books, and reading; and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, led by Norman Strouse, an active member of the National Book Committee, prepared and placed ads in magazines and newspapers throughout the country. Similar campaigns took place in subsequent years, now complemented by local programs in individual cities led by local public libraries and their supporters. National Library Week was the largest coordinated public relations effort ever undertaken for books, libraries, and reading (fig. 11.6). There is no way to estimate the effect it may have had on the significant increase in reading as measured by book sales and library circulation that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, but it undoubtedly helped in the substantial increase in support for public and school libraries. The council and the National Book Committee also worked in the 1960s with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters to develop two pioneer public television programs, one consisting of half-hour interviews with distinguished authors and the other involving leading citizens reading aloud to children. B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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FIGURE 11.6. National Library Week events at the Forsyth County (North Carolina) Public Library in 1977 included a disco dance for teens. Part of the campaign for “reading development,” National Library Week was a creation of the National Book Committee that was eventually continued by the American Library Association. Courtesy of the Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection.
These public campaigns on behalf of books and libraries and the close collaboration with the ALA were designed in part to encourage the establishment of federal programs in support of libraries. The passage of the Library Service and Construction Act of 1964, after long effort by the ALA, was probably aided by the Conference on Rural Reading. National Library Week and its related activities were part of the general background that supported the library components of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the creation of the temporary National Advisory Commission on Libraries and Information Science, on which Lacy served, and the enactment of the statute creating the subsequent permanent National Council on Libraries and Information Science. (See chapter 18.) A crisis emerged in the late 1960s when the Nixon administration sought to eliminate or drastically reduce the appropriations made under the various education and library laws enacted during the Johnson administration. A joint committee was established by the council, the American Textbook Publishers Insti206
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tute, and the Book Manufacturers Institute under the chairmanship of Albert Edwards Holt. This committee collected an emergency fund that Frase used to retain the services of Richard Schmidt, formerly general counsel of the United States Information Agency, and Maurice Rosenblatt, an experienced lobbyist. Frase then worked in coordination with a Committee on Full Funding established by a broad group of library and educational organizations. The drastic Nixon cuts were adopted by the House Appropriations Committee, but with Rosenblatt’s help Frase was able at the last minute to secure an amendment restoring the funds. A massive effort of educational, library, and publishing groups led to ultimate victory in the House. Eventually for that fiscal year, President Nixon signed a bill that was more than $600 million higher than his initial budget recommendations. The struggle continued for another four years. At the end of five years just short of $3 billion more had been appropriated than the total of Nixon’s budget requests, and $758 million of the increase was for library programs alone.54 The preservation of these programs from the Johnson administration made a major contribution to strengthening the American educational and library systems. This may well have been the signal accomplishment of the council’s efforts to enlarge the role of the book in America.
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Merger and Demise A merger of the council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute, later renamed the American Educational Publishers Institute, had been discussed since 1965. Lacy’s resignation to become a senior vice president of the McGrawHill Book Company in 1966 and the growing tension over copyright led to its more active pursuit, though final agreement was not reached until May 1970. Even after the merger was approved, the two associations maintained their former organizations and staffs, with Sanford Cobb of Rand-McNally as acting president and Austin McCaffrey of the American Educational Publishers Institute and Frase as vice presidents. During this time Frase continued work on copyright and other Washington-related matters, and Carol Nemeyer, later associate librarian of Congress and president of the American Library Association, actively carried on in reading development. In 1972 the merger was completely formalized. Edward M. Korry, a journalist who had been ambassador to Chile, was appointed president. He persuaded the association’s board to move its principal office from New York to Washington because he wished to maintain his home there. Frase resigned because he found Korry incompatible, and he continued his career in other positions related to books. Korry did not stay long; in the spring of 1973 he resigned. The new Association of American Publishers conceived for itself a somewhat B U I L D I N G O N T H E 19 40 S
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different function from that envisioned by the council. This was in part because of the change that had taken place in the industry: more MBAs, fewer bookmen. The board of directors of the council had included publishers such as Cass Canfield, Harold Guinzburg, Charles Scribner, Douglas Black, Storer Lunt, Bradford Wiley, and others who were deeply committed to books as intellectual and cultural instruments. The board of directors of the Association of American Publishers, on the other hand, tended to be dominated by executives of large, complex firms, a number of which became European owned. In consequence, the association conducted itself in Washington more like a traditional business lobby, representing the legal and financial interests of the publishing industry (a role the council had also played), but with limited concern for the role of the book in American society. This orientation was reflected in the choice of those who served as president after Korry’s brief and somewhat unsuccessful tenure. Townsend Hoopes had been assistant secretary of the Air Force. He was followed by Nicholas Veliotis, a retired career foreign service officer who had been ambassador to Greece. He was succeeded in turn by Patricia Schroeder, a former member of the House of Representatives. All were able; all had extensive Washington connections. But, though Hoopes was an author of considerable stature, none had any real prior involvement in the world of books; none saw enlarging and enriching the cultural role of books as an ultimate career fulfillment. While association service followed their earlier careers, Schroeder, in particular, embraced her role during challenging times for the book industry. Many of the achievements of American Book Publishers Council faded out of existence with the council itself. The National Book Committee, now on its own, collapsed financially and was dissolved, as was Franklin Book Programs. The National Book Awards continued but under other sponsorship. National Library Week, now without publisher backing, continued on a smaller scale as a project of the American Library Association. The Government Advisory Committee on International Book Programs was terminated. The close collaboration with library and educational groups did not regain its strength, except in the field of censorship, where effective collaboration of the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers continued.55 But many solid achievements of the years from 1950 to 1970, when the council was most active, still endure. The threats of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s were vanquished and firm public opinion and strong Supreme Court opinions now protect the freedom of books as never before, a protection still needed in the face of continued attacks, including those spawned by the USA PATRIOT Act following September 11, 2001. Congress passed the Library Services Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Higher Education Act, in 208
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each case committing the federal government to the general support of libraries, as well as schools and colleges, and leading to the appropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds for the purchase of books. The National Advisory Commission on Libraries, whose creation had been urged by the council and on which both Waller and Lacy had served, brought in its landmark report. That in turn led to the creation of the permanent National Council on Libraries and Information Science. Urged on by the council, the United States approved a general international copyright treaty, and a sound basis was laid for the long-needed general revision of the copyright law. The national flat postal rate for books was preserved. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) and cataloging-in-publication continued. American books, which had once had only a minor international role, came to be a major force abroad. The report on the American Library Association’s Commission on Freedom and Equality of Information, chaired by Lacy, restated the objectives that had been pursued by ALA and the council.56 The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, created in part to be a successor to the National Book Committee, carried on similar reading development programs with great and growing success. Finally, as a measure of the pervasive role of books in American society, more books are sold and read today in the United States than ever before.
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C H A P T E R 12
Editorial Vision and the Role of the Independent Publisher Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy
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If commercialization, technological innovation, and corporatization are the major trends of recent book publishing history, then we do not have to look too hard to find the countertrends that establish what passes for equilibrium in our hard-pressed business early in the twenty-first century: a rugged bookishness that has so far proved surprisingly resilient. After a flurry of millennialism in the 1990s, when for a few years it appeared that books printed on paper were about to be replaced by futuristic reading devices called electronic books, there came a magical and unexpected result: the age-old reading device known for centuries as the book appeared suddenly to be a marvel of technological perfection, and nothing new was able to match it. In the same way, and just as unexpectedly, the vast corporatization of the publishing industry that dominated the last two decades of the 1900s did not change how books are made, or how they are read, and thus the traditional approaches that had characterized the independent age of the great twentieth-century publishers—the era of people like Kurt Wolff, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Barney Rosset, George Braziller, and so many others—still look fresh and relevant in the early twenty-first century. So much so in fact that it would be impossible to imagine the book in America today without a number of very old-fashioned sounding notions about writing, reading, and the importance of ideas. Book publishing loves its metaphors: the house as the image of the shelter publishers provide, the voice of the written word. The bridge may be the most dominant of all publishing metaphors, the span that connects two shores in the way publishers connect writers with readers, or our histories with our future. Book publishers are after all nothing more than mediators, bridges. It has usually been in the embrace of this humble role that book publishers have had their greatest influence. What is notable today are the ways in which the traditional roles of book publishers have not been subsumed, at least not yet, within the powerful forces of the new marketplace. While it is too soon to say whether in fact some kind of bedrock, sui generis
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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publishing philosophy is reasserting itself, there is emerging a recognition that book publishing today relies on a highly nuanced and complex ecology in which shifting marketplace realities are balanced by an unchanging sense of what constitutes a good book, and in which the trend away from older editorial values has somewhat reversed itself. Where as recently as five or ten years ago, the very word “independent” may have seemed quaint, today the word “corporate” may sound equally so to many ears. In the unending dialectical spiral, at the very moment when complete corporate control is all but achieved, its antithesis benefits and thrives, and there comes a new awareness of mutuality. To establish these points, consider two publishing companies over the past fifty years. The first is Pantheon, one of the great names of modern publishing and a firm that has shown tremendous staying power both as an independent and as a corporate house through a history of near constant rebirth. The second, Dalkey Archive, another great name, has also shown a remarkable ability to transform itself, although in its case the movement has always been away from the corporate sector toward noncommercial forms. These two examples reveal what kind of a cultural enterprise publishing has become and some of the ways it plays an undiminished role as a cultural and sociological force. Shortly after S. I. Newhouse hired yacht-lover Alberto Vitale to head Random House in 1990, the entire staff of the Pantheon Books imprint resigned in protest of a new decree that every title be profitable. Kurt Vonnegut, E. P. Thompson, and Studs Terkel were among the hundreds of authors and publishing insiders who protested outside the Random House offices. Pantheon had lost its corporate independence long before, having been purchased by Random House in 1961. But the tradition of editorial independence in the company was exceptionally strong, and the debacle precipitated by Vitale’s focus on the bottom line was the culmination of a string of changes in ownership, from Random to RCA to Newhouse Publications (and later, in 1998, to Bertelsmann). Pantheon’s fate was “an early example of a pattern that has now become commonplace,” the outgoing director, André Schiffrin (fig. 12.1), observed a decade later in a book whose title, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read,1 blazoned a challenge to the status quo for which Schiffrin was roundly attacked in publishing circles. Yet in the years since he wrote his book, the corporate model has proved in many ways to be even worse than he feared and the rate of degeneration even swifter than he foresaw. In the words of Mattia Carratello, a young Italian editor then at Einaudi (once one of the great independent publishers, today part of the Berlusconi empire) holding forth at a dinner party at the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair, “The system is now almost perfect.”2 (Carratello is now at Neri Pozzo.) And by that he did not mean perfectly good, or for that matter perfectly evil, T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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FIGURE 12.1. André Schiffrin’s career, which spanned most of the second half of the twentieth century, has reflected the changing status of the editor in the corporate publishing world. Photograph courtesy of André Schiffrin and Melville House Publishing.
only that it now formed a nearly closed circle, all but completely controlled and managed by its owners, who were able to determine not only what was and was not published but also, to some extent, what did and did not succeed. Pantheon had been launched in 1942 by the German refugees Helen and Kurt Wolff, in partnership with Kyrill Schabert, an American. At the very moment when high German Jewish culture was being systematically wiped out in Europe by Nazism, the Wolffs were able to plant its seed in New York where it would eventually thrive and come to dominate a segment of the literary publishing scene. In Europe, Kurt Wolff Verlag had published, among others, Heinrich Mann, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, and Sinclair Lewis; in New York, as enemy aliens, the couple had to obtain a permit to leave their residence to travel.3 The new firm defined a center of European intellectual life in America, with titles directed toward refugees and natives alike. (Early on, Pantheon issued both untranslated editions and editions in English.) Jacques Schiffrin, André’s father, joined Pantheon in 1943. Schiffrin, who had founded La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in Paris, had been ejected in 1940 from Éditions Gallimard, when it succumbed to the Nazi-led expurgation of Jews from cultural institutions.4 Schiffrin’s involvement resulted in Pantheon editions of several new books by his friend André Gide, as well as an edition in French of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. Another early addition to the Pantheon stable was the Bollingen series, initiated by philanthropists Paul and Mary Mellon, who contacted Kurt Wolff about publishing a line of books on art, psychology, and 212
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the humanities, beginning with works by Carl Jung. Mary had been psychoanalyzed by Jung and wanted to spread his ideas in the United States. The Bollingen series (named after Jung’s country home) included works by André Malraux, Paul Valéry, Miguel Unamuno, and Joseph Campbell. The series would deliver one of Pantheon’s biggest financial scores, a 1960s hardcover edition of the I Ching that sold more than 1 million copies.5 “I like to publish authors, not just books,” said Helen Wolff in a 1982 interview. “I don’t like to take a book as a single entity. One finds an author who has an exceptional talent, and then builds him up, little by little.”6 Pantheon’s reputation for commitment to its authors, and for scrupulous editing and literary taste, drew writers to the fold. Acquisitions were aided by a network of refugee intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, friend to both the Wolffs and Schiffrin. Early literary and sales highlights of the Pantheon list included Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery (1953), a new translation of the complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s best-selling essay collection Gift from the Sea (1955), Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, published in 1958—the year the author was awarded the Nobel Prize.7 The book had been suppressed in Russia and would sell several million copies in paperback.8 In-house friction, and a heart condition that mandated a change in climate for Kurt, prompted the Wolffs’ departure from Pantheon. They moved to Locarno, Switzerland, in 1959, and directed the company from abroad until their 1961 resignation. Immediately the Wolffs were approached by William Jovanovich of Harcourt Brace, who proposed a Helen and Kurt Wolff imprint; when the Wolffs accepted, several Pantheon authors followed them to Harcourt, or tried to. Arendt withdrew a two-volume manuscript from Pantheon, while W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer’s translation of Goethe’s Italian Journey was too far into production to allow a similar transfer.9 In the years after the Wolffs’ departure the core of Pantheon would change radically, beginning with its purchase in 1961 by Random House under Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. What was left of the original Pantheon team dispersed in the two years that followed. André Schiffrin, whose father had died of emphysema in 1950, was invited to join the new Pantheon in 1962, and soon took over as editorial director. Under Schiffrin fils the company would continue to publish a preponderance of European thinkers, with a new emphasis on writers “who spoke with a special relevance to what was happening in America.”10 These included Gunnar Myrdal, Jan Myrdal, R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault, and E. P. Thompson. Schiffrin initiated annual trips to London, Paris, and Frankfurt, to shop for foreign titles and stay current with trends of thought. In addition, the house brought to its list a host of U.S. writers of the Left—Ralph Nader, Noam T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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Chomsky, Herbert Gutman, Eugene Genovese, and Studs Terkel, whose Working (1972) was a runaway best seller. They were oppositional, alternative voices all, natural heirs to the literature of refugees and internationalism championed by Pantheon originally. By 1990, when Vitale took over Random House operations, Pantheon’s sales were near $20 million annually, with more than half that business from paperback sales, in a shift that reflected an industry-wide trend. The house had recently launched Art Speigelman’s graphic novel memoir Maus and Matt Groening’s comics collections, creating a reputation for itself as the originator of books that were both best sellers and cultural trendsetters.11 The announced reason for the shake-up at Pantheon was that it was losing money. But Schiffrin has suggested that this was not the case, and his view is credible considering the string of best sellers Pantheon had published. If anything, one could argue, the very opposite may have been true: Pantheon may have been closed for the very reason that it had found a way to maintain its editorial independence and succeed within the corporate structure. In that scenario, it was not the profits the corporate parent was missing so much as the corporate control and influence that go with them. In contrast to Pantheon, Dalkey Archive Press had its genesis not in book publishing at all but in an effort to rejuvenate literary criticism through a journal called the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Founder John O’Brien described himself as frustrated with a lit-crit culture that was content to print “the 5,000th essay on Saul Bellow” but had no interest in discovering and rediscovering unknown authors of merit.12 With funding from the Illinois Arts Council, the Review was launched in Chicago in the spring of 1981. The first edition of RCF was devoted to Gilbert Sorrentino. The second treated the work of Paul Metcalf and Hubert Selby. Special numbers of the journal, which has been published thrice annually since its inception, included an issue on the novelist as critic; “The Future of Fiction”; and, in 1993, a “younger writers” number featuring David Foster Wallace, W. T. Vollmann, and Susan Daitch. One goal of the Review, articulated early on, was to seek out and appraise trends in foreign fiction. Thus separate issues on New Flemish Fiction, New Danish Fiction, New Finnish Fiction, New Latvian Fiction, and New Japanese Fiction, among others. The Review of Contemporary Fiction soon attracted funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and O’Brien decided to use the resulting surplus to bring back into print books that probably would have no chance otherwise—books for which RCF had been founded. The resulting entity, Dalkey Archive Press, named for a 1964 novel by the Irish writer Flann O’Brien, was up and running by 1984. Its first titles were Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hôtel, Nicholas Mosley’s Impossible Object, and Douglas Woolf ’s Wall to Wall. Dalkey 214
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prints “subversive” books, John O’Brien has said, meaning that they “in some way or another upset the apple cart, that they work against what is expected, that they in some way challenge received notions, whether those are literary, social or political.”13 In 2003 the list comprised more than 240 titles, all of which the press vows to keep in print, including works by U.S. writers Harry Mathews, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, William Gass, Gertrude Stein, Ishmael Reed, and Rikki Ducornet; foreign writers on the list include Henry Green, Aldous Huxley, Viktor Shklovsky, Ann Quin, Raymond Queneau, Arno Schmidt, Jacques Roubaud, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (fig. 12.2). In 1992 RCF/Dalkey Archive moved to Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, consummating a not uncommon union of independent publisher and academy.14 The arrangement gave the director of the press a tenured professorship in the English department and supplied Dalkey with university offices and staff support. Students could gain publishing experience at the press, which now added another periodical, the newsprint freebie CONTEXT. Distributed on campuses nationwide and in bookstores, CONTEXT included discussion of
FIGURE 12.2. The 2006 poster for the annual Reading the World Festival, a project of Dalkey Archive Press and other organizations. Poster by Susan Mitchell and Peter Sis. Used by permission. T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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worthy writing that mainstream review organs either had not covered or had covered sparsely. Dalkey’s arrival at Normal was followed by funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and a significant bequest from the Lannan Foundation. The press also attracted translation grants from foreign governments. Near the end of its first decade at Normal, the publisher regrouped its activities under the name “Center for Book Culture,” emphasizing its holistic approach. “If through some miracle all good books were published and kept in print by other publishers and if there were no longer a need for Dalkey Archive,” said O’Brien, “we would still have the same mission we now have, but would place an even greater emphasis on interpretation and education.”15 The unique combination of foundation and government funding, together with university ties, put a viable and responsible plan behind what would otherwise be an idealistic vision with little hope of sustainability. In 2005 the organization officially changed its name to the Dalkey Archive Press and in 2007 relocated to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where it is housed in the School of Literature, Cultures, and Linguistics. At the same time, a new company, Open Letter, based at the University of Rochester, was founded by Chad Post and other Dalkey alumni to focus exclusively on literary translation, proliferating the Dalkey model. Similarly, Archipelago, another outstanding new voice among literary independents, was started by former Seven Stories editor Jill Schoolman. Pantheon and Dalkey, like other successful independent houses, thrived because of a passion that was broad enough to include good books and balancing the books. Merely by existing, they each both resisted and proposed an alternative to the relentless corporatization of book publishing during a period when a hundred or so viable large publishers were reduced to just six huge divisions of similar-seeming entertainment megalopoli, all but one of them foreign-owned. In that context, the independent publishers that have survived and endured have certainly become less marginal, more necessary, than ever before. Kurt Wolff, epitomizing that resistance, wrote once, “I personally am able to envision the genuine publisher only within certain limits of size. As a general rule it can be said, although the exception does exist, that the books of great writers have not been published by giant companies, and that important literary movements were supported and developed by small firms, that is to say individual publishers.”16 The editor and author Ted Solotaroff, speaking in 2004, described a similar state of affairs, modernizing Wolff ’s adage: “The independent publisher is the editorially driven publisher. All the more reason for the bookstores, the review media, and readers to be aware that the future depends more on the university presses and independent presses than the mainstream publishers. Why? The whole notion at the big houses of enterprising, 216
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risk-taking, literary publishing revolves around what are called debut novels. So many major writers in mid-career are moving to university or independent houses. The few big houses that do poetry are backed up for years. As late as the early 1980s, the editors were telling the sales force how to sell their books. Now that’s all changed, permanently I think.”17 Most often, the outcome for independent publishers is that they cease to exist after a run of three to ten years. Publishing houses go out of business almost as fast as new ones are born. And growth does not necessarily have the appeal that it does in the corporate world. In fact, growth can be a great danger to smaller companies, because growth requires capitalization, and there are economies to smallness that cannot necessarily be replicated in a larger size. For example, an excellent literary house that publishes six to twelve titles a year may score a rate of reviews at the major metropolitan newspapers as high as 50 percent. When that company grows to publish sixty or eighty titles annually, however, the same level of support from the newspapers will mean that only 10 percent or less of the company’s books get reviewed, while the other 90 percent or more go unnoted in the review media. It is not uncommon for growth to cause the failure of publishing enterprises. The larger the present six publishing conglomerates become, the greater the danger that the smaller independent houses will fall between the cracks. On the other hand, the greater the gap in size between the smaller and the largest houses, the greater the opportunities for independent companies to excel at the basic tasks of acquiring, editing, and publishing books well. In the margins of a multibillion dollar corporate giant, independent companies with sales in the mere tens of millions or the mere millions, or less, may find they can attract major authors, edit them properly, and promote them successfully, because for the time being major media channels still require some real content at least some of the time, and in many cases the scale of operations at the large houses boils down to an inability, despite their resources, to attend to the fundamentals. Anecdotally, there have been instances where corporate and independent houses help each other coexist. When Grove Press, one of the larger quality independent houses, published the novel Cold Mountain, it had presold the paperback rights to Vintage, a Random House imprint. The Random House sales force, with much greater marketplace muscle than Grove’s excellent independent distributor, Publishers Group West, aggressively pressed booksellers across the country to bring in and hand-sell the Grove edition, knowing that this was the best way for it to ensure the success of the paperback edition that would follow a year later. This symbiosis between an independent and a corporate house led to sales of more than a million copies of the hardcover edition, restoring the struggling independent to financial health, and to sales of more T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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FIGURE 12.3. Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books of Brooklyn, N.Y. with author SJ Rozan, author of Bronx Noir (Akashic, 2007). Akashic is an independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers. Courtesy of Akashic Books.
than 3 million of the paperback edition, paying off Vintage’s long-odds bet quite brilliantly. These days collaborations tend to be between similar-minded entities more often than across the divide. Thus independent publisher Akashic Books (fig. 12.3) has a successful association with Punk Planet magazine, which has produced the fiction hits Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, both by Joe Meno; or Seven Stories has successfully collaborated with Tomdispatch. com on Elisabeth de la Vega’s indictment book, United States v. George W. Bush et al. and Project Censored on its annual Censored series. Amid the shifting positions of corporate and independent publishers in the past two decades, the center of gravity in book publishing has shifted to the retail sector, the biggest booksellers. This shift was fueled by Wall Street money and relied on a still-untested belief in the elasticity of the nation’s demand for books. Barnes & Noble grew from a single new-and-used bookstore on 18th Street in Manhattan to a massive chain with more than 1,400 outlets, half of 218
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them vast superstores, before closing most of the smaller mall stores. Borders expanded from a college store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a sophisticated software system for managing inventory, to a chain only slightly smaller than Barnes, before nearly collapsing late in the first decade of the new millennium. Amazon.com came on the scene, giving people with computers a way to buy books without leaving home, and is fast becoming the nation’s number one bookseller. The warehouse clubs, like Sam’s and BJs, sold heavily discounted best sellers by the pallet-load. And other retailers, including Target and, most recently, Sears, became major booksellers. Yet this classic case of profit-driven, Wall Street–financed growth tied to the blockbuster publishing syndrome at the large houses also expanded the ability of independent publishers to reach readers across the country and may in the years ahead prove more of a boon to the core backlist sales on which both the larger and the smaller houses depend than to the blockbusters it was created to serve. When Oprah chose John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a literary classic by one of America’s greatest writers, it hit the paperback bestseller list at number 1 and generated substantially higher sales than many of the new books she had chosen. Within corporate publishing there are still editors and executives who care about literature. But the fundamental conflict between corporate “values” and publishing values is a real one. The blockbuster phenomenon recently backfired when the major nonfiction author James Frey was exposed for having fabricated key parts of his story. At the same time as the Frey scandal, Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was withdrawn after it was revealed that the author had copied significant portions of the book from another published work. This will happen more and more in an industry where the leading corporate publishers deny having any particular literary standard or publishing philosophy, and as marketing-driven books short-circuit editorial process. A literary standard, an editorial point of view, and a publishing philosophy are exactly what readers have every right to expect from publishers every time they walk into a bookstore. And flight from these values has certainly been a factor in the souring of the marketplace for books, as readers eventually realize that the books that are being sold to them may not have been supported by any particular enthusiasm or conviction or sense of responsibility anywhere along the line. In the publishing tradition, an editor’s initial belief in a book or an author is eventually disseminated, through the sales force, to booksellers, who then start a fire among individual readers in their communities. The difference between this and the marketing model cannot be overstated. The older way entails a passionate sense of responsibility, which builds a bridge of trust between writers and readers, and leads to a careful, intimate editorial process. In the corporate T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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model, there is a profound distrust for that very kind of relationship between a book’s creators, or between them and its readers; readers and book buyers are left with nothing or, as in the case of the Frey scandal, with less than nothing. Some bad things have happened. But the death of the book that was prophesied since the early 1980s, as digitized technology seemed poised to replace it, did not happen. Independent publishing was supposed to wither as the muchtouted corporate behemoths came in with unlimited resources and demanded an increasing share of the shelf space in stores. But instead of withering, independent publishers became a redoubt for traditional book publishing values. Even as the ever-larger corporations laid off editors and looked for ways to increase profit margins, independent publishers took the punch and then looked for ways to benefit from the tools that had been created, in a sense, to bring about their demise. Remember that we would not have talked about independent publishing before 1960—because that is all there was. The radical experiment today is corporate publishing, which took root only in the last half century. The hard question today is not whether independent publishing can survive but whether corporate publishing can survive: if so, at what cost—and if not, what the effect of its demise or mutation will be on the independent publishing community that in part depends on the survival in some form of the larger publishing houses. The contradictions and ironies abound. And that may well be the healthiest sign of all. Literary production in America, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, has become a marginal outpost and, at the same time, is more robust than ever. The share of the marketplace given over to literature and serious books generally is minuscule, and yet it is often the catalyst that causes change, whether in literary style or in national opinion. Books themselves may be nearly irrelevant in the direct influence they exert, yet indirectly they are still the main source of ideas and information that will flow into public discourse. Book publishing is less adaptable to change than movies, television, or radio, yet also less vulnerable than these other media to pressure or coercion by the powers that be. After much talk a decade ago about the end of the book and of literature as we know it, now the impression that appears to be the most persistent one is that books have a certain integrity, a certain ability to resist the most corrosive aspects of our times, and perhaps books are the best lens through which to understand ourselves and the world we live in. It would be an oversimplification to say that qualities like smallness or independence are better, or worse, than largeness or “corporateness.” But the more interesting observation may be to note all the ways in which largeness as a corporate quality can be unimpressive or ineffectual, and all the ways in which, in today’s publishing world, smallness sometimes goes with other necessary char220
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acteristics of good publishing, like careful title selection, painstaking editing, and strong advocacy for writers’ voices. At the time of Pantheon’s 1990 debacle, the coterie of senior staff included, besides Schiffrin, Tom Engelhardt, Sara Bershtel, and Wendy Wolf, all of whom, acting in solidarity with Schiffrin, left their jobs when Schiffrin was fired and all of whom then continued to pursue the vision that had been Pantheon’s at other companies. Schiffrin decided to pursue foundation support for launching a new company. He envisioned books that would make in-depth surveys into areas of public interest, including demanding works of nonfiction that would break intellectual ground—much as Pantheon had published Campbell and Foucault. Schiffrin also wanted to publish political critique—by authors like Chomsky and Nader—of the sort that seemed to exclude possible government support. Like Dalkey Archive Press, support from nonprofit foundations permitted him to operate on a high-risk, low-return basis. When he later established the New Press with grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the result was similar to a continuation of the Pantheon tradition and yet, as the name suggests, something entirely new. Besides the New Press, Pantheon’s strangulation led indirectly to the creation of Metropolitan Books, an imprint at Henry Holt devoted to exactly the kind of publishing that Pantheon made possible. The cofounder and publisher of Metropolitan Books is Sara Bershtel, formerly an editor at Pantheon. Another former Pantheon editor, Tom Engelhardt, is a consulting editor at Metropolitan. As the creator of the blog Tomdispatch, Engelhardt is also a highly successful promoter in cyberspace of the meeting place of culture and politics, as he had been at Pantheon. Engelhardt had been the editor at Pantheon to publish the pioneering graphic novel Maus, one of the company’s great successes. As Bershtel remembers it, “No publisher in New York wanted it. Tom did and we all supported him in that.” Bershtel speaks movingly of the team of editors at Pantheon and how they supported one another. It is not farfetched to say they are still doing that, only as a far-flung network rather than within a single company. At Pantheon she published Barbara Ehrenreich’s books during the 1980s, and twenty years later, at Metropolitan, she had her biggest success with Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, a cantata to working women that defied every article of conventional wisdom about what it takes to be a best seller. Not many people would have credited this success to the Pantheon tradition, and yet keeping that tradition alive was exactly what Bershtel was doing, brilliantly, in how she edited and published Nickel and Dimed, which had begun as a Harper’s article commissioned by then-editor Lewis Lapham. “It’s easier to be brave when you’re with other people who are like minded and will back you up and help you than when you’re all alone,” Bershtel says. Her words echo, from T HE RO L E O F T H E I N D E P E N D E N T P U BLI SH ER
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the editor’s point of view, others spoken around the same time by author Kurt Vonnegut, addressing from the author’s point of view why he began working on a book again after a break of seven years, and why he chose to publish it with Seven Stories Press, an independent house, instead of one of the larger corporate houses: “You have to have somebody to write for. You can’t just open the window and make love to the world.”18 The heritage that small, independent companies continue to produce is extraordinarily rich. It is hard to imagine it without printed and bound books at its core. Change is coming, but, in the end, what is created may just be an even more diverse literary culture, one where e-commerce and trade bookselling, printed and bound and electronic books, corporate and independent houses, all have their place.
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C H A P T E R 13
Literary Culture, Criticism, and Bibliography Section I Cultures of Letters, Cultures of Criticism
David D. Hall
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Ours is “truly an age of criticism.” Spoken by the critic Randall Jarrell in 1952,1 this defiant affirmation is an appropriate point of departure for a chapter that encompasses three aspects of literary history in the decades since 1940. The concluding section traces the rise of the “New Bibliography” from its British origins to a position of prominence in the United States by the 1950s; thereafter, it was slowly eclipsed by other ways of understanding texts. This story is preceded by a description of the changing place of cultural criticism, with an emphasis on the situation after 1960. But we begin with an account of the communities or “cultures of letters” that in the immediate postwar years served as sites of literary production, aligning readers, critics, publishers, and writers with particular understandings of writing or the “literary.”2 A useful point of departure for recognizing the varieties of American letters in 1950—varieties that sometimes came into conflict3—is to glance at Theodore Morrison’s informal history of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from its origins in 1926 to 1955. In a given year the teaching staff at Bread Loaf included a literary agent who briefed novices on the art of constructing the commercially viable short story, this at a time when mass-circulation magazines such as Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post were important outlets for publishing this genre. More often than not in the 1940s and early 1950s, the staff also included writers who drew on the American past for their subject matter—for example, Wallace Stegner, A. B. Guthrie Jr. (who credited Morrison for teaching him how to write fiction), Bernard DeVoto, and Catherine Drinker Bowen, all of whom
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won Pulitzer or National Book prizes for their fiction and nonfiction.4 These were writers favored by the editorial staff of the Saturday Review of Literature (founded 1924), a periodical with a distinctive authority for those Americans who appreciated the Review’s affirmations of literary craftsmanship and its selfconscious distance from any avant-garde. The best-selling anthology of American verse, Louis Untermeyer’s eclectic Modern American Poetry (1919, much reprinted and revised before the final edition of 1965), was another expression of what may be termed a “middlebrow” ethos.5 A very different point of departure is marked out by the publishing house New Directions, founded by James Laughlin in 1936 in the aftermath of the several months he spent in 1935 with Ezra Pound in Italy. Reprising the role he had played much earlier in the century with Poetry, though also eager to have a sympathetic American publisher for his own verse, Pound encouraged numerous American and European modernists to send their manuscripts to Laughlin, whose openness made New Directions the most important vehicle for literary movements that extended beyond the parameters of modernism to the prewar expatriate Henry Miller and the “Beat” poet Gregory Corso.6 No less innovative was the remaking of Grove Press in 1951, like New Directions an instrument of the taste and politics of its new editor-owner Barnet (Barney) Rosset, who was able to ignore the economics of publishing thanks to money he inherited. Rosset’s taste ran to newer versions of European modernism (Beckett, Genet) and the counterculture of the fifties and sixties, especially the outer edges of sexuality (e.g., Miller’s long-suppressed Tropic of Cancer) at a moment when mainstream trade houses and journals continued to practice an ethics of discretion. Buoyed by Supreme Court decisions that allowed him to print an American edition of Tropic of Cancer, Rosset became one of the makers of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.7 In these postwar years, however, the revolutions that weighed most heavily on many writers and critics were the failure of communism and the transformation of critical sensibilities associated with the New Criticism, a phrase introduced by John Crowe Ransom in 1941. Personal testimonies to the power of the second revolution abound, testimonies by professors of English literature who experienced something akin to a conversion that prompted them to replace their hard-learned notes on philology and history with a close reading of texts and a focus on the form of poetry, plays, and fiction.8 The provocation for such experiences and the proximate reason for the coming into being of the New Criticism were the poetry and prose of T. S. Eliot, especially the essays in criticism he began to publish in 1919. Soon he was being seconded by the critics who wrote for the Kenyon Review (founded 1939), edited by Ransom and sponsored by Kenyon College, along with Partisan Review, Sewanee Review 224
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FIGURE 13.1. Authors and editors who espoused the New Criticism, including Allen Tate, Léonie Adams, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Spencer, and Robert Penn Warren, pictured in Whittall Pavilion at the Library of Congress, Washington, 19 November 1948. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-135719. Gift of Seymour Lawrence, 1987.
(the oldest literary quarterly in the country, edited by Allan Tate between 1944 and 1946), and a few others supporting the same program. The New Criticism may be described as the doing of a small group of men, all of whom wrote for the Kenyon Review as critics; several in this group, such as Ransom and Tate, were also poets and fiction writers (fig. 13.1). But to do so is to overlook the many who associated themselves with the movement without ever being friends or collaborators of Ransom or Tate. Given the crisscrossing of alliances in the years between 1939 and 1959, the heyday of the New Criticism,9 it is more accurately described as (1) the procedures for practical criticism spelled out in an immensely influential book, Understanding Poetry (New York, 1938), co-written by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, that foregrounded the structure of the poem itself, particularly the qualities of “irony, paradox, and ambiguity”; and (2) an enthusiasm for modernist writers, coupled with a severe reappraisal (spilling over into endorsement) of certain writers from the past.10 Together with Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and Ransom, Brooks and Warren regarded L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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FIGURE 13.2. Poet and playwright Robert Lowell, a younger practitioner of the New Criticism, was mentored by the poet Allen Tate. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-60875.
criticism as having much more than technical significance. At its best, it served two ends: establishing the criteria by which great writing could be differentiated from its simulacra, and articulating the cultural work that such forms of literature accomplished. In both respects, criticism marked out the conditions or qualities that writers should aspire to accomplish; criticism, as it were, prepared the way. How the New Criticism functioned as a “culture of letters” for younger writers is exemplified in the career of Robert Lowell (1917–77) (fig. 13.2). An aspiring writer from his private boarding school years, Lowell gained a mentor in Allan Tate, with whom he stayed in 1937 after his sophomore year at Harvard; through Tate and on his own, he also came under the influence of T. S. Eliot. Soon thereafter, Lowell enrolled at Kenyon College. During his wartime experience as a conscientious objector, he published his first book of verse. The sec226
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ond, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), with an introduction by Tate, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Other honors and fellowships followed, as did an extraordinary degree of recognition by contemporaries, some of whom would refer to the postwar years as the “Age of Lowell.” Indeed, he was the youngest (and concluding) poet to appear in the 1950 edition of The Oxford Book of American Verse. Thereafter, Lowell would evolve in fresh directions; Life Studies (1955) showed him responding to the influence of William Carlos Williams. Dismayed by the international politics of President Lyndon Johnson, he moved into a phase of overt political criticism in his poetry and plays, especially Old Glory (1964). Lowell benefited from a distinctive aspect of his times, the work done by critics and literary historians to articulate an “American” literary tradition. As late as the 1930s, American literature had only a minor place in departments of English and, as the academic literary historian Robert Spiller complained mid-decade, was regarded as a “minor branch of English literature.”11 Thanks to a burst of rediscoveries and reevaluations, most strikingly of Henry James, whose appreciation of the “art” of fiction coincided with modernist–New Critical interest in form, claims for an American literary “tradition” became far more persuasive by 1950. In Philip Rahv’s “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940), the social realism of the European tradition was contrasted with the experience-centered individualism that Rahv regarded as the essence of the American tradition; in Charles Feidelson’s Symbolism and American Literature (1953), a daring chapter entitled “An American Tradition” identified the typological imagination of the Puritans as source of the emphasis on symbolism in Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville, recast as modernists before the advent of modernism. With a backward glance at Henry James’s famous indictment of American culture in his study of Hawthorne (1879), Rahv argued in 1952 that postwar writers had at their disposal a “substantial tradition” and a “social machinery more than sufficiently complex for literary purposes”—hence the possibilities for “reconciliation” with American culture in place of the “attitudes of dissidence and revolt that prevailed” before the war.12 The effects of this transformation can be felt in William Faulkner’s assertion that Sherwood Anderson was “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writers which our successors will carry on. . . . Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.”13 It enabled Lowell to appropriate certain writers from the New England past and F. O. Matthiessen to rework The Oxford Book of American Verse, a very different anthology from Untermeyer’s that Matthiessen fashioned around an argument (owing much to Eliot) about the nature of the American tradition in poetry. Reflecting the influence of the New Criticism, Matthiessen resolutely determined L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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to “include nothing on merely historical grounds,” dismissing James Russell Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” as a text that “once passed for poetry in Cambridge”; reflecting the new confidence in American culture, he proclaimed that “In the past forty years in particular we have produced for the first time a body of poetry comparable to that of any European country during the same interval.” Here, for the first time, the seventeenth-century minister-poet Edward Taylor entered a major anthology, likened to “our modern poets” in his “astonishing use of bold colloquialisms.” In a similar tradition-making mood, Matthiessen asserted that Eliot’s religious perspective was an outgrowth of Puritanism.14 The power of this mood is evidenced as well in the opening words of Saul Bellow’s novel Augie March (1953): “I am an American, Chicago born.” International recognition of American modernist writing was soon forthcoming; in 1949 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, only the third American to be so honored (Pearl Buck in 1938 and Sinclair Lewis in 1930 had preceded him); five years later the prize would go to Ernest Hemingway, and Bellow was honored in 1976. The tendencies and movements mentioned thus far also figured in the making of the “New York Intellectuals.”15 Even more emphatically than the New Critics, the New York Intellectuals were cosmopolitans committed to modernism as an international movement encompassing not only literature but also social thought, especially Freudianism. The event that defined the group most concretely was the collapse of communism and left-wing socialism. These deradicalized radicals carried over from their past an interest in the relationship between literature and politics and attendant anxieties about the situation of the “intellectual” in a democratic society they regarded as having strong tendencies toward anti-intellectualism. Conscious of themselves as members of an avantgarde, the New York Intellectuals regarded modernism as an archetypal example of artistry attempting to free itself from the clutches of ideology (Stalinism) and capitalism. Far from being nationalistic in the most obvious meaning of that term, the New York Intellectuals imagined a role for themselves as necessarily critical of their own culture even as they accepted (and celebrated) the “end of ideology” that spared America the nightmares of fascism and communism.16 Via journals such as Partisan Review and, in the 1940s and 1950s, Commentary, this group offered a model of the “man of letters” that attracted younger critics and writers, some of them ethnically Jewish, others not. Augie March benefited from an admiring review by Lionel Trilling, the doyen of the group; a National Book award followed. As Norman Podhoretz pointed out in a memoir of his own emergence as a New York Intellectual, Bellow “embodied the impulse [of the group] . . . to lay a serious claim to their identity as Ameri228
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cans and to their right to play more than a marginal role in the literary culture of the country.”17 Making a living as a critic and writer of modernist sympathies and practice was little easier in the 1940s and 1950s than it had been for avant-garde writers in the 1920s. James Laughlin financed New Directions with the wealth he inherited as a scion of a steelworks-owning family, and the company frequently ran at a loss because the books he was publishing barely sold, few of them (at least as Laughlin remembered the situation) given major reviews except in “small literary magazines and in scholarly journals.”18 Evoking the “ideal public” that the poet or novelist can take for granted as having “read widely, naturally, joyfully” in the “greatest literature,” Randall Jarrell told a story of declension: such an audience was “gone” and “mass culture” the new reality, one consequence being that poets could not expect to earn a living from their craft. Certainly it was the case that, in the mid-1940s, Faulkner was not earning enough from his novels to cover the costs of his household—hence, the stories he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and the screenplays he attempted for Hollywood. Yet, as Jarrell acknowledged with some disdain, the possibilities for busywork seemed to be increasing: lectures, interviews, appearances on television, “trips abroad for the State Department,” judging “books for Book Clubs,” editing magazines, and—of most significance in these postwar years—“teach[ing] writing at colleges or conferences.”19 Indeed, as Harvey Teres points out in the second section of this chapter, the movement of critics and writers into college and university positions was a notable feature of these decades. Fellowships and prizes were other sources of income, already in place before World War II but handed out in ever-increasing abundance and variety after the war. A third was the incorporation of modernist writers into college curricula, in tandem with the rush to create courses in American and/or modernist literature. Abetted by publishing innovations like the inexpensive reprints in the Modern Library, the paperback editions of the New American Library, and the “paperback revolution” underway by the mid-1950s, sales of certain texts exploded far beyond the scope of the customary market for modernist or avant-garde writing. To move beyond 1960 is to enter a period that is less easily described than the postwar years. The disaffections and revolts of the 1960s had multiple causes, and their consequences reverberate with us still. The most immediate consequence may have been the eclipse of the New Criticism. Even its most ardent advocates were realizing by the 1950s that it had hardened into an academic orthodoxy, a technology of analysis ever more disconnected from the larger vision of its founders. A key event in the displacing of the New Criticism was the introduction of French structuralism into American academic culture, a L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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move that prompted efforts to differentiate “theory” from “criticism.” A Johns Hopkins University conference in 1966, with Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Tzvetan Todorov attending, did much to introduce Americans to the thinking of these French theorists. By the early seventies the “Yale critics”—first and foremost Paul de Man, followed by J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and sometimes Harold Bloom—had emerged as the leading spokespersons for an understanding of literature that distanced itself from “all forms of criticism attributing a privileged position to literary language” (fig. 13.3).20 Wholly separately from this current of ideas, the 1960s and 1970s were also marked by the eruption of movements directed at recovering the political dimensions of the literary and exposing the politics of the academy itself, movements described more fully in the next section of this chapter. The political and personal turn of the 1960s meant that the status and nature of “minority” or hitherto marginal writers became central questions, and remain so to this day. By the 1970s the concept of “Native American literature” was beginning to disturb the framework, so fully worked out by 1960, of an “American literary tradition.” 21 Feminist criticism would add women writers to the list of those who had been excluded from the canon, and advocates of Latino/a culture would follow suit. The most impressive accomplishment of these years may have been to fashion a “tradition” of African American writing. No African American poets appeared in Matthiessen’s Oxford Book of American Verse, though several did in Untermeyer’s. The leading black writer as of 1940, Richard Wright, had cut his literary teeth in left-wing circles devoted to social realism, though he himself admired certain modernist writers and recommended Henry James and Joseph Conrad to the college-age Ralph Ellison after meeting him in New York through the services of Langston Hughes. Ellison had already come under the spell of Eliot: “I went to Tuskegee to study music . . . and there, during my second year, I read The Waste Land, and that, although I was then unaware of it, was the real transition to writing.” Recalling, two decades later, the experience of looking up its references as the starting point for “my conscious education in literature,” Ellison found his way “to Pound and . . . Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and ‘round about til I was come’ back to Melville and Twain . . . Perhaps it was my good luck that they were taught at Tuskegee, I wouldn’t know.”22 Via Wright, his literary apprenticeship was initially served in the pages of the New Masses, but in 1944 he was given a fellowship by the Rosenwald Foundation to undertake a work of fiction that evolved into Invisible Man (1952); its affinities with modernism explain why Partisan Review published, in advance, a section ( January–February 1952). As Ellison would repeatedly insist, he was never simply a representative of his race but first and foremost a writer. 230
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FIGURE 13.3. S. B. Whitehead, “Great Moments in Lit Crit,” a send-up of literary theory first published in the Village Voice in 1988. Courtesy of S. B. Whitehead.
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Other African Americans wanted to associate race and culture, usually as a means of contesting racism and the perceived hegemony of a “dominant” and exclusionary culture. By the late 1960s some black writers, artists, and critics were participating in a “Black Arts” movement that shared the categories of “blackness” and “black power” with radical civil rights groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The goal of the movement was to articulate and promote a “black aesthetic” understood as “unique,” an aesthetic promising liberation from the “western cultural aesthetic.” The playwright LeRoi Jones enacted the paradigmatic conversion, changing his name to Amiri Baraka and insisting, thereafter, that “an absolute gulf ” separated African (American) from Euro-American culture. Leaders of the movement aspired to create an infrastructure of sites and institutions for the making of such a culture, most of them provisionally located in close proximity to the “black masses,” themselves seen as a source of authentic “soul.”23 The Black Arts movement faded away almost as rapidly as it arose, giving way by the mid-1970s to efforts at fashioning a middle ground framed, on the one hand, by the cosmopolitanism evinced in Ellison, Wright, and W. E. B. Du Bois and, on the other, by a confidence in a race-related “tradition.” The young critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. played a leading role in fashioning such a middle ground. Arraying himself against the extreme nationalists and essentialists, Gates insisted on the presence and persistence of an African American literary tradition that was both internally pluralist and externally connected with the larger (white) culture. At its heart lay a corpus of “vernacular” tales and verse that writers such as Toni Morrison would also extol and recycle. Gates played a major role in a movement of recovery for black writers similar to what critics and historians of the interwar years had undertaken for “American” writing, a movement embodied in an ever-growing number of anthologies, the grandest of them the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996).24 In this manner a context was fashioned for many African Americans that functioned as a culture of letters just as surely as modernism had for so many people after 1930.
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Section II The Critical Climate Harvey Teres
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Perhaps the most dramatic change in the critical culture of the United States since midcentury has been that many critics no longer assume that such a culture exists, some claiming that it never did. Although a plausible case can be made that until fifty years ago educated citizens could turn to certain publications, intellectuals, and institutions and find there a public discussion of arts and ideas, today the consensus is that, for better or worse, no such broad-based elevated and respected discourse exists. Because of diversification and segmentation, a smaller proportion of the overall public reads the same publications and thus participates in a common dialogue. The very notion of a “general public” served by a coherent critical culture has recently been described as “the silhouette of a phantom” by the critic Jacques Derrida, an allusion to Walter Lippmann’s famous characterization in The Phantom Public (1925).25 Historians and critics attempting to explain the dispersal and decline of critical culture generally cite as reasons the rise of the academy, changes in the culture at large, and changes in the market. Yet the trends that have tended to marginalize the role of the literary critic have coexisted with—and sometimes paradoxically contributed to—an ongoing effort to reshape criticism so that it serves the needs of a vital democracy.
The Rise of the Academy From the 1940s to the 1960s, the dominant model of the literary and social critic was the cosmopolitan, engaged figure of the public intellectual. The New York Intellectuals (represented by Hannah Arendt, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald) joined with many others ( James Baldwin, Lewis Mumford, and Edmund Wilson among them) to create an urban, widely shared critical culture, often connected to communities of writers and artists (fig. 13.4). Such individuals rarely held Ph.D.’s, were usually unaffiliated or intermittently affiliated with the university, and published in the commercial press. Even those L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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FIGURE 13.4. Some New York Intellectuals. Mary McCarthy and friends are pictured at a 1947 gathering on East 57th Street. From left: Bowden Backwater (McCarthy’s husband at the time), Lionel Abel (standing), Elizabeth Hardwick, Miriam Chiramonte, Nicola Chiramonte, Mary McCarthy, and John Berryman; seated in front are Dwight Macdonald and Kevin McCarthy (Mary’s brother). Nicola Chiramonte was editor of the Italian Tempo Presente and Hardwick would later be associated with the New York Review of Books. Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries.
commentators with doctorates and professorships often appealed to a nonacademic audience through trade books and journals of opinion: in the 1950s, these included Hannah Arendt, Jacques Barzun, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Lionel Trilling. Beginning in the 1950s, however, as leading critics took up appointments in universities, the major site for critical culture shifted to an institutional environment with its particular affiliations, practices, and protocols. No longer was it possible to characterize criticism in the terms of the redoubtable midcentury critic R. P. Blackmur: as “the formal discourse of an amateur.” Instead, the ideal became theoretically informed assessments produced by professionals, many of whom were politically committed yet relatively detached from ongoing political movements, parties, or public debates. To be sure, much of this criticism was shaped, to varying degrees, by the transformative social movements of the period of the civil rights movement, the racial and ethnic nationalist and internationalist movements, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, the en234
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vironmental movement, and the gay rights movement. But the tendency was to retreat from the broader audience of educated readers that had previously sustained a largely nonacademic (and sometimes antiacademic) public critical culture. These developments changed the language of criticism, which on the whole became more self-reflexive, specialized, and obscure. As Joan Shelley Rubin notes in chapter 23, specialization bred disaffection between critic and audience—at least for the middlebrow readers who valued the accessible, tolerant tradition represented by the Saturday Review of Literature.26 On the other hand, freed from the pressures of immediate political exigency, critics developed complex, sophisticated techniques for investigating the often tacit relationship between literature and power, language and ideology—offering new perspectives on what Lionel Trilling once famously called “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Within the academy criticism entered an exhilarating period during which the New Criticism, which had dominated during the 1950s and 1960s, gave way in the 1970s to various theories of interpretation that vied for supremacy: structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. Similar influences arose within the other humanities disciplines, particularly history and art history. The results have changed critical culture in several ways. First, the literary and cultural traditions of previously neglected groups were given unprecedented attention, so that literary and artistic canons were expanded to include works by women, gays and lesbians, members of ethnic and racial minorities, and the working class. Anthologies, textbooks, and the range of books published all reflected this dramatic new interest in previously excluded authors and experiences. Second, the notion that literature and art should be free from political considerations was uniformly challenged. They were understood instead to have a close but complex relation to ideology and networks of social power. Third, questions of artistry, craft, taste, and value either gave way to inquiries into ideology or, in some cases, were considered to be essentially the preferences of elites and thus mechanisms of power and hierarchy. Instead of cultivating sensibilities and making value judgments, academic critics were intent on challenging the priority of mainstream over marginal cultural traditions, canonical over noncanonical texts, and highbrow over popular culture. Produced within an ideological ethos of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, anticapitalism, feminism, and a general skepticism of authority, academic critics replaced the New York Intellectuals’ mandarinism of the streets, as it were, with the populism of the pedagogue. Gone was the widespread midcentury disdain for what many intellectuals had termed “mass culture” or what the Frankfurt critics Max L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry.” Beginning in the 1960s academic critics greatly expanded what counted as literature and culture worth taking seriously. Thus, a democratization of outlook accompanied the academic critics’ narrowing conception of their audience. Those transformations have entailed both losses and gains, depending on one’s point of view. On the one hand, to some observers the rise of theory and specialization in the academy has discouraged the development of reading skills necessary to a vital critical culture. What has been lost is what F. R. Leavis termed “a training of intelligence that is at the same time a training of sensibility. . . . I mean the training of perception, judgment and analytic skill.”27 Instead of learning alertness to the subtle forms and devices that distinguish a work of art from a social document, a generation of students and citizens has dispensed with aesthetic experience in favor of the hunt for a text’s ideological propositions, conflicts, contradictions, and deficiencies. The goal has become “interrogating” the text rather than being challenged by it, mastering it through superior political awareness rather than surrendering temporarily to the author’s world. The poet Billy Collins, for instance, writes of his students that “all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means.”28 They prefer this rather than submitting to the pleasures and insights that arise when literal reality is suspended in favor of an imaginative virtual reality that paradoxically illuminates it. “What we fear,” observes the literary critic Denis Donoghue, “is that our students are losing the ability to read, or giving up that ability in favor of an easier one, the capacity of being spontaneously righteous, indignant, or otherwise exasperated.”29 On the other hand, one might argue that increased ideological sensitivity, regardless of how unimaginative or unliterary, has contributed to students’ and thus to the public’s awareness of the cultures and experiences of formerly neglected groups. Advocates of an ideological approach to literature and the arts insist that imaginative identification with the “other” is precisely what is required of readers and audiences and that, without developed critical awareness of the social dynamics that both surround and inhere in art, the most cultivated sensibility will fail to contribute to the needs of an egalitarian society. Furthermore, the multiplicity and decentralization characteristic of American higher education has meant that a university-centered literary scene has permitted a greater geographic diffusion of literary culture than was the case when “intellectual” was synonymous with “New York.” However one weighs the consequences of criticism’s specialized and ideological turn, by the early twenty-first century changes in higher education had undermined whatever promise of far-reaching influence academic affiliation 236
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had earlier held. Ironically, even though specialization made literary studies look more like the natural and social sciences, and despite the critic’s embrace of popular culture, the humanities (and the liberal arts generally) have continued to lose ground among both undergraduates and graduate students. Currently the most popular undergraduate major is business, which accounts for 20 percent of all degrees granted.30 Louis Menand has noted that “there are almost twice as many undergraduate degrees conferred every year in a field known as ‘protective services’—largely concerned with training social workers—as there are in all foreign languages and literatures combined.”31 Between 1966 and 1993 the percentage of bachelor’s degrees granted in the humanities shrank from 20.7 to 12.7 percent, the proportion of doctoral degrees from 13.8 to 9.1 percent.32 A concomitant decline in English majors has long caused concern in that discipline: from 7.6 percent of all college majors in 1970 to 4.2 percent in 1997, a drop in absolute numbers from 64,342 to 49,345.33 No doubt students’ anxiety about job prospects in an economy increasingly ambivalent about the value of a humanities education has contributed mightily to this trend. Along with the waning of critical authority over the past fifty years, there nevertheless have remained figures who believe, with John Dewey, that democracy is fully realized “when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving [public] communication”34 and that the role of the public intellectual in fostering that communication is still a viable one. A selective list of writers who continued to address an educated but nonspecialist audience in the second half of the twentieth century includes Renata Adler, William Bennett, David Brooks, Gregg Easterbrook, David Halberstam, Christopher Hitchens, Pauline Kael, Hilton Kramer, Anthony Lewis, Charles Murray, Katha Pollitt, Andrew Sullivan, Gore Vidal, Leon Wieseltier, and George Will. In addition, a considerable number of academically trained and affiliated intellectuals have attempted to reach a wider public through books and articles with a commercial appeal: among others, Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Robert Bork, Noam Chomsky, Frederick Crews, Morris Dickstein, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Frank, Milton Friedman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Doris Kearns Goodwin, June Jordan, Henry Kissinger, Christopher Lasch, Louis Menand, Toni Morrison, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Martha Nussbaum, Cynthia Ozick, Camille Paglia, Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Elaine Showalter, George Steiner, Cornel West, and Patricia Williams. Yet, despite admirable forays into broader sectors of the public sphere, and despite frequent appeals to transgress boundaries in general, most academics continue to be strongly encouraged by their circumstances to remain ensconced within their institutional networks. When academics are invited by the media to address a wider public, their time is severely curtailed, and the nature of their L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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remarks is altered to enhance its entertainment value. The rates for “rent-anintellectual” are daily, and they are low. By and large the public conversation is dominated by ubiquitous media and political “pundits,” whose range of opinion and depth of thought are not sufficient to sustain a vital critical culture. The so-called culture wars of the 1980s and the post-9/11 public dialogue are cases in point.
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The Larger Culture The rise of the academy was not the only factor refashioning American critical culture in the mid- and late twentieth century. Suburbanization, shifts in cultural values, technological change, alternative leisure activities, and increased corporate cultural prowess have all contributed substantially to what Michael Kammen has usefully termed “the decline of cultural authority and the rise of cultural power.”35 The growth of the suburbs and the abandonment of urban neighborhoods meant bereft cultural communities as big-city newspapers declined, theaters and cultural organizations went under, and independent bookstores began closing their doors. Despite the rise of New Age, left-wing, feminist, and children’s bookstores beginning in the late 1960s, the dominance first of mall outlets and then of superstore chains—developments that Laura Miller chronicles in chapter 5—eroded the sense of community, the shared readerly passions, and the bookseller’s expertise that had prevailed in the independents. That change in the critical climate occurred as many American writers shifted their allegiance from the political radicalism and avant-garde aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s (a position again typified by the New York Intellectuals) toward what Arthur Schlesinger Jr., called “the vital center.” Partisan Review’s famous symposium of 1952 “Our Country and Our Culture” has often been cited as illustrative of this shift, for among the two dozen respondents to four queries about the role of the writer and intellectual in America, none highlighted the threats to democracy posed by McCarthyism, the abuses of global corporate or military power, or domestic race relations. On the other hand, nearly all of the respondents commented on the threats to serious culture posed by the proliferation of “mass” culture, either marketed straightforwardly as “kitsch,” to use the term made famous by Clement Greenberg, or dressed up in high-culture disguise as “middlebrow.” Only Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, and Philip Rahv warned of the waning of dissent among America’s increasingly respectable intellectual elite. If there were any doubts about the intellectual’s new status, they were dispelled in 1956 when Time magazine placed Jacques Barzun on its cover for a story entitled “Parnassus—Coast to Coast,” in which it 238
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was observed that the “Man of Protest has to some extent given way to the Man of Affirmation.” Affirmation may be too strong a word, but certainly the shift from noncooperation to participation was palpable, in no small part because of the New York groups’ successful integration of avant-garde art and literature into key portions of the culture at large. Just as retreat into the academy was not the whole story, however, neither was the exchange of radicalism for respectability. It is no coincidence that Sal Paradise, the narrator of the signature Beat novel On The Road (1957), left town at the same time and on the same road as the white American middle class. Paradise just kept driving. The Beats and their progeny within the counterculture represented a serious challenge to the established critical culture of the 1950s and to the idea of a homogeneous public sphere. In the ensuing decades, a new generation demanded that criticism not only pay more attention to America’s cultural variety (especially the contributions of women and minorities) but also acquire popular and international scope. The “postmodern” era—the term, ironically, emanated from the New York Intellectuals—saw established (and newly established) hierarchies, styles, and priorities of cultural criticism give way to skepticism toward highbrow culture, redemptive modernism, fixed standards of taste, and, in many cases, taste itself. By doing away with distinctions between high and low, avant-garde and conventional, and artistic and commercial, both artists and critics encouraged vital new cultural hybrids. Pop artists and celebrities like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein brought the visual arts down from the rarified heights of abstract expressionism by making elements of mass and popular culture central to their art. Authors such as Kathy Acker, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Robert Coover deliberately rejected what they regarded as somber, portentous modernism in favor of the interplay of signs and texts that derived from all levels and walks of life, including fairy tales, advertisements, TV shows, comics, and the movies. In dance, ballet—itself transformed by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Agnes de Mille—gave ground to modern and jazz through the contributions of extraordinary choreographers such as Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, and Merce Cunningham. Popular music experienced an era of unprecedented creativity and range as previously marginalized musical traditions such as the blues, rock and roll, folk, bluegrass, and country in the hands of dozens of highly talented artists and producers took over the radio waves and utterly transformed the musical tastes of millions. The Hollywood film industry refashioned itself by giving new power to independent directors, including Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovitch, Stanley Kubrick, and the so-called movie brats Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorcese, and Steven Spielberg. Even television responded to the changing culture L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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with controversial new programming like All in the Family. In each of these arts, a corps of critics helped to fend off the inevitable uniformity and standardization—perennial problems in mass culture—and contributed to change by encouraging audiences to appreciate innovation and to demand and expect more of it. What was unique about these alterations in the cultural climate was that they were tied to dramatic technological developments that brought immediate access and more choices (within a limited range) to the vast majority of Americans. Television, of course, led the way. By the 1970s the average amount of viewing time per day had reached four and a half hours, a number that has remained constant ever since.36 The options made available by television, and thus its appeal, further increased with the widespread use of convenient remote control devices, cable, satellite transmission, the VCR, video games, and more recently DVD. MTV forever changed the look and sound of the small screen. Changes in film technology were less dramatic but certainly consequential and included sophisticated sound systems and extraordinary advances in computer generated special effects. Multiplex theater complexes replaced single-screen venues, providing a larger portion of the population with easier access to more films, although, again, within a range that excluded a large number of innovative, experimental, and foreign films. Technological change in recorded music, from the LP to the cassette to the CD significantly improved sound quality and durability. Finally, the computer has led to an array of new cultural practices that involve some older ones—creating hypertext; screening films; downloading music, newspapers, magazines, and books—and some new ones—email, the Internet, and chat rooms. Moreover, mass culture has exposed vast numbers to an array of cultural art forms and practices and, in so doing, has empowered and equipped ordinary people to make their own choices about what to experience and how to respond to those experiences. Specifically, since the 1960s, observers have pointed to the choices and influence of a host of audience sectors, including informed, passionate, and opinionated enthusiasts of jazz, blues, alternative rock, spectator sports, wine, gardening, antique cars, and film. In addition, what Robert Hughes aptly termed the “cataract of styling” that began in the 1950s—“fridges, toasters, Formica countertops, juicers, microwaves—gaudy, lush, avocadocolored and hot pink, chrome everything, and big”37 —continues to grow exponentially as dynamic retail, design, and packaging industries produce haute couture and Michael Graves tea kettles for Target and modernist furniture for Ikea. This mainstreaming of erstwhile controversial, countercultural values and styles has had the effect of both equalizing and raising taste levels across the 240
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board. Advertising has contributed enormously to this process: today the Gap refers to Jack Kerouac in its ads, and Microsoft cites Gandhi. We see a similar development if we look at the changing role of the museum in American society. Once the repository of traditional art for the elite, museums since the 1960s have opened their doors to hoi polloi with blockbuster exhibitions. Equally important, since the 1960s they have actively transformed the market for art, buying up contemporary art objects at an extraordinary rate, thereby institutionalizing the avant-garde, or at least significant sectors of it, and perhaps suffocating it with its sometimes awkward embrace. What had once been art’s signature values of aloofness and defiance can now have the look of gratuitous, self-dramatizing posturing. The critic William Phillips, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, observed some sixty years ago that “culturally what we have is a democratic free-for-all in which every individual, being as good as every other one, has the right to question any form of intellectual authority.” Michael Kammen added in 1999 that “for many Americans, that ‘free-market’ attitude toward cultural authority would persist right down to the present.”38 In this view critical culture has not so much been destroyed or diminished as refashioned and redistributed to encompass larger populations and their cultural interests. Critical culture, it might be said, has multiplied, and now manifests itself as the more discriminating element within a range of American subcultures.
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Current Prospects Yet the question remains whether the new diversity, spontaneity, and engaging informality of American mass culture is adequate (to use Matthew Arnold’s venerable term) to foster the innovative art and commitment to excellence a democratic citizenry deserves. Of course some would argue that the quality of high culture has little relationship to changes in mass taste; they assert that widespread public participation has never been essential to sustain a culture that produces, publishes, and discusses the very best fiction, poetry, and criticism and that a community of 10,000 to 20,000 knowledgeable, discerning readers is sufficient to fuel creative output. Yet ordinary educated people, who have learned since elementary school to value the best, are more eager for the insights and satisfactions of exceptional art than that dismissal of their participation in critical culture assumes. The problem is that, for all the elevation of taste and collapse of “brow” levels over the past fifty years, and despite the claim that consumers exercise choice over their aesthetic experiences, a half dozen multinational corporations— L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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whose size and influence, as chapter 2 describes, have grown substantially during a decade of government-sanctioned mergers and acquisitions—now wield the power to produce, distribute, and promote culture in the United States.39 These corporations exist in a highly competitive, market-driven cultural field in which the public’s critical involvement is discouraged and curtailed, in part because it leads to unpredictable results, and corporations crave predictability. The larger the conglomerate, the more opportunities available to fashion the market. AOL Time Warner, for example, marshaled its resources for the 2001 release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Before the release Harry Potter books had sold nearly $120 million worldwide. AOL users, who numbered approximately 31 million (half of all home Internet users) were led through numerous links to Harry Potter merchandise. Another AOL Time Warner company, Moviefone, promoted and sold tickets. The company’s phalanx of magazines, more than 160 titles including Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, featured cover stories, ads, and contests. Warner Bros. Studio advertised on Time Warner cable systems, which enters some 20 percent of wired American homes, and Turner Broadcasting Network, which includes four of the top ten cable networks, aired promotions. Warner Music Group produced the soundtrack and sold CDs and cassettes. Advertising sold the worldwide rights to promote the film, along with its sequel, to Coca-Cola for $150 million. Online purchasers had their choice among Harry Potter toothbrushes, T-shirts, and much more.40 In the face of such corporate strategies, what power does Walter Lippmann’s elusive “sovereign and omni-competent citizen” have to actively shape his own culture? If market pressures, demands from investors, and capital-intensive, high-production cultural projects are shaping the cultural experiences and tastes of ordinary citizens, what room is left for a critical culture that might afford them greater insight and satisfaction? At present, the best prospects lie in those institutions and individuals that, while beleaguered, have remained committed to Dewey’s ideal of public communication. These include university presses that have been staying afloat despite strong countervailing market currents. They also include the small nonacademic presses, that, as Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy report in chapter 12, seem to thrive on little capital other than the quality of their editors’ firsthand perception: such firms as Archipelago, Archiv, Coffeehouse, Copper Canyon, Graywolf, Milkweed, New Directions, and Seven Stories. Likewise, journalistic criticism, especially in the form of the little magazine, remains an influential domain. To be sure, the following comparison of circulation figures for reviews and magazines of opinion in 1950 and 2005 reveals only minimal gains in proportion to the total American population, which nearly 242
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FIGURE 13.5. Frederick Morgan, a 1943 Princeton alumnus, edited the Hudson Review for half a century. Morgan was one of three Princeton graduates who founded the Review, having studied creative writing with Allen Tate. Their intent was to create a “little magazine” dedicated to publishing good poetry and prose, including short fiction, criticism, and other works of renowned and unknown writers. Photograph courtesy of Gaylen Morgan.
doubled in that period: Atlantic Monthly (176,068/458,667), Commentary (19,553/25,000), Esquire (784,665/676,052), Harper’s (159,357/213,141), the Nation (35,106/94,003), the New Republic (32,680/98,328), the New York Times Book Review (1,116,944/1,682,208), the New Yorker (332,324/1,003,209), and Poetry (4,000/10,000).41 The New York Herald Tribune Book Review (675,105 in 1950) and the Saturday Review (100,823 in 1950) ceased publication altogether in this period. In addition, the past decade has witnessed a precipitous decline in the number and size of newspaper book review sections. Yet many of the journals that helped to create a vibrant avant-garde literary culture before midcentury survive. They have been joined since 1950 by such publications as the American Poetry Review (14,000), Hudson Review (4,700) (fig. 13.5), Threepenny Review (10,000 combined), Salmagundi (5,100), and Tikkun (20,000), to name just a few of the smaller journals, as well as by the New York Review of Books (117,221) and the Village Voice (253,961 combined). Finally, there remains a talented corps of critics—some independent and some academically affiliated—that has served the public and the arts well since 1950. These critics have encouraged artists and cultivated audiences for a growing range of cultural endeavors. In recent years they have included literary critics and book reviewers like Michiko Kakutani (fig. 13.6), John Leonard, John Updike, and James Wood; drama and media critics like Frank Rich; film critics L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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FIGURE 13.6. Caricature of New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani reading a book, by Charlie Powell. First published in Slate, 10 April 2006. Courtesy of Charlie Powell.
like Richard Corliss, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Richard Schickel; dance critics like Joan Acocella, Jack Anderson, Jennifer Dunning, and Anna Kisselgoff; music critics like Robert Christgau, Albert Murray, and John Pareles; art critics such as Arthur C. Danto, Michael Kimmelman, and Lucy Lippard; and political commentators like Katha Pollitt and David Brooks. Any significant revitalization of critical culture through processes of cultural democratization will require extending the critical work of those individuals and that of their more public-minded academic colleagues mentioned earlier, to encompass a greater portion of the general public they now serve well but incompletely. Equally important, the critical culture will need to adopt a global perspective, especially in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent intensification of American political and military involvement abroad. No doubt such changes must be preceded by a serious national commitment to eradicating illiteracy, by educational reform that places due emphasis on reading good books and more generally on a sustained encounter with 244
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the arts, and by encouraging exchanges between amateur and professional critics found increasingly on the Internet and in some communities. Whether corporate America can afford such a renaissance remains to be seen. A thriving democracy can ill-afford anything less.
Section III Bibliography and the Meaning of “Text”
David D. Hall
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.
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Bibliography as practiced in the twentieth-century United States has taken several forms, most commonly the descriptive cataloging of certain kinds of records and the books in libraries and private collections. Here, as in Europe, bibliography before 1950 customarily relied for its patronage on book collectors and rare-book dealers, with learned libraries, both private and public, another important client. In the postwar years, however, colleges, universities, and private research libraries became the principal agents in the accumulation of books and manuscripts and, in alliance with the academic discipline of English literature, sponsored most projects of analytical and descriptive bibliography, many of them linked with editions of literary texts. Moreover, these projects were increasingly concerned with the books that make up “American literature,” a field that had no stature or representation before World War I. By the 1940s the “New Bibliography,” which arose among British scholars studying the English Renaissance, was being avidly practiced on this side of the Atlantic. Yet its reign came under sharp attack in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of French deconstruction, other versions of “critical” theory, and fresh historical work within the field of bibliography itself. One other strand of a complex story demands our attention: the emergence of new technologies for reproducing books that abetted certain kinds of bibliographical research—microfilm and photostats, both of which came into wide use in the 1930s, and the still unfolding technology of digital reproduction, which emerged in the 1980s as a new academic field known as “the history of the book” was also taking shape. Before 1940, the rare-book dealers Bernard Quaritch in London, A. S. W. L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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Rosenbach in Philadelphia, Lathrop Harper in New York City,42 and Charles Goodspeed in Boston were collaborating closely with such major collectors as J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington, Henry Folger, and Lessing Rosenwald.43 The ever-rising wealth of American entrepreneurs, coupled with the immense strain that two world wars and the Depression put on European economies, abetted the transfer of rare books from Europe to the United States. One quantitative measure of this process is the growth in the number of incunabula in American libraries. The first such census (1919) noted some 13,200 copies, the third (1964), 47,188, and the supplement of 1971, 50,748, a total that has subsequently risen much higher.44 Another consequence of the ongoing collaboration between collectors and dealers was an insistence on improving the quality of bibliographical description, an imperative that also involved making rare and archival materials more available. The Bibliographical Society of America, founded in 1904 by a coalition of cataloger-librarians at universities and public and private libraries, encouraged these efforts via a program of publications. So did book collectors’ clubs, most notably the Grolier, founded in New York City in 1884.45 The “new bibliography” elevated these ambitions into a systematic or, as was sometimes asserted, “scientific” body of rules and knowledge.46 Criticizing the casualness of most bibliographical scholarship, the British scholars who initiated this movement in the early decades of the twentieth century—significant figures in the group included A. W. Pollard, Ronald McKerrow, and Walter Greg—wanted to understand book trade practices, including every aspect of printing as a technology, in order to establish the publication history of English Renaissance texts, especially those by Shakespeare.47 The purpose of mastering such knowledge was to enable the textual editor to discern the sequences of editions and the changes a text had undergone as it was transmitted from author to printer and through successive printings, the end in view being to remove corruptions from the text as intended by the author. The key concept, articulated by Greg, was “copy text,” the version that, in the editor’s judgment, was closest to what the author had written or wanted.48 Another foundational assumption was the priority of “internal” evidence: in the absence of autograph manuscripts, the material text contained within itself the means of accounting for most if not all of the variants from one printing to another. As a method of research, the new bibliography was exacting, for in the absence of an authorially sanctioned text or manuscript—no such animal existed in the case of Shakespeare—the bibliographer-cum-textual editor had to collect variant readings from a wide range of copies as the only means of dealing with changes from one sheet to the next in the process of printing and reprinting. Meanwhile there were other major tasks to accomplish. One of these was to prepare a bibliography of every book printed in England or elsewhere in English. The first version 246
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of the “STC,” or A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England . . . and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, edited by Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, appeared in 1926 under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society. Before World War II, the main actors on the American scene had been persons associated with private research libraries and private collectors. A principal concern was to gain some degree of control over the archive of printed materials from the seventeenth century onward. Although flawed in various ways, Charles Evans’s American Bibliography, which Evans, a librarian by training, began on his own initiative, was a major advance. Two decades after Evans’s death in 1935, it was completed by staff of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and its accuracy much improved when the American Antiquarian Society, in cooperation with the Readex Microprint Corporation, issued a microtext edition of everything in “Evans.”49 After 1940, in the person of Fredson Bowers, leadership in the field of analytical bibliography and textual editing passed to Americans (fig. 13.7). Bowers (d. 1991) joined the department of English at the University of Virginia in 1938. Soon he founded the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and, of more importance, Studies in Bibliography (1948), which he edited for many years.50 In continuity with his British peers and predecessors, Bowers studied the intersection of printing and the transmission of literary texts, summarizing a
FIGURE 13.7. The bibliographer Fredson Bowers received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1970. His citation noted that this University of Virginia faculty member was a “professor of English, author of scholarly books and internationally known literary critic of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama.” Photograph courtesy of the Bowers family. L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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half century’s worth of scholarship on these topics in Principles of Bibliographical Description.51 Bowers and other contemporaries in Britain and America also took up the challenge of understanding printing as it was transformed in the nineteenth century with the introduction of the machine-driven press, stereotyping, electrotyping, and Linotyping.52 Bowers participated in a distinctive moment in the history of literary scholarship, a newfound confidence in the stature of American writers and, flowing from that confidence, an effort to establish authoritative editions of what they published.53 Beginning with Walt Whitman, fourteen such multivolume projects had been launched by 1975, each under the auspices of a university press. Most relied on funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Center for Editions of American Authors, founded in 1963 by the Modern Language Association; subsequently the title mutated into the Center, then Committee, on Scholarly Editions. The goal of the Hawthorne series was paradigmatic, Bowers declaring in 1962 in “A Preface to the Text” of The Scarlet Letter that readers were encountering the first “critical” version of the text, “critical in that it is not necessarily an exact reprint of any individual document: the print or manuscript chosen as copy-text . . . may be amended by reference to other authorities or by editorial decision.” Here, too, he wrote of creating a “pure text” that filtered out “unauthorized printing-house variants,” to the end of recovering “Hawthorne’s final intentions.”54 To aid him and his staff in the immense labor of comparing various editions or copies of editions, he relied on a mechanical collator, a machine invented in the 1940s by the American Charlton Hinman to identify different compositors’ hands in the printing of Shakespeare’s plays.55 The quarter century between the founding of Studies in Bibliography and the undertaking of so many critical editions was the golden age of analytical bibliography in America. Professors of American literature embraced the role of textual editor, possibly because they had been persuaded that literary criticism depended on the preparation of reliable editions and these, in turn, on the principles and categories of bibliographical description. So Bowers declared again and again in manifestos scorning the sloppy practices of literary critics and insisting that bibliography and criticism were kindred enterprises.56 Although Bowers was surely the chief spokesperson for a heightened sense of bibliography as an exacting discipline, others shared his confidence in the field. For example, William A. Jackson, a professor of bibliography at Harvard, remarked in 1945 that “[R. B.] McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography is assigned reading in every graduate school, and courses based on it are given in many of them.”57 As already noted in the case of incunabula, the ingathering of books and 248
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FIGURE 13.8. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has become a leading repository for twentieth-century books, manuscripts, and first editions by contemporary authors. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
manuscripts proceeded at a remarkable pace after the Second World War. One new site for this activity was the University of Texas, Austin. Harry H. Ransom (d. 1976), a professor of English who founded the university’s Humanities Research Center in 1957 (renamed in his honor in 1983), encouraged it to focus on twentieth-century books, manuscripts, and related archives; at present it also collects first editions of nearly 600 contemporary authors (fig. 13.8). Although, as Robert DeMaria notes in chapter 27, individuals have continued to acquire significant collections of books,58 the balance of rare book and manuscript acquisitions tipped to universities and rare-book libraries in these postwar years. The enthusiasm for critical editions of major American writers was more than matched by the willingness of historians to undertake documentary letterpress editions of major statesmen. A good many such editions had been published around the beginning of the twentieth century, but the historians who took on this task after 1945 aspired to a completeness and exactitude without precedent, even though it was evident that few of the originating editors would live long enough to see such projects completed. First off the mark (1950) was The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, with Julian P. Boyd as editor and with funding from Princeton University and the New York Times Corporation (fig. 13.9). Conscious of his role as standard-bearer, Boyd decided to include state papers (broadly construed) and incoming correspondence. Other series quickly sprang into being: for example, the Franklin Papers at Yale; the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, with Harvard University Press as cosponsor; and the Woodrow Wilson Papers, at Princeton. In 1964 the federal government began to channel funds to an ever-lengthening and much more diverse list of projects through the already-existing National Historic Publications and Records Commission, a branch of the National Archives. Subsequently, the near-impossible burden placed on editors who adopted Boyd’s practices, together with the ecoL I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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FIGURE 13.9. Julian P. Boyd (1903–80) conceived the idea of creating the definitive edition of the papers of Thomas Jefferson and served as series editor from 1943 to 1980. The Jefferson Papers became a landmark in the movement to publish documentary editions of the papers of prominent historic Americans. Previously, Boyd had been librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1934–40) and of Princeton University (1940–43). Princeton University Archives.
nomic pressures on university presses, caused most series to omit incoming correspondence, shorten the annotation, and rely on microfilm to meet the criterion of completeness. When a leading theorist of bibliography and textual studies turned his attention to these series, moreover, it was easy to demonstrate that their editors were not publishing verbatim versions of manuscript letters and documents. A sharp debate arose over the proper standards of critical editing for historical texts that is sustained to this day within the Association for Documentary Editing, founded in 1979.59 From the mid-seventies onward the story begins to break down. It does so for several quite different reasons; to establish the sequences of cause and effect or to identify the most influential trends is chancy at best. It must be noted, first, that analytical bibliography and textual scholarship persist as active fields of work. These fields gained a new institutional location in 1979 with the founding of the Society for Textual Scholarship and its journal TEXT (1981). Bowers’s most vigorous ally and intellectual heir, G. Thomas Tanselle, has constantly sought to refine the rules and practices of bibliographical description, often in response to critiques from outside the field.60 Debate remains lively over editorial practices, a notable case in point being the tremors aroused by the New Oxford editions of Shakespeare’s plays.61 Yet in these years the center of gravity in literary studies shifted away from the editorial enterprise. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, few and far 250
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between are the departments of English that require or encourage doctoral students to take a course in bibliography, if such courses exist. The very different situation of the New Bibliography is suggested most starkly by how this movement has recently been characterized. As though they were suddenly seeing themselves in a fun house mirror, the new bibliographers, alive or dead, have found themselves likened to Hitler and the leaders of the eugenics movement (because of the concept of a “pure” text) or associated with homophobia, maledominating misogyny, and Cold War imperialism.62 Less dramatically but no less painfully, they have been accused of practicing an ahistorical idealism, the same sin imputed to the New Criticism with which—incorrectly by any fair assessment of the evidence—their own movement has frequently been linked.63 Invective aside, the tide was turning within literary studies and, for that matter, within the field of analytical bibliography itself. Pride of place among the revisionists within Anglo-American bibliographical scholarship belongs to the New Zealand–born Donald F. McKenzie (1931–99), who concluded his career as professor of bibliography and textual criticism at Oxford. McKenzie wrote his Oxford thesis on the Cambridge University Press at the beginning of the eighteenth century, exploiting for this purpose an archive “unprecedented in its completeness” and providing “a unique key to understanding the complex working patterns and conditions of an early-eighteenth-century printing house.” Because the archive included detailed records of payments to compositors and how production in sheets was organized, McKenzie was able to demonstrate that the press practiced concurrent printing—that is, work proceeded simultaneously on several books, with compositors and pressmen varying their daily labor accordingly. This information, which revealed that output fluctuated from one day or week to the next, led him to conclude that productivity was “astonishingly variable” and edition sizes smaller than Hinman and others had supposed. The implications were twofold: to reintroduce archival evidence as a necessary supplement to the material form of the printed book, and to invalidate certain of Hinman’s and Bowers’s assumptions about compositional practices. Challenged by Bowers to demonstrate that Cambridge was not the exception but the rule, McKenzie used a broader range of evidence in “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices” (1969) to demonstrate the prevalence of concurrent printing throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the mid-seventies, he was arguing for a fresh understanding of “text,” thinking he spelled out more fully in his British Library Panizzi lectures of 1985, published as Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. At the heart of his position was the argument that every text contained mediations that could not and should not be erased by the editorial process.64 That something larger was at work than merely an effort to improve editorial L I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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practices was suggested by certain sentences in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts and perhaps especially by the concluding chapter, an essay McKenzie had previously published on “oral culture, literacy, and print in early New Zealand.” The feeling had come over him that “Greg’s definition of what bibliography is would have it entirely hermetic,” that is, excluding everything McKenzie subsumed under “sociology” or “history.” The word “sociology” in his title referred not to that academic discipline but to the wider social field in which texts were continually being read, performed, or otherwise put to use. Only if those mediations or interventions were acknowledged could the “meaning” of a text be comprehended. For a case in point, McKenzie turned to the 1841 Treaty of Waitangi, ceding to the British government “all the rights and powers of Sovereignty” to New Zealand and “signed” (the quotation marks are McKenzie’s) by forty-six Maori chiefs. “Its variant versions” and “its range of ‘signatures’ ” required textual critics to widen their lens to encompass, among other matters, “European assumptions” about literacy and print and, on the other, the “conditions of orality” among the Maori themselves. Although the essay was prompted by uneasiness about the treaty among Maori in the late twentieth century, it also conveyed McKenzie’s unhappiness with what he took to be the irrelevance of analytical bibliography to literary, cultural, and social history. The lectures of 1985 signaled the failure of the New Bibliography to do what its makers had promised: despite Bowers’s oft-repeated insistence that analytical bibliography and textual criticism were intrinsic to literary criticism, no such connections had emerged. Instead, the field had become closed off from wider debates and wider currents of scholarship—hence, “hermetic.”65 Although Tanselle savaged the Panizzi lectures as incomplete, illogical, and deceptive in their account of the New Bibliography—by his reckoning, the field had always been open to the kinds of evidence McKenzie was foregrounding— the lectures touched a nerve.66 Others were also becoming restless. Beginning in the seventies, the American scholar Jerome McGann, a student of nineteenthcentury British writers, was drawing on his experience editing poetry of that century to propose that literary texts undergo mediations that lie beyond the control of their authors. In place of author-centered editing intended to erase such mediations, McGann called for a “social” or “historical” approach. Like McKenzie, McGann sensed that analytical bibliography had become too isolated from wider currents of scholarship, not to mention the enterprise of criticism.67 One other part of these revisionist currents was German editorial theory, which in the 1960s and 1970s put forward the concept of “historical-critical” editing, a method of incorporating the history of a text—that is, its variants— into an edition.68 In these same years the field of literary studies was transformed by the influx 252
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of what came to be known as “Theory.” Any attempt to chart the multiple meanings of this term, not to speak of the currents that led into and out of the astonishing rise of “Theory” to centrality within Anglo-American literary studies, is beyond the scope of this chapter. But we must surely take note of four currents of work originating for the most part overseas but vigorously appropriated in the United States by the 1980s: structuralism; deconstruction, which had French sources;69 reader-response, which originated within German criticism; and the new historicism. In their quite different ways, each was critical of “formalist” and ahistorical literary criticism of the kind that presumably had been practiced by the New Critics; indeed, each rejected the concept of “literature” that underlay the New Criticism. Collectively, these movements dethroned an author-centered perspective and the author’s intentionality. In a much-read (or much-cited) essay on the “death of the author,” Michel Foucault sketched a scheme of change linked to the rising economic value of literary properties and proposed that idealist conceptions of author be replaced with the term “authorfunction.”70 Via other lines of work, a new understanding emerged of the literary text as always in process and therefore inherently unstable71—hence, for those caught up in theory, the irrelevance of any critical edition the end of which was closure or authority. One way out for those who absorbed this way of thinking and applied it to the task of editing Shakespeare was to eschew the task of eliminating variants and, instead, to publish different versions of the same play side-by-side or sequentially. Wholly apart from the developments chronicled in the preceding two paragraphs was the ever-growing role of electronic technologies in the storage and retrieval of information and, more tellingly for bibliography as a field, in the production and distribution of “print.” A full telling of this story would detail the postwar vogue of microcards, microfiche, and microfilm as the means of conserving and distributing printed books, newspapers, dissertations, and manuscript archives, a process much abetted by recently founded university centers as well as by two commercial ventures, University Microfilms (founded 1938) and the Readex Microprint Corporation (founded 1948).72 Both have now turned to digital technology for reproducing these media. But the real story concerns the “revolution” in printing technology that accompanied the arrival of the word processor, the storage disk, and printing from computer-set tape. The first books in the United States to be published using this technology date from the 1960s. By the 1990s a century of bookmaking practices had been swept into near oblivion. How analytical bibliography should reimagine itself in order to deal with this new materiality had become a much-discussed subject by the end of the century.73 The arrival of the World Wide Web in 1993 would stimulate another rethinking of textual editing at places like the University of VirL I TE R A RY C U LT U R E , C R I T I C I S M , A N D BI BLI OG RAP H Y
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ginia, where faculty in English and history, together with colleagues in computer studies, founded the Center for Electronic Texts (fig. 13.10). Separately from all of these currents of work, social and intellectual historians were producing studies of reading, writing, and book production that, in the aggregate, rapidly became known as the “history of the book.” Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, soon joined by François Furet and, a decade later, Roger Chartier, made France a center of this kind of scholarship; it was also a group of French scholars led by Martin and Chartier that produced the first multivolume national history of the book (more precisely, “l’édition”). In the wake of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979), which drew fresh attention to printing as a “revolutionary” technology, and in the wake as well of essays and books by Robert Darnton, the American Antiquarian Society launched in 1983 its Program in the History of the Book in American Culture,
FIGURE 13.10. Jerold Grizzle demonstrates the Linotype machine on which he worked at the University of Virginia for nearly fifty years. It is possible that Studies in Bibliography 56 (2007), was the last publication produced from Linotype in America. Photograph by David Vander Meulen. 254
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which undertook a multivolume history of the book in this country. About the same time, McKenzie was embracing the history of the book and, with others, set about organizing another such series, a “history of the book in Britain,” a means for him of reestablishing the connections between bibliography and literary history.74 In the 1970s and 1980s, much of what was regarded as “history of the book” scholarship concerned the history of reading, with Chartier’s argument for reader “appropriation” of a text playing an important role. More recently, attention has shifted to the material aspects of a text and how these shape its meaning and/or how it is read. Because such work can require close attention to typography (including the “accidentals” of punctuation), bindings, and format, all in the service of answering the question, Who controls the text?, the details that once upon a time were the singular territory of bibliographers have suddenly gained a much wider importance within literary studies.
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CHAPTER 14
Magazines and the Making of Authors Carol Polsgrove
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United under the designation “the publishing industry,” magazines and book publishers have for more than a century participated jointly in the creation of authors. In the nineteenth century, book authors ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edgar Allan Poe reached readers through magazines. Both Henry James and Louisa May Alcott honed their craft writing for the Atlantic Monthly. Ida Tarbell wrote her turn-of-the-century history of Standard Oil for McClure’s, then published it as a book. Magazines’ significance to book authors continued in the twentieth century. Magazines provided writers not only a venue for developing their skills and reputations but often significant revenue as well, both by publishing original work and by excerpting and serializing writers’ books. There were years in the 1920s when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proceeds from stories published in magazines exceeded revenue from his books.1 In the decades after World War II, magazines nurtured a particularly rich array of book authors whose reportage, fiction, and essays fell into the category of “serious” literature. Unlike more conventional magazine writers, these writers claimed ground uniquely theirs: a voice, a perspective—a particular way of looking at the world. From Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin to Norman Mailer, they responded to mid-twentieth century life across a span of magazines, large circulation and small. The books that earned them fame as authors likely started out as magazine articles, and magazines gave them a broader audience than books alone were likely to bring. (For an extended example, see the discussion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in chapter 25.) So striking was this phenomenon that Norman Podhoretz, a young editor at Commentary, an intellectual Jewish magazine, wrote an essay about it: “The Article as Art,” published in 1958. “Anyone who has given much attention to postwar American fiction is likely to have noticed a curious fact,” he remarked. “Many of our serious novelists also turn out book reviews, critical pieces, articles about the contemporary world, memoirs, sketches.” The writers themselves no doubt regarded this work as inferior to their fiction, he said, but often
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it turned out to be “more interesting, more lively, more penetrating, more intelligent, more forceful, more original—in short, better—than their fiction.”2 The writers of whom he spoke—James Baldwin, James Agee, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, and others—were at this point publishing their articles, by and large, in the little magazines at the heart of an intellectual and artistic community that would go down in history as the “New York Intellectuals.” Radicalized in the 1930s and disillusioned with communism by the 1940s, the New York Intellectuals retained in the 1950s their radical belief that culture was political, as it was—more than most readers knew: secret subsidies from the Central Intelligence Agency propped up an array of magazines like Partisan Review and the New Leader. While the little magazines fought among themselves to forge a new political way in the Cold War years, their vitality spilled out into the larger commercial magazines. Diana Trilling would recall a woman’s magazine editor telling her in the early 1950s that “there had been a recent moment in which the editors of all the large-circulation journals in this country had had to decide whether to seek a more general public or, as she put it, ‘raid Partisan Review.’ ”3 What placed before women’s magazines (and the “slicks” in general) the choice “to seek a more general public” or raid Partisan Review? Television, for one, just beginning its triumphant march into American homes. Faced with competition for audience and advertising, magazines could try to match television numbers, and some did try, with disastrous financial outcomes. Or they could carve out a more specialized demographic niche for themselves, appealing to the increasingly educated and affluent audiences of the postwar years. Some large-circulation magazines tried to do both, blurring the line between high and mass culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, by-lines of serious writers— novelists, historians, essayists, literary journalists—appeared across a broad magazine spectrum. Writers for Partisan Review or Commentary began contributing not only to Harper’s and the New Yorker but also to slick magazines intended for a mass audience: Esquire or Mademoiselle or even Life. Joan Didion, eventually a grand dame of American letters and regular contributor to that haute intellectual periodical the New York Review of Books, started out her publishing life at Vogue, wrote for William F. Buckley’s political magazine, the National Review, and contributed a regular column to one of America’s favorite coffee-table magazines, the Saturday Evening Post. A majority of the articles in her first collection, Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), appeared first in the Saturday Evening Post, with others coming from the American Scholar, Vogue, Holiday, and the New York Times Magazine. As early as 1960, critic Dwight Macdonald expressed his dismay at the blurring of cultural lines he saw taking place: in the spring 1960 issue of Partisan M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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Review, he let fly at what he called “Masscult & Midcult.” A postwar rise in affluence, leisure time, and education level had produced a “remarkable cultural change,” Macdonald wrote: an outpouring of products tailored to the new taste for high culture. Macdonald did not mind paperbacks of Greek myths or classical records: these were genuine high-culture articles, made available on a mass scale. What distressed him more were cultural products created for the masses: “Masscult.” And what distressed him most of all was “Midcult,” which “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.” In Macdonald’s view, Midcult represented, not an elevation of Masscult, but “a corruption of High Culture.” Naming names, he listed Life, Look, and Saturday Evening Post as mass magazines and Atlantic and Saturday Review as Midcult magazines. He placed Esquire and the New Yorker—two magazines to which he contributed—in a special category: “betwixt-&-between.”4 Ironies abounded. Macdonald himself had given up politics, the little magazine he started during World War II, and had gone to work, first, for the New Yorker and then for Esquire, as its movie columnist. The very process he lamented supplied his income and the incomes of numerous writers who at other times in American history might have resigned themselves to selling insurance and writing short stories in the evening hours. When serious writers, of whatever genre, could bring in thousands of dollars in fees from Esquire and Glamour and earn celebrity as a bonus, then serious authorship became a more viable profession, and serious authors became more significant public figures. James Baldwin, one of the most public by the early 1960s, took a path to fame that was more dramatic than most, but his rise to prominence illustrates the common pattern: he interwove book publication with writing for magazines across a wide spectrum. As a young author of an unpublished novel in the late 1940s, Baldwin turned to writing reviews and essays for little magazines. By 1955, with two novels published, he had also written enough essays for the Nation, the New Leader, Commentary, Partisan Review, and Harper’s to make up a collection, Notes of a Native Son, published by Beacon Press. The book established his reputation as an important spokesman for African Americans. Notes of a Native Son caught the eye of Harold Hayes, a young editor at Esquire, one of the magazines transforming itself for a new time. In the early 1960s, Baldwin wrote for both Esquire and, on the other side of the gender divide, Mademoiselle, where he reported on the 1960 sit-ins sweeping the South. His second collection of magazine articles, Nobody Knows My Name, published in 1961, boosted his visibility. Next came his startling essay, “Down at the Cross: A Letter from a Region in My Mind.” Published first in the New Yorker, it composed the greater part of the 1963 book The Fire Next Time, which catapulted him into a Life photospread and onto the cover of Time. Appear258
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ing as the 1960s civil rights movement neared its climax, The Fire Next Time established Baldwin as a political celebrity and public spokesman for the movement.5 Because of his participation in the civil rights movement, Baldwin achieved an unusual degree of fame, but other writers, too, earned celebrity through a similar combination of magazine and book publication, sometimes, like Baldwin, with a political edge. Hannah Arendt, émigré author of one of the more influential books of the postwar years, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), traveled the shrinking distance between the little intellectual magazines where her essays had appeared and the New Yorker, where her 1963 reportage on Eichmann’s trial stirred more controversy, even, than Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross.” Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) had established his reputation as a fiction writer, but two novels later when his success flagged, he resurfaced with a controversial 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” published in literary critic Irving Howe’s new magazine, Dissent, started in 1957 to give noncommunist socialism a voice. “The White Negro” also went into Mailer’s 1959 collection, Advertisements for Myself (1959), a bold bid for attention. By 1960, Mailer, like Baldwin, was writing for Esquire—starting out with a long piece on the candidate John F. Kennedy and continuing with a regular column. He would eventually abandon Esquire for Harper’s after a young Mississippian named Willie Morris transformed that rather conventional magazine in the later sixties into a forum for writing that matched the drama of the times. Several Mailer books originated as reportage for Harper’s, among them Armies of the Night (1968). In 1971, inviting Gore Vidal to write a profile of Mailer, Harold Hayes (fig. 14.1) would say, “Certainly he is a creature of the mass media, magazines more specifically, and it’s hard to imagine where he would be today had he not conformed so precisely to the needs of modern-day magazine journalism, manipulating the appetites and interests of editors more skillfully than any other part of his constituency.”6 Magazines in the sixties needed writers who could offer energetic alternatives to what Hayes called “the banality of the Fifties,” writers who could catch the fast-changing sixties scene on the run, writers who knew how to be celebrities.7 Norman Mailer fit that multiple bill. .
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Hayes was in a good position to comment on the role magazines could play in building an author’s career. Esquire had launched or boosted the careers of an array of celebrated writers in the 1960s. Eyeing the sea of men educated by the GI Bill, Esquire editors saw there an opportunity for an audience that would attract the upscale advertisers the magazine had largely lost during the war.8 Deliberately, in the late 1950s, they set out to bring the best writers on the M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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FIGURE 14.1. Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire from 1963 to 1973. Walter Bernard Photograph.
scene into their pages. They courted writers who would make a splash—not the “hacks” who filled so many slick magazine pages with dull, formula prose but literary writers like Baldwin and Mailer, with their own unique personas. Like the women’s magazine editors, Esquire editors, too, drew writers from the intellectual-political magazines—William F. Buckley and Garry Wills from the National Review became regular contributors. They turned fiction writers like Gina Berriault and Terry Southern into reporters with style. But they also took chances on young unknowns, like newspaper reporters Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. The story of how Tom Wolfe found his razzmatazz voice is legendary. After a desperate editor wearied of waiting for him to produce a story on customized cars and asked him for his notes so someone else could write it, Wolfe typed out a long memo in a marathon session. The editor added a title and ran the memo as an article, and the distinctive Tom Wolfe persona made its appearance—a writer talking to his readers, as if he were there in person, just telling a story; or as time went on and his inhibitions loosened, shouting at them like a carnival barker on speed. In piece after piece in Esquire and New York, Wolfe cut cartwheels on the page—“Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces. . . .”9 After collecting his magazine articles in The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby (1965), he turned to book-length nonfiction, producing 260
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the best-selling counterculture chronicle, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and, later, wrote novels. Gay Talese was another young newspaper writer, reporting for the New York Times, who made his way to book authorship through the pages of Esquire (fig. 14.2). He started publishing in Esquire in 1960; by the mid-1960s he had quit his job at the New York Times to become a contract writer for the magazine. His Esquire articles on the New York Times blossomed into a book, The Kingdom and the Power (1969), a detailed account of newspaper life written in the nonfiction mode that Talese and Wolfe had helped to invent: New Journalism, peopled by characters interacting in scenes and told by a storyteller with a distinctive voice. By the time Talese wrote Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980), an encyclopedic narrative of his journeys through the contemporary sexual scene, he, too, had become more a book author than a magazine writer, but, like Wolfe, he had developed his talent and made his name first as an Esquire writer. While other editors were nurturing high-quality nonfiction, fiction editor Rust Hills, formerly editor of his own literary magazine, set out to bring the best of American fiction into Esquire’s pages. Like most slicks, Esquire had a long prewar tradition of publishing fiction, even serious fiction; founding editor
FIGURE 14.2. New Journalist Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power, a 1969 study of the New York Times. Talese, here pictured writing at a newsroom typewriter, gave up smoking long ago. Courtesy of Gay Talese. M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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Arnold Gingrich had published Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s. But Esquire’s literary luster had dimmed in the war years. Hills set out to revive it by publishing the very best fiction writers he could attract. To burnish Esquire’s literary reputation, in 1958 he launched a series of annual Esquire symposia, each in association with a different university (or, in the San Francisco Bay Area, several universities) and featuring four writers. Sketching out the plan for the first symposium (at Columbia University), he wrote Saul Bellow on 8 May 1958, that the theme was to be “The Role of the Writer in America.” The phrase carried a heavy weight of assumption: that there was a unitary character—“the writer” (who was, as his letter went on to imply, likely to be male). “[H]ow does the writer earn a living and send his son to college?” he asked. “Does he become a part of a university? Does he become a journalist, writing articles of opinion for the quarterlies and the weeklies? Does he exist on grants from foundations?” Then there was another, more exalted question: “[I]s he a public figure, a conscience of the society? . . . If the writer is involved with societal issues, how will it affect his work? . . . Must the world of, say, fiction, and the world of political action be separated?” That question, at least, came directly out of the 1950s currents bearing writers away from the kind of political action in which some of them had engaged in the 1930s; yet it hinted, too, that writers still might have a political role, as the “conscience of the society.”10 The Esquire symposia played their own role in enlarging the public presence of writers in the 1960s although, when Hills put together his 1963 literary power chart in the July issue, he modestly left Esquire out of the “red hot center”—in fact, he left Esquire out of the list altogether. Commercial magazines that did make his list: the New Yorker, Harper’s, and a handful of editors from “Ladies’ fashion magazines”—Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue. The list of notable writers and editors associated with “Little Magazines” was a third longer than the list of notable writers and editors associated with “Commercial Magazines.” The little magazine with the longest list of all was the Paris Review. Founded in 1953 in Paris and moved to the States in 1973, the Paris Review, too, played its part in sanctifying writers and writing by publishing in each issue a long, chatty interview with well-known authors. But in the commercial arena, Esquire had only one serious rival as a forum for literary fiction and nonfiction in the 1960s: the New Yorker. As a writer’s magazine, Esquire was in one key respect different from the New Yorker, which honored writers with ample space and decent fees, but also edited them closely. Esquire avoided heavy editing of both fact and fiction (until Gordon Lish took the job of fiction editor in the late 1960s). At the New Yorker, on the other hand, editors and writers collaborated closely to polish articles and stories. In a 1998 memoir, Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, longtime New Yorker writer 262
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Ved Mehta has described the painstaking editing to which his fact pieces were subjected. Even fiction writers underwent close scrutiny. Nadine Gordimer’s early editor there, Katharine White, wrote detailed critiques of her stories, and Gordimer took them seriously. Although by her own account she learned from this editorial guidance, Gordimer was not always comfortable with the New Yorker’s advice, which at times was dictated more by the magazine’s concept of itself as a polite magazine than by literary considerations.11 Thus, the New Yorker did a good deal more than offer writers publishing opportunities; New Yorker editors actively participated in the writer’s craft. Despite the stylistic sameness created by such tight editorial control, the New Yorker had such financial resources and, in editor William Shawn, such editorial integrity that no other magazine could match its stature in the magazine world during the postwar years. Other magazines did, however, respond creatively to the extraordinary upheaval of the 1960s, those years when assassinations, racial politics, and the Vietnam War shook the nation. Ramparts transformed itself from a Catholic magazine of conscience into a freewheeling forum for investigative, radical journalism. Rolling Stone helped to make Hunter Thompson a household name. A new magazine, the New York Review of Books, spread analysis by intellectuals like C. Vann Woodward out across tabloid-sized pages, distinguished not only by the quality of thought and prose but by David Levine’s deadly caricatures. As protests of the Vietnam War neared their peak, the New York Review of Books offered some of the stronger voices against it. But it was the New Yorker, under the direction of William Shawn, that published Jonathan Schell’s powerful reporting on Vietnam and, earlier, the long environmental exposé by Rachel Carson that became the book Silent Spring (1962). It was the New Yorker, too, that published the piece that (with a short essay from the Progressive) became Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It was the New Yorker that published Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965): an early warning of the violence that, in the 1960s, Americans felt suddenly all around them. And it was the New Yorker that remained the most hospitable home for fiction writers, especially those favored with contracts that guaranteed the magazine first reading of their stories and reasonable fees. This financial support was significant. In 1964 Nadine Gordimer, lamenting a run of rejections by the New Yorker, told her British publisher Victor Gollancz that magazine publication had sometimes brought her more income than the books in which her stories were collected.12 .
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The New Yorker would retain its fondness for fiction as the century wore on, but other magazines proved less reliable sources of income for writers, for a M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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variety of reasons. For one thing, magazines were experiencing new economic pressures, and, as longtime agent Sterling Lord has observed, “it’s easier for the business side to see the salability and promotability in nonfiction . . . than in any but the very top names in fiction—the very top, and not all of them.”13 Magazine fiction did not provide the kind of editorial environment advertisers were looking for,14 nor, for many readers, could magazine fiction match television’s dramatic appeal. Meanwhile, a shift within literary fiction itself may have accelerated the disappearance of fiction from large-circulation magazines. As Esquire’s fiction editor Gordon Lish explained to a puzzled Harold Hayes in the late 1960s, “The major stuff is getting pretty oblique in manner.” Clinging to an older idea of what fiction ought to be, Hayes nevertheless paid $30,000 to excerpt Hemingway’s last, unfinished novel; the issue was a disappointment on the newsstands.15 Writing in the late 1980s, Rust Hills (again Esquire’s fiction editor and as knowledgeable on the subject as anyone) described the shift that had taken place over the preceding quarter century. In a revised edition of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (1987), Hills observed, “If one but stands back a bit and looks, one sees that it is no longer the book publishers and magazines, but rather the colleges and universities, that support the entire structure of the American literary establishment.” Where serious fiction writers had at some points in history earned their living selling stories to magazines and books to trade publishers still willing to sustain authors with modest sales, serious fiction writers in the postwar years often earned their living teaching. “Few new magazines publish fiction, and the older ones abandon it. There are now not enough commercial magazines regularly publishing literary fiction to count on the fingers of a single hand.”16 While writers as fine-grained as Eudora Welty or as edgy as Raymond Carver had appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s and 1960s, by the start of the new century Harper’s Bazaar was no longer publishing fiction, and neither were most of the other women’s magazines. While literary fiction did still appear in Esquire, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and newer magazines like the Oxford American and Doubletake, even the best fiction writers faced fierce competition for the slim magazine pages assigned to their art. The decline of fiction as a significant staple of consumer magazines was, for writers of fiction (whether formula or literary) the most dramatic change in magazines in the postwar years (fig. 14.3). In addition to losing magazines as an outlet for fiction, writers of distinctive nonfiction found magazines a less hospitable source of income as the century wore on. As glossy big-circulation magazines increased their emphasis on service and celebrity, they had less need for high-profile writers with recognizable flair. What magazines needed instead were content providers. Late-century 264
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FIGURE 14.3. A sign of the times: competition among writers to place their work in magazines increased drastically as periodicals offered fewer outlets for fiction. 〈www.cartoonstock .com〉.
consumer magazines for the most part preferred that the distinctive voice be the magazine’s, not the individual writer’s. Celebrity writers could still command hefty fees from a handful of high-end magazines—Esquire, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and a few others—but high-priced, talented, and unpredictable writers were more nuisance than asset in service magazines. If writers were interchangeable, so, it appeared, were editors in chief. The rapid turnover in top editorial personnel further depressed the market for distinctive writers. Harold Hayes’s decade-long tenure at Esquire gave him time to nurture writers who would be identified with his magazine; later editors in the service magazine world, moving rapidly from one magazine to another, did not have that luxury. Yet, despite their indifference to distinctive authorial voices, service magazines still contributed to the making of authors. For one thing, young writers often worked first as editors on magazine staffs, making contacts and learning the ropes, before or while they launched themselves as free-lance writers, hoping an agent who liked their magazine work would take them on and land them book contracts. Their books in turn made them more marketable as magazine writers (although some book authors, recognizing the need to “brand” themselves, wrote for magazines under different names).17 Service magazines also fed the book industry in another way. Book publishers, M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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too, had found service a lucrative category, and agents and editors scoured service magazines for ideas and authors. As publishers demanded more titles for exploding lists, commercial magazines were, if anything, more significant than ever as originating points for commercial books. Magazines as service oriented as Inc. ran articles that became books: Harriet Rubin’s Going Solo, David H. Freedman’s Corps Business, John Case’s Open-Book Management. In the flush economy of 2000, productive writers combining magazine with book publication could earn a decent living. So common was such publication that, in its biographical entries, Contemporary Authors routinely listed samples of these magazine publications: for Oliver Sacks, author of several popular collections of neurological case histories, articles in the New Yorker, Discover, New York Review of Books; for fiction writer and essayist Barbara Kingsolver, publication in Calyx, Cosmopolitan, Heresies, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, New Mexico Humanities Review, Redbook, Sojourner, Tucson Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Smithsonian. New magazines appeared in the closing decades of the century, and some of them nurtured the careers of literary writers: the adventure magazine Outside featured the work of Tim Cahill, Barry Lopez, and Jon Krakauer, whose bestselling 1990s books Into the Wild and Into Thin Air both began as articles in Outside. Less lucrative was writing for political and intellectual magazines, yet these magazines did offer opportunities for serious writers to expand their readership. To the older magazines—the Progressive and the Nation, for instance, were added new ones: the Co-Evolution Quarterly, Mother Jones, Ms. (all products of the activist 1970s); the Utne Reader, a digest of articles from alternative magazines; the American Spectator, an addition on the right; the Washington Monthly. Even celebrated book authors continued to publish for magazines that shared their political values—Alice Walker, for instance, maintained a long association with Ms., while Barbara Ehrenreich wrote regularly for Mother Jones and Gore Vidal contributed to the Nation. While intellectual and political magazines did not pay enough to sustain writers financially, they did broaden the writers’ readership and, in the case of writers just beginning their trade, offered practice working with editors. Thus magazines continued to play an important role in book authors’ lives in the last years of the century. This was true, as well, on the marketing end. Since the nineteenth century, magazines had excerpted and serialized books. Indeed, some of America’s great nineteenth-century magazines—Scribner’s, Harper’s—had actually started out as marketing arms of publishing houses, and Harper’s continued its association with Harper & Brothers into the 1960s, 266
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although most magazines were no longer associated with book publishing companies. By the end of the century the tide had turned again, and many of America’s better-selling consumer magazines became part of companies that also owned book publishing wings. Whether or not magazines had self-interested incentive to promote books produced under the same corporate umbrella, magazines continued at century’s end to be included in book publishing companies’ marketing plans. Every publishing house had staff in charge of selling serial rights to forthcoming books (although in some cases the author’s agent retained those rights and did the selling). Every house, too, had its publicity agents, who sent out copies for review by newspapers and magazines. But, according to longtime participants in this process, magazines at the end of the century turned less to books as direct sources of content than they had in times within their memory.18 For those excerpts they did run, magazines paid less than they once had. At Good Housekeeping, one of the few magazines that still bought serial rights to novels, prices paid had dropped precipitously in the 1990s, from upward of $20,000 to $5,000 or $6,000. The prices magazines paid for nonfiction excerpts also dropped precipitously, as editorial decisions came under closer scrutiny by the business side. One reason magazines were less interested in excerpts than they once were was that each magazine spoke with its own distinct voice, and it was hard to find books that matched that voice. Articles were shorter, too, than they had once been, and that made excerpts less appealing (though an editor might ask a book author to write a piece tailored to the magazine’s needs, thus providing publicity for both the book and the author). Some magazine editors frowned on reliance on book excerpts as evidence of low editorial energy and imagination. The exception was the book so heavily promoted in advance that it became a media event, activating what was sometimes called the “get” factor: a book, for instance, like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, excerpted in Newsweek. Television and radio—talk programs like Oprah Winfrey’s or Terry Gross’s Fresh Air—topped magazines as powerful marketers of books. Yet after a July 2000 cover story in Esquire led to a contract for a book on a warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, the New York Times’ Martin Arnold wrote, “The article, as it appeared in the magazine, was apparently considered such a potent awareness builder for a full-length work that it was sold without a book proposal or even an auction for potential buyers.”19 Thus, the role of magazines in creating authors—a constant in publishing since the nineteenth century—continued into the late twentieth century. True, some significant changes had occurred as the postwar years wore on. Mass M AGA Z I N E S A N D T H E M A KI N G OF AU TH ORS
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magazines had ceased to be significant forums for fiction and podiums for intellectuals. But what was more obvious than what had changed was what had not. Despite shifts in emphasis or degree, the synergy between magazine and book publishing prevailed, as vigorous at this turn of the century as it had been a century before. To a still significant degree, book authors were still being made in magazines.
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CHAPTER 15
The Oppositional Press James P. Danky
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The publications of the early suffragists, of labor organizers, political radicals, and the like have long been characterized as “the dissident press,” meaning that their content took issue with the views of the majority. Some publications that focused on literary or intellectual topics were accorded a measure of respect by the term “little magazines” and the feisty, often garish tabloids of the 1960s and 1970s became known as the “underground” or “alternative” press.1 Most such publications share certain attributes: distinctive, radical, and sometimes unruly ideas; publishers with limited resources; uncertain distribution; and a niche outside the mainstream. Used here, the term “oppositional press” applies to nonstandard, nonestablishment publications that advocate social change. By scanning the margins of society where the oppositional press exists, it is possible to learn a good deal about the scope, diversity, and societal impact of print culture in America since 1945. What follows is a fairly generalized discussion of some main currents of the oppositional press. There is little unity from one publication to another, but each may be described as challenging the status quo of print and the society that supported it; and each tells how those challenges were met, overcome (or not), or eventually absorbed by the mainstream print media.2 Perhaps the overarching message to be drawn from fifty years of the oppositional press is that of regeneration—of each age raising a dissenting voice as the times demand. .
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With the close of World War II, the Old Left faced a number of external obstacles that both caused and exacerbated political and ideological debates within socialist, communist, and labor circles. The Truman administration began to suppress the political opinions of the Old Left publications, which were directly at odds with the increasingly militant anticommunist stance of the United States on the world stage. Almost overnight, the Soviet Union, America’s ally in the victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, became a threat and a potential enemy. The effect on the publications of the Old Left was sudden and shattering. In 1940, for example, an ambitiously radical newspaper entitled PM was
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launched in New York. Its editors assumed that the leftward shift in American politics that began during the Depression would inevitably continue in the postwar period. But it was not to be. In 1946 staff writer James Wechsler—a former member of the Young Communist League—resigned from PM, charging the publication with communist sympathies. He then led a Red-baiting attack on PM that ultimately led to the paper’s demise in 1948.3 That same year, Henry Wallace’s miserable showing in the presidential election heralded the end of leftist politics on the national scene. Membership in both the communist and socialist parties declined dramatically. Russia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the victory of Mao’s communists in China, the Alger Hiss case, the Rosenberg spy case, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 all fueled the emerging Cold War. Throughout the 1950s, the Old Left suffered further battering as Senator Joe McCarthy and his numerous supporters in and out of government aggressively stirred the fears of the American public about the Red menace. In New York, subscriptions to the communist Daily Worker (later the Daily World ), which boasted a circulation of close to 75,000 in 1944, plummeted to a mere 5,000 before the paper ceased publication in 1990.4 Many other Old Left papers folded in the face of political hostility and a general lack of organized, defined, or marketable objectives. After 1950, the Old Left had little political capital, a dwindling audience, and a crumbling organization. In the inaugural issue of Dissent, an independent socialist journal launched in 1954, the editors frankly admitted that the magazine owed its existence to “an awareness that in America today there is no significant socialist movement and that, in all likelihood, no such movement will appear in the immediate future.”5 Eschewing the grandeur and fury of prewar leftist rhetoric, the editors spoke to a generation of veteran radicals who grudgingly acknowledged their political impotence, even as they continued to carry forward the tattered flags of communist and socialist ideas. In some ways, ironically, their very lack of explicit political direction helped Old Left ideas survive the McCarthy era. Scholars of the Left debate whether the radical publications that emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s were “skirmishers of an army in indecorous retreat” or important vehicles for ideological repositioning.6 Whatever the case, a number of important radical papers, including the Monthly Review, New Foundations, and the National Guardian, debuted in the postwar environment and attempted to define the new parameters of radical opinion. (Irving Howe, a founder of Dissent, observed, “When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine.”)7 No longer affiliated with Stalinist or other party lines, these radical publications of the 1950s focused their discussions on the broad layers of the working class, the struggle for civil rights, the defense of political prisoners, opposition to the Cold War, and 270
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support for international liberation movements. As voices of significant political opposition, however, the remnants of the Old Left remained largely unheard. Although many socialist and communist party veterans saw potential for a revived American radicalism with the advent of the New Left in the 1960s, they were dismayed by the younger generation of activists’ disdain for what they viewed as the rigid, antiquated ideological frameworks of the Old Left. Only a small handful of Old Left publications remained by the 1960s, and radical readership largely turned its support to the New Left press. As one reader of the National Guardian complained to the editors, he had “hoped you would make a break to a genuinely new left position, but see only a constant back-sliding toward ‘pro-Soviet liberalism’ characteristic of earlier years.”8 After 1960, when a younger generation of activists ushered in New Left critiques of social, economic, and political inequities, a new radical press eclipsed the few remaining Old Left publications. By the mid-1960s it was clear that despite their mutual embrace of civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and support for Third World struggles, the Old Left and the New did not speak the same language. Today, the few surviving Old Left publications linger on as historical relics or mere reference materials for academic radical criticism. The communist-published People’s Daily World (40,000 circulation) and Political Affairs (5,000 circulation) continue to publish in the twenty-first century, but they are more ideological records and less a force for political change at present.
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On 23 May 1964, a modest four-page periodical appeared in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park on the occasion of the Pleasure Faire and May Market. The Faire Free Press, renamed the Los Angeles Free Press with its second issue, was a new print genre: the alternative or “underground” newspaper. But in many respects the Free Press was simply the rebirth of time-honored journalistic practices: investigative reporting, sex, scandal, and sensationalism. There was even a tradition of youth publishing going back into the nineteenth century. More immediately influential were the writers, poets, artists, booksellers, and publishers of the Beat Generation who created an oppositional print culture in the two decades after World War II.9 The new undergrounds were, as Ben Bagdikian wrote, “small and sometimes ephemeral . . . [publications] that live between the cracks of an economy dominated by giants.”10 Lacking the resources of the mainstream print media, the undergrounds had to invent, or reinvent, ways for distributing their papers. Distribution was a particularly knotty problem for the underground papers because they espoused radical politics, endorsed the “youth culture,” covered T H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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taboo subjects such as recreational drug use, employed wildly innovative layouts, and contained graphic sexual material, including personal ads of a new dimension. At least initially, these papers were not going to find a niche in the neighborhood newsstand or grocery store rack. The solution lay in the independent distributors who emerged from the papers themselves, and, to a lesser extent, hawkers on street corners.11 In many respects, the publishers of these radical new oppositional papers resembled the revolutionaries of an earlier generation, who hand-printed their rabble-rousing tracts and handbills and passed them out in the streets of Boston and New York. What was new about the alternative press of the 1960s were the ways in which a matrix of developments coalesced to produce the print explosion. Technology played an important role, because high-speed offset lithography permitted cheaper, faster, more creative work by minimally trained staff. The papers also established a vital community among publishers and their readers, which soon coalesced into a social force simply called “the Movement” (fig. 15.1). Both ambiguous and clearly understood, “the Movement” included individuals committed to civil rights for African Americans (and later Latinos and Asians), anti– Vietnam War protesters, hippies, and other counterculture types. Frequently editors, writers, cartoonists, press operators, and street hawkers lived commu-
FIGURE 15.1. Movement 4, no. 10 (November 1968). This issue of the underground newspaper features Frank Cieciorka’s woodcut of the clenched fist, an allusion to the popular image of the Black Panther Party. Wisconsin Historical Society, Image ID 50272. 272
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nally, and within the community of readers they hoped to reach. They were attuned to and in touch with one another. They analyzed national and international events from a fresh perspective, covered local issues, protests, and concerts, and also produced subsistence revenue through the sale of advertising and sales of their papers.12 The Los Angeles Free Press, or the “Freep,” as it came to be known, embodied this new genre. Art Kunkin, the founder-editor-publisher, began the paper with an investment of fifteen dollars and pledges of advertising. A former organizer allied with a number of leftist organizations, Kunkin, with volunteer help, saw the Free Press grow rapidly to include a paid staff and regional distribution. It presented critiques of culture and politics by covering “happenings” and other art—often political—that the mainstream press ignored, by discussing the racial prejudice experienced by African Americans, and by providing frank and useful discussions of sex and recreational drugs aimed at the youth who needed it most. All of this along with intense local coverage of stories the major newspapers ignored and the now-ubiquitous calendar of community events created a unique journalistic lens that showed the established political and social order’s decay. The ascent of the Free Press was fueled by increasingly talented contributors and trenchant articles that championed free speech and decried censorship. Tensions in the Los Angeles community over obscenity in the movies, radio, and books were rigorously analyzed in the pages of the Free Press, often by writers like Lawrence Lipton, whose books on the Beats (The Holy Barbarians) and premarital sex helped fuel the changing social norms. John Wilcock, one of the founders of the Village Voice and collaboratorbiographer of Andy Warhol, and artist Ron Cobb, whose cartoons still resonate with their fierce defense of individual rights, also contributed to the Free Press. The paper provided an important alternative voice for advocacy and criticism that exposed fault lines in the mainstream culture. The demands by African Americans for justice and civil rights took on added urgency after the Watts riots in August 1965, and racism and racial politics were increasingly reported by the paper. The columns of the Free Press covered police brutality in the black community, offering sustained and insightful criticism of the Los Angeles Police Department, and published the photos and home addresses of its narcotics officers.13 The Free Press soon became a force in Los Angeles of sufficient magnitude that the state and local authorities targeted it for monitoring and harassment. But the publication’s success also served as the model for a national phenomenon. By 1967 the Underground Press Guide listed forty titles, including papers in notoriously conservative cities such as Austin, Texas (the Rag), and Durham, North Carolina (the Anvil ). Papers came and went, of course, but a deT H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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FIGURE 15.2. Space City, an underground newspaper published in Houston, Texas, illustrating the range of publications the term “underground press” encompassed. This issue, dated 16 March 1972, features an article on “Psychosurgery: The Modern Way to Peace of Mind.” Wisconsin Historical Society, Image ID 50399.
cade later the Alternative Press Syndicate Directory contained nearly 100 titles (fig. 15.2). The largest and longest-running publications, for the most part, were produced in major cities (e.g. Milwaukee’s Kaleidoscope and Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird), but small towns and rural areas had publications as well (Flush from Houghton, Michigan, and the Florida Underground News from Apopka). Underground papers in Lawrence, Kansas, offered historian Beth Bailey a wonderful opportunity to study how the “sexual revolution” had played out away from both coasts. The Screw, Lawrence’s first important underground newspaper, began publication in 1966, offering its readers tales—and frequently graphic descriptions—of “guiltless sex.” Similar papers were soon flourishing on college campuses, and in many nonstudent areas, throughout the country.14 Not surprisingly, the next step was to organize a national network to improve communications and marketing. Loosely organized, the Underground Press Syndicate (later the Alternative Press Syndicate) distributed articles to a varying extent and, more significantly, brokered advertising space from big music and recording companies. Tom Forcade, later the founder of High Times, a magazine of the drug culture, was the guiding force behind UPS. Liberation News Service (1967–81) was more focused on politics and provided weekly packets of articles and photographs that were regularly featured in the nation’s alternative press. And the national movement to produce and consume papers was not limited to articles. The use of “psychedelic” artwork, wild typography, 274
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offbeat printing techniques, and uncensored photographs produced pages that were very different from their staid mainstream rivals. Of these, the San Francisco Oracle (1966–68) was the most flamboyant, a status reinforced when it was reprinted in a deluxe retrospective edition in 1991 (fig. 15.3). By the early 1970s, the alternative press was in gradual decline. A number of causes contributed to the trend—not least the approaching end of the Vietnam War and a general burnout among leaders and followers in the Movement. But the direct intervention of the FBI and the government’s illegal “counterintelligence” program also damaged the alternative press. Another factor was the growing queasiness and reluctance of recording companies to advertise their musical wares in the undergrounds. By the late 1960s this source of revenue had largely dried up. When America’s war in Southeast Asia drew to an end and the draft was replaced by a voluntary military service, the progressive or radical possibilities and the print organs that promoted them declined. The Free Press continued to publish until 1978, but under a variety of new owners. Kunkin had become overextended financially and sold the paper, which was eventually purchased by Larry Flynt of Hustler. The changing times, more yuppie than hippie in some eyes, transformed the “underground” papers into “alternative news weeklies,” with a more diffuse focus on local politics and cultural affairs. The politics did not disappear entirely, but the tone was no longer outraged or revolutionary. Fewer staff members and owners fretted about the moral quandaries entailed by accepting advertising, and the revenue it produced, from corporations and business entities of all kinds. The revenues generated by the new papers grew dramatically and were soon attracting corporations and chain ownership. Even the titles of the papers began to sound different. The shift from the Berkeley Barb to the Bay Guardian (San Francisco) and from the Seed to the Reader in Chicago was replicated across North America. The political, cultural, and personal norms of the generation that came of age in the 1960s had found voice in the underground press, but as the these boomers aged, they demanded a different kind of print, one that absorbed and transformed their more radical impulses. To be sure, some of the rough, radical energy found in the pages of the underground press found its way into the “street papers” of the 1980s, usually produced and sold by the homeless. But the transformation of hippies and radicals into bankers and teachers inevitably made the undergrounds a phenomenon of the past. .
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Polly Joan and Andrea Chesman observe in their Guide to Women’s Publishing that “[a] book about women’s publishing is a book about feminist politics.”15 American women first witnessed this connection in 1963 when Betty Friedan T H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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FIGURE 15.3. The San Francisco Oracle was published in the Haight Ashbury district from 1966 to 1968 and edited by Allen Cohen. The legendary psychedelic newspaper featured graphic design by major San Francisco artists in rainbow colors. Its articles, interviews, and poetry were a contemporary creative response to the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the cultural changes that were sweeping the United States. The Oracle continued the cultural influence of the Beat writers, publishing the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure. The San Francisco Oracle: A Complete Digital Recreation, ed. Allen Cohen. Courtesy of 〈www.regentpress.net〉, Mark Weinman, publisher.
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published The Feminine Mystique, a groundbreaking critique of women’s physical and ideological confinement to the home that had a profound effect on its readers.16 Throughout the dramatic evolution of the feminist movement since then, activists have never underestimated the power of words to enlighten, challenge, and empower. After the Women’s Liberation Movement began in the mid-1960s, publishing became the fiber that bound together a community that was otherwise divided along lines of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. In 1970 Random House published what it claimed was the “first” anthology of women’s writing, Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Morgan took great pains to ensure that only women worked on the production and editing of this collection, which went on to become a classic text of the women’s movement. Another, lesser-known anthology of the women’s liberation movement was also published in 1970 by poet Judy Grahn and artist Wendy Cadden. Their collection, Woman to Woman, had an ephemeral publishing life, yet it left as profound an imprint on feminist history as Sisterhood Is Powerful. To raise money for a women’s bookstore, Grahn and Cadden borrowed the money to mimeograph a thousand copies of Woman to Woman on lavender onionskin paper. They sold their book out of the back of a van to small communities of feminist activists across the country. Their personal distribution of Woman to Woman established networks between communities of feminists who were just beginning to understand the powerful connections between publishing, politics, and grass-roots activism.17 Sisterhood Is Powerful and Woman to Woman are both important works that represent the different, but equally challenging, strategies explored by the feminist movement throughout its thirty-year history. Sisterhood Is Powerful asserted women’s equal access to existing structures of male, corporate power. Woman to Woman attempted to create a separate structure beyond those controlled by men. Together, these politically charged publishing strategies constituted important dissenting voices in the wider effort to establish a public voice for American women. Among the most significant concerns of the early feminist publishing operations during the late 1960s and early 1970s were women’s ownership and access to the press. Most radical feminists were not as concerned about access to the formal publishing establishment as they were with creating grass-roots presses to produce and promote feminist literature outside of the mainstream. The first women-owned publishing house, Shameless Hussy Press, opened in 1969. There soon followed a number of such enterprises across the country that published everything from political pamphlets, studies, and articles to poetry, novels, and plays.18 The technology of these early presses was storefront and shoestring, often relying on electric typewriters and mimeograph maT H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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chines (both now extinct) or donated time on small-job presses. The world of computer-assisted “desktop” publishing lay some years in the future.19 But publishing was not about technology. Rather, publishing provided the framework and a structure for networking and community building between the feminist “consciousness-raising” groups of the mid-1960s and radical activists across the country, creating the groundwork for the larger political enterprises of the Movement. KNOW, Inc., a publisher formed in 1969 out of a Pittsburgh chapter of the National Organization of Women20 was the vehicle for publishing their political material. Local women’s liberation journals, such as Ain’t I a Woman in Iowa City and Female Studies in Old Westbury, New York, served local audiences and influenced the journals of the larger movement, such as Ms. (1972) and off our backs (1970). During the late 1960s and early 1970s, printshops, publishers, distribution networks, and centers for feminist political activism were one and the same.21 After conquering the initial hurdles of technology, networking, and knowhow, feminist presses began to emphasize the visibility of a feminist community. The feminist bookstores, which began to open in cities nationwide throughout the 1970s, played a crucial role in linking the public, both radical and mainstream, to feminist literature and political life (fig. 15.4). One of the main goals of the feminist press after its initial networks formed, says Carol Seajay, founding editor of Feminist Bookstore News, was simply to “get women out into the world.”22 Through grass-roots publishing, bookstores, and continued chal-
FIGURE 15.4. “Support Your Local Feminist Bookstore,” a cartoon by Alison Bechdel, c. 1985, showing the diverse composition of bookstore supporters. Feminist bookstores have been centers of publishing and political organizing as well as of bookselling. Courtesy of Alison Bechdel. 278
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lenges to mainstream literature, feminist activists hoped to showcase women’s political potential to a rapidly growing community.23 At the same time, however, that feminist community was becoming increasingly complex. By the early 1980s, activists were widely acknowledging the diversity in their ranks. The number of presses specializing in lesbian literature, recognition of Third World women, and writings by women of color reflected the agitation, and sometimes the conflict, that existed within the feminist community. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, for example, set out in 1981 with an explicit directive to publish works by women across race, class, ethnic, or sexual lines. Among their most significant publications was The Combahee River Collective Statement, the seminal work of black feminist theory. Significantly, the revised edition of Sisterhood Is Powerful (1984) reflected this same diverse and expansive perspective in its new title: Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology.24 By the mid-1980s, the line dividing “alternative” and “mainstream” feminism was becoming less clear. Several new conditions helped to change the tenor, character, and purpose of feminist presses. First, many of the radical presses that had helped place feminist publishing and feminist politics on the map had gone out of business. Second, as the readership of women’s literature grew, feminists gained greater access to larger publishing houses and larger markets. Third, increased access to academic publishing during the mid-1980s helped usher feminist politics into the mainstream.25 Through the 1990s, the scale of feminist publishing and networking enterprises dramatically changed, creating a new set of concerns for the community and its survival. Whereas tiny local presses had once huddled together like orphans of the storm, in the early 1990s feminist publishing houses began gathering at the National Women-In-Print Conference and the International Feminist Bookfair. This dramatic trajectory from homegrown small presses to blockbuster best sellers by authors such as Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, and Phyllis Chesler had its price. By the end of the decade, the proliferation of successful feminist titles marketed by mainstream publishers had forced many small presses to close. Similarly, the advent of online book sales and superstores cast a shadow of doubt on the future of feminist bookstores. By the close of the 1990s, changes in the publishing industry forced feminist presses to adopt creative solutions to significant financial problems. Some have adopted nonprofit status, others support themselves through grants, and many still rely on volunteer labor.26 .
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In 1947 a woman calling herself “Lisa Ben” (an anagram for lesbian) published Vice Versa, a lesbian magazine she meticulously hand-typed on the sly at her secretarial job. She was a pioneer. As one of many men and women who confronted their homosexuality during the war, “Ben” collected poems, letters, fiction, and reviews and assembled them, against considerable odds, as a means of discovering and sustaining a lesbian community. Vice Versa established two themes that have persisted in the gay and lesbian press in the decades since: identifying community and expressing dissent through published claims to sexual identity. The tenor and intentions behind dissent vary as well, from merely stating sexual identity in the public forum, to radical opposition, offensive attacks, theoretical criticism, and internal debates within the gay and lesbian communities. Most important, since World War II, gays and lesbians have recognized and employed the gay and lesbian papers as an important vehicle to both serve their communities and render them visible.27 The gay and lesbian press of the 1950s was radical in context far more than in content. The Cold War culture did not equate homosexuality with political or social identity, but rather with a disturbed psychological condition that posed a threat to national security. Yet, despite this hostile environment, a “homophile” movement emerged as gays and lesbians searched for community. The three major publications of the 1950s—the Ladder for lesbians, the Mattachine Review and ONE magazine for gay men—focused on defining social more than political rights. The main issues debated in these publications reflected the gay community’s attempt to define itself. Writers discussed what constituted suitable appearance for gays and lesbians. Readers submitted letters explaining their own definitions of what qualified as homosexual preference. Articles reported at length on “expert” medical studies into the psychology of homosexuality. The publications explicitly denied political content and strove to blend in with the 1950s culture. Simply by existing, however, these national gay and lesbian journals opened avenues of communication and established bonds within and among a growing number of otherwise fragmented, isolated communities.28 The early 1960s witnessed a distinct radicalization of the gay and lesbian community, led largely by members of the gay and lesbian press. The new radical approach began as internal dissent as a younger generation questioned the accommodationist stance of their elders. In 1963, the newly appointed editor of the Ladder, Barbara Gittings of Philadelphia, tartly summarized the stance of the new generation of gays: “The publications of the 1950s gave undue deference to ‘authorities’ and ‘experts.’ The true experts on homosexuality—then as well as now—are homosexuals.”29 Leaders like Gittings and Franklin Kameny of Washington, D.C., took up new directions and asserted their sexual identity clearly through their publications. Gittings changed the title of her magazine to 280
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the Ladder: A Lesbian Review, and Kameny founded the Homosexual Citizen. In 1965 they further pressed the visibility of homosexuality by staging the first gay march on Washington, adopting a conservative mode of dress to distinguish themselves from the scruffier, anti–Vietnam War protesters. By the late 1960s an emerging grass-roots gay and lesbian press had embraced the militancy and sexual openness of the counterculture. The Ladder continued to serve as the major voice of lesbian journalists, and the number of gay men’s publications grew dramatically. The Los Angeles Advocate (later the Advocate) became the first newspaper, while San Francisco saw several new publications—Vector, Cruise News and World Report, and Town Talk—to focus on covering and advertising the city’s gay bar scene. Increasingly, these papers included explicit homoerotic images and content. Philadelphia’s Drum and the “Homosexual Citizen” column in New York’s Screw, in particular, grew increasingly militant and explicit, setting the standard that became a trademark of the gay press after the Stonewall riot of 1969. Historian Rodger Streitmatter disputes Stonewall as a watershed of gay activism in publishing, instead arguing that traditions of juxtaposing politics, community, and sexually explicit imagery were established in the gay press earlier in the decade.30 However, Stonewall did encourage important growth in gay and lesbian publishing that lasted throughout the early 1970s. The sheer number of publications, many low-budget and short-lived, increased dramatically. Publications such as Come Out!, Gay Times, Gay Sunshine, Lavender Visions, and Killer Dyke expressed grass-roots militancy and political diversity, as well as open dissent and a sense of possibility.31 Second, the gay and lesbian presses split when many lesbian women focused their energies on women’s liberation rather than on the gay movement per se. Though political perspective ranged from the Women’s Liberation Movement to the decidedly more militant Gay Liberation Front during the early 1970s, the gay and lesbian press as a whole endorsed the idea that sexuality and gay rights were significant to the larger quest for civil rights. During the mid-1970s, the Liberation Front was in chaos and gay and lesbian presses were increasingly at odds. With some prominent exceptions like the militant Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine, and Gay Liberator, gay men’s publications largely turned into establishment life-style magazines that cashed in on “dink” affluence (double income, no kids). The lesbian press, by contrast, adopted a strong dissenting voice, launching highly theoretical critiques against both the male privilege of the gay movement and the straight privilege of white feminists. In the early 1970s, Betty Friedan and other conservative leaders in the National Organization for Women (NOW) purged lesbians from the organization. By then the Ladder had folded, and the lesbian press felt alienated by the slick, conventional success of gay life-style magazines like the Advocate. Lesbian publicaT H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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tions, most notably Lesbian Tide and the radical, Washington-based collective the Furies, articulated strident critiques of every possible convention, directly linked sexuality to politics and oppression, and emerged with a lesbian-feminist ideology.32 Despite the divisions of the 1970s, the gay and lesbian press found new reason for coalition and cooperation during the 1980s in opposition to the rising tide of conservative politics. Galvanized by the murder of Harvey Milk, an openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco (1978), and by the potential federal attention that the growing AIDS crisis could bring, the gay and lesbian press rallied together to demand rights and resources. As a result, publications such as Gay Community News, Lesbian Tide, and the Washington Blade became increasingly professional and political in their reporting.33 The gay and lesbian press raised its powerful dissenting voice against the conservative and religious right by investigating hate crimes and antigay violence and reporting on civil rights legislation and other legal news. Several publications, notably New York Native, Gay Community News, and Big Apple Dyke News, provided important community services by tracking news of the AIDS epidemic, legal issues, and medical research. While many small, low-budget presses simply could not compete with the professionalism of these new papers, smaller publications, such as the Leaping Lesbian in Ann Arbor, continued important, consciousness-raising work in the nation’s heartland. Indeed, toward the end of the 1980s, many such publications began a radical resurgence reminiscent of the post-Stonewall 1970s. Increasingly irreverent publications launched attacks against the homophobia of conservatives as well as the political correctness of liberals. Some gay men’s magazines began “outing” public figures as a political strategy. Lesbian publications waged a fierce offensive against the conventional sexual mores championed by straight feminists. Displaying sexuality had been an important part of both the gay and lesbian press since the 1960s, so when feminists published their antipornography message in off our backs, many lesbians felt as alienated by feminists as they had in the early 1970s. The lesbian press responded with explicitly erotic magazines like On Our Backs, Bad Attitude, and Yoni. Although many of these publications were short-lived—with the exception of On Our Backs, which is still published—they defined the most radical positions of the 1980s sex wars. The 1990s saw more financial stability than ever before in the gay and lesbian press. Many publications, such as the gay Out and Genre or the lesbian Deneuve, were decidedly in the mainstream and attracted advertisements from major companies. While many in publishing welcomed the financial success and acceptance of the gay press, others criticized the intentions of these profitable publications. Gay activists argued that the profits of the glossy magazines 282
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should be spent on AIDS research or otherwise returned to the community. Others lamented how the success of life-style magazines detracted from more serious gay and lesbian news reporting.
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Until quite recently, the scholarly attention paid to American conservatives, to say nothing of racists and homegrown fascists, has been scant.34 But, like the leftist, radical, and gender-based ideologies discussed in this chapter, the ideas and rhetoric of the Right have been marginalized or excluded from mainstream publishing outlets and their national distribution networks. The postwar resurgence of an oppositional Right may be said to have originated in December 1954 when Robert Welch, retired head of a popular candy company in Belmont, Massachusetts, wrote a memorandum lamenting President Eisenhower’s failure to support conservative Republicans running for Congress. Welch’s typewritten memo was the beginning of the Politician, a kind of underground classic that famously termed Eisenhower “a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” Originally, the text was circulated among Welch’s friends and other like-minded individuals in a few carbon copies, with no authorial attribution. Welch always considered it “a private unfinished manuscript for limited distribution,” but his screed rapidly gained fame and status. Although relatively few people probably read the Politician, the entire country learned of Welch’s sensational charges against left-liberal Americans after he founded the John Birch Society in 1958. Welch urged his followers to establish “reading rooms” stocked with periodicals such as the society’s flagship publication, American Opinion, as well as the Dan Smoot Report and William F. Buckley’s National Review. In the 1960s the John Birch Society’s monthly membership bulletin included an “agenda for the month” with a list of letters to write, books to read and recommend to friends, and related tasks. A network of society-sponsored American Opinion Bookstores reinforced Welch’s emphasis on print. Well-funded and fired by ideological zeal, the society effectively used print to create a community of like-minded individuals dedicated to remaking society. The grass-roots success of right-wing publishing illustrates how the dissemination of oppositional ideas is not unique to the liberal left.35 Sometimes the print produced on the right becomes mainstream, as did the National Review, which began in 1955. From a position on the extreme fringe of the Republican Party and of conservatism, Buckley’s publication developed beyond the dissemination of antigovernment rhetoric into an active role within the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Heritage Foundation’s move from little-known California insiders to national agenda setters is perhaps the most important example T H E O P P O S I T I O NA L P RES S
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of this shift. For many on the right, Buckley’s commitment to keeping his magazine free of any corporate or governmental contamination was crucial.36 The books and serial publications produced on the right vary widely, and in a sense are united only by their critique of mainstream politics. And, rather than gaining support, this critique frequently forms a closed system: a reader’s preestablished worldview is authenticated in print by like-minded publishers. The publications, and usually the organizations that support them, range from broad-gauge political tracts with such eponymous titles as the Limbaugh Letter or the Phyllis Schlafly Report to those with a more specific focus—for example the economy (McAlvany Intelligence Advisor and Moneychanger), antiabortion (Life Advocate and the Missionary Update of Missionaries to the Preborn), and homosexual conversion (Second Stone and Between the Lines of Love in Action). Even in an age dominated by electronic media, print continues to play a crucial role for members of these groups in determining and communicating their perception of a world in desperate need of change. On the farther, darker right, racist and hate groups have likewise developed their own oppositional vehicles like the anti-Semite publications WAR/White Aryan Resistance and NS Vanguard. Publications from the Klan and similar “white power” groups continued to be one of their primary vehicles for the dissemination of hate well into the 1990s, when audio, video, and cyberspace joined or supplanted them. In April 1995 a truck bomb exploded at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 people—at the time, the worst terrorist act in American history. The perpetrators, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were soon captured, and eventually they were connected to the oppositional press; specifically, to Hillsboro, West Virginia, the home of William Pierce and the National Alliance. Pierce, a racist and anti-Semite, began publishing his neofascist periodical, National Vanguard, in 1969. Today his followers produce audiotapes, a newsletter, white power music CDs, and copies of his dystopian work of fiction, The Turner Diaries. Writing under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald, Pierce concocted a lurid tale of heroic white neo-Nazi revolutionaries reclaiming an America dominated by nonwhites. First published in 1978, and reprinted in 1980 by the National Alliance, a third edition of The Turner Diaries was produced by Barricade Press, a venture of Lyle Stuart (who is more usually associated with controversy on the liberal-progressive side). Pierce’s tale provokes extreme reactions, as a search of Amazon.com reveals: it is either “the best since Mein Kampf ” or “an evil book.” The FBI terms it “the bible of the racist right,” and it seems to have fueled Tim McVeigh’s antigovernmental rage, for he declared that it was one of the texts he had been reading. We will never know precisely what McVeigh took away from reading The 284
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Turner Diaries, but it is clear that his world contained a print culture that is little known in the larger society.37 Not for the first or last time, an obscure “underground” publication intruded itself upon the national scene.
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The oppositional press has a long though generally obscure history. From Tom Paine and other pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, from abolitionists of the nineteenth century through African Americans in the 1960s, from suffragists striving for the vote and peace activists for an end to wars, to proponents of radical politics of every shade—all have turned to print as a means of informing, converting, and enlisting their fellow men and women in The Cause. These oppositional publications espoused, and in many cases inspired, significant changes in American society. They originated on the fringes of print culture, and there many of them remained, or withered and died. But some gained a readership, flourished, and ultimately had an impact that belied their humble origins. The writers, printers, publishers, and readers of the oppositional press consume print just like everyone else, but their reading includes ideas not endorsed by the daily newspapers or major publishers. The range of ideas and vehicles for expressing them change constantly, but they are indisputably in opposition to the most commonly expressed views. In this perilous age, when both democracy and print culture seem at risk, the oppositional press continues to provide an alternative to mainstream print in America, just as it has for more than 200 years. The oppositional press is sometimes in the spotlight, sometimes virtually invisible. It is many things, and it is elusive. But it is not an illusion. Almost by definition, it is perpetually in the process of renewing itself, of fading away as part of its agenda is accomplished—and arising, resurgent, with each new generation. Make no mistake: because of the oppositional press, we are different as a people and as a nation.
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CHAPTER 16
The Black Press and Radical Print Culture Jane Rhodes
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In the years following World War II, the black press underwent a series of changes that mirrored the dramatic transformation of America’s racial landscape. The dismantling of Jim Crow segregation, the ascendancy of a powerful civil rights movement, and the revival of radical black nationalism forever altered the meaning and significance of a medium largely written by and for black Americans. By the end of the twentieth century, scholars and pundits bemoaned the decline of the black press. The cause, they declared, was the very success of the movements against racism and discrimination, particularly the advent of integration. “With the crumbling of segregation came the hemorrhaging of talent from black newspapers coupled with a decline of black patronage and advertising revenue,” notes a recent study. “By 1970, many black newspapers were only a shell of their former selves.”1 This shift was particularly pronounced in the decade of the 1960s. One catalyst was the move to integrate the nation’s all-white newsrooms in the wake of urban uprisings that began with the 1965 riots in Watts. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Johnson to study the causes of the riots, noted that black Americans felt disenfranchised and ignored by the national media, hence contributing to the national crisis in race relations. The report was blunt in its assessment: “The news media have failed to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States and, as a related matter, to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations of journalism.” The Kerner Commission, authors of the report, called the segregation of American journalism “shockingly backward” and recommended that the news media “make a reality of integration—in both their product and personnel.” News organizations took heed and quickly developed programs to integrate their work force, in the process draining the most experienced journalists from the black press.2 The loss of key personnel was but one reason for the drop in circulation and influence of the black press during this era, however. Equally important were the difficulties faced by editors and publishers as they struggled to respond to
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postwar interests and shifting ideologies among black readers. The black press was far from monolithic; although dominated by mass-circulation newspapers like the Chicago Defender (fig. 16.1), Pittsburgh Courier, and Amsterdam News, there was a range of political, literary, and cultural publications that addressed the breadth of diversity in black communities. But by the late 1960s, the door was open for a decidedly radical, audacious brand of African American journalism that supplanted many of the steadfast leaders of the past. The history of African American publishing in the United States is inextricably linked to an enduring tradition of protest and resistance. The nation’s first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827–30), was founded in the antebellum era to present a vociferous argument against slavery and to assist in the building and sustenance of black communities. In the newspaper’s inaugural issue, editors Samuel Cornish and John Russworm declared, “Too long have others spoken for us,” as they asserted the importance of print communication for black American autonomy and self-sufficiency. Freedom’s Journal played many roles simultaneously; it was a forum through which African Americans could inform themselves about slavery and abolition, it offered a framework in which to debate political strategies for civil rights, it was a model for civic participation and the exercise of democratic principles, and it disseminated news about community culture and business. The editors were also explicit in their desire to counteract the damaging representations of black Americans that circulated in national culture. “From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented . . . Our vices and degradations are ever arrayed against us but our virtues are passed by unnoticed,” they noted in the first issue.3 Since its inception, the black press has also been an essential institution for facilitating the development of black nationalism. This race-based nationalism required the formation of a group consciousness among a widely dispersed and intensely oppressed people. Print culture, as Benedict Anderson suggests, is essential for the spread of nationalist identities and in the construction of imagined communities. Russworm and Cornish made this plain when they announced, “It is our earnest wish to make our Journal a medium of intercourse between our brethren in the different states of this great confederacy.” This agenda made print culture a crucial emancipatory project—black Americans could learn from and share their experiences within the pages of their journals, in the process forging strategies for political and social change.4 From the antebellum period through the middle of the twentieth century, African American newspapers and periodicals were a vital political tool. They provided a forum for debate and discussion over every issue facing black communities, from abolitionist strategies to women’s suffrage to racial uplift. The T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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FIGURE 16.1. Front page of the Chicago Defender, 31 July 1948, announces the presidential decree to desegregate the military. Courtesy of the Chicago Defender.
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black press also disseminated African Americans’ intellectual and cultural output, which was largely ignored by white-owned media. During the 1880s and 1890s, as the nation retreated from the civil rights accomplishments of Reconstruction, the black press was one of the few institutions to survive as blacks were pushed out of the electoral system and to the margins of the economy, particularly in the South. Many newspapers, like the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight edited by Ida B. Wells, crusaded against lynching and Jim Crow laws. Others stayed away from the politics of agitation, concentrating on the more mundane, yet vital, aspects of community building such as education, social life, and the promotion of black entrepreneurship. After World War I Jim Crow segregation in the South reached its zenith, prompting the dramatic migration of southern blacks to the North. Newspapers including the Chicago Defender, the New York Age, and the Pittsburgh Courier all exhorted rural blacks to move North and leave behind the land peonage and racial violence that desperately constrained their lives. In so doing, they produced a powerful critique of the South’s racial order: “If a million Negroes move north and west in the next twelve-month, it will be one of the greatest things for the Negro since the Emancipation Proclamation,” the Christian Recorder proclaimed.5 By the 1920s, there was a growing range of divergent radical voices emanating from the black press, such as in Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, the standardbearer for back-to-Africa black nationalism; the Crisis, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as an organ of the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Messenger, which argued for socialism as the tool for black empowerment; and the Crusader, which called for an independent black state and a global pan-African network to overthrow white supremacy. The goal of these publications was to “promote radical political, economic, and social ideas among the growing Black middle class,” which was assumed to be passive and fearful of “rocking the boat,” notes one historian. These periodicals, while short-lived, set the stage for an independent black journalism that had little concern for economic feasibility or social respectability—instead, they were committed to taking often-unpopular stands in the name of social justice and black self-sufficiency. This tradition became increasingly appealing in the 1960s.6 By the middle of the twentieth century, many of the stalwarts of the black press were searching for an identity and an audience. In the North, black citizens emboldened by their service in World War II and improved educational opportunities, sought other sources for news and entertainment. Mass-circulation black newspapers and periodicals took on an increasingly accommodationist stance as they strove to attract and maintain a broad audience. Some contend that, in the process, they abandoned their role as agitators for civil rights. The T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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most scathing indictment of the black press came from sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who declared that by the 1950s, the black press was primarily a mouthpiece for the black bourgeoisie and was preoccupied with economic success and social status. Frazier maintained that the postwar black press had lost much of its political edge and race consciousness, instead focusing on an isolated and insular “Negro social world.” Many writers and columnists in the black press had a limited worldview, he observed, and were unable to inform black readers about global economic and political issues. Instead, they became little more than celebrity sheets: “The Negro press is compelled to focus attention upon the relatively few Negroes who have gained any form of recognition in the white world,” Frazier opined. “In playing up the recognition which the Negro receives, the Negro press utilizes the most trivial events.”7 The more radical voices in the black press also waned during the 1950s as the Cold War political climate led to the collapse of the communist-inspired black left. In his landmark study of the decline of black politics during the era, Harold Cruse expressed little enthusiasm for African American journalism. The newspapers and magazines that played such a crucial role decades earlier were either pandering to middle-class sensibilities or mired in left political squabbles. Cruse looked back to 1919 with nostalgia, when he claimed “There is not a single Negro publication in existence today that matches the depth of the old Messenger,” edited by A. Philip Randolph.8 Cruse cited the example of the short-lived Freedom newspaper (1951–55) published in Harlem by Paul Robeson, which ultimately failed to appeal to black readers because of its leftist politics and intellectual bent. The paper, which claimed a circulation of 25,000, had an impressive array of contributors including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and novelist John Oliver Killins. But in Cruse’s view, this newspaper embodied the “whole gamut of wasted talents of the radical generation of postwar Harlem.” Failures like Freedom left the market open for more mainstream black weeklies including the Amsterdam News, which offered no tangible political alternative. Historian Theodore Vincent agreed with Cruse’s assessment when he said: “A hallmark of the New Negro press had been its variety of political expression. . . . By the 1950s it [the black press] lacked a single nationalist, socialist or communist periodical.”9 This may have been a particularly harsh assessment, but there was no ignoring the fact that the large-circulation weeklies faced a dilemma. Nevertheless, some of the periodicals based in the North played a pivotal role at the dawn of the civil rights movement. One vivid example occurred in 1955 when the nation was rocked by the news that a black teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till had been lynched in Sumner, Mississippi, by two white men. The black press took the lead in unveiling this sordid event. The Chicago Defender, based in 290
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Till’s hometown, published banner headlines condemning racial violence and presenting the details of the trial, in which the defendants were exonerated by an all-white jury. Meanwhile, Jet magazine published gruesome photographs of Till’s battered body to underscore the horrendous nature of the crime. National publications like the New York Times followed the lead of the black press, giving widespread coverage to the incident and the efforts of Mississippi law enforcement to justify the crime. This was one of many instances in which the black press was effective in expressing a collective voice of outrage, but such bold actions did not improve its viability.10 In the South, the situation for the black press at midcentury was even more fraught. A study of the black press in Mississippi, for example, identified the 1950s as a “terror-filled decade.” African American newspapers retreated into a conservative position as lynchings and political repression peaked. Four of the state’s five black-owned papers supported segregation, were politically and financially controlled by whites, and remained on the sidelines as the civil rights movement began to coalesce. Only one courageous underground paper, the Jackson Eagle Eye, denounced segregation and the Jackson police routinely harassed the editor for his efforts.11 At the start of the 1960s, the South’s black press walked a narrow line between promoting civil rights and attracting abuse from the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizen’s Councils, the police, and local governments. On one hand, these publications survived by providing a black parallel to segregated white newspapers and by reporting on black communities without disrupting the racial order. But, like all media, they relied on a sustained readership that attracted advertising revenues. Many of these papers, with their stories about local businesses, churches, and social events, failed to capture the attention of a new, more radical generation. Young, restless activists who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement were often disappointed with the local black press. For example, as the student sit-ins swept across the South in 1960, a group of students in Atlanta composed “An Appeal for Human Rights” which they hoped to run in black newspapers. To the student’s outrage, the influential black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World, required they pay the full advertising rate, and later published editorials that suggested the students leave politics to adults. “With the start of the sit-ins, the black press responded to the civil rights movement only by reporting the news made by the people, editorializing occasionally about the progress of social or moral events, and taking an occasional jab at governments,” noted one study.12 By most accounts, the circulation of black newspapers peaked in 1950, with 2.4 million readers distributed among a handful of well-known publications. The period between 1950 and 1969 was marked by a rapid decline in circulaT HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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tion, even among some of the industry’s leaders such as the Chicago Defender and Baltimore Afro-American. By the mid-sixties only 124 black newspapers remained, and circulation was down to 1.58 million. The causes were a complex set of circumstances linked to the political, social, and technological changes sweeping the nation: increasing competition from the mainstream press and television, the migration of middle-class blacks out of urban areas where most black papers are based, and greater social integration. Black Americans no longer needed a race-based press simply to tell them the news of the day. Instead they sought out black-owned publications as a political act—to gain an insider’s understanding of the myriad political movements that were emerging and capturing public attention, and to express solidarity with black activism. While the southern civil rights movement pressed for a politics of integration, a resurgent black nationalism in the North attempted to respond to the urban decay, unemployment, and sense of hopelessness that was increasingly commonplace.13 The Black Arts movement of the mid-sixties generated a host of new periodicals and little magazines that reflected a black nationalist aesthetic. “Those who identified with the black arts movement wanted their little magazines to go to the heart, or the essential reality, of blackness,” argues one study. These periodicals sought to integrate calls for black separatism and the claiming of an African identity with the literary output of a new generation. Similarly, the two bestknown black nationalist organizations, the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Panther Party, launched publications during this era. By the end of the sixties, the two most widely read black newspapers in the United States were Muhammad Speaks, the organ of the Nation of Islam (fig. 16.2), and the Black Panther, organ of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. While the two newspapers’ claims of a half million readers per week are impossible to verify, even half that number still outpaced the circulation of the most venerable black publications of the past.14 The Nation of Islam has its origins in the Great Depression and the decline of the Garvey movement. Its founder, W. D. Fard, encouraged working-class blacks to convert to Islam during the 1930s, preaching the concept of blacks as The Original Man. All blacks were Muslims, regardless of whether they acknowledged the fact, and the white race was created by Yakub, a black scientist in rebellion against Allah. In NOI doctrine, whites have “deceived the black nations of the earth, trapped and murdered them by the hundreds of thousands, divided and put black against black,” hence earning the label “devils.” In the mid-1930s, Fard disappeared and Elijah Muhammad emerged as the Nation of Islam’s leader. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Muhammad built a national network of Muslim temples that maintained a rigid hierarchy and required strict 292
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FIGURE 16.2. Muhammad Speaks, 27 August 1965. Courtesy Muhammad Speaks, Inc., and Dodd Center, University of Connecticut.
adherence to proper modes of behavior. As one scholar has pointed out, “The cornerstone of the Nation of Islam’s ability to propagandize among the Black working class was the sensitivity of Elijah Muhammad to the needs and conditions of life of the urban Black working class of the time.”15 During the NOI’s early years, leader Elijah Muhammad—often known as “The Messenger”—reached the public through speaking engagements and pamphlets. But in the mid-1950s the black press became a useful vehicle. He eventually wrote articles for the Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles HeraldDispatch, Amsterdam News, and Milwaukee Defender, among others. Muhammad’s column in the Pittsburgh Courier, then the largest black newspaper in the country, attracted thousands of letters applauding or denouncing the Black Muslim’s ideologies, in the process drawing considerable attention to the paper. It has been suggested that the stir created by Muhammad’s writing helped increase the Courier’s circulation. Even the conservative, curmudgeonly black T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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columnist George Schuyler defended the right of Muhammad to proselytize through the newspaper. “Mr. Muhammad may be a rogue and a charlatan, but when anybody can get tens of thousands of Negroes to practice economic solidarity, respect their women, alter their atrocious diet, give up liquor, stop crime, juvenile delinquency and adultery, he is doing more for the Negro’s welfare than any current Negro leader I know,” he wrote in his nationally syndicated column. When the Courier changed owners in 1959, however, the Muslim column was dropped, to reappear in the weekly Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, which became a quasi NOI organ. Again, the Black Muslim connection expanded the readership of the newspaper, which opened a bureau near Muhammad’s headquarters in Chicago. Muhammad also tried his hand at magazine publishing, but all of the ventures were short-lived. However, a pocket-sized magazine issued in 1960, Muhammad Speaks to the Blackman: The Magazine That Dares to Tell The Truth would inspire the creation of a newspaper just a few months later.16 Muhammad Speaks to the Blackman was an initial attempt to blend the NOI’s theological positions with political testimony that might inspire Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The cover of the inaugural issue displayed a background image of Elijah Muhammad with the words “The Magazine That Dares to Tell the Truth,” suggesting the provocative aspirations the NOI had for the periodical. It included articles addressing internal concerns, such as “The Duty of the Muslim Women” and pieces that critiqued the failure of public schools to teach black history. In an extended essay titled “The Blackman’s Future,” the editors addressed readers with a challenge to remake themselves as liberated black subjects: “The So-called Negro today wallows in a slime of self ignorance; from the white man’s well-laden table, he scuffles and fights for meager crumbs, even though his labor without recompense made it possible for the Slave master to dine so well.” Such bold language was a return to the polemics of the early twentieth-century black press. The essay by Elijah Muhammad attacked the black bourgeoisie for forgetting the black masses in its quest for white recognition and, in the process, abandoning the struggle against oppression. The Nation of Islam, he proclaimed, offered a viable alternative. “The solution to the American so-called Negro’s dilemma, is for the Blackman to take the offensive and carry the fight for justice and freedom to the enemy,” he wrote. This was a call-to-arms that would resonate in future publications.17 When Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam in the 1950s, he brought a keen intellect and talent for public expression to the leadership ranks of the organization. As a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, he is credited with enabling the Nation to reach a large swath of African Americans through his strategic use of mass media. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X appeared on television and radio and wrote for numerous periodicals in his quest to spread 294
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the Muslim word. In 1957 James Hicks, then editor of the Amsterdam News, was so impressed with Malcolm, who headed a temple in Harlem, that he invited him to write a column. Malcolm challenged the hegemony of black ministers in the community, and his articles became wildly popular. Another catalyst for the Nation of Islam media campaigns was the attention focused on the group by the mainstream press. In 1959 the FBI launched a large-scale media campaign to discredit the NOI by briefing selected journalists who channeled the information to the employers. The articles appeared in newspapers, Time, U.S. News and World Report, the Saturday Evening Post, and other respected outlets. The scheme backfired on two counts, however—the adverse publicity actually heightened black interest in the organization and helped increase its membership, and the NOI decided it needed to produce aggressively media of its own.18 Malcolm’s media experience, particularly at the Amsterdam News, proved useful when he launched the monthly tabloid Muhammad Speaks out of his own basement in 1960. After two years it was switched to a weekly publication. The newspaper eventually became the most widely read paper in black America with a reported circulation of 600,000 copies a week. Malcolm X was keenly aware of the importance of the black press in advancing the NOI’s agenda. “The Negro press may have its shortcomings, but when the die is cast and your ‘downtown’ friends ready you for the dogs, there must be a NEGRO PRESS to present your case to the ‘Negro’ public,” he wrote in an NOI periodical. “The Negro press is our only medium for voicing the true plight of our oppressed people in the world.”19 Malcolm produced much of the copy and took the photographs for the early issues, with the assistance of black journalist Louis Lomax, who would later write a book on the Black Muslims. Malcolm X served as the first editor in chief, and he turned to more experienced writers and journalists for assistance, including the historian C. Eric Lincoln, who was writing his dissertation on the Black Muslims at the time. Several sources note, however, that the immediate success of Muhammad Speaks sparked intense jealousy on the part of Elijah Muhammad, who eventually replaced Malcolm as editor and moved the newspaper’s offices to the group’s headquarters in Chicago. Ironically, a few years later “The Messenger” would use the pages of Muhammad Speaks to discredit Malcolm X. Nevertheless, when the editorial office moved to Chicago, veteran journalist Dan Burley took the helm and recruited other journalists to work for the paper. Author and playwright Richard Durham, who wrote Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest, became editor in chief in 1964. Durham was succeeded by John Woodford, a former editor at Ebony magazine, at the end of the 1960s.20 T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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What set Muhammad Speaks apart from the rest of the black press was its combination of hard-hitting journalism and unabashed black nationalism. Its conventional-looking tabloid format belied the radical nature of its content. Every issue had invocations to black solidarity, such as “Unite and Accept Your Own Kind.” Reporters from the paper traveled the United States to investigate and write about the problem of race relations. They covered civil rights conflicts in the South, arguing that integration was a failed goal and that the Nation of Islam offered the best solution to black liberation. In every issue, one page was devoted to The Muslim Program, a list of the NOI’s core beliefs and goals. Among its demands were freedom, equal justice under the law, equal opportunity, an end to the violent attacks on blacks across the nation, and the opportunity to establish a separate territory or state. The paper published editorial cartoons that ridiculed the civil rights movement and its leaders, maintaining that whites still held the political power to determine if blacks were to be accorded equal justice. There were full-page photographic spreads of Black Muslim gatherings and events, illustrating a robust and autonomous black community unafraid to challenge white supremacy. The paper could attack all perceived enemies, including whites, Jews, black elites, and others, without concern. Wire-service articles discussed the freedom struggles of colonized groups around the globe, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. All of this material was interspersed with Black Muslim doctrine and speeches from Elijah Muhammad. The NOI newspaper appealed to a wide swath of black Americans who identified with the messages of black empowerment even as they rejected its theology. The editors of Muhammad Speaks were adept at conveying their efforts to construct an imagined community of black resisters. Just two years after its founding, the paper had a running headline that announced “Circulation over 225,000 with More Than 900,000 Readers And Still Growing.” Such tactics, no matter how exaggerated, gave readers the impression that they were part of something big. The April 1962 issue was devoted to a conference in Chicago in which Elijah Muhammad addressed the topic “The Future of the American So-Called Negroes.” One headline proclaimed a separatist agenda, stating “Land of Our Own the Only Justice,” while another indicted the dominant media: “White Press, TV Tried to Fool ‘Negroes,’ Truth about Convention in This Issue.” Readers were told that they must turn to Muhammad Speaks to obtain an accurate representation of black America’s news. Numerous photos showed a peaceful, orderly audience, including sympathetic whites, who sat in rapt silence as they listened to Muhammad’s invocation. The lasting image was of a self-contained, well-organized, and growing community that placed itself in direct opposition to the dominant culture.21 Muhammad Speaks had a clear financial advantage over the conventional 296
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black press. The newspaper was subsidized by the Nation of Islam and was sold on the streets by dedicated cadres of young Muslim men, known as the Fruits of Islam. The paper’s limited advertising came mostly from NOI-owned businesses in Chicago and New York, or from black entrepreneurs—dry cleaners, clothiers, and grocers—seeking business from the paper’s readership. In an era of increasing black militancy in both the North and South, Muhammad Speaks satisfied a seemingly unquenchable thirst for an Afrocentric, radical, confrontational discourse. In February 1965, Malcolm X—who had severed his ties with the Nation of Islam—was assassinated in Harlem, allegedly by Black Muslims angered by his defection and changing politics. After his death Malcolm X became a symbol of radical black nationalism for a new generation of activists. Later that summer, the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in a massive riot of destruction and violence. The frustrations of young urban blacks in the North exploded in subsequent uprisings across the nation. In the midst of this maelstrom were two students at Merritt College in Oakland, California, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who were active in the school’s black student union. The pair were avid readers of Muhammad Speaks and were influenced by the writings of Malcolm X, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon, among others. They sought to establish an organization with ties to the local community that would give expression to this mounting climate of black rage. On 15 October 1966 they founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, with a ten-point platform that was wholly reminiscent of the Nation of Islam’s statement of goals. In addition to demands for full employment, housing, education, and self-determination, Newton and Seale focused on the problem of police harassment. They organized a handful of recruits to monitor the activities of the Oakland Police and started armed patrols of their neighborhoods.22 Their newspaper, the Black Panther Black Community News Service, was launched in April 1967 following an incident in which a twenty-two-year-old black man named Denzil Dowell was shot and killed by the police. The periodical would go through several name changes until it was shortened to the Black Panther and settled into a weekly publication cycle. If Muhammad Speaks was a radical child of the black press, the Black Panther was more akin to the underground press of the sixties. As James Danky notes in chapter 15, periodicals such as the Los Angeles Free Press (1964) and Berkeley Barb (1965) were the unconventional voice of the New Left and antiwar movements. They used racy language and confrontational politics to inspire and mobilize would-be young revolutionaries. Newton and Seale produced a hybrid of these influences.23 The first issue of the Black Panther was a four-page mimeograph sheet with crude, hand-drawn graphics and typed text. The headline screamed “Why Was T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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Denzil Dowell Killed?” and the accompanying article declared that the incident was a case of police brutality and that the Black Panthers were organizing themselves to resist this problem. There was also an announcement for a meeting to strategize further about the issue. The Panthers distributed six thousand free copies around the Bay Area, and the paper attracted immediate attention. The fledgling group appeared on local television as it led a protest outside of police headquarters, and potential recruits started showing up at Black Panther meetings. The newspaper was Newton’s brainchild, and he understood its organizational and propaganda utility. In that first issue he wrote, “Lacking access to the radio, television, or any other of the mass media, we needed an alternative means of communication . . . a way of interpreting events to the community from a Black perspective.”24 Over the next few months, the paper evolved into a polished, professionally printed broadsheet with a regular staff headed by Eldridge Cleaver, the party’s minister of information and a former columnist for Ramparts magazine (fig. 16.3). The Black Panther was startlingly different from Muhammad Speaks in both politics and appearance. The Panthers employed a bold, inflammatory rhetorical style that emphasized community resistance and armed conflict with symbols of power. The organization eschewed separatist black politics, instead making an all-encompassing appeal to Third World revolutionaries and white radicals. Phrases like “All Power to the People” were emblazoned on the front page and became popular chants at marches and demonstrations. For the Panthers, the chief enemy was the state and its system of law enforcement, and the word “pig” was used almost universally to denote the police. The Black Panther did join Muhammad Speaks in denouncing the black middle-class in its pages, using symbolic devices like its weekly “Bootlickers Gallery” to vilify African Americans who criticized their politics or who chose to work for “the man.” The paper also devoted considerable space to the growing network of Black Panther chapters across the country, as well as anticolonial organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The paper, which often had as many as sixteen pages, reported on instances of police brutality, the plight of political prisoners, and the developments of the antiwar movement. It served to establish the organization as a unifying force for all radical activism in the United States. Guns and the threat of violence were another departure from the Nation of Islam’s strategies. The Panthers used weapons as a staple graphic device that created the aura of a paramilitary organization. Early issues had a picture of a machine gun with the words “The Sky’s the Limit” on the front-page flag. By 1968 the paper made a martyr of the imprisoned Huey Newton, depicting him on the flag in full revolutionary regalia, including his signature black beret, a rifle, and an ammunition belt slung across his shoulder. The party’s main art298
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FIGURE 16.3. Following their flight into exile in Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver is shown with Black Panther communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver and their newborn son. Black Panther, 16 August 1969. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
ist, Emory Douglass, created an array of cartoons and illustrations he called “revolutionary art” that ridiculed the civil rights establishment, demonized the police, and created “a visual image of black power and revolutionary martyrdom that hinged on potent black masculinity and patriarchal authority.” In every issue there were comics featuring dedicated black revolutionaries—men, women, and children—brandishing guns, holding off the police, or stashing an arsenal for the coming war.25 The party leadership saw the newspaper as a vital organizing tool. In an early issue, the front page was dominated by the now-famous photograph of Newton sitting in a rattan chair holding a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. Under the headline “In Defense of Self Defense,” Newton expounded on the group’s ideology and the necessity for starting the publication. “It is of prime T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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importance that the vanguard party develop a political organ, such as a newspaper produced by the party, as well as employ strategically revolutionary art and destruction of the oppressor’s machinery,” he wrote. A running motto for the paper was: “A Newspaper is the Voice of a Party, the voice of the Panther must be heard throughout the land.” This theme was repeated regularly as the Panthers recruited writers, photographers, clerical workers, and distribution staff who labored for the paper voluntarily. The editors of the Black Panther also reminded their audience that the act of reading the newspaper was evidence of their revolutionary inclinations, noting that their publications offered “needed alternatives to the ‘government approved’ stories presented in the racist mass media.” The press was so crucial to the work of the organization that within a year the Black Panthers published a variety of spin-offs, such as an occasional paper called the Ministry of Information Bulletin, and numerous books, pamphlets, flyers, and posters.26 As it was for the Nation of Islam, distribution of the newspaper was an important activity for party members; each chapter or cadre was expected to sell a set number of copies. By 1968 Bobby Seale claimed the paper had a circulation of 125,000, and by 1970 the circulation was estimated at 140,000. The Black Panther thus became a regular source of income for the organization. The rapid and widespread growth of the newspaper attracted the attention of the FBI, which had launched a major counterintelligence program to eliminate the Black Panthers, whom it deemed a subversive group. The Black Panther was a target of these efforts. The publishers were dependent on commercial airlines to ship the paper across the United States, and there were multiple incidents of the papers being lost or damaged en route. The Panthers accused the airlines of sabotage and filed multiple claims for compensation. On other occasions, they accused the FBI of spraying chemicals on the papers bundled for distribution, and in 1971 the circulation director Sam Napier was mysteriously murdered.27 By the end of the sixties, Muhammad Speaks and the Black Panther reached more readers than the mainstream black press. They also demonstrated that there was a market for provocative, sometimes outrageous, black nationalist politics and culture. In the period 1969–72 the circulation of Muhammad Speaks rose to 650,000, according to the editor at the time, John Woodford. The paper was so successful that the publishers bought their own color press and printing plant in New York, and it was distributed widely in Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. But factionalism within the NOI and resistance to innovative journalism spelled the paper’s demise. Woodford left the editorship in 1972 after being informed that the NOI leadership intended to denounce him because the paper’s news content went against “The Messenger’s” point of view. When 300
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Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, the newspaper gradually disappeared; its replacement, the Bilalian News never attained the same visibility and folded a few years later.28 The Black Panther was also subject to the changes of power and politics in its parent organization. In 1970 Eldridge Cleaver went into exile in Algeria and was expelled from the party, and in 1974 Bobby Seale resigned from the party and Huey Newton fled to Cuba to escape government prosecution. Elaine Brown, a former editor of the paper, became chair of the party. Brown kept the paper going with an increasing emphasis on local and national politics, according to one study. The Black Panther became less ideological and more news oriented, abandoning the flamboyant use of guns and violent rhetoric that attracted widespread attention. But by 1978, after Newton’s return, the paper stopped publishing on a weekly basis. It folded in 1980, although there have been several new versions of The Black Panther published since the early 1990s.29 Many have tried but none have succeeded in capturing the spirit of these publications, which epitomized very distinct strands of radical black nationalism in the United States. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Muhammad Speaks and the Black Panther were newspapers with a clear political imperative—to inspire and mobilize black Americans to resist racial discrimination and oppression. They were also necessary for recruiting adherents dispersed across a wide geographic terrain. African Americans who never seriously considered joining the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam nevertheless found an empowering message in their pages—a call to black solidarity and political consciousness, and a rejection of the mainstream politics that offered halting progress, at best. By the late 1960s these newspapers could be found across black America. They were regular fixtures in black households, and it was common to see people reading them on subways and buses, in schoolyards, and at the myriad political events that marked these times. As the urgency and tactics of the sixties disappeared, so did the periodicals that were the underpinnings of these movements. Despite the predictions of doom, the black press in the twenty-first century continues to exist as an alternative to the constantly shrinking, corporateowned mainstream press. The essential difference between the contemporary black press and its predecessors is size. There are few remaining black publications that qualify as mass circulation—perhaps the venerable Ebony magazine and a handful of newspapers. But Ebony’s circulation dropped 8.5 percent (to 1.4 million) in 2005 and has not fully rebounded. At the end of the twentieth century, New York City’s Amsterdam News struggled to hold onto a circulation of just 26,000, a 50 percent drop from the mid-1960s. In many metropolitan areas once dominated by a single newspaper, the black press now offers a range T HE B L AC K P R E S S A N D R A D I CA L P RI NT CU LT U RE
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of smaller enterprises. For example, in New York, the Amsterdam News has been supplanted by newer upstarts like the City Sun, a popular weekly, and small, neighborhood-based sheets. San Francisco’s Sun-Reporter, which has covered the city’s black community since World War II, has diversified in its quest for survival. Today, the Sun-Reporter has absorbed smaller publications, and now owns the Metro Reporter and the California Voice, generating a combined readership of 600,000 across the Bay Area. In Chicago, the survival of the Chicago Defender has been an issue of concern since the death of its owner, John Sengstacke, in 1997 (fig. 16.4). His estate owed $4 million in taxes, and the company languished in receivership for six years before being sold in 2002. Now the Defender, a shadow of its former self with a circulation of just 15,000, hopes to establish a younger audience interested in contemporary affairs.30 The Internet may be the best source for creating a reinvigorated black press. One recent study suggests that publishers are beginning to “reconsider what constitutes the black press now that the age of cyberspace all but removes brick
FIGURE 16.4. John H. H. Sengstacke (left) succeeded his uncle Robert S. Abbott as editor of the Chicago Defender in 1940. He started the Chicago Daily Defender in 1956 and remained its editor and publisher until his death in 1997. Courtesy of the Chicago Defender. 302
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and mortar obstacles to mass publishing operations.” The Chicago Defender, like the Charlotte Post and the Afro-American Group (which includes the Baltimore Afro-American), have turned to online versions and podcasts to attract and sustain readers in the digital age. The transition to the Internet offers new hope for an institution that still has a role to play in disseminating the politics and aspirations of black Americans.31
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CHAPTER 17
Where the Customer Is King The Textbook in American Culture Jonathan Zimmerman
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On 22 November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald forever etched the Texas Schoolbook Depository onto the American popular memory. Perched atop a carton of Think and Do workbooks on the depository’s sixth floor, Oswald gunned down the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.1 Few Texans seemed to give much thought to Think and Do, which accompanied a “basal reading” series for elementary schools. Already, however, the state’s high school textbooks had sparked considerable controversy. Two years earlier, a group called Texans for America charged that history texts’ discussions of the New Deal and the United Nations promoted delinquency, communism, and “one-worldism” among Lone Star teenagers. After the assassination, debate shifted to a different subject: biology. Developed with several large federal grants, a new series of biology texts boasted a “thorough, unbiased, and scientifically objective presentation” of “organic evolution.” But this very feature caught the attention of fundamentalist Christians, who converged upon Austin in 1964 to block the books’ adoption. Some critics feared that the texts would lay the groundwork for “Godless Communism,” while others—capitalizing upon Kennedy’s death—said that instruction about evolution would spawn “another Lee Harvey Oswald.”2 The two sets of Texans bore one crucial similarity: both won changes in the texts. “In any selling situation the salesman wants to give customers what they want,” explained a publisher of the biology books. “If the customer wants strawberries and cream, the salesman tries to give it to him.” Fundamentalists wanted evolution depicted as a “theory” rather than a “fact,” so the books were altered accordingly; a decade later, four of five Texas biology textbooks omitted any mention of evolution at all. Likewise, all but one of the history books were changed to meet the demands of Texans for America. The lone exception was a commercial flop, eschewed by school districts because of its frank examination of slavery and Native American history. The book went out of print and its publisher merged with McGraw-Hill, a much larger company that saw no reason to
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revive it. To placate critics in the urban North, however, the company soon announced that its new textbooks would devote at least 25 percent of their pages to racial and ethnic minorities.3 Bracketing America’s emblematic postwar tragedy, these episodes help illuminate a second, less dramatic one: the complacent, compliant quality of its public school textbooks. For the next half century, a wide array of citizens worked to strip almost every trace of controversy from the books. A rigid, monotonal nationalism permeated textbooks in the 1950s and early 1960s, when any good word for Franklin Roosevelt—let alone civil rights—drew charges of “subversion” from patriotic societies. After that, racial minorities and women’s groups pressed publishers to recognize—and, increasingly, to celebrate—their distinctive cultures, histories, and heritage. Often aligned against these activists, finally, fundamentalist Christians invoked a nearly identical argument. They too had a “culture,” the fundamentalists insisted, so texts should award them “equal time”—and, most of all, equal deference. As a result, America’s textbooks became more “diverse” but stayed every bit as dull. Swamped by a host of new constituencies, publishers struggled to eliminate any material that might offend one camp or another. Happily, book companies heeded African American demands and removed much of the outright racism that had plagued texts since public schools began. But they often substituted a new set of myths about ethnic harmony and equality, reinforcing the books’ bland, cheerily upbeat tone of progress and prosperity. To placate the so-called religious Right, meanwhile, publishers pared discussions of sex, reproduction, and evolution from texts in literature and history as well as science. Controversy swirled above the books, in other words, but almost never within them. To be sure, citizen pressure groups were not the sole culprit in this bleak winter’s tale. Throughout the postwar period, a strong tradition of local control in American education hamstrung federal efforts to improve textbooks. Congress helped create alternative books, as in the Texas biology episode, but it could not require states or school districts to adopt them. At the same time, ironically, certain states obtained an unofficial stranglehold over the national market. Here, again, the Texas example is instructive: when Lone Star schools rejected the lone text that decried racial discrimination, the publisher also dropped it. The company’s absorption into a larger firm adds a third crucial theme to the story: the relentless conglomeration of the American textbook industry. Starting in the mid-1980s and continuing through the 1990s, a small set of publishers gained control of the market. Even as text consumers railed against evolution, publishers seemed intent upon demonstrating its supposed corollary: survival of the fittest. Whereas Darwinian theory predicts for a widening diversity of T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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species, however, textbook conglomeration had the opposite effect: fewer companies and fewer choices. American capitalism conspired with American federalism to produce the modern textbook, a multicolored monument to educational monotony. This chapter aims to describe and interpret these developments, drawing upon scattered manuscript sources, the small historical literature on postwar textbooks, and the textbooks themselves. It begins with brief surveys of textbook publishing, state and local text adoption systems, and the mostly futile federal attempts to influence both. The chapter then examines the “3 Rs” of postwar textbook politics—Reds, Race, and Religion—explaining how each arena of conflict altered textbooks’ content. It concludes with a few remarks about the future of textbooks, examining them in light of new technologies, teacher professionalism, and the broader context of American school politics.
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Funds for Dick and Jane: The Postwar Publishing Industry America’s textbook industry emerged slowly from the Second World War, showing little sign of the enormous growth to follow. The GI Bill and subsequent baby boom swelled demand for texts, but shortages in paper and cloth kept publishers from meeting it. By 1958, however, nationwide sales had doubled. More than seventy-five firms charged after the textbook trade, generating “a wider choice of comparatively inexpensive products,” as one observer noted. In an industry marked by short production runs and frequent new editions, he added, any trend toward concentration or monopoly seemed “most unlikely.”4 The next few years seemed to bear him out. Sales accelerated at an astronomic pace, nearly quadrupling by 1967, but the industry remained remarkably decentralized. Although Scott Foresman’s Elson-Gray primers—known colloquially as the “Dick and Jane” books—continued to dominate the basal reading field, for example, at least seventeen other companies produced a competing series for grades 1–8. The most successful high school product was probably Harcourt Brace’s Adventures in Modern Literature, a multiedition anthology that reached more than 100 million students by 1969. To compete with the burgeoning paperback market, Harcourt also published the fifteen-volume Adventures in Good Books series. Each volume contained four complete novels, plus introductions, study questions, and footnotes. Several companies also designed special “Cathedral” or “Cardinal Newman” anthologies for the parochial school market, adding popular Catholic authors and subtracting any stories that might offend their readers.5 306
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Although prosperity continued into the 1980s, the number of competing firms fell sharply. Development costs skyrocketed to $35 million or even $40 million for a new textbook series, pushing smaller companies out of the market or into one of the emerging conglomerates. By 1988 ten publishers controlled 70 percent of the American textbook business; two years later, the so-called “Big Three”—Macmillan, Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster—owned nearly half of it. Profits lagged in the early 1990s, as school enrollments and educational expenditures declined. But the industry rebounded later in the decade, spurred by a healthy overall economy and the move toward state-mandated standards and testing. Textbook purchases rose 13 percent in 1997 alone to $3 billion, the strongest sales gain in any category of the $21 billion book market. Conglomeration also continued, as the top ten textbook companies increased their market share to 83 percent. More than a quarter of the American trade was controlled by a single firm, the British media giant Pearson PLC, which acquired Simon & Schuster’s educational division in 1998.6
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Color My Words: Trends in Textbook Production and Adoption In every subject, the merger trend curtailed the range of available textbooks. Schools could choose from nine different textbook series to teach music in the 1960s, but only three by 1990; during the same era, the number of basal reading series on the market halved. Frequently produced by a “team” of more than 100 authors, editors, and designers, many individual textbooks swelled to 600 or 700 large-format pages. But actual text declined, thanks to an explosion of photos, maps, charts, and diagrams as well as glossaries, indexes, and “suggested activities.” By the early 1980s, for example, only 53 percent of the pages in high school civics books were devoted to expository text. The proportion of text was even smaller at the elementary level, plummeting to 21 percent in one firstgrade science book. The trend was sparked in part by new technologies, which made graphic design both easier and cheaper. As video entertainment saturated youth culture, moreover, publishers presumed that colorful new features would appeal to the “MTV generation” of students. Most of all, though, illustrations were expanded to catch the eye of state and local text selection committees. Responsible for reviewing hundreds of books, these panels too often judged them based upon their colors—or, worse, their covers—rather than upon their intellectual content.7 Even as words became scarcer, meanwhile, they also became simpler. From the 1920s until the mid-1960s, the number of different words in textbooks—the “vocabulary load”—dropped steadily. With more and more children attending T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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school, educators feared that complicated terminology or syntax would confuse many young minds. Simpler vocabulary also reflected the popular method of “sight-reading,” which stressed word recognition and comprehension rather than phonics. Textbooks edged toward a phonetic approach in the 1960s, adding a few more words and challenging readers to “sound them out.” But the pendulum swung back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when “whole-language” instruction—a latter-day incarnation of sight-reading—spurred yet another simplification. In 1998 a national panel of specialists urged teachers to transcend “the polemics of the past” by combining phonetic and whole-language methods. But most textbooks retained their facile style, as publishers installed computer programs to limit sentence length and to weed out words deemed too difficult for juvenile readers.8 Most of these trends started in Texas and California, the pacemakers of postwar textbook publishing. Swelled by America’s demographic shift to the Sun Belt, the two states now account for 20 percent of text sales nationwide. Yet their real influence stems from their statewide adoption systems, which compel text companies to heed their wishes. Texas approves five textbooks in each subject area for every grade, requiring schools to choose from them; California gives local districts slightly more leeway, approving state texts for grades 1–8 only and allowing districts to select other books (although schools forfeit state textbook funds if they do so). Twenty other states adopt textbooks at a central level, but none exerts the sway of Texas or California: for publishers in an evertightening field of battle, either state’s approval can literally mean the difference between life and death. Companies spend millions of dollars lobbying state officials, often dispensing free equipment and discounted books to key decision makers. Most of all, though, they tailor their wares to meet the specifications of both states. Between 1975 and 1986, for example, at least a quarter of the changes in American basal reading texts stemmed directly from a Texas or California mandate.9 Most commonly, these requirements concerned books’ “social content.” Under a 1976 California law, for example, texts must portray “the necessity for the protection of our environment.” To win state approval, then, one publisher was forced to supplement a section on whale-hunting with material regarding whales’ near extinction. Another company removed a picture of a slingshot, to comply with the text safety code; two other publishers deleted references to pizza and ice cream, which violated the California stricture against depictions of “junk food.” Until 1984, Texas required that biology textbooks grant “equal time” to creationism and evolution; to this day, the state bars books that “undermine authority” or “encourage life styles deviating from generally accepted standards.” For publishers, however, the most important mandates 308
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surrounded the representation of minorities and women in textbooks. Such regulations were loosely worded, often requiring only that texts provide an “accurate recording” of America’s “cultural and racial diversity.” Yet to carry out the new rules—and to save time—text committees simply counted the raw number of women and minorities who appeared in textbooks; increasingly, in fact, committees based their adoption decisions solely upon that measure. So publishers reacted in kind, preparing in-house “tally sheets” on race and gender and issuing new content guidelines about the desirable percentages of each. By the mid-1990s, two leading fourth-grade reading books devoted 73 and 64 percent of their respective contents to ethnic or non-European subjects; among sixth-grade basal readers, four of the leading six books gave at least half of their pages to these topics.10 The adoption of a new state textbook is a labyrinthine affair, involving a maze of school officials, publishers, and private citizens. Consider Texas’s 1980 selection of basal reading texts for its 4 million elementary and junior high school readers. Twelve companies pursued this lucrative prize, which promised to generate upward of $7 million for each of the five publishers that the state chose. A fifteen-member State Textbook Committee performed the first set of evaluations, soliciting critiques of the submitted books from citizen “petitioners” as well as answers to these complaints from publishers. Over a four-month period, it collected more than 3,100 pages of complaints and responses. Amassed in thirteen volumes, some of the complaints focused upon simple spelling or grammar errors. A few others concerned visual presentation: in one bizarre case, a protester even hired an optometrist to argue that a reading series using horizontal and vertical formats would injure students’ eyes. For the most part, though, citizens claimed that the textbooks transgressed one or more of Texas’s numerous restrictions on content. To one petitioner, for example, a story about a young boy who stole money violated the state ban on classroom materials that “encourage or condone . . . disrespect for the law.”11 The State Textbook Committee conducted week-long hearings on the texts, then selected five basal reading series and two alternates. Next, it presented its recommendations—and all of the written and oral testimony it had collected— to the Texas Education Agency. Over the next six weeks, agency staff members read the testimony and the textbooks (more than 150 books in all) and identified ninety-nine different changes that the books would need to make in order to win adoption. The state’s education commissioner approved these suggestions and submitted them to the State Board of Education, along with a two-volume, 1074-page “distillation” of the most important citizen and publisher testimony. The board then conducted its own hearings, allowing petitioners yet another opportunity to air their grievances. When the board finally approved the five T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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series, more than six months after the process began, it instructed the commissioner to study the possible use of supplementary texts that “emphasize the intensive phonics approach to reading.” This caveat sought to soothe so-called “Christian conservatives,” whose favored texts—stressing phonics over wholelanguage instruction—had failed to win adoption.12
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Capital Gains? The Federal Government and American Textbooks The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 helped spur the shift toward ethnic diversity in textbooks, providing federal assistance to schools for the purchase of “multi-racial” materials. Likewise, the 1974 Woman’s Educational Equity Act funded the creation and dissemination of “non-sexist” instructional items. In each case, however, Congress merely piggybacked a small amount of money onto a movement that was well underway at state and local levels. By contrast, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 made the federal government a key player in textbook development. Sparked by the Soviet Union’s orbiting of its Sputnik satellite the previous year, the act authorized more than $1 billion to help American schools and colleges keep up with their communist competitors. At first, the act did not earmark any funds for textbook development. By converting education into a weapon of the Cold War, however, it inspired a vast federal effort to transform American texts.13 Most congressional textbook money came through the National Science Foundation (NSF), which increased its aid to science education fivefold in 1958 alone. By 1978 the NSF had distributed roughly $500 million to more than fifty different curriculum development projects. Best known was the Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC), a group of university and secondary school physics teachers who galvanized in 1956 around Jerrold R. Zacharias of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reviewing physics textbooks, the group was appalled at their “applied,” anti-intellectual cast: in place of classical topics like light and electricity, texts emphasized the physics of “ordinary” subjects such as sports, automobiles, and washing machines. With the aid of more than $6 million in NSF grants, the PSSC produced four new textbooks that presented physics not as a “mere body of facts” but rather as “a continuing process by which men seek to understand the nature of the physical world,” as the first volume proclaimed. Each of the succeeding texts also stressed investigation over “content” and “coverage,” examining a few select topics in theoretical and even historical depth. By studying the actual construction of knowledge over time, the PSSC maintained, students would be encouraged to develop their own theories rather than simply imbibing them from a book—or from a teacher.14 310
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A nearly identical emphasis marked a second major NSF initiative, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). It spent four years and $8 million in federal funds to develop three new textbooks, stressing “investigative processes” over “authoritative content,” as a 1963 BSCS text noted. Like the PSSC, the BSCS also produced laboratory guides and teacher manuals to accompany each textbook. Both series were moderately successful on the market. In the end, however, neither project revolutionized science education in the manner that its progenitors had imagined. Only 11 percent of high school physics instructors used a PSSC book by 1975, often in conjunction with precisely the sort of “applied” approaches that the series was designed to replace: bridling at the PSSC’s ivory-tower utopianism, teachers frequently substituted “practical” demonstrations for the texts’ singular focus upon laboratory experiments. The BSCS textbooks made a wider initial splash, reaching more than a third of America’s 2 million biology students by 1965. Yet the books’ use tapered off in the 1970s, when their frank exploration of human evolution came under fire from Christian fundamentalists. Adopted a decade earlier by Texas, always the bellwether in textbook politics, all three BSCS books were rejected by the state in 1974 under a new policy requiring texts to describe evolution as only “one of several explanations” for life’s origins.15 Yet the NSF’s forays into the social sciences generated the sharpest controversies of all. Starting in the early 1960s, about five years after its physics and biology efforts began, the foundation funded a wide range of curriculum projects that became collectively known as the “New Social Studies.” The central figure in this movement was Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, who argued that schools should try to teach children the “structure” of each discipline—its fundamental principles, methods, and questions—rather than mere “facts” or “information”; indeed, students needed that structure in order to grasp and remember old “facts” as well as to organize and interpret new ones. Like reformers in the hard sciences, then, Bruner favored curricula—and textbooks—that examined a small number of topics in depth. But this approach also reflected a palpable disdain for classroom teachers, whose supposed predilection for factual minutiae seemed to quell students’ quest for actual knowledge. Teachers responded with similar contempt, citing their own knowledge of student needs: whereas many “new” social studies texts skipped aimlessly from one “world problem” to another, teachers argued, children in the real world required the comprehensive, fact-driven narrative that traditional textbooks provided. Indeed, Bruner and his followers often failed to justify the facts that they did choose to include in their curricula. Asked why his NSF-funded social studies course for fifth graders centered upon the Netsilik Eskimos, Bruner blithely quipped, “Why not?”16 T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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As reflected by its title, Man: A Course of Study, Bruner’s fifth-grade curriculum used the Eskimo example to probe the broadest questions of human existence: what makes people unique, and how did they get that way? Its “text” was a series of thirty booklets, supplemented by nine teacher’s guides, six hours of film, and a vast array of other materials. The MACOS project won warm accolades from other educators but a cold shoulder from publishers, who dreaded its mammoth cost ($8 per student per year, more than eight times the average allotment for social studies) and its complicated, multimedia format. They also worried that a course drawing mostly upon anthropology—and focusing mainly upon a single group of Eskimos—would not fit the traditional American social studies sequence, in which fifth graders studied U.S. history. Most importantly, publishers feared that some MACOS material would insult religious conservatives—and inhibit its adoption in the schools.17 On the last count, especially, the publishers could not have been more prescient. After more than three years and more than three dozen rejections, MACOS finally received a commercial contract from a small firm. Shortly thereafter, though, right-wing citizen groups began a sustained, coordinated, and ultimately successful campaign to destroy the course. “Who is this Bruner person to indoctrinate our children with such unwholesome thoughts?” asked a Florida parent, in a typical attack. “What possible purpose can there be in spending all of this time learning about the social structure of the herring gull or baboon or the Netsilik Eskimo where there is our own country’s history and background to learn about?” The textbooks’ focus upon diversity across species and cultures supposedly encouraged “Marxist revolution” and “Humanist revolt,” the twin bogeymen of postwar conservative textbook attacks. By the time Congress defunded MACOS in 1975, humanism had trumped communism: critics skewered the course for encouraging atheism and sexual promiscuity, not slavishness to the Soviet Union. The MACOS battle marked a bridge between these fears, which would each exact an enormous toll upon the nation’s textbooks.18
Citizen Attacks I: Seeing “Red,” 1946–1961 Although attacks upon allegedly “Red” textbooks stretched back to the First World War, they accelerated sharply during the anticommunist fervor that followed World War II. Their initial target was Building America, a three-volume social studies series issued by the curriculum arm of the National Education Association in 1947. Published a decade earlier as separate pamphlets, each of the volumes’ 10 chapters probed a different aspect of American or foreign society. Domestic chapter headings included “Family Life,” “Civil Liberties,” and “The American Indian,” while other units examined China, Russia, Africa, 312
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and Europe. When the books came up for consideration in California, however, the Sons of the American Revolution charged them with spreading “class consciousness” as well as “international socialism.” The state board of education responded by approving the texts pending several revisions, including the insertion of right-wing objections to the growth of the federal government. Yet even after these changes, conservatives claimed, the books remained “a blueprint for radicals and agitators.” Enlisting the aid of Jack B. Tenney, fire-breathing chair of California’s Un-American Activities Committee, critics persuaded the legislature to block its appropriation for Building America in 1947. The publisher let its California contract lapse, and the series soon went out of print.19 Over the next four years, social studies textbooks across America suffered a similar spate of revision and rejection. The central catalyst in this effort was a small tear sheet called the Educational Reviewer, which began publication in 1949 with a modest stipend from conservative stalwart William F. Buckley Sr. Its first issue included a scathing attack upon Frank Magruder’s American Government, the nation’s most popular civics text. The review passed into the hands of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, who authorized a long series of articles condemning Magruder’s “pink” proclivities. By 1952 two states and dozens of cities had removed the text. It made a small comeback during the next few years, when its publisher pared away the most controversial passages and overall text criticism waned. But attacks resumed with the launching of Sputnik and the subsequent publication of English professor E. Merrill Root’s Brainwashing in the High Schools, an exposé of “Marxian collectivism” in history textbooks. Most notoriously, Root claimed that reading “Red” texts as youngsters had caused U.S. prisoners to succumb to communist indoctrination during the Korean War. The claim found its way into a wide array of right-wing assaults upon textbooks, including a film entitled The Ultimate Weapon. Shown to text adoption committees across the country, it was narrated by a well-known Hollywood actor: Ronald W. Reagan.20 Two general themes marked conservative textbook attacks in the late 1940s and 1950s. The first concerned texts’ praise of the United Nations, which supposedly threatened to drown American sovereignty and identity in the sweet syrup of “one-worldism.” Immediately after its birth, textbooks did commend the UN: in the 1948 and 1949 editions of American Government, for example, Magruder celebrated its early peace-keeping work and proclaimed it “more than worth the little money” that the United States provided for it. In 1952, however, Georgia adopted the book on the condition that it delete its discussion of the United Nations; by the following year, much of this material had disappeared. As late as 1961, another social studies text replaced an entire chapter about the UN with the flag manual of the American Legion, a leader in many rightT H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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wing textbook campaigns. Yet most attacks upon the UN in texts had dissipated by the mid-1950s, when conservatives began to rethink their postwar aversion to American global intervention. Right-wingers increasingly demanded a more interventionist foreign policy than liberal Democrats, embracing anything that would help counter the communist menace—including, at times, the United Nations.21 On the domestic front, meanwhile, 1950s conservatives challenged the spirit—if not always the content—of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, especially its sharp expansion of state power at the expense of the individual. Rightwingers labeled this evil “collectivism,” the second major target of textbook attacks. Texts were partial toward government regulation and control, critics charged, moving America ever closer to its Red rivals: like socialism and communism, detractors argued, the welfare state subordinated personal initiative and responsibility to the autocratic whims of “society.” Of course, this viewpoint unjustly tarred a vast range of liberal Americans with the same subversive brush. But textbooks did favor the welfare state, at least in the years directly following World War II. Even the chair of a National Education Association committee to rebut right-wing attacks acknowledged this bias, which was most clearly visible in the Building America series. “Our Nation Is Fortunate but Many Are Insecure,” read the title of its chapter on Social Security. “Many people think that the system should be expanded,” the text continued.22 Publishers initially responded to these attacks by adding right-wing perspectives, so that students could see “both sides” of any given issue. For example, Building America’s revised Social Security unit started with the heading, “Our People Hold Different Points of View”; the chapter went on to note that critics “fear the Act will encourage people to be lazy.” But many conservatives bridled at this approach, too, fearing that it would simply confuse children or—even worse—soften them to radical appeals. “Giving the same emphasis to all points of view, good and bad, and letting immature minds make decisions without guidance, is just what the propagandists want,” declared Lucille Crain, editor of the Educational Reviewer. “Truth and falsehood are not equal; there is no equality between right and wrong.”23 Starting in the early 1960s, racial minorities and then religious fundamentalists would leaven this rigid, monolithic view with a more open, pluralistic one. They would alter American textbooks forever, although often in a direction quite different from the one they foresaw.
Citizen Attacks II: Revising “Race,” 1961–1991 Like right-wing attacks upon “Red” texts, African American complaints about bigotry in textbooks dated back to the start of the century. The black campaign 314
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also picked up steam in the wake of World War II, when the struggle against Nazi racism brought American prejudice into broad relief. A 1949 report on textbooks by the American Council of Education confirmed what black citizens already knew: texts either ignored African Americans altogether or depicted them as clownish, obsequious simpletons. The worst offenders were history books. In California, a text claimed that American slaves had “worked away quite cheerfully”; in New York, that they enjoyed “a happy life”; and in Virginia, that they received “comprehensive social security.” In their accounts of Reconstruction, by contrast, textbooks transformed the docile African American into a scheming thief who robbed—or, even worse, raped—innocent whites. The books drew scattered protest from blacks in the North, who especially condemned a text by liberal historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager that described the American slave as a happy-go-lucky “Sambo.” A miffed Morison refused to remove this language, noting that “Sambo” had been his own nickname—and that his own daughter had married Joel Spingarn, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).24 By 1962, however, the book had been revised to stress slaves’ suffering and rebellion. The previous year marked a burst of activism against racist textbooks, spurred by the sit-in movement in the South as well as the centennial of the Civil War. The NAACP urged history textbooks to “present the contribution of the Negro to American culture,” echoing a report by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Yet protesters also started to indict texts in other subject areas, focusing particularly upon the all-white cast of basal reading books. A 1962 cartoon showed a black mother reading a first-grade primer to her daughter, who asks plaintively, “Where Am I”? The caption gave the answer: “Still Missing.” Aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Follett Company released a mixedrace reading series; other publishers followed suit, so that by 1966 the NAACP could proudly report that 175 elementary texts had “integrated” their pages. Concern then shifted back to history books, which omitted the most offensive slurs against blacks but continued to overlook much of their past. An important exception was Land of the Free, a 1966 textbook developed to meet California’s new requirement that texts “correctly portray” racial minorities. Coauthored by black historian John Hope Franklin, the text stressed the deeds as well as the difficulties of African Americans, Indians, and women. It also celebrated recent civil rights gains, which brought the nation closer to its professed ideal of “government by the people,” the book claimed. “Most Americans agree that this trend should continue,” it added.25 Across America, however, the book’s reception suggested otherwise. Just as the threat of integrated schools and communities sparked “massive resistance” among whites, so did “integrated” textbooks. Opposition was strongest in the T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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southern states, which especially reviled grade-school readers that showed black boys and white girls in the same illustrations. To maintain sales, then, publishers often hawked so-called “mint julep” books—that is, all-white editions—below the Mason-Dixon Line, even as they promoted integrated texts above it. Yet multiracial books also met resistance in the North and West, reflecting whites’ mounting antipathy toward civil rights in both regions. In Philadelphia, for example, white critics suggested “removing to the suburbs” rather than submitting to the integrated textbooks of “human relations salesmen”; likewise, white Californians condemned Land of the Free for exaggerating both the suffering and the successes of African Americans. Showing their true colors, however, the same whites who complained about the excess of black heroes in new textbooks—especially Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ralph Bunche—claimed that these leaders were not really “black” at all. “That man Bunche . . . is around 75 percent white and COMES FROM GERMAN JEW STOCK,” ran a typically racist jeremiad, “and has never used the Jungle brains of his Negro ancestors.”26 Even as black demands sparked change, then, white reaction slowed its pace. By 1968 the Kerner Commission report on urban riots called for more textbooks that addressed “the harsh realities of life in the ghetto” as well as “the contribution of Negroes to the country’s culture and history.” Increasingly, however, African American activists and whites rejected these twin approaches. Of course, their reasons were different: whereas whites worried that “integrated” reading primers would promote interracial love, for example, blacks condemned them for reinforcing stereotypes about the races. In the first edition of its pathbreaking integrated reading series, for example, Follett sparked loud black protest for picturing matriarchal African American families who lived in brownstones and played on the stoop. Future editions depicted two-parent households with neat lawns and morning milk delivery, causing other blacks to complain that the books merely “colored some of the children brown,” as prominent psychologist Kenneth B. Clark argued. Texts should depict tough inner-city realities such as poverty and “broken homes,” Clark insisted, lest schools alienate young black readers. Yet his was a minority voice among American minorities in the late 1960s, when a vast array of groups—Latinos, American Indians, Asians, and blacks—argued that textbooks should reflect “aspirations instead of reality,” as one publisher gingerly surmised.27 Occasionally, these groups clashed with each other. In California, for example, Chicanos and Asians both claimed that Land of the Free gave too much attention to the black experience—and not enough to their own. By the early 1970s, meanwhile, another long-neglected constituency began to influence American textbooks: women. Feminist groups pressed publishers to adopt new 316
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antisexist guidelines, which generally directed texts to depict women in a wide variety of roles. As in the case of racial representation, however, many companies responded by requiring a simple “head count”—that is, a percentage of female characters and illustrations in every textbook. Moreover, even sympathetic publishers often discovered that they could not meet their “goals” or “quotas”—terms borrowed from the affirmative action debate—without distorting America’s actual social circumstances. Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s in-house guidelines specified that texts should avoid showing American Indians “in low-paying jobs, unemployed, or on welfare”; yet as an editor admitted, “the reality for the Indian in our society falls into all of the avoids.” On matters of race and ethnicity, then, publishers made a calculated decision to alter “reality.” By 1987, for example, female characters in basal readers were more likely to be spies, shepherds, or anthropologists than homemakers.28 Especially in the field of history, finally, the burgeoning “diversity” of textbooks begged two crucial questions: Can different Americans be woven into a single story? And who should determine the answer? In the 1960s and 1970s, textbook activists reached an informal, ethnoracial modus operandi: each group could insert its own heroes and stories into the text, provided that no group interfered with the larger narrative of progress in democracy that was captured in the books’ titles—The Great Republic, Land of Promise, and so on. Yet the bargain began to fall apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when some minorities questioned the entire goal of a shared culture or past. Scattered critics suggested separate textbooks as well as classrooms for African Americans, arguing that blacks had learned more about their past during the Jim Crow era than they did after it.29 The shift was most conspicuous in the 1990–91 controversy over a new Houghton Mifflin history series in California, the state’s most acrimonious text battle since the days of Land of the Free. Whereas the Land of the Free dispute cast racial minorities and their white liberal allies against white conservatives, the new struggle simply pits minorities against white liberals. Written by cardcarrying liberal historian Gary B. Nash, the series’s eighth-grade textbook reflected Nash’s long-standing effort to demonstrate how different races, classes, and genders helped shape the United States (fig. 17.1). Yet this very objective was anathema to the texts’ enemies, who included a Chinese teachers’ organization, the California Jewish Community Relations Council, and the state assembly’s Black Caucus. According to these disparate foes, any “single narrative” would necessarily demean or silence minority stories. As an example, they cited one text’s account of Indian migration across the Bering Strait land bridge: since Native Americans believed they were created in America, critics said, that theory should receive “equal time” with the “white” viewpoint.30 Here, textT H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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FIGURE 17.1. Controversy flared after California adopted a history textbook coauthored by UCLA historian Gary B. Nash (right). A pioneer in the study of social history, Nash emphasized the roles and contributions of women, immigrants, African Americans, and other minorities. Yet, these additions did not satisfy many citizen groups, who complained that Nash’s textbook shortchanged or misrepresented them. Nash became a leader in the professional development of teachers through the Teaching American History grant program. Photograph by Marian McKenna Olivas.
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book activists on the “cultural Left” unknowingly echoed fundamentalist Christians in the “religious Right.” The fundamentalists were already using the parallel to its fullest potential.
Citizen Attacks III: Reclaiming Religion, 1961–1991 Fundamentalists’ attacks upon textbooks traced back to the evolution battles of the 1920s, when the Scopes trial created an enduring symbol of religious controversy in American schools. Their attacks declined during the next four decades, as fundamentalists tended to emphasize individual faith and salvation over social action and improvement. They returned to the political arena in the 1970s, targeting abortion, pornography, homosexuality—and public school textbooks, which Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell labeled “a disgrace and concern for America.” In the fall of 1974, fundamentalist ministers led a bitter three-month struggle against literature texts in Kanawha County, West Virginia (fig. 17.2). Up to 90 percent of children boycotted class, 10,000 coal miners walked off the job, two schools were bombed, and two school buses were sprayed with 318
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FIGURE 17.2. In April 1974 the five members of the Kanawha County Textbook Selection Committee of Charleston, West Virginia, supported by teacher readers from elementary and secondary schools, recommended the adoption of new textbooks. These books included stories and poems by and about African Americans and other minorities and narrative stories emphasizing tolerance and the acceptance of alternative traditions and cultures. The decision to consider adopting the books caused uproar in the community. Public schools there closed for nine months during which people were shot, schools were dynamited and firebombed, and teachers were threatened. Coal miners went on strike in support of the protest, and the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated in the streets of Charleston. Charleston Daily Mail, 20 November 1974, photograph by Taylor Jones. West Virginia State Archives.
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shotguns—all to protest Interaction, a new anthology series that supposedly promoted youth rebellion, sexual promiscuity, and atheism. Fundamentalists stepped up their complaints about textbooks in the 1980s, when setbacks in Congress led them to refocus on local issues—especially education. By 1991 California school officials cited “religion” as the greatest cause of attacks on textbooks. The most common target was a new language-arts text, Impressions, which allegedly encouraged witchcraft, homosexuality, and “excessive regard for animals.”31 The Kanawha episode marked the first national spotlight for Texas firebrands Mel and Norma Gabler, perhaps the single most influential figures in postwar textbook politics (fig. 17.3). Like Lucille Crain and the Educational Reviewer in the 1950s, the Gablers started a “clearinghouse” in 1961 to examine—and to remove—allegedly “Red” social studies books. Yet the Gablers’ focus soon
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FIGURE 17.3. Mel and Norma Gabler established Educational Research Analysts to conduct a forty-year crusade to rid Texas schoolbooks of factual errors and what they saw as amoral, anti-Christian, pro-evolution biases. Because Texas is the country’s secondlargest textbook purchaser, their work had a national impact, as school districts in other states purchased books with content approved for sale there. Photograph by Darlene Chapman, Longview (Texas) News Journal, 3 December 2000. 320
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shifted from communism to “humanism,” mirroring larger changes in American right-wing activism. Citing obscure “Humanist Manifestoes” signed by John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, and Betty Friedan—among other suspects—the Gablers found humanism lurking in textbooks across the curriculum, from English and history to health and home economics. According to its critics, “humanism” put people—not God—at the center of the moral universe. Hence “humanist” textbooks were marred by a ruthless relativism, which set children on an inevitable road to moral and spiritual ruin. Even math texts taught that “there are no absolutes,” the Gablers complained; so did the Interaction books used in Kanawha County, where the couple conducted a six-day speaking tour at the height of the 1974 protests. “Too many textbooks leave students to make up their own minds about things,” the Gablers surmised.32 During these same years, however, other Christian conservatives appropriated the very language of relativism that the Gablers attacked. In Kanawha, for example, Interaction had been adopted to comply with a new state standard requiring texts to “accurately portray . . . the inter-cultural character of our pluralistic society.” Yet the texts’ off-color language (including the term “Goddammit”) denigrated fundamentalist culture, critics claimed, thereby dishonoring the pluralistic spirit of the state mandate. This strategy reached an apotheosis during a circus-like 1986 courtroom struggle over literature textbooks in Hawkins County, Tennessee, just a short distance from the site of the 1925 Scopes trial. Whereas the earlier struggle concerned the right of fundamentalists to force their theistic views upon others, the “Scopes II” battle (as it was inaccurately dubbed) examined their right to exempt their children from using “Godless” texts. The distinction was not lost upon the plaintiffs, who consistently linked their plight to blacks and other “downtrodden” minorities. Even in cases where fundamentalists sought to remove a book from an entire school—not just from their own children—they seized upon multiculturalist language. A Florida minister successfully lobbied for a 1986 ban of an anthology containing Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” arguing that the story’s use of the words “piss” and “ass” made it as offensive to devout Christians as the term “Sambo” was to African Americans.33 A similar pattern marked the controversy over evolution, which reawakened in the mid-1960s from its own forty-year hiatus. At first, like their predecessors in the Scopes era, fundamentalists simply sought to revise or remove biology texts that discussed the subject. Several states still barred evolution instruction in 1968, when the Supreme Court struck down these measures (Epperson v. Arkansas) and forced a major shift in fundamentalist strategy. Rather than seeking blanket prohibitions upon evolution instruction, activists demanded that textbooks give “equal time” to biblical creation. Here, again, their rhetoric echoed T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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postwar American pluralism: because Americans held a “diversity” of viewpoints on human origins, texts should present “both sides” of the issue so that students could “make up their own minds.” Even Jerry Falwell now announced that John T. Scopes should not have been convicted in 1925, because he was “teaching both points of view—evolution and creation.” The equal-time position received an important boost in 1980 from Ronald Reagan, who endorsed it during a campaign address at a fundamentalist convention. By the following year, more than three-quarters of Americans favored instruction in both evolution and creationism. Textbook companies altered their wares accordingly, inserting tepid statements that “some people” believe in evolution while “other people” do not. More commonly, however, they sought to avoid the subject altogether—even to the point of deleting photographs of fossils.34
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Conclusion: The Burden and the Boredom Textbooks did increase their coverage of evolution slightly in the late 1980s, after the Supreme Court overturned measures requiring “equal time” for biblical views (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987). Antievolutionists shifted ground again after that, touting the theory of “intelligent design” as a scientific alternative to natural selection. Yet publishers continued to dodge the topic, fearful of provoking “controversy from pressure groups,” as one editor explained. The comment provides a convenient epigraph for the past half century of American textbook politics, which has been dominated by publishers’ dogged quest to remove politics—that is, anything smacking of debate, discord, conflict, or contention—from their texts. Over the past fifteen years, literature anthologies have purged or bowdlerized Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, to satisfy Christian conservatives; Huck Finn, for fear of alienating African Americans; and Othello, to appease white bigots who might bridle at miscegenation. History textbooks now describe slave rebellions and note placidly that blacks “still struggle for rights,” but the books give few clues about whom blacks might have struggled against; race has become ubiquitous in American textbooks, but racism remains unmentionable. In passages on the Watergate crisis, likewise, texts downplay any trace of partisan strife with bland assurances that “the system worked” in the end. Most recently, publishers have deleted discussions of homosexuality and illustrations of sex organs from health texts, probably the most common targets for citizen protest in the 1990s. To avoid “anything that might be offensive,” one publisher surmised in 1998, the industry produces “totally bland, middle-of-the-road pabalum.”35 How can America relieve this monotony? One answer, repeated in man322
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tralike fashion since the 1920s, is to rely less upon textbooks and more upon other instructional media. From sound movies and gramophone records to filmstrips and overhead projectors, Americans have hailed the birth of every new educational technology as the death knell of the textbook. Computers are the most recent knight in this century-long saga, poised—we are told—to slay the textbook dragon and spawn a new era of truly progressive teaching: interactive, inquiry-based, and individualized. As in the past, however, reports of the beast’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Aided by large sums of federal dollars, schools invested frantically in computers during the 1990s; yet teachers remained devoted to the textbook, using it for 80 to 95 percent of their instruction. Textbooks are durable, portable, and most of all reliable: their hefty pages carry the apparent weight of authority, listing thousands of facts that can be easily presented, digested, and regurgitated. Especially for instructors lacking a solid background in the disciplines they teach, this emphasis upon cut-anddried “information” represents the prime virtue—not the perennial vice—of American textbooks.36 In the long run, then, the best hope of improving the nation’s textbooks might lie in providing more education—and, most of all, more authority—to its teachers. The postwar textbook debate has largely ignored teachers, except to insult them; indeed, the very terms of the debate presumed that classroom instructors would slavishly follow the text. This view cut across lines of ideology, afflicting the fundamentalist Right and the multicultural Left in equal measure. In the California battle surrounding the Houghton Mifflin history series, for example, black critics did not simply argue that the books were racist; they also assumed that teachers would fail to detect this virus, spreading it automatically via contact with the host. The same voices demanding teacher “empowerment” often seek ever-tighter restrictions on textbook content, which implies a much weaker view of instructors’ “power” than these reformers would care to admit. Even sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the single-best critique of American texts, called his 1995 study Lies My Teacher Told Me; although Loewen dedicated the book to “teachers who teach against their textbooks,” his choice of title—and his subsequent argument—presumed that most instructors would not do so. Little wonder that so many teachers have chosen to fulfill this negative prophecy, given the enormous range of citizens who continue to promote it.37 For their own part, finally, publishers have begun to construct a multiculturalist defense of mundane, dull textbooks. “Since this is a pluralistic society,” one editor noted, explaining his removal of controversial material, “we try to consider the sensitivities of many kinds of students when preparing our texts, T H E T E XT B O O K I N A M E R I CA N C U LTU RE
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not only in sexual matters, but in matters relating to race and religion as well.”38 A multicultural nation needed singularly bland texts, in other words, because any controversial issue was certain to antagonize one culture or another. The cost of diversity in American society was monotony in American textbooks. Before too many people scoff at this solution, they should pause to examine their own role in the problem. For as another publisher remarked in the early 1960s, responding to laments about “gray flannel” textbooks, the very critics who demanded “more interpretive” texts typically wanted their interpretation to triumph.39 Forty years later, the same irony continues to bedevil American textbooks. Their gray flannel has evolved into a rainbow, to be sure, but textbooks remain unclouded by contention, passion, or inspiration. Until more Americans agree to countenance viewpoints other than their own, the textbook will sail harmlessly across our stormy political horizons, a timid giant on a tempestuous sea.
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CHAPTER 18
Libraries, Books, and the Information Age Kenneth Cmiel
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The book, it is sometimes said, is the soul of a library. The institution itself is a massive house of books, a place you can browse, find unexpected treasures, give yourself a liberal education. Any drift away from that ideal is a calumny against the library’s true character. If that is said, it is said less often these days. The library today, the new story goes, has evolved into a wired, multimedia center geared to the information age. The library used to be a house for books. Now it is more. These competing judgments touch the heart not only of current tensions about libraries but of struggles going on for the past fifty years. Is the library a place of literature and history? A place for reflecting on civic life and relaxing with a recent mystery? Or is it a large, electronic information bureau, devoted to quickly finding whatever facts a patron might need? Is it about literature, or is it a kind of “Google” site? In other words, where is the heart of a library—the book stacks or the reference desk? That is the controversy. It is not hard to find defenders of each point of view, but it is clear that those in control of libraries are moving to an information-based model. This trend prompts several questions. What is happening to the book as these changes take place? Is it disappearing from libraries? And are the calls for an information-based library simple technophilia or something more? History may shed light on these issues. The information-centered library evolved over a long period of time. While it triumphed in the 1970s, the first push dates from the 1940s, well before the computer was viable for libraries. Its first proponents were political progressives hoping to make the institution more relevant to the life of the community. At the same time, scientists needing information for their research asked librarians for help. By the end of the 1950s, computer scientists began to develop machinery that would help these scientists out. By the 1970s, these groups would, for different reasons, create the information-based library. The modern library is the offspring of both technophiles and political reformers.
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The simple opposition between “books and bytes,” therefore, does not accurately capture the real stakes of contemporary disputes about the library. It is a mistake to claim that books are obsolete and heading for extinction in libraries. Books are not disappearing. The real question is, What is the place of the book in the new library? And that question, in turn, is really about other issues. Arguments about the library and its books are stand-ins for anxieties over literature and the humanities, on one side, and what sort of public institutions we need for a healthy civic life, on the other. The new public library, as it emerged in the 1970s, often spoke casually of customers instead of citizens. The new research library worried less about reflective, leisurely reading and increasingly imagined reading as a utilitarian, problem-solving activity. Often these debates were framed in terms of books versus computers, but the key issues were really how we read, how we learn, and how we live together.
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Civics and Space: Library Reform in the 1940s Leaders in the field were discontented in the 1940s. They viewed public libraries as moribund. They dreamed of a new sort of library, one that would actively engage the needs of a modern, industrial society. The American Library Association (ALA), the Carnegie Corporation, and the Social Science Research Council all contributed money and brainpower to search for new paths. Together they created the Committee on Public Library Inquiry, which in the mid-1940s undertook nineteen separate studies of the U.S. public library, the most exhaustive research ever done on the subject. In 1943 the ALA suggested new standards for the postwar public library. The report bewailed the meager resources of most public libraries, suggesting that a respectable town library needed a reservoir of 10,000 books. (Two-thirds of the nation’s public libraries had fewer than 6,000 books at that time.)1 But they wanted more than added tomes. Library reformers advocated a whole new way of thinking about the library. The library should be more than a collection of books on shelves. It had to actively serve the public, be a vibrant part of community life. The library, it was said, was in the “business of communication.” The term “communication” emerged in that decade as a key word describing the glue of the modern world. In industrialized societies, mass communication built solidarity, mitigated misunderstandings, and taught us all how to get on with our lives. The public library had to rethink its priorities in light of the complete array of mass media available to the public.2 Providing the public the information it needed was the core of this communication. Libraries must “serve the community as a center of reliable information” and “provide opportunity . . . for people of all ages to educate themselves 326
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continuously.” The information mentioned ranged widely, from better understanding of the world to how to fix a car, from how to grow houseplants to how to change jobs, from how to write a radio script to the latest ideas about economics. Mary Rothrock, who had served on the Public Library Inquiry and who in 1947 became president of the American Library Association, argued that the best libraries were now interested in “achieving broad and rapid diffusion of information,” information that would help citizens better plan their lives.3 This meant that libraries had to think more creatively about their collections. Current libraries, reformers thought, spent too much money buying popular literature. They were plagued by out-of-date volumes on technical topics. The federal government was then printing mountains of pamphlets summarizing recent medical and scientific research or providing information on topics ranging from how to heat your home to basic divorce law. All this should be in public libraries and accessible to patrons, the reformers thought, as well as educational films, documentaries, art prints, and records. The Library Journal, the leading source for information on public libraries, was sprinkled with articles about listening rooms for new record collections and how to add caches of educational documentaries to their collections. This all had a New Deal air to it.4 The key reformers were moderate liberals, peppering their 1940s discussions of libraries with references to New Deal reports on national planning. Some, like Mary Rothrock, were government librarians. The Public Library Inquiry strongly urged that both state and federal government start financially supporting libraries. The 1940s reformers were adapting ideas that originated with left-liberals and socialists in the late 1930s, the latest version of the library as a “people’s university.”5 To a certain extent, these new visions displaced the book. “Book Houses or Modern Communications Centers?” was a typical title on the subject, with the answer clearly tilting to the latter.6 It was not incidental that the 1940s research was dominated by social scientists, not humanists. Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research argued that only about 15 percent of users actually went to the library for cultural broadening. Nearly twice that number came for vocational advice and still more came for light reading to “kill time.” On another front, the research of the Public Library Inquiry confirmed the obvious— people got information about modern life from a host of sources apart from books (fig. 18.1). Newspapers, radios, pictures, magazines, and movie newsreels all contributed. Robert Leigh, the director of the Public Library Inquiry, asserted in 1948 that, although librarians traditionally were reverential about books, that was changing. Because “of the heterogeneous output of current print and pictures,” Leigh argued, “the virtue claimed for books had to be qualified.”7 LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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FIGURE 18.1. Amid older ways of acquiring knowledge, high school students watch a football game on a television set in the Young People’s Room, Minneapolis Public Library, October 1949. Courtesy of the James K. Hosmer Special Collections Library, Minneapolis Collection, M1314.
Still, books were not disappearing. The 1940s library reformers wanted to nudge the profession, not push it. Despite all the talk, the actual budgets for nonbook media captured only a minuscule portion of the overall library budget. While considerable attention was given to records, documentary movies, and prints, reformers were at the same time arguing that libraries also needed many more books on their shelves. If the American Library Association now said that “progressive libraries” had to think about resources outside the “traditional book stock,” it still believed that books were the public library’s “foundation.”8 As important, there was huge inertia among rank-and-file librarians. Much of the profession was out of step with its visionaries. It took political savvy and public relations to increase the local library budget. It took imagination to refigure the mission. Hundreds of librarians in small towns and suburbs preferred to bustle on as they had before, presiding over quiet rooms of several thousand books, a local newspaper, and a few magazines. Reform seemed even more daunting to the men (and they were all men) who ran the libraries of the nation’s largest cities. Most midcentury librarians were simply temperamentally unsuited to change their environment.9 Outside pressures also helped define how far librarians would travel from the 328
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book. By the early 1950s, libraries all over the nation were mired in censorship battles. Fears that books on the shelves might breed radicals in the streets surfaced in hundreds of communities. The works of John Steinbeck, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, Thomas Paine, and others all came under attack. These debates helped keep public libraries focused on their mission to provide books to the American public.10 Major university research libraries did not face a similar crisis of purpose at midcentury. Librarians at these institutions continued to see their job as collecting as much serious literature as possible in all fields of intellectual endeavor, a vision that had gradually emerged in the first decades of the century. As one librarian put it in 1944, the “ideal objective” of the research library was “a complete record of human thought, emotion and action. . . . In short, it should have everything.”11 The models were clear: Harvard, Yale, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress. Smaller libraries would not get to those exalted heights, of course, but they could try to move in that direction. While the giant strides would not come until the 1960s, the book holdings of university libraries were growing significantly during the 1950s, a seeming confirmation of the ideal. Research libraries measured themselves by the number of volumes held. Their librarians worked to keep the institution quiet, a conducive place for book reading. They debated how to encourage better reading habits in students. Books were “the college library’s principal stock in trade,” the “core” around which teaching and research took place.12 Yet, in a way parallel to public librarians, new themes were emerging that would create a little distance from an exclusive preoccupation with the book. Some research began to look into an obvious fact but one long ignored by librarians—not all scholars relied on books. Scientists spent far more time with journals and very recent journals at that. The pioneering 1940s research by the British physicist and sociologist of science J. D. Bernal helped shift attention in the United States to this issue. (Bernal was a lifelong Marxist, again making the connection between library reform and leftleaning politics at this time.) Bernal raised the issue of bibliographic incoherence. With so much science now being done, scientists could not keep up. Increasingly, they did not know what their colleagues were doing. The war effort, which called on thousands of scientists to work on hundreds of projects, was especially important in popularizing this theme. The same language that public librarians were using—the timely flow of information—crept into discussions of research libraries. Bibliographers and librarians needed to make sure, as Bernal put it, that “the right information in the right form is sent to the right people.” They needed to develop a “modern information service.”13 Research librarians faced a second issue: space. Libraries were filling up. LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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Since the 1880s, the accumulated stock of formal knowledge was growing exponentially. Where would it all be housed? The most common answer of the 1940s was a technological one. The panacea of the day was the newly effective medium of microfilm. Invented in the late nineteenth century, microfilm was perfected in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1934 the Bibliofilm Service, a private, nonprofit organization, emerged as a national clearinghouse to microfilm research reports and make them available throughout the country. It began by making available materials in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Library, the Army Medical Library, and the Library of Congress. In 1942, in one of the most widely read books on research libraries of the time, Fremont Rider argued that microfilm was the key to solving the research library’s space problem. In the present, Rider thought, “the recorded words of men were coming in to us librarians, not in the form of the ‘books’ in which they have been coming in to us for two millenniums [sic], but in a brand-new form, an utterly and completely and basically different form.”14 The changes in research libraries, just as in public libraries, were not huge. Nevertheless, by the early 1950s it was taken for granted that at least part of the library collection would be devoted to nonbook materials and that not all research was book-centered. Moreover, a new model of the library had been introduced: an information center for modern life instead of either a house of serious literature or a collection of popular best sellers. It was a place where citizens might get information on civic or social issues, as well as careers. It was a place where scientists could quickly get the facts they needed to pursue their research.
The 1960s and the High Modern Library Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s two things happened that further altered the relationship between the book and the library. First, federal money began to flow into libraries in large quantities. Second, the computerization of libraries began. Computers allowed a few visionaries to dream of a radically new sort of library, one devoted exclusively to the communication of information instead of the storage of books. The first speculations about a “bookless” library appeared in the early 1960s. On the other hand, the money flow helped put off any serious confrontation over this new vision. Whatever fantasies a small number of computer devotees might have had, the largess kept everyone happy. Through the 1960s, there was enough money for both bytes and books. In 1956 Congress passed the Library Services Act, designed originally to funnel funds to rural areas without real libraries. Congress soon expanded the act’s range, sending millions of dollars to both research and public libraries through330
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out the nation. And this was only the most important of several pieces of legislation that sent money to libraries. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson targeted libraries as part of his Great Society agenda. The next year, the Higher Education Act earmarked $25 million for college libraries, and the Library Services and Construction Act sent $135 million to public libraries. These new funds generated enormous optimism about the future of the library. Also beginning in the late 1950s, the first serious discussions of library computerization began. Engineers, like research librarians, had been interested in information handling since the 1940s. The development of the computer during World War II is the best-known example of this. The Cold War kept the interest alive. The Department of Defense especially wanted to develop ways for machines to push information to distant places, both for purposes of coordinating scientific research at different laboratories and to pass information back and forth between defense command installations. Much present-day computer technology—the Internet, for example—began as Department of Defense initiatives. In the late fifties, computer scientists began to apply their knowledge to areas outside the restricted world of national defense. Government, the corporate world, and universities were each the target of computer scientists. The well-known 1957 Hepburn-Tracy comedy, The Desk Set, played on the anxieties raised by these new forays of computer scientists. Subsidies now came from sources outside the Defense Department. The Ford Foundation began giving millions to study the automation of libraries. The National Science Foundation also became a major patron. Both paid for a crucial conference on libraries and automation held at the Library of Congress in 1963, a conference that established the Library of Congress as the leader in the drive to computerize the nation’s libraries.15 University libraries were increasingly interested in what computers might do. In 1956 there was not one computerization project underway in the research libraries of the nation’s universities. Ten years later some 40 percent of college and university libraries had either started computerization projects or were planning one.16 Public libraries lagged behind, but the larger, urban libraries were experimenting with computerized serial tracking and circulation systems. This bred more speculation on the library’s future. As in the 1940s, the terms “communication” and “information” were omnipresent in these discussions. Edith Patterson Meyer, in her breezy Meet the Future: People and Ideas in the Libraries of Today and Tomorrow (1964), imagined the future library renamed as the “City Information Center.” But in this new wave, the weight was not so much on getting information to citizens. It was, rather, on how more powerful machines might move information to experts more efficiently. In 1963 the President’s Science Advisory Committee argued that enhancing national science and LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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technology depended on improving “our ability to communicate information about current research efforts.” Strong science was a national necessity, the committee asserted, and “adequate communication was a prerequisite for strong science and technology.” This thinking directly echoed the 1940s concerns of J. D. Bernal, but without the Marxist nimbus. In 1958 the National Science Foundation gave $150,000 to experiment with computerizing abstracts of articles on chemistry. In 1961 a similar project began for biology. The first major, successful online network bibliographical system for a nonmilitary institution was developed between 1961 and 1964 at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. Getting information to doctors quickly, after all, might save lives.17 If the 1940s rhetoric suggested that the library had to catch up with industrial society, two decades later the claim was different: information itself drove modern society. Writers started talking about the “information age,” a phrase that did not exist in the 1940s. Sharp disputes appeared among those thinking about libraries. A few, for the first time, began talking about the “bookless” library to come. These were the prophets, the most fanatical of the dedicated. Almost all were computer scientists by trade; almost none were career librarians. Some, like Walter Carlson, the director of Technical Information at the Department of Defense, were contemptuous of mainstream librarians. Others, like Marjorie Griffin of IBM, simply argued that future scientists and engineers would get their information sitting at their desks in front of computers. The “library of tomorrow,” she wrote in 1962, will be “filled with people and not with books.”18 Some librarians angrily rejected such visions. Scattered through the Library Journal in the early 1960s were letters from librarians worried about losing their jobs to computers, just as Katherine Hepburn and Joan Blondell worried in The Desk Set. Others questioned how efficient the new machines actually were and whether all the money invested in them was really worth it. Still others defended the “old” library. The trend toward “anti-intellectualism” troubled Leon Carnavsky of the University of Chicago’s Library School. A librarian should be liberally educated, Carnavsky thought. He or she “must be a bookman.” Princeton’s librarian, William Dix, was similarly suspicious of the preoccupation with information retrieval. “This may seem old-fashioned,” he remarked in 1964, “but an attractive room and a wide-ranging collection of books, freely accessible, seems to me what a library is.”19 The controversy directly echoed C. P. Snow’s famous argument about “two cultures,” first delivered as a lecture in 1959. Snow argued that the sciences and humanities had split into two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. Scientists, he found, had little reverence for books. But humanists, Snow thought, were even more ignorant of science than vice versa. Snow’s essay set off an 332
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enormous debate in the next few years. Humanists and scientists argued loudly about whether modern science lacked wisdom or whether the humanities were increasingly remote from what was most exciting in modern life.20 The contemporaneous debates about whether libraries should be information centers or caretakers of the book repeated Snow’s arguments almost verbatim. Articles such as “To the Barricades! The Computers Are Coming!” turned up in library journals by the mid-sixties.21 But the divide wasn’t always this stark. During the 1960s, not everyone thought there was any divide at all. If Snow argued that the two cultures had separated, his answer was for them to start mixing. Cross-fertilization, Snow thought, was the way. Most librarians in the first half of the 1960s instinctively agreed. It was not books or computers; it was books and computers. The new library could do it all. Despite all the “gadgetry” in the new “Information Center,” Edith Patterson Meyer suggested in her 1964 fantasy of the future library, there was still “an appealing and literate atmosphere” to the place. In the glory years of the New Frontier and Great Society, faith in the future ran high. The library could fundamentally change under the impact of the new technology yet not lose sight of its traditional functions (fig. 18.2).22 For a number of reasons the blend appeared unproblematic. First, computers were not necessarily hostile to book culture. The main thing the computer could actually do for libraries in the 1960s was track serial and book purchasing. A few libraries experimented with computerized circulation systems. All these were service tasks. There was, also, computerized bibliography. The computerization of the Library of Congress card catalog, begun in the wake of the 1963 conference, promised to make information about books more accessible to the country at large. Second, in the flush economic times of the early 1960s, one of the most common refrains in the talk about libraries was that leisure time was increasing. Lifelong learning was going to be necessary, it was commonly argued, given all the extra time that the American public would have in the next generation. Relaxed, reflective book reading was pictured as part of this future.23 Finally, a good chunk of the money pouring in was spent buying books. In 1959 public libraries spent $34 million on books. By 1968 that jumped to $91 million. The shift was even more dramatic at colleges and universities. They went from spending $24 million to $125 million on books in the same years. In 1964 only twelve libraries in the country purchased 100,000 new books in a year. Four years later twenty-three did. Even with the experiments with computers, a lot of books were being bought, more than libraries had ever been able to buy in the past.24 When the American Library Association set up its “library of the future” LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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FIGURE 18.2. A TWX (teletypewriter) machine in the Norfolk, Nebraska, Public Library (1966–72). This equipment was installed following the introduction of a statewide interlibrary loan system. The Nebraska Library Commission set up a regional program based on a statewide union list of holdings in collaboration with the Lincoln Telephone and Telegraph Company. Public libraries as well as universities, the state law library, and historical societies were connected via teletypewriters such as this one, enabling patrons to receive materials “days sooner” than the old postal system of locating and requesting books, according to the director of the Nebraska Library Commission. Photograph courtesy of Nebraska Library Commission.
at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, the same blend was on display. At the impressive 6,000-square-foot display, the public could be awed by the mammoth Sperry Rand Univac Solid State 90 Computer with its flashing lights and electronic beeps. Univac demonstrated a little of what the computer could already do for a well-funded library. But just a few steps away, you could visit the ideal “adult reading area,” courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Behind the modern, comfortable chairs and tables was a wall of books, the “Great Books of the Western World.”25 The mass media saw it the same way. You didn’t have to choose. In 1965 Time produced an article discussing the new library (Readers Digest soon reprinted it.) The nation was in the midst of an “information explosion,” according to Time. Computers were going to solve the crush of fact, sort out the mountains of research. But Time also cautioned modernizers not to kill “the joy of the ordinary reader,” the “serendipity in the stacks.”26 334
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The 1970s: Public Library Reform and the New Populism This optimistic blend, enthusiastically anticipated between 1962 and 1966, never came to be. In the next fifteen years, the supporting props crumbled one after another. By 1966 the Great Society was becoming more controversial. From the left, more politically charged ideas surfaced about what a library should be. Librarians revived the progressive idea of the library as a community information center. From the right, Richard Nixon began cutting federal funding for libraries in the early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, inflation was eroding libraries’ purchasing power. Now choices had to be made. Moreover, choices had to be made in an environment in which online databases, only dreamed of in the early 1960s, were turning into a reality. To be sure, libraries kept buying books. By 1980, however, the book had changed its place in the nation’s libraries. As early as 1966, liberals and those further to the left started to doubt the optimism of the early sixties visions. Instead, librarians cautioned, it would take a lot of hard work to make the library serve underprivileged constituencies. Well-known liberals and social democrats who were not librarians, people such as Herbert Gans, Kenneth B. Clark, and Michael Harrington, urged librarians to take up this commitment.27 Beginning at the onset of the Great Society, some urban librarians took federal funds and began setting up programs for poor minority constituents. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Public Library in 1965 began a program trying to make available job-related information to inner-city residents. Others started literacy programs, public health programs, or pregnancy classes for teenagers. Some leaders in the field were soon arguing that reaching the poor involved a basic rethinking of the library mission. In March 1966 Kathleen Molz, the liberal editor of the influential Wilson Library Bulletin, complained that libraries worried too much about books. “Isn’t it possible,” she asked, “that a public library could be just as useful, if it served to provide only information?” The “circulation of materials” need not be “the library’s prime function.”28 Molz was elaborating ideas just then being spun out by academics and social workers involved in the Great Society’s war on poverty.29 Molz’s comments were made at a symposium on the future of the urban public library. Most of the participants in that symposium were directors of libraries in major U.S. cities. They were all skeptical of Molz’s suggestion. But in the next fifteen years, the idea took off. The federal government threw money at it. Library schools began promoting it. By the mid-1970s, it had become the centerpiece of public library thinking.30 This was not about technology. It was information as public service and social reform. When Ralph Nader spoke to the American Library Association in LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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1973, his “specific message,” one that received “thunderous applause,” was to “redefine libraries as information centers for the community.” Marilyn Gell, the director of the First White House Conference on Library and Information Services, spoke in 1979 of libraries as “agencies of information justice.” In Atlanta, programs were begun to give guidance on how to get college credit outside the classroom. In Watts, librarians began teaching poor African Americans how to fill out job applications.31 The new ethos also connected with the burgeoning women’s movement. “Community information” came to include basic help learning about women’s health, about how to find a job if you had been a homemaker for years, and about divorce, abortion, and family law. Although the leadership of the American Library Association was overwhelmingly male, most of the nation’s librarians were women. A strong and articulate feminist lobby emerged in the profession, arguing for more advancement for women. Sometimes the new service imperatives and professional reform meshed perfectly. In 1974–75, in Iowa City, Iowa, after feminists in town vigorously protested the library board’s selection of a male candidate with weak qualifications and no vision, the library director job then went to a feminist, Lolly Parker Eggers, who proceeded to pull the library toward the new information-service model.32 The “community information model” retained its liberal edge, but it also drifted during the seventies. All citizens, not just the poor or disenfranchised, might profit from the new orientation. Librarians figured out ways to provide whatever information the community-at-large might need. San Diego librarians gathered information about how to practice law in Mexico. In Spruce Pine, North Carolina, dress patterns were added to the library’s collection. Libraries around the nation began buying the automobile blue books. Rock records and old movies entered library shelves. Everything from karate lessons to local real estate information became available. The new emphasis implied a diminished role for the book. Indeed, at urban libraries throughout the country, book borrowing declined in the 1960s and 1970s, a result of the middle-class exodus to suburbia. Recognition of this trend was often the starting point for new thinking about libraries. Books might not matter to contemporary urban populations, librarians argued, but that did not mean that the library had no purpose. Librarians could “no longer afford to view themselves as custodians of stacks and stacks of books that all too frequently have been collecting dust for lack of readers.”33 But if the book declined in importance, community information librarians were not necessarily against books. Rather, they were building more eclectic libraries. Books, movies, records, and, in the eighties, videos—they were all 336
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good. Whatever lured people in was fine. It was the book and everything else, not the book against everything else. As one commentator put it: “To maintain and broaden the base of its users, the public library had to lose its reputation for being a print-only institution.”34 These reformers differed vastly from the computer scientists who began talking about the “information-based” library in the late 1950s. The computer jockeys cared about machines and efficient communication. They were the magi of the high-modern library, descendants of those 1940s bibliographers who worried about how the research community should organize its product. The 1970s community librarians, in contrast, were populists, hoping to bring everyone in town to the library. They were the heirs of the midcentury reformers who wanted the library to be a vital information center for all citizens, a “people’s university.” But if they were heirs, it was with some important differences. The generation of reform librarians coming out of the New Deal might have wanted the library to broaden itself, to include new media. But this group still, in the end, saw the book as foundational. In the 1970s, on the other hand, the reform librarians rarely mentioned books. The word itself was virtually absent from writing on library reform. When David Wasserman, the dean of the Library School at the University of Maryland, called on librarians in 1972 to become agents of social change, he attacked the “bookish orientation” and “elite values” of traditional librarianship. What was central to the library was information that people needed, not learned tomes of history or philosophy.35 This was a real shift in priorities. To be sure, books remained on the shelves. They were borrowed and read. They were bought. But there was also ambiguity in the word “book.” Learning to Knit or the automobile Blue Book turned up in library budgets as books bought. They were purchased, however, because of the new priorities. It was not that those objects made up of paper and print and encased in cardboard were disappearing. It was that an earlier notion of reading as cultural enrichment was being pushed to the side. In a 1979 interview, Charles Robinson, the head of the innovative Baltimore County Public Library, proclaimed that his library was not “preserving knowledge for the ages.” It was giving the public what it wanted. In the past, too much money was spent on the “wrong” books. And the “wrong” books, Robinson sarcastically added, were usually those labeled “good” or “important” or “worthwhile.”36 Robinson’s sort of populism indicated a second shift from the 1940s rhetoric on library reform. There was a “civic” language to the earlier discussion of the information-based library. “Community” was the collective community, local citizens as part of a single and great nation. In the 1970s, on the other hand, the public was increasingly referred to as “consumers.” The new library was in the LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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business of providing countless individuals help with their own particular life projects. There was a more liberal, individual tint to the new talk, whereas the 1940s reform rhetoric had been more communitarian. The new library model also implied the favoring of a certain sort of reading. It was task-centered reading, taking place in a bustling environment. It took place in short bursts. In the voluminous literature on the community information library, next to no mention was made of leisurely, reflective book reading, the sort of reading assumed to happen in a quiet setting. Just ten years before, in the early 1960s, such reading was often discussed as central to the library mission. It was now ignored, a relic of a bygone era. Not surprisingly, in the late seventies disputes broke out across the country about library noise. The new library model tolerated more ambient activity, more sound. To those librarians in favor of the new reform, some level of noise was a sign of vibrancy. But to the friends of the old library, that same noise signaled decline. Libraries were no longer places where you could read comfortably. By 1978, “quiet” and “noisy” patrons at the library in Roanoke County, Virginia, were “ready to go for each others’ throats.” That same year libraries in Elk Grove, Illinois, in Salt Lake City, and in Montgomery County, Maryland, took the lead in developing different zones in the library where different levels of noise were acceptable. But the debates remained sharp, and neither side wanted to give in.37
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Retrenchment and Revisioning in Research Libraries: The 1970s Designed to serve scholars and students, research and university libraries completely missed the populism that swept into public libraries. Instead, research libraries directly confronted something else during the 1970s: economic crisis. Public libraries had to deal with this as well, to be sure, but the crisis did not affect the public library’s sense of its mission. Its impact on research libraries, on the other hand, was deeper, contributing to a larger confusion about purpose and ultimately helping to shift the research library away from its long-standing central preoccupation with the collecting of books. The money problems mounted through the decade. In 1973 Richard Nixon dramatically “zero’ed out” the library line for federal appropriations. After that, there was some federal money available, but not as much as before.38 Also during the decade, the number of students attending colleges declined, further reducing the monies available. The inflation of the seventies added other woes. Book buying was more expensive. As John Thompson discusses in more detail in chapter 20, the cost of scientific journals had a brutal impact on library budgets. The increases were astounding, often more than 200 percent in the space 338
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of a few years. Some European journals jumped as much as 800 percent.39 If inflation hurt acquisitions directly, it pinched libraries in other ways as well. The cost of heating and air conditioning went up, as did salaries and benefits. It was becoming significantly more expensive to run a university library. The serials crunch, heating crunch, funding crunch, and payroll crunch all took their toll. After decades of steady growth, research libraries had to cut back on new book buying. Libraries spent increasingly large sums just to keep their serials current. For the first time since World War II, book acquisition declined. Berkeley, for instance, purchased almost 40,000 fewer books in 1977 than in 1969. Thirty-six out of the fifty-eight largest research libraries showed decline in the first half of the seventies.40 Optimism about the future was another casualty. Directors of major research libraries spent most of the 1970s just managing the crisis. New visions did not appear until the end of the decade. In the meantime, however, the grandiose dreams of the sixties vanished. Economists in the mid-1970s produced an influential study arguing that the research library simply could not fulfill its mission in the long term. The money would not be there. Others argued that the research library was becoming less important. According to one major American Library Association study, the research library was becoming “irrelevant” on campus.41 Among librarians, the idea of a self-sufficient research library died for good. This had always been a controversial notion. How could a library possibly collect everything researchers needed? Nevertheless, in the fat and happy times of the 1960s, the talk was of having more university libraries emulate the Harvard, Yale, and the New York Public libraries. The next decade, however, brought talk of a “new realism” in acquisitions.42 There was a lot of attention to expanding interlibrary loan, to having libraries pool their book buying, and to building regional online bibliographic networks. In the 1960s, most of the effort to computerize libraries had been internal—each university tried to build its own self-contained systems. But research libraries in the next decade quickly took advantage of the telecommunications revolution. Now computers could be linked through phone lines. As late as 1968, experiments with such a system had failed. Three years later, the first of these networks, the Ohio Computer Library Center, was up and running. Soon the Research Libraries Information Network was up. By 1978, more than 1,200 college and university libraries were connected to some regional online bibliographic system. Having these systems allowed librarians to quickly find materials that the home library could not afford to purchase.43 There was another side to the online revolution. Databases well beyond bibliographies came online during the 1970s. These had more than information about sources. The sources themselves started to come online. The New York LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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Times Information Bank was one. LEXIS, which put thousands of legal decisions online, opened for business in 1973. NEXIS, which by the year 2000 had more than 2 billion newspaper stories online, dates from 1979. After 1975, the number of commercial online databases exploded. To be sure, these were not widely used (or even owned) on campuses in the 1970s. But university librarians understood that this was going to change the nature of the library.44 It was during this first burst of commercial online information service growth that a number of manifestos appeared mapping out a new future for the research library. One of the more dramatic was from Wilfred Lancaster, who in the 1960s had worked at the National Library of Medicine, where computerized bibliography was pioneered. In 1978 Lancaster predicted the quick arrival of the “paperless library.” The “printed book,” he thought, would soon die. Librarians, according to Lancaster, would soon become “information specialists,” as often working outside a library as in. In another manifesto, this one by Vincent Giuliano, the library was a dying institution. To survive, librarians had to shift away from caring about buildings and think about providing “information services to their constituents, using whatever means, media, or structures that are appropriate.”45 Much of this had been heard before. The dream of a paperless library had been around since the early 1960s. What made the late 1970s discussions so urgent was the different context—a decade of economic decline and the emergence of online databases. In the early sixties, the voices against the book had been a few visionaries, mostly people in the information technology industry. By 1980, these voices were at the center of the profession. Most leading librarians were not as dramatic as Lancaster or Giuliano. Most wanted a balance between books and bytes. Very few actually thought books were going to disappear. Most took up the idea of plural media in the library. “Frankly, I cannot imagine a more appropriate medium for a novel than a printed book with which one can curl up in front of a fireplace,” one head of a major research library noted in 1974. “On the other hand,” he added, “I cannot think of a less appropriate medium of the U.S. Census than a printed book, and I cannot think of a less appropriate medium for a great historical interview with a key personality than a printed book.” Despite the drama of the manifestos, most of the profession thought that the book would survive.46 But if the book survived, as in the public library, it survived in a different place. Even the balancing research librarians had a different language and a different sense of what the library was than their predecessors. Their rhetoric, unlike that of midcentury academic librarians, did not circle around the book. The predominant idiom was “information science.” By the early 1980s, the leading research librarians had come to consensus on this term. Moreover, these librarians had 340
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given up the notion of collecting all relevant monographs on particular topics. There was a new library aborning, one not measured “by the size, depth, or breadth of the collections owned” but by “its ability to provide access to information in all formats.”47 Not explicitly stated, but nevertheless there in the literature on the research library, was the same assumption about reading found among the public library reformers. The leading figures in research and university libraries by no means thought that reading literature, philosophy, or history was bad. Many did this sort of reading themselves. But it was not what they spent time thinking about on the job. The implicit assumption of their new library image was that research reading was a process of hunting and gathering information. It was not particularly reflective. Nor was it leisurely. It was a matter of “problem solving,” as one librarian put it.48 Of course, those who followed research libraries had known for a long time that scientists did not use books the same way humanists did. What changed in the 1970s was that the science model for the research library was rapidly becoming the model for all library innovation.
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The 1980s and 1990s: Wired Together or Slouching toward Bethlehem? After 1980, changes came very quickly. The new library blossomed. The basic nature of the library—public and research—shifted (fig. 18.3). In major research libraries, new machinery and databases took an increasingly prominent role. In those public libraries with adequate funding, the same thing happened. The similar changes, however, had different repercussions. Research librarians faced debate and skepticism—computer-generated innovations were seen by some as part of a larger 1990s attack on the humanities. Public librarians, however, found the changes exhilarating. They were often coupled with a new public interest and enthusiasm for a venerable civic institution. During the 1980s, the new computerized research library swiftly emerged. Increasing money went to buying online databases. By the 1990s, the university library had all sorts of new gadgets—CD-ROMs, banks of terminals for students, impressive new video collections of historic film. In the mid-1990s, the library was usually one of the first places on campus to connect to the World Wide Web. The latest cutting-edge research, the Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994, devoted to creating a nationwide network of mega-databases. The funding came from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and NASA. The first research projects were located at leading universities. The links between big science, national defense, and university research on computerizing libraries, links dating back to the 1950s, were again on display.49 LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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FIGURE 18.3. Library patron reads the newspaper in the periodicals section at the Lincoln Branch of the Rochester (N.Y.) Public Library. City Hall Photo Lab Contemporary Collection, City of Rochester, N.Y.
At the same time, however, books and periodicals languished at universities. It was not simply the result of money reallocated to new technology. The price of paper mattered just as much. Scientific journals, especially from Europe, got even more outrageously expensive in the late eighties. By 1990–91, many universities across the country began mass cancellation projects. It was just too expensive, librarians decided, to keep going this way. Scholarly monographs also shot up in price, some 41 percent between 1986 and 1991. Libraries responded by buying fewer of them. In the late 1980s, monograph buying dropped 16 percent at university and research libraries. About four in ten were cutting their purchases by more than 20 percent. But if pricing mattered, so did basic priorities. By the late nineties, university librarians were looking for warehouses to store little-used books and make more room for computer workstations.50 If print people were not particularly critical of the new research library at first, the complaints started coming in the 1990s. Throughout the decade, attacks turned up in journals of prominence, places like the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. Small groups of humanities faculty turned up on numerous campuses to fight, with singular ineffectiveness, against the new drift. University librarians could now occasionally muse about the “growing schism,” at times the “downright hostility,” between “the former staunch allies who built the great research libraries of the world.”51 342
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Critics mounted arguments about the horrors of the online catalog when compared to the older card catalog. The elimination of old and outdated books (a practice dating back to the 1860s) was attacked as anti-intellectual. Money going to electronics over monographs was viewed as a misuse of resources. The whole new library was seen as frivolous, full of bells and whistles but no longer devoted to what mattered. “McLibraries,” one critic sniffed.52 Writers played a large role in the 1990s criticisms of the library. The novelist Nicholson Baker, for example, published several of the more widely read essays attacking the new library.53 Hovering behind these articles were the simultaneous debates about whether the book and novel were dying forms.54 On campuses, the concerns of humanities faculty were similarly part of a larger feeling of loss. Trends in academic monograph buying seemed of a piece with other troubles—eroding tenure, increased teaching loads, student careerism, faculty alienation from the administration, and the general capitulation of the university to corporate interests devoted to scientific research.55 The 1990s critics were different from those hoary humanists who defended the “old” library in the early 1960s. Outside the academy critics were still willing to say that “reading books encourages us to think” or to speak of the psychological “intimacy” found in the great novels.56 But the campus critics talked less of the examined life and more often of cultural critique. The shift in libraries was, they thought, one sign of the corporate drift of campuses. One of the more insistent themes—from both academic and literary critics—was the importance of the tactile dimension of the book. Reading, the French historian Roger Chartier argued in the early 1990s, was “not just an abstract operation of intellection: it is an engagement of the body, an inscription in space, a relation to oneself and others.”57 What mattered was not the book and the mind, but the book and the body. The book had an aesthetic edge to it. The texture and format of the printed page, its ease on the eyes, and its portability and compactness would all contribute to the book’s persistence. This was a post-sixties theme to be sure: book reading as epicureanism.58 Hovering behind all the specific issues was a larger claim—that the “printed book” seemed “destined to move to the margin of our literate culture.”59 When the information model first emerged in the 1940s, that was not an idea entertained by librarians. In the ensuing half century, however, it has settled in among them. Futuristic computer scientists in the early 1960s, liberal public librarians in the late 1960s, research librarians in the 1970s—all began suggesting that book reading was moving to a different place in the culture. By the 1990s, what was so shocking to library critics was not that the book was under attack but that librarians seemed to be colluding. But if research librarians faced skepticism, public librarians often found enLI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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thusiasm. The 1990s was an exciting moment in the history of the public library. When the Cambridge, Massachusetts, libraries linked to the Internet in 1994, it was news. Three years later some 45 percent of all public libraries in the country were online (fig. 18.4). One goal of the Clinton administration was to wire as many public libraries as possible.60 It was more than just connecting to the World Wide Web. It was a whole new attitude about the institution. “Libraries are not just about books anymore,” wrote one upstate New York librarian. “Services have increased to include health information and reference, counseling and parenting. Videos have brought in non-readers.” The Queens library bought Harlequin romances in Spanish, advice books about romance in Chinese, the latest potboilers in Urdu and Russian. In Portland, Oregon’s main library, you could “sip a cup of Starbucks latte, take a personal finance workshop, surf the Web, view an art show, listen to a jazz concert, pet a potbellied pig, buy a book—and oh, yes, borrow a book.” Across the nation, public libraries tried to make everyone welcome: seniors during the day, adolescents after school, families in the evening, and the homeless at any time (fig. 18.5). All sorts of community organizations were encouraged to meet in the local library. A good library now bustled with activity. The public library, it was asserted again and again, should be “a local community center.”61 These were all ideas that had first percolated in the 1970s. Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library reported in 1995 that books were still important, but “we’re moving away from this almost fetishistic obsession with the object itself.” Such ideas were often discussed in political terms. “The library’s main goal in a democracy is to bring information to everyone,” claimed Betty Turock, the president of the American Library Association.62 But, unlike research libraries, public libraries’ book budgets did not suffer.
FIGURE 18.4. Computer workstations in the public library. Martins Ferry Public Library, Martins Ferry, Ohio. 344
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FIGURE 18.5. New functions of the public library: homework help for recent immigrants from Somalia to Minneapolis. Minneapolis Public Library. Courtesy of the James K. Hosmer Special Collections Library, Minneapolis Collection. M2714.
As in the early 1960s, the flush times of the 1990s meant there was money to be spent on computers, videos, and CDs as well as on more traditional printed matter. Book buying actually increased throughout the decade. A study of 533 public libraries across the country found that budgets rose by 28 percent in the last half of the 1990s.63 There were critics, particularly in the large cities.64 Yet the complaints got little political traction. Overwhelmingly, patrons were enthusiastic. Whatever the critics might say, the public flocked to the new libraries. Teens were fascinated by the computers. And as for adults, a 1996 survey found that 67 percent of them visited a library in the previous year, up from 51 percent in 1978. And they still came for books. Circulation shot up 47 percent in San Antonio, Texas, after the new library opened. In Quincy, Massachusetts, it tripled once the renovated building was finished. In San Jose, California, circulation shot up 65 percent. “The more Internet-access computers we put in,” said Jane Light, director of the San Jose Public Library, “[the more] our circulation goes up.” The director of the Los Angeles Public Library claimed that it was “the best time for public libraries in my entire [thirty-year] career.” According to the editor of the Library Journal, we were in the midst of a “public library renaissance.”65 The buoyant economy of the 1990s underwrote much of the enthusiasm. LI B R A R I E S , B O O K S , A N D T H E I N F ORMATI ON AG E
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Once the dot.com bubble burst in March 2000, budgets started to shrink and a “new wariness” set in.66 Still, the nervousness was about funding, not the vision. There was no sign that public librarians—as a whole—were anything but content with the new-style library. Nor was there any sign of public concern. From the middle of the twentieth century, the information-based library had come from two sources: technophiles interested in a “post-book” culture and political liberals hoping to provide service to local communities. That remained true in the last two decades of the twentieth century, but each found themselves centered in different institutions. Research librarians were the technophiles, arguing that they were adapting to a new global economy, that the old model for a research library was no longer economically sustainable, and that the scholarly monograph was a dying form. Computerization, for those librarians, would be the way out. Critics of the new research library, liberal or radical humanists on campuses or writers like Nicholson Baker, saw the new information library as a capitulation to corporate interests, a sign of wrong priorities triumphant. In public libraries, however, the link between political liberalism and information services remained strong. During the 1990s, the American Library Association was one of the most reliably liberal organizations in the United States, fighting against book censorship, Internet censorship, and, after 9/11, the Patriot Act. Community planning in libraries was explicitly connected to a vision of participatory democracy. By the late 1990s, the ALA was a regular target of conservative ire. Debates about libraries became especially acute in the 1990s precisely because they were about something else—about forms of life. Economics, politics, and the politics of reading were all involved. Were the new libraries a necessary part of globalization? Were they so hostile to book reading? But there was the other side: weren’t the new computer-friendly libraries just one part of a genuine democratic commitment to vibrant community life? Whatever the answers, the new library was bound up in different attitudes toward reading and the book. Libraries with “information services” at their core pushed a certain style of reading—intensive, reflective, critical, book-length reading—to the margins. This reading was not outlawed, but it lost its centrality. For the critics of the new library, too many librarians now thought of reading as informational, narrowly devoted personal life projects, not about cultural broadening at all. Careerism on campus, customer service in the public library—this is what the new libraries were about. Who now nurtured informed cultural criticism? Who spoke for the collective citizenry? The traditional book had to jostle with other media for a place.
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CHAPTER 19
Science Books since 1945 Bruce V. Lewenstein
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In early 1988, an editor at Bantam Books in New York faced a challenge: he had just been handed the portfolio for a “popular” science book that drew on both quantum mechanics (the science of the very small) and general relativity (the science of the very big). Scheduled for publication within the month, the 200page book filled with dense and difficult science and philosophy had suddenly become an orphan when the editor who had shepherded it for nearly four years left for another company. Although Bantam had paid more than $200,000 in advance for the volume, the text was challenging, and it was not clear that anyone other than a specialized audience would be interested. Worried, the editor cut the press run “drastically,” to 40,000.1 That book was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, written by a Cambridge University astronomer who held the same endowed chair once occupied by Isaac Newton.2 Within weeks, the book entered the best-seller lists; within two years, it had sold 1 million copies worldwide. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, A Brief History of Time had sold more than 9 million copies. Some of the book’s sales were driven by curiosity, because the author suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and, by the publication date, could communicate only through a computer and a voice synthesizer. But sales also resulted from widespread interest in Hawking’s subject. In that respect, the volume’s success signaled the centrality of scientific ideas in intellectual life.3 This chapter explores the role of books in the years after World War II in scientific culture, in broader public culture, and in the coalescence of those cultures into a single culture scientifique (a French term with no English equivalent, expressing the absolute integration of science into the cultural matrix).4 While the focus is on the United States, science by its nature crosses many boundaries and thus so will this story. Many scientists believed that science itself no longer needed books, for they had become accustomed to reading about most new findings in journals (or, by the end of the century, in electronically circulated preprints). Yet books continued, in a variety of ways, to construct the community of science, both among scientists themselves and among wider publics.
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Indeed, the history of science books in America shows that public interest in and support for science grew throughout the postwar years, especially after the “baby boom” demographic bubble reached maturity in the late 1970s. The popularity of science books in the last twenty years of the twentieth century may also have reflected one branch of a cultural tension between romantic or “antiscience” beliefs (supported by fundamentalist approaches to religion) and an Enlightenment vision of reason and evidence as the base for social progress.
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Science Communication as a Community Activity Although scientists and the public often perceive science as a collection of facts and ideas about the natural world, sociologists have long understood that it is also a social activity, dependent on the collective actions of individuals and institutions organized in both formal and informal ways.5 Communication, according to the psychologist and sociologist William Garvey, is the “essence” of science.6 Yet both observers and practitioners of science have traditionally regarded the history of science communication as a progression toward modern peer-reviewed journal literature.7 At the turn of the twenty-first century, a young scientist being trained in how to report results is likely to be given a copy of the most recent edition of Robert Day’s How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper.8 Similarly, the Council of Biology Editors’ Style Manual (frequently updated since 1968) contains sections on research articles, review articles, multiauthored books, abstracts, posters, theses, book reviews, and grant proposals, among others; the main instructions are labeled “Writing the article.”9 The 1968 combined Publications Handbook and Style Manual of the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America begins with “journal management and procedures,” while the American Chemical Society’s 1992 Style Guide launches immediately into “the scientific paper.”10 There is good reason for this emphasis: the number of journals grew from between 5,000 and 10,000 in 1945 to as many as 100,000 in the 1990s.11 Yet the almost complete absence of reference to books in those manuals and handbooks is striking. To a historian steeped in the traditions of Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), Antoine Lavoisier’s Treatise on the Elements of Chemistry (1789), and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the question becomes: what happened to books? The answer lies in recognizing what research on science communication in the past twenty years has demonstrated: that robust knowledge about the natural world emerges not fully formed in a single article, but becomes “science” only after passage through a matrix of multiple forums and audiences that collectively produces a successful description of what na348
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ture is.12 Books clearly appear in such a complex system. They serve as locations for the development of ideas and as repositories for stable knowledge. They are markers of community activity and forums for establishing community values—both for those communities existing within scientific practice and for those extending beyond the professional scientific world to encompass various publics. Books, for this purpose, can be understood as shared social experiences, ones that create a common bond that may or may not be based on the substantive content of the text. In some cases, books may serve multiple communities, crossing boundaries in complex ways. Books likewise serve as social memories, providing cultural touch points that give communities their common understandings. Although these functions of books remained constant throughout the postwar period, the changing form, content, and availability of books of various types helps identify changes in the communities of science. These changes become clear in examining several categories: books within science itself; textbooks; and books with clear influence on intellectual culture and on broader public culture, on culture scientifique. In each of these contexts, information and ideas are presented, conveyed, and used to create intellectual regimes, shaping discourses that contribute simultaneously to scientific knowledge and to science’s social authority, with ideas shifting meanings as they are employed in different contexts.
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Daily Life in Science At the beginning of the postwar period, books continued as they had for generations to play a role in routine scientific work, creating communities of practice that shaped daily life. Reference books like the CRC Handbooks (of math, chemistry, and so on) appeared on many scientific desks, and teachers encouraged students to buy them early in their careers for easy access to formulas, standardized data, and common calculations or tables.13 Librarians bound database serials such as Chemical Abstracts (begun early in the century) or Science Citation Index (published in its earliest form in the mid-1950s) as books; scientists routinely visited the library to check for new publications or references to older material.14 Beginning in the 1960s, publishers compiled these databases on computers, and the books consisted essentially of computer printouts. Scientific societies such as the American Chemical Society (publishers of Chemical Abstracts) and government agencies like the U.S. National Library of Medicine (publisher of the Index Medicus) expanded their units preparing bibliographic material. New businesses emerged: Eugene Garfield, a chemist and librarian, in the late 1950s created the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to publish S C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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the Science Citation Index that he had invented; by the 1990s ISI had become a part of the worldwide Thomson Publishing empire.15 The shift to computer production had profound implications for the behavior of scientists. By the end of the 1970s, distributed computing networks allowed libraries and some scientists direct access to the electronic databases, a development that dramatically accelerated with the advent of personal computers and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s. By the turn of the century, few young scientists made a weekly library visit to scan new journals; they expected to have information delivered directly to their office computers. Even the handbooks and reference books of the past were replaced by online tables and reference sites. Thus the shift in production and eventually distribution of scientific information led to a declining commitment of scientists to traditional books and libraries. It also isolated them in their labs and offices, leading to less of the informal exchange of information common in libraries and hallways, which compounded the increasing specialization of scientists and their increasing inability to share information and ideas across disciplinary boundaries. (In the 1980s, designers of scientific laboratories began deliberately creating “conversation spaces” in their buildings, to attempt to overcome increasing isolation.)16 The Internet also affected the dissemination of conference proceedings. Many scientific societies had issued proceedings of their meetings or special symposia. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for example, began formally publishing symposia in the 1930s and continued into the 1970s.17 Especially during the 1960s and 1970s, some scientific societies with smaller budgets distributed proceedings less elegantly (for instance, by photooffset from typewriter manuscripts) or less systematically. Despite these limitations, conference proceedings often provided the first notice of new findings. They were also literally documentation of communal efforts, of occasions when scientists came together to work through their ideas. With the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, however, scientists found new ways to distribute their ideas in progress. Because meeting abstracts and papers were published online, they became available to much wider audiences than the few hard copies that might sit only on the shelves of meeting participants. New systems of online preprints (draft papers circulated before the formal version was published in a journal) became common in some fields, again obviating the need for the collections of preliminary ideas and initial experimental reports that conference proceedings had provided.18 While no statistics are yet available, the value of formally published conference proceedings available in paper formats appears to be decreasing as the new century begins. Nevertheless, another type of communal book affecting daily life in science, the Festschrift, is surviving those developments. The Festschrift is a celebratory 350
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volume intended to document a senior researcher’s career and interests. Production of a Festschrift is a statement about shared values and personal bonds, a commitment to science as a community as well as a body of knowledge. Although Festschrifts are usually collections of reviews or summary papers, they have sometimes allowed a researcher to publish ideas that have had trouble passing through the peer review system, such as geologist Harry Hess’s first systematic presentation of the ideas that became plate tectonics, an essay that he labeled as “geopoetry.”19
Textbooks
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But while the books of daily practice and the Festschrift document science as a community, textbooks show how books can create and shape a community. By the mid-1980s, for example, three-quarters of a million students took introductory biology each year; about twenty texts vied for that market, with an average wholesale cost of $30 per book. The number of new titles to serve the biology market grew from about five each year in the early 1950s to fifteen each year by the mid-1980s.20 Several factors contributed to rapid growth in the science textbook market. The GI Bill after World War II sent a new generation of students to college, and the palpable value of science and technology in “the good war” led many students to those fields. In 1958, after America was shocked by the success of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite, new money flowed into primary and secondary science education as well (fig. 19.1).21
FIGURE 19.1. George C. Pimental et al., Chemistry: An Experimental Science (1960; San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1967). This textbook was produced by the Chemical Education Material Study (CHEM) under a grant from the National Science Foundation and designed to teach the process of chemistry, while developing problem-solving skills. The contributors include high school teachers, as well as university professors and a representative of the American Chemical Society. Used by permission of the Regents of the University of California at Berkeley. S C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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The intellectual effect of the new textbooks was most apparent at the college level. There, scientists were eager to shape the minds of the new generations of students streaming into universities. Linus Pauling’s General Chemistry (1947), one of the first great postwar textbooks, illustrates the importance of such works. Pauling (who won both the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize) used his textbook explicitly to reformulate how to teach chemistry, introducing visual imagery and insisting on organizing the material around the new knowledge of atomic structures that had emerged earlier in the century, rather than continuing to invoke older “laws” of chemical behavior. By introducing a conceptually different way of thinking about the natural world, Pauling’s book went beyond a simple “discovery” about nature. It was more important: it was the means by which thousands of students came to understand chemistry as a theoretical structure for comprehending the arrangement and behavior of atoms and molecules.22 By contrast, two leading physics texts, Francis Sears and Mark Zemansky’s College Physics (1947) and David Halliday and Robert Resnick’s Physics for Students of Science and Engineering (1960) made their mark by sustaining older views of the physical world. Both focused on the needs of engineering students, being fundamentally designed to teach the Newtonian mechanics that most of these students would have to face in their careers. As the physicist and historian Charles Holbrow has shown, quantum mechanics and other issues of twentieth-century physics were almost literally an appendage, appearing in separate chapters near the ends of these texts.23 For many workaday physicists, not the elite researchers but the ones keeping government laboratories and experimental facilities running, the ones doing routine calculations and operations, the engineers who make up the vast bulk of the physically oriented, scientifically trained work force, esoteric cutting-edge science was just one part of what they learned. The worldview, the intellectual matrix into which they placed the individual facts, theories, formulas, and behaviors that to them defined science, was essentially a product of the nineteenth century. Even so, textbooks, especially at the advanced level, were more likely to be places for creating and consolidating new fields. James Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) was one such work. Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA (fig. 19.2), was a wunderkind whose more famous book, The Double Helix (1968), has been interpreted as a polemic arguing for a new, competitive, high-stakes approach to biological research.24 Less recognized has been the role of the earlier text in creating a new discipline. Watson brought together the range of research that had previously been scattered in crystallography, biochemistry, genetics, and other fields to show that it could be taught together fruitfully— and that, by so doing, teachers could train a new generation of scientists ready 352
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FIGURE 19.2. Nobel Prize winner and book author James Watson. National Library of Medicine.
to move into this coherent area rather than merely reaching into it from their own home disciplines. Other books synthesized new knowledge, providing the theoretical base for whole new areas of research. Historians have called Ledyard Stebbins’s Variation and Evolution in Plants (1950), for example, the founding document of evolutionary botany, one that “provided a detailed argument that plants were subject to the same processes of evolution as animals.” After a larger debate about the nature of biological progress—a debate that took place largely in books, such as magnum opuses published by Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould at century’s end—biologists could not imagine a world in which plants were not subject to evolutionary forces.25 The power of such textbooks lay in their ability to create communities of people with similar training, similar perspectives, and similar tools. Sustained by those communities, texts often acquired additional authors in their revised versions and grew dramatically in size. The increasing length of texts, however, reflected a tension between the intellectual goal of organizing information and the economic goal of ensuring that no teacher or textbook adoption committee could reject a text because it did not S C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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contain a particular favorite topic. In 1988 an exasperated chemistry professor plotted the growth of organic chemistry textbooks from the 1950s onward and discovered a growth rate of 16 pages per year—which, he predicted, would lead within fifteen years to average textbooks of more than 1,500 pages and “a bodybuilding prerequisite to the organic chemistry course.” More seriously, he worried that while new, exciting, challenging material was added, older material was not being deleted.26 A survey of biology teachers in the late 1980s showed that more than half believed that textbooks had too much information and too many facts.27 To address these concerns, textbook publishers used new production techniques in the 1980s and 1990s to offer “custom” texts, packaging individual chapters to meet a particular teacher’s course design. Supplementary material was provided on CD-ROMs or Web sites, rather than added as appendices or sidebars within the texts. The texts also changed in their intellectual substance, capturing new interdisciplinary linkages among the sciences and adopting more theoretical approaches to such reconceived subjects as earth science. But not all scientists applauded the shift to theory. “Some people say the study of descriptive chemistry is dull and boring,” wrote prominent chemist John C. Bailar Jr., near the end of his life. Recalling the evocative power of the books he had used in his own studies, Bailar called them “extremely interesting. . . . I frequently wonder if we wouldn’t attract more students into the chemical fold by giving them this sort of [detailed, specific] introduction to the subject. At least it would give them the feeling that chemistry is useful. I wonder whether they get that feeling from a long discussion of theory.”28 The tension between theory and fact—a tension between different visions of what science is and what knowledge a community of students needs—occurred at the elementary and secondary school levels as well. New school curricula launched during the Cold War crisis of confidence after the 1958 Sputnik launch were designed to attract the very best students into the sciences, and curriculum designers drawn from the top ranks of research scientists often drew on the latest theories for their projects.29 The theoretically oriented curricula were particularly difficult for students unlikely to become cutting-edge scientists. By the 1990s thirty years of research into student learning and dissatisfaction with the various approaches tried since the 1950s led to reform efforts. New national “standards” for mathematics and science education were developed. Although the standards were voluntary, most states by the turn of the century had adopted some version of them, leading texts to carry tables showing teachers how particular units addressed particular standards.30 In one field, evolution, conflict over fact and theory in school textbooks reflected a wider, recurring struggle between America’s commitment to science 354
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and widespread fundamentalist religious values. In several states, most notably Texas, citizens committed to biblical interpretations of creation successfully lobbied state textbook adoption committees to reject any text that described evolution as a scientific “fact.” At best, the creationists argued, evolution was a “theory” and should be taught only in the context of competing theories. Because the Texas market for high school biology texts was very large, and because the state had a statewide textbook approval system, many publishers chose to avoid discussion of evolution in their texts, to protect the sales of their texts in a key market.31 The struggles over creationism in schools showed the power of textbooks to create common cultural meanings for students—sometimes at the expense of what scientists believed.
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Culture Scientifique As the cultural resonance of textbooks suggests, even books intended for use within the scientific community (or the protoscientific community, in the case of students) were shaped by and had influence on wider communities. A famous example was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a scholarly treatise by the physicist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn.32 Kuhn offered a dramatic restating of how to imagine scientific change. He argued that the sciences did not proceed incrementally but periodically underwent “paradigm shifts” in which scientific communities had to develop entirely new conceptual frameworks to reconcile new findings with “incommensurable” long-established explanations. In the tumultuous 1960s, many scholars and social commentators appropriated the term “paradigm shift” to question the traditional, positivist belief that progress necessarily followed from the continuing development of science and technology—an appropriation that deeply bothered Kuhn himself.33 Although Kuhn’s influence was mainly confined to the intellectual community, throughout the postwar period other science-related books appeared frequently on best-seller lists, earning Pulitzer Prizes and similar tokens of cultural importance, thus illustrating the growth of a culture scientifique in America. Some books, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), often credited as the founding document of the environmental movement, became revered objects for those sounding warnings about perils to the public interest (see chapter 25). Praised by some scientists, vilified by others, Carson’s book illustrated how scientific controversies could not be separated from public controversies.34 Indeed, although scientists frequently complain that science is not respected in American culture and that nonscientists need more “science literacy,” the history of science books in public discourse suggests that science grew in popuS C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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larity during the second half of the twentieth century—especially after the welleducated baby boom generation began to reach adulthood in the 1970s. By the end of the century, that popularity may have been a factor in the simultaneous growth of a religious, fundamentalist culture—a culture war between science and religion, between romantic and Enlightenment outlooks that played out both on college campuses and in politics and other forums.35 From the end of World War II until 1977, only two science-related books won Pulitzer Prizes. But from 1978 to 1984, five science books won, all in the “general nonfiction” category (which had been introduced in the early 1960s). In the late 1970s, science was also succeeding in other areas of public culture, with a “science boom” in magazines and television shows.36 Even after the boom in magazines and television waned, science books remained strong, winning Pulitzers on average every other year from 1985 to 2000. Although the trend was not as clear for National Book Award winners, science books were recognized by the arbiters of quality publishing. These books became part of public culture through cocktail party discussions, references in editorials and magazine articles, and college reading lists. The 1970s also marked an inflection point for best sellers. In the early postwar period, science books had appeared regularly on various best-seller lists, mixed in with other general reading books. Those lists became increasingly dominated, however, by cookbooks, self-help and fitness books, and various “packaged” books designed to be consumed as products rather than read as literature.37 But a significant increase in best-selling titles that scientists could recognize as popularizations of current research occurred in the 1970s. From the end of World War II until 1975, almost never did more than ten new science books a year reach the New York Times weekly best-seller lists. After 1975, virtually never did fewer than ten new science books each year reach the best-seller list.38 In 1974 Little, Brown released as a book the scripts of Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, a BBC-produced television series. The book spent more than forty weeks on the New York Times list, and the series became “required” viewing for many scientists and intellectuals. Bronowski’s personal vision was crucial: the scripts contained an extended argument for the dominance of science over other approaches to understanding the world.39 The success of Ascent of Man led to the U.S. Public Broadcasting System’s decision to commission an even broader exploration of the universe from the astronomer Carl Sagan (fig. 19.3), who had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling Dragons of Eden (1977). Moreover, Ascent of Man producer Adrian Malone deliberately planned to create a star out of the astronomer.40 He succeeded, perhaps too well: much of the criticism of the resulting show, Cosmos, focused on Sagan’s immense ego. 356
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FIGURE 19.3. Carl Sagan’s science books included works aimed at a popular readership, and he developed an even broader following as a result of his television appearances, including the public television series Cosmos. Sagan poses with a model of the Viking Lander in California’s Death Valley. Photo credit: NASA.
Sagan’s insistence that the book version be a separate text, though it caused tension with Malone, nonetheless gave the book (published in 1980) an extra intellectual boost, and many reviewers preferred it to the television show. The book was on the Times best-seller list for more than seventy weeks. With Cosmos, science books became dramatically more visible in the publishing world. Until then, most science-oriented volumes had sales in the region of 100,000–200,000 hardcover copies, with a few reaching sales of 500,000. Cosmos sold 900,000 copies while on the best-seller list and continued to sell well for years. As a result, in 1982 Sagan received a $2 million advance for his novel, Contact (1985), which at the time was the largest advance ever given for a fiction book that was not even in manuscript.41 A few years later, Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985) spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Three years later Hawking’s book started its remarkable career. The numbers affected even books from lesser-known authors: in 1995 Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence sold 400,000 copies when it was fourteenth on the annual best-seller tally and then sold more than 300,000 copies the following year, even though it failed to break into the top-thirty list.42 Still, Sagan and Hawking demonstrated an increasingly important phenomeS C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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non for book sales: the media-savvy scientist as object of public worship. As early as the 1950s, Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World (on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-three weeks in 1953) was followed by a film of the same name, with stunning views of the undersea world. Joy Adamson’s Born Free (1960), describing her life with a lion cub, spent thirty-four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list before becoming a 1966 feature film that directly contributed to the wildlife conservation movement. But these authors also show the complex relationship between the content of their books and their celebrity. Cousteau was as admired for his physique as his science; Adamson’s maternal reflections on life in the jungle were as important as her ethological observations. Even Sagan himself was probably famous as much for his appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as he was for his printed words. Like Hawking, Adamson, and others he was a celebrity within a general culture that increasingly valued celebrity for its own sake.43 Not all contributions to culture scientifique required such dramatic authorial presence, of course. The increasing attention to science made it easier for “explanatory” books to gain influence—volumes that served primarily to present the current status of areas of scientific work. Sometimes, these books addressed multiple audiences, serving as community builders not just with the general public but also within the scientific community. James Gleick’s Chaos (1987), for example, was primarily a broad description of current developments in a fascinating area of science and thus fit securely in the “popular science” genre. Yet at the same time, like Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene, Gleick’s book brought together for the first time a set of disparate work that had never previously—even among the intellectual community—been clearly seen as a single coherent field. Thus, it was, in some ways, a founding document for a field of science that is today characterized by its own institutes, meetings, journals, and so on. Coming shortly after Sagan’s Contact novel and at about the same time as Hawking’s Brief History of Time, Gleick’s book also helped demonstrate the changing nature of the relationship between the scientific community and books. Beginning in the late 1970s with a series of autobiographies subvented by the Sloan Foundation, senior scientists had begun to see books as a way to address the public directly without violating the norms of peer-reviewed journals that held together their community of professional colleagues.44 This new generation of “great men” of science discovered that books allowed them to make broad philosophical statements. They were aided in many cases by the literary agent John Brockman, who perceived his role to be the intellectual agent provocateur, that is, not simply a financial or sales agent, but one who shaped publishing to ensure that it affected cultural debate.45 In the 1990s, he could 358
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achieve his goal of being a cultural avatar by focusing on science, demonstrating the crucial role that science had acquired in American culture. The popularity of books by Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson suggests the place of sex in contemporary culture as well. Based on scientific studies of human behavior, these authors’ volumes were deliberately written in dry, technical language. Although the authors had political agendas, their authority depended on maintaining their scientific status, and so their rhetoric had to meet scientific expectations.46 They skillfully plied the boundaries of science, sex, and culture. Many purchasers probably bought the books expecting something more titillating and never finished the detailed research reports. Nonetheless, the books created a common bond in conversations, set agendas for future debates, and became shared experiences. The language of science provided a cultural touchstone for readers from throughout the culture. Furthermore, despite the extraneous appeal of celebrity and sex, many science books did have direct impact because of their content. Their arguments became important to policy debates and conversations among what the British call the “chattering classes.” They were cited in magazine articles, in newspaper editorials and columns, and in policy reports. Books like James Conant’s On Understanding Science (1947), E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s Bell Curve (1994) were widely discussed, their sometimes controversial theses debated in academic conferences and colloquia. The ability of American culture to take up books as diverse as Lewis Thomas’s essays on the human spirit or Herrnstein and Murray’s polemics on racial politics suggests that the United States was not a science-phobic, antiscience culture (as many scientists feared).47
Cultural Conflict Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the growth of culture scientifique was universal, or even that the books of scientists themselves unequivocally contributed to that culture. The increase during the postwar era in religious publishing and the growing political power of religious fundamentalists after the 1960s suggests that a parallel cultural commitment to spirituality was common in the final years of the twentieth century. Indeed, some of the most popular science books carried a spiritual message that almost seemed to counter their more explicit, rational, Enlightenment goals. Hawking’s book was famous for its final paragraph, suggesting that finding a complete theory of the universe “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” Sagan’s work also demonstrates this complexity. Sagan was an adamant S C I E N C E B O O K S S I N C E 19 4 5
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believer in the power of science to explain the world and actively worked with “skeptics” to question spiritual or supernatural explanations of natural events. Yet his biographers and various cultural critics have also noted that some of his books—including the immensely popular Cosmos—have deeply religious and mystical strains to them, commitments to “belief ” that seem to contradict his oft-stated norm that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”48 Along with challenges from religion, political conflicts also influenced the public life of science books. Silent Spring, having sparked or at least fed the growing environmental movement, is the most prominent example of that phenomenon. Many of the key pieces of legislation related to the environment, however, came only after publication of other science-based polemics in 1968, including Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. On the opposite political side, Julian Simon and Herman Kahn published their The Resourceful Earth in 1984, countering the argument that Earth’s ability to sustain human population growth and technological development was necessarily limited. And, carrying the debate into the twentyfirst century, Danish social scientist Bjørn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), arguing that data compiled over the years since the beginning of the environmental movement showed that concerns about environmental degradation were unwarranted. The book was widely attacked within the scientific community, with major critical reviews in the journals Science, Nature, and Scientific American, but the book received substantial support from the business community, including the Wall Street Journal and the Economist.49 Books provided the forum in which religious, spiritual, and political exchanges involving science could take place. Those forums provided a place, a discourse space, for communities of interest to explore crucial issues in American society in the postwar years.
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CHAPTER 20
U.S. Academic Publishing in the Digital Age John B. Thompson
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Since the early 1980s, few topics have generated as much interest and speculation in the publishing industry as the significance and impact of the digital revolution.1 Many people working in the industry were convinced—and many remain convinced today—that the digital revolution would have a profound impact on publishing, even if it was never entirely clear just what the impact would be. There were some commentators in the 1990s and early 2000s who were confidently predicting that e-books would become a rapidly expanding sector of the book publishing market, and a great deal of money—many hundreds of millions of dollars—was invested by publishers and others in an attempt to turn this possibility into a commercial reality. Looking over their shoulders at what had happened in the music industry and elsewhere, some senior executives in the large publishing firms argued in favor of investing substantial sums to experiment with new modes of content delivery, fearful that, if they were not willing to experiment, they would run the risk of being left high and dry when the new technologies invaded the market and took off. Investment also came from outside the industry, as new technology firms, backed by private investors and spurred on by a temporarily buoyant stock market, saw commercial opportunities opening up in areas where the traditional world of publishing intersected with the new world of digital information and the Internet. The publishing world became an arena of active and ongoing experimentation by organizations that had, or wanted to have, a stake in a digital future. The appeal of the digital future was as strong in academic publishing as elsewhere in the industry, but in academic publishing there were additional factors that fueled the interest in digital technologies. As American higher education expanded after World War II, so did American university presses, as well as commercial publishers oriented to the academic market. University presses, growing in numbers and size in the 1950s and 1960s, began to see signs of trouble in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, academic publishers commonly printed between 2,000 and 3,000 hardback copies of a scholarly mono-
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graph. The principal task of many academic publishers was one of selection: to decide which of the scholarly projects presented to them was of sufficiently high quality to merit publication. Once the decision to publish had been taken, it was generally assumed that the financial aspects could be worked out. By the 1980s, however, monograph sales were clearly in decline. Today, many academic publishers say that total sales of hardback-only monographs are often as low as 400–500 copies worldwide (fig. 20.1). This, more than any other single factor, transformed the economic conditions of scholarly publishing. By 2000 the unit sales of scholarly monographs had fallen to a quarter or less of what they were in the 1970s, and what was once a relatively straightforward and profitable type of publishing has become much more difficult in financial terms. The most important factor in the decline in the sales of scholarly monographs is to be found in the financial pressures faced by university libraries. During the turbulent economic conditions of the 1970s and 1980s, many universities dependent on public funding found that their budgets were being squeezed, and university administrators looked for ways to cut costs. Library budgets were vulnerable, especially budgets for new acquisitions. (See chapter 18.) At the same time, the libraries were spending a growing proportion of their acquisitions budgets on periodicals, whose numbers had been rapidly growing and whose costs increased in the 1980s and 1990s well above the rate of inflation. By 1997 journals were thirty times more expensive than they were in 1970, an average annual increase of more than 13 percent.2 Meanwhile, libraries were also spending increasing sums on information technology to keep pace with the changing opportunities and requirements for online catalogs and circulation control, among other things. Well into the 1980s, leading university libraries still depended on printed card catalogs and handwritten systems for readers to check out books. Today, card catalogs seem like an ancient relic. The decline in the sales of scholarly monographs led many academic publishers in the late 1990s to hope that new revenue channels could be generated by making the content of scholarly monographs available in digital formats rather than as traditional printed books—there were many who dreamed of “an electronic solution to the monograph problem.” But by late 2000 these hopes began to fade as the inflated expectations in the publishing industry generally gave way to a mood of growing skepticism about the capacity of the digital revolution to transform the publishing world. The bursting of the dot-com bubble contributed to this; so, too, did the poor sales performance of books that were made available as e-books that could be downloaded from the publisher’s Web site or from “e-tailers” like Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. The muchcited prediction made by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2000—which forecast an explosion of consumer spending on electronic books, estimating that e-books 362
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FIGURE 20.1. The international context for the academic book in the twenty-first century: the Michigan State University Press exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Fredric C. Bohm.
would compose 17 percent of the market by 2004—seemed more and more like a pipe dream. By the end of 2002, many of the new electronic publishing divisions and e-book programs, some of which had been launched with much fanfare and at considerable expense only one or two years earlier, were being either closed down or radically scaled back. The e-book revolution had certainly stalled, possibly failed, and in any case had definitely been postponed. However, the stalling of the e-book revolution has not brought an end to experimentation with new technologies, nor has it demonstrated that digitization has not had, or is unlikely to have, any impact on the publishing world—far from it. The much-heralded e-book revolution was only part—and, as it happens, a rather superficial part—of a much wider and deeper series of transformations that were being wrought in the publishing industry by the digital revolution.
The Impact of Digitization on Publishing In order to understand the impact of the digital revolution, we need to distinguish at least four levels at which digitization can affect the publishing business. The most immediate impact of digitization can be seen at the level of operating systems and information flows. Like many sectors of industry today, the management systems in all major publishing houses have undergone a thorough U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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and continuous process of computerization. In the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, most publishing firms switched from a paper-based office culture to a screen-based culture and incurred the costs—often quite substantial—associated with building, maintaining, and updating the information technology infrastructure upon which a screen-based office culture depends. The digital revolution has also transformed the supply chain both in terms of book production and the management of relations with suppliers and in terms of the ordering and supplying of books to wholesalers and booksellers. Second, digitization can affect marketing, sales, and service provision. With the development of the Internet in the early 1990s, many publishers invested in the development of Web sites to give themselves an online presence. Initially the Web site was regarded by most publishers as little more than an online catalog, but the Internet quickly became much more than this: it became the central medium through which publishers interact with both their actual and potential author base and their actual and potential customer base. Publishers turned increasingly to the Internet to provide a range of support services for customers—such as companion Web sites for textbooks—and to develop a range of electronic marketing initiatives. They also found themselves relying more and more on online retailers like Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com to sell their books: from its humble origins in a Seattle garage in 1995, Amazon’s sales in its books, music, and video division reached $1.87 billion by 2002, and online booksellers as a whole were accounting for about 8 percent of adult trade book sales in the United States. By 2005 Amazon had become the most important retail outlet for many academic publishers. Third, digitization affects publishing at the level of content management and manipulation. The digital revolution has made it increasingly clear to many in the publishing business that the content they acquire and develop is one of their most valuable assets—indeed, as many in the industry have emphasized in recent years, “content is king.” Insofar as publishers are in the business of acquiring and transforming content, their business is susceptible to a high level of digitization for the simple reason that the content they are dealing with—words as well as images—can be codified in digital form. Hence, the whole process of creating, managing, and developing this content is a process that can, at least in principle, be handled digitally. Fourth, the digital revolution can affect publishing at the level of content delivery. It is here that the impact of the digital revolution is potentially the most profound because the delivery of content to the end user electronically, rather than in the form of the physical book, would transform the whole financial model of publishing. It would no longer be necessary to lock up resources in physical books (with the attendant costs of paper, printing, and binding), store 364
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them in warehouses, ship them to bookstores and wholesalers, accept them as returns if they were not sold, and ultimately write them down if they turned out to be surplus to requirements. In the dream vision of electronic content delivery, publishers could bypass most if not all of the intermediaries in the traditional book supply chain. This dream vision generated many of the experiments in electronic publishing—including the many e-book ventures. To understand why some of these have succeeded while many others have failed, we have to look more carefully at the relations between technologies, markets, and value.
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Technologies, Markets, and Value There are many people who are inclined to believe that technology is the pacemaker of social change and that even if new technologies encounter some initial resistance, they will eventually prevail. The recent history of the publishing industry is littered with examples of failed ventures that attest to this technological view of the world (the huge investment in CD-ROMs in the late 1980s and early 1990s—what some publishers refer to as “the great CD-ROM fiasco”—is one notable example). What this technological view fails to see is that the real significance of technologies can be understood only if they are analyzed in relation to social contexts of use—that is, in relation to actual and emerging markets and what the users of technologies want and are willing to pay for, and in relation to the value that is added by these technologies. It is easy to be carried away by the bells and whistles of technological innovation while paying scant attention to the needs of end users. So how does the use of digital technologies enable publishers (and other content providers) to add real value to their content, value that is sufficiently important for end users (or for intermediaries like libraries) that they are willing to pay for it? There are six main ways in which online technologies enable value to be added. First, they provide ease of access: in an online environment, users can access content easily and quickly from the comfort of their home or office rather than go to a library or bookstore to get a physical copy of a book. And the same “book” can be accessed by multiple users at once. Second, content delivered online can be updated quickly, frequently, and relatively cheaply. Third, the online environment is an economy of scale: it offers the possibility of providing access to collections of material that are extensive and comprehensive, thus allowing for a range of choice and depth that is simply not possible in most physical collections. Fourth, delivering content online can enable users to search it with tools that are much more powerful than the search mechanisms (such as indexes) that are used in printed texts. A fifth feature of the online environment is that it can give a dynamic character to the referential function of U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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texts by using hotlinks to enable readers to move to other pages and other sites. Finally, online delivery enables the publisher to use a variety of multimedia to supplement the text, including visual images, streaming video, and sound. These various ways in which value can be added in an online environment are all important, but the extent to which they matter to end users depends on the type of content that is being delivered. For example, the fact that financial information (such as prices of stocks and shares, exchange rates, data on business performance) can be easily accessed and searched online and can be continuously updated in real time matters a great deal to many users. Scholarly journal content also lends itself to online dissemination. Because journal articles are short, they can be either read on screen or easily printed out, and the ability to do this from one’s office rather than having to go to a library is a convenience that matters greatly to many users. Moreover, because users are generally looking for articles on specific topics, they generally value the capacity to search for relevant material across a large corpus of material. Hence, it is perhaps not surprising that since 1990 scholarly and scientific journal publishing has moved rapidly into the online environment. All the major journal publishers—including Elsevier, Wiley, Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis—have increasingly shifted their journal programs from print-only to print plus electronic, and in some cases to electronic-only delivery. Moreover, a variety of third-party aggregators have emerged that are engaged in packaging journal content from a variety of publishers. These aggregators range from commercial players like Gale and EBSCO to not-for-profit organizations like JSTOR. Established in 1995 with the help of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, JSTOR has created an electronic archive of the back issues of journals that is made available to university libraries at a relatively modest cost.3 Reference works, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, also lend themselves to online availability. Users do not read a reference work from cover to cover but generally consult it in order to answer a specific question or acquire a specific piece of knowledge; the capacity to search a reference work quickly is therefore a particularly valuable feature. Moreover, users may value the fact that reference works made available online can be comprehensive in their scope; large reference works, such as multivolume encyclopedias and dictionaries, are very costly and unwieldy in print. It is also costly to revise and update printed reference works, whereas it is relatively cheap to revise and update them online. For these and other reasons, many large reference works, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary, have been turned into online resources. What is much less clear is whether—and, if so, to what extent—those types of content that have hitherto been published in the form of the traditional 366
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printed book, from novels and biographies to scholarly books and textbooks, lend themselves to being made available online. Undoubtedly, there are ways in which the online environment could add value to this content—for example, by providing scale and portability, by building in search facilities and multimedia components, and so on. Whether these are features that end users really want and are willing to pay for, though, is another matter. And whether the kind of value that can be added in an online environment would be sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages involved in accessing extended texts online—not the least of which is the sheer inconvenience of reading an extended text on screen—is by no means clear. We can understand why this might be so if we think of “content” as falling into four broad categories. The first category involves data, content that is essentially a compilation of numbers presented in varying degrees of orderliness, like financial data on the prices of stocks. Data of this kind, like share prices, may be time sensitive and hence well suited to being made available online where they can be continuously updated in real time. Second, there is information, basic descriptive content that is generally articulated in a discursive form. This might be records of court cases or basic information about the history, ownership, and size of businesses. Information is also well served by an online environment. The third type of content is knowledge, a form of discursively articulated content that involves interpretation or analysis. There is a variety of types of knowledge, some of which are well served by an online environment and some of which are not. What I call “discrete results”—knowledge claims that can be expressed in a concise form—works well in an online environment. Scientific journals trade in discrete results and have moved increasingly and effectively to online publishing. “Aggregated knowledge,” content involving the accumulation of discrete results into an extended text as in standard reference works, has moved more unevenly into the online world. Some large reference works, like multivolume encyclopedias, which were traditionally sold to libraries and other institutions, have moved effectively into online environments, while smaller reference works that were traditionally sold to individual consumers have not. It has not been easy to establish a business model that would enable publishers to recover the substantial costs involved in preparing reference works and making them available online. “Pedagogical knowledge,” as in textbooks, and what we can call “sustained argument,” most familiar in the scholarly monograph, are forms of knowledge that have not, or not yet, found online formats that are as suitable for the end user as printed textbooks and monographs. Even less amenable to online use is material in the fourth category of content, what I call narrative. A narrative U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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is an extended story with a beginning, a plot of some kind, and an ending of sorts. It may be fiction or nonfiction. Each of the categories of content I have discussed here is progressively less “bitty,” that is, less constituted by discrete pieces of data or text. An online environment can add real value to content that is “bitty” in character, aggregating it into corpora of various kinds, building in search components and adding multimedia features. But whether these are features that end users really want and are willing to pay for when it comes to textbooks, sustained argument, and narrative is another matter, and whether these features would be sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages and inconveniences of accessing extended texts online is by no means clear. Nevertheless, since the late 1990s various initiatives in academic publishing have sought to make the content of scholarly books available in digital formats. Partly, these initiatives were driven by third parties who saw opportunities to open up new markets and create new businesses from delivering scholarly book content online; partly they were driven by philanthropic organizations that wanted to support experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication; and partly they were driven by publishers themselves, some of whom were eager to be at the forefront of new developments and were keen (or at least willing) to participate in initiatives that might eventually generate new revenue streams. Attempts have been made to sell individual e-books to individual readers who would download the content to their PC or hand-held reading device (in the field of academic publishing, by Taylor & Francis among others), but they have so far proved to be of limited success and have, to date, generated only modest revenue streams. Indeed, one lesson that has emerged clearly from the brief history of experimentation in this domain is that if there is a market for the delivery of academic book content in electronic form, then it is likely to be institutional rather than individual—that is, the main market is likely to be university libraries who buy access to content for their members, rather than individuals who purchase their own personal copies of e-books. So how might academic book content be delivered to this institutional market? I focus here on two different models—what I shall call the virtual library model and the scholarly corpus model.
The Virtual Library Model Virtual libraries involve the creation of collections of books and other content that can be accessed by end users without being purchased by them. The virtual libraries are built and maintained by third-party intermediaries who acquire the right to use content and convert it into suitable electronic formats (fig. 20.2). They are set up as commercial concerns that seek to generate a profit by selling 368
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FIGURE 20.2. The Kirtas 2400 book scanner has become a familiar sight in libraries involved in digitization projects. Courtesy of EBSCO and American Antiquarian Society.
access licenses to institutions such as university libraries, government departments, and private corporations. In academic publishing, three of the most important virtual libraries, all of which rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are netLibrary, Questia, and ebrary. Each used a different way of acquiring and converting content, each developed its own business model for charging customers and reimbursing copyright holders, and each had its own strengths and weaknesses. Here I focus on netLibrary. Founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1998 by three entrepreneurs (one with a background in banking, one with a background in finance, and the third with an engineering background), netLibrary’s plan was to acquire content from publishers, convert it and add some functionality such as full search facilities, and then sell it to libraries and other institutional customers. In 1999 they raised $110 million from venture capitalists and strategic partners to implement their plan. In order to induce publishers to license content to them, netLibrary initially offered to digitize content for free. Books were shipped to netLibrary’s facilities in Boulder, where the spines were sliced off and page images created. The production of files was then outsourced to overseas production facilities in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere. In many cases books were rekeyed. The files would be checked for quality and then returned to Boulder where they were converted into a proprietary format—a netLibrary edition ebook. NetLibrary’s model was based on the idea that the books held in their collection would be sold on a title-by-title basis to academic libraries and other institutions. The librarian would purchase a range of individual titles from netLibrary at the price of the hardcover edition. The e-books would be held on netLibrary’s server and legitimate library users would be able to access it via a U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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user identification system. The library would pay a management fee of 9 percent per annum of the purchase price of the book (or 50 percent in perpetuity) for the book to be held on netLibrary’s server and managed by them, but the library would save the cost of having to catalog, shelve, manage, and repair or replace the physical book. NetLibrary would pay a royalty or fee to the publisher of somewhere in the range of 30–50 percent of the sale price (the precise figure was negotiated separately with each publisher). From the publisher’s point of view, a fee at the upper end of this scale would be somewhat similar to the net price they would receive if the book had been sold as an ordinary printed book at a full trade discount. NetLibrary launched its service in February 2000 and generated a significant level of sales in the first year of operation. Its customers were largely university libraries and public libraries in the United States; they also sold books to various corporations and to some libraries overseas. The books were generally bought in collections in specific subject areas such as history, women’s studies, business, or law, reflecting the priorities and acquisition policies of the institutions concerned. By 2001 publishers were receiving checks from netLibrary; in most cases the sums were very modest, though some publishers who had licensed a substantial number of titles reported significant earnings. But the rate of growth of netLibrary’s sales was not sufficient to cover its costs. Already in 2000 the company had reduced its staff and slashed its sales force to cut costs; it phased out the arrangement whereby it covered the cost of digitization and shifted the cost onto publishers. But the gulf between costs and revenues, and the difficulty of raising fresh financing for new technology ventures in the aftermath of the dot.com collapse, eventually forced netLibrary into receivership. In September 2001 netLibrary filed Chapter 11 and was bought by OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center) for $2 million—a small fraction of the total sums that had been invested in the venture a few years earlier. NetLibrary continues to trade now as a wholly owned subsidiary of OCLC. The great strength of netLibrary’s model is that it was and remains firmly rooted in the institutional library market. The founders and managers of netLibrary perceived early on that university libraries were likely to constitute the most robust market for electronic books in the scholarly domain, and they worked hard to cultivate their relations with the librarians and acquisition staff. However, there were certain weaknesses in their model and overall approach. Perhaps the most serious weakness is that the managers restricted the usage of e-books to one user at a time. They adopted this approach because they thought it would help allay the anxieties of publishers, upon whom they were dependent for content. The model of selling e-books to libraries at the same price as hardcover editions and restricting access to one user at a time 370
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was a model with which publishers were already very familiar, because it was the same model that had been used for centuries with physical books. But this model was anathema for librarians; it undermines one of the key respects in which the online environment can add real value to content by making it easily accessible to multiple users. Librarians had become accustomed to this feature from their experience of acquiring electronic journals and online databases and they complained bitterly about what they saw as netLibrary’s unacceptably restrictive usage model. By the time it went into receivership, netLibrary had more than 6,000 library customers. It demonstrated that there is a real market among university libraries for academic book content delivered in an online environment. However, like many of the early pioneers in this domain, netLibrary overestimated the rate and volume of sales growth and soon found itself in a position where costs greatly outstripped revenues, forcing the company into receivership and obliging it to make fundamental changes to its business model and working practices.
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The Scholarly Corpus Model The scholarly corpus model is run not by a third-party aggregator but by publishers themselves, acting either on their own or in collaboration, although the development costs have often been met, in whole or part, by funding from philanthropic foundations. There are several different variants of this model depending on whether the corpus is restricted to the content of a single publisher (as with Oxford Scholarship Online), involves collaboration between publishers (as was envisaged with The Online Resource Center in the Humanities or TORCH), or stems from a grant-funded project that involves the participation of one or more university presses (as with Columbia International Affairs Online or CIAO, the Gutenberg-e project, and the History E-book project). Here I briefly consider the History E-book project. In 1999 the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) was awarded a grant of $3 million from the Mellon Foundation to set up an electronic publishing project in the field of history. The ACLS is an umbrella organization comprising numerous learned societies, and the idea was that five of these societies would collaborate with a select group of university presses to publish highquality historical work in an electronic environment. Ten university presses were eventually selected—California, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Oxford, and Rutgers. In October 1999 Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto joined as project directors. Gardiner and Musto developed the project along two parallel tracks. On the one hand, they planned to publish eighty-five new books in an electronic format. On the U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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other hand, they aimed to digitize around 500 key backlist titles that would be selected to form subject-based clusters of high-quality book content; these would complement and supplement the new books and give greater depth and scale to the project as a whole. The two sets of books—new and backlist titles— would be aggregated into a single searchable database which would be hosted by the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan. Access to the database would be via site licenses that would be sold to libraries on an annual subscription basis. The project was oriented toward four broad fields within history: American history, European history, Middle Eastern history, and the history of technology. Within each of these fields, the project directors and the publishers would identify new books they would like to include in the project; in some cases these would be books already under contract with one of the university presses, while in other cases they would be new books that had yet to be commissioned. The arrangement was that one of the university presses would sign a contract for the book and undertake to publish it as a printed book. The History E-book project would then license the electronic rights from the press and pay it a fee—both a license fee of $2,000 for the electronic rights and a “materials fee” of $12,000 to facilitate the process of creating an e-book and producing a file in the appropriate format, so that the content could be integrated into the project’s database. In preparing the e-book version, authors were encouraged to experiment with the form of the text—to use illustrations (including color illustrations), to add archival material, and to include hyperlinks, among other things. The backlist titles were selected with the help of the learned societies, which produced lists of books that they regarded as works of lasting merit in their fields, and a committee of scholars, who scrutinized the lists and recommended additional titles. The project staff then sought to acquire nonexclusive electronic rights for the selected titles and covered the cost of conversion. While the new books were marked up according to the tagging system worked out by the project’s technical staff, the backlist titles were scanned and converted using OCR (optical character recognition), with a minimal amount of coding (e.g., of the table of contents) to facilitate navigation through the site. While the initial funding for the project was provided by the Mellon Foundation, the aim was to generate a revenue stream by selling site licenses to libraries. The subscription fees were set at a very modest level, ranging from $300 for the smallest institutions to $1,300 for the largest. Half of the revenue generated would be channeled into a royalty pool for the publishers, and each publisher would be paid according to the proportion of hits on its titles. The site was launched in September 2002 with 500 backlist titles and half a dozen new titles. 372
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By the end of December, just over 100 institutions had signed up; by April 2004 160 institutions were on board. The directors still had some way to go to make the project financially viable; given their existing costs and pricing structure, they would need to increase the institutional subscriptions sixfold to become self-sustaining. The original grant from the Mellon Foundation expired in 2004, and the project directors found themselves obliged to embark on a restructuring plan, which included some staff cuts, while at the same time redoubling their efforts to build up the subscription base. By the spring of 2005 the project had become self-sustaining. In January 2007 it broadened its focus beyond history and was renamed the ACLS Humanities E-book. A year later the project was collaborating with twelve learned societies and more than a hundred publishers, including university presses and other publishers of scholarly and academic e-books.
The Hidden Revolution
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It is too early to say whether experiments like the History E-book project and the many others that are still underway will provide financially viable ways of making the content of scholarly books available online. There can be no doubt that the context of academic publishing is changing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as scholarly journals and reference works migrate increasingly to online environments and as electronic forms of communication become increasingly widespread in the academy as a whole (figs. 20.3 and 20.4). Speculation will continue about the implications of these developments for scholarly book publishing and for the future of the university presses.4 It would be unwise
FIGURE 20.3. The traditional context for the use of academic publications: students reading from printed texts in Eaton Library, Tufts University, ca. 1950. Digital Collection and Archives, Tufts University. U. S . ACA D E M I C P U B L I S H I N G I N T H E D I GI TAL AG E
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FIGURE 20.4. Students reading both printed and digitized academic publications in the state-of-the-art Gleason Library for undergraduates at the University of Rochester. Photograph by Richard Baker, University of Rochester, 2008.
to try to predict how this field will evolve in the coming years, as new entrants can suddenly appear and change the stakes in ways that were largely or entirely unforeseen.5 However, regardless of what happens in terms of the online delivery of scholarly book content, the digital revolution has already had an enormous impact on the business of academic publishing. The impact to date has been experienced not so much in terms of new modes of content delivery but rather in terms of the process by which books are produced—it is a revolution in process rather than a revolution in product. The e-book is merely a symptom of a much more profound transformation that has taken place behind the scenes and has reconstituted the book as a digital file. This hidden revolution began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as digitization began to transform various aspects of the production process. Gradually, a new workflow emerged that was increasingly digital in character—that is, the process of producing books, from the point at which an author’s keystrokes are captured in a digital file to the point at which final books are printed, was increasingly transformed into a process of creating and managing digital content. From the viewpoint of production, the book has been reconstituted as a database that is manipulated in the production process according to certain rules and procedures and eventually delivered to the printer in a form that enables bound books to be produced. The emergence of digital printing and print-on-demand in the 1990s added another important dimension to the rise of the digital workflow, as it enabled books to be printed in much smaller quantities than is customary with traditional offset printing. This is particularly important for academic publishers because they have many slow-moving titles on their backlists that they would find difficult to reprint using traditional offset methods; however, with digital printing, they can reprint slow-moving titles in small quantities and keep them 374
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available much longer—potentially in perpetuity. It is one of the great ironies of the digital revolution that only ten years after some commentators were confidently predicting the death of the book, digitization has in practice given the printed book a new lease on life, allowing it to live well beyond the age at which it would have died in the predigital world and, indeed, rendering it potentially immortal.
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CHAPTER 21
The Perseverance of Print-Bound Saints Protestant Book Publishing Paul C. Gutjahr
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With appropriate echoes of the David and Goliath story, the evangelical publishing house of Zondervan in the 1990s challenged Publishers Weekly’s highly respected best-seller list by juxtaposing to it an advertisement touting Hal Lindsey’s astoundingly popular The Late Great Planet Earth. The advertisement read: “A bestseller you will not find listed on the opposite page.”1 Nestled in this tiny confrontation is a central truth about American religious publishing, namely that neither the contemporary publishing industry itself nor scholars interested in that industry have paid much attention to religious publishing in modern America. As the religious historian Martin Marty has commented, American religious publishing is “largely an invisible phenomenon.”2 Yet, American religious publishing has long been much like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth: significant in both size and influence. A former tugboat captain turned preacher, Lindsey published his The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970. An extended exposé on the end of the world and the imminent return of Jesus Christ, The Late Great Planet Earth became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s with 10 million copies in circulation.3 Its sales were so enormous that even the New York Times best-seller list finally noted its dominance by calling it one of the most popular books of the decade. Such recognition was so slow in coming, however, that Christian publishing houses—tired of being ignored—established their own best-seller list known as the “National Religious Bestseller List.”4 Lindsey’s book has kept on selling. By 1999 it had sold 35 million copies, leading one scholar to comment that “only the Bible itself has outsold Hal’s” book.5 Religious publishing in general is no less awe-inspiring. This chapter explores this often overlooked facet of modern American print culture by concentrating primarily on the past fifty years of Protestant book publishing. This period of Protestant publishing is remarkable for two reasons. First, between 1945 and 2005, American religious book publishing grew at a rate faster than the book industry as a whole. Second, these same years saw pronounced changes in the
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organization of Protestant publishing, as it increasingly fused with twentiethcentury trade book publishing. This linkage has had a profound influence on the production and the distribution of religious printed material in America.
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The Massive Presence of Religious Books One characteristic that has long defined the culture of the United States in general and its print culture in particular is the deep religious orientation of much of the country’s population (fig. 21.1). Studies have shown that the United States holds one of the most religiously interested populations in the world, ranking well ahead of most of its European counterparts.6 This religious interest is reflected in the hundreds of religious presses still active in the United States today. To trace the history of postwar American religious book publishing, one might look at the statistics gathered by the American Association of Publishers (AAP) and reported by R. R. Bowker. Using a broad definition of what constitutes a religious book—any book “with a religious theme”—the Bowker Annual has charted the growth of religious publishing over the past sixty years. (See tables 4–6.) While impressive, the growth in the numbers of religious titles reported in tables 4–6 vastly understates the vibrancy of religious publishing in the postwar era, for three reasons. First, religious publishers were often not associated with the AAP, and their books did not show up in the standard counts. They operated “under the radar,” to borrow a term from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a commercial trade association.7 Thus, the numbers of new titles reported by Bowker were much too low in the religion sector. Second, even if new religious titles had been accurately reported over the years, the totals would still only dimly reflect the scale of the religious publishing enterprise. That is because the Bowker annual reports and much industry attention concentrate on new titles and new editions introduced each year. As a category, though, religious books have had a history of long shelf lives, meaning that they stay in print—and thus in circulation—much longer than most books.8 In other words, old titles are a significant force in this area of book publishing. Third, the number of new titles reveals little about the volume of sales or the circulation of religious books. This is particularly important for religious publication where titles are frequently produced in enormous press runs. In the 2000s, book industry data gatherers began to cast their nets more broadly, and the true size of the religion book market was at least partially revealed. Although Bowker had reported only 6,206 new religion titles for 2000, for 2004 it reported 14,009 new titles, and later it revised that 2004 figure to 21,669!9 This astonishing increase had more to do with changes in methods of P ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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FIGURE 21.1. Women’s Bible study. Messiah Lutheran Church, Red Lodge, Montana, 30 August 2007. Photograph by Andrea Holmen.
reporting than changes in reality, but some reality was involved as well: 2004 was clearly an absolutely splendid year for American religious publishing. The Book Industry Study Group, which focuses not on titles but on numbers of copies sold and dollars earned, found that religious publishing was probably the fastest growing sector of the industry in the early 2000s, with sales jumping 53 percent from 2000 to 2005. By 2005, according to the BISG, religious book publishing was a $2.3 billion business.10 Yet, even so, many religious book sales continued to fly under the radar of industry trackers. Some of these characteristics of religious publishing are reflected in the publishing work of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Having become the nation’s largest denomination by the end of the nineteenth century, Roman Catholicism continued to grow after World War II with an annual baptism rate of a million infants a year from 1945 to 1949.11 In 1962 there were approximately 43 million American Catholics. That figure had grown by 1996 to an estimated 61 million, a sizable 23.5 percent of the U.S. population.12 Though only 50 percent of this number attend church regularly, there are millions of Catholics involved in religious activities connected in some way to Catholic printed material, including Bibles, catechisms, magazines, and periodicals. Millions of copies of specific titles—such as the Catholic Living Bible and the enormously popular first book by Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope—are produced annually on subjects such as daily living, liturgy, theology, and educa378
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tion to supply the Catholic Church’s enormous parish structure and extensive university and parochial school systems.13 Other religious traditions that have enormous publishing enterprises turning out millions of volumes of the same book include Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the Christian Scientists, and L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. Standard titles for the Jehovah’s Witnesses include The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life (100 million copies in print by the 1990s), Enjoy Life on Earth Forever! (70 million), and You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth (60 million).14 The Mormon Church has produced and distributed more than 120 million copies of The Book of Mormon.15 The Church of Scientology claimed in 1991 that more than 90 million copies of its founder L. Ron Hubbard’s books had been sold, while the Christian Science Church had produced more than 9 million copies of Mary Baker Eddy’s The Key to Science and Health.16
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Protestant Book Publishing The great diversity of religious book publishing in the postwar era makes it impossible to cover the full range of the industry in a brief essay, so this chapter focuses on Protestant publishing. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Protestantism dominated the religious landscape of North America. In the postwar era, the sheer number of American Protestants—thought to have been nearly 42 million (30 percent of the population) in 1945 and 86 million (32 percent of the population) in 1997—continued to make them the central players in American religious book publishing.17 The Book Industry Study Group estimated that religious book sales passed the billion-dollar mark in 1995 and accounted for about 5 percent of the book market.18 But, again, this figure provides only a partial picture. Besides overlooking much of the market, industry sales figures ignore the millions of Bibles and other religious books distributed free of charge every year by organizations such as the American Bible Society, the Gideons, and the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation. The Gideons alone distributed 256,823,700 portions of Scripture in the United States between January 1945 and May 1999.19 American Protestant book publishing has four major components. The first component is the publishing enterprises of the seven mainline denominations, each of which has its own press. These denominations, with the dates of the origin of their publishing endeavors, are Congregationalists (1868), American Baptists (1824), Disciples of Christ (1824), Episcopalians (1918), Lutherans (1855), Methodists (1789), and Presbyterians (1838). These presses are primarily responsible for their denominations’ most central texts (hymnals, liturgy books, P ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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governing documents) and organs of communications (newsletters, magazines, newspapers, and journals).20 A variety of independent publishers also specialize in meeting the needs of particular denominations. For example, Morehouse Trinity Press mainly prints Episcopal books but is not officially a part of the Episcopal Church in America. The second component is Evangelical Christian publishing, the largest category in both annual numbers of titles and volumes produced.21 This is a more nebulous category of Protestant publishing because of the fluid and hard-todefine nature of American Evangelicalism. As the historian George Marsden has noted, “Evangelicalism” is not a denomination but an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of Christians from different denominations and backgrounds who share some common beliefs about the Bible and the processes of religious conversion and sanctification.22 While membership in most mainline denominations declined in the last half of the twentieth century, Evangelical Protestantism grew.23 Denominations with the highest percentage of Evangelicals, such as the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God, experienced substantial growth in the postwar years while denominations with lower percentages of Evangelicals, such as the Congregationalists, suffered serious declines in membership. A 1982 Gallup poll estimated that there were about 30 million adult Evangelicals, 17 percent of the U.S. population.24 Within the dramatic growth of American Evangelicalism stands Evangelical Christian publishing, the most active and successful segment of American religious book publishing in the postwar era. Evangelical Christians were not only the major moving force behind large-scale missionary publishing endeavors; they also consumed books by the millions on everything from church histories to Christian romance novels.25 Evangelical Christian publishing can be broken down into two categories: for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. The for-profit publishing houses include publishers such as Zondervan, William B. Eerdmans, Revell, Baker, Crossway, Word, Tyndale, Moody, and Thomas Nelson. These publishers stand outside traditional denominational affiliation and serve Protestant readers from a wide spectrum of denominational and theological perspectives. They publish everything from Bibles to cookbooks.26 The not-for-profit publishers include parachurch and educational organizations such as Focus on the Family, InterVarsity Press, NavPress, New Life, Gideons International, the International Bible Society, and the American Bible Society, to name only a few. These publishers produce material that furthers a particular evangelical mission, such as developing Christian families (Focus on the Family), serving faithful disciples on college campuses (InterVarsity Press, 380
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NavPress, and New Life), and spreading the Gospel message (American Bible Society, Gideons International, and International Bible Society). Third, a small source of Protestant books is the university press. University presses function as not-for-profit organizations, but they do not have the same missionary agenda as not-for-profit presses found in the Evangelical Christian publishing sector. University presses are primarily concerned with religious titles that meet the needs of an academic audience. Finally, another component of Protestant publishing is commercial trade publishing. When Evangelical Christian publishing took off in the 1970s and 1980s, some trade presses acquired Christian publishing houses or formed new departments and imprints within their own publishing houses. HarperCollins bought Zondervan in 1988, and in the mid-1990s Random House established the Moorings imprint (which lasted only two years), while Bantam Doubleday Dell established the WaterBrook imprint.27 Other publishers, such as Macmillan, Prentice-Hall, Ballantine, and Simon & Schuster, had religion departments during the 1950s and 1960s, but many of these departments closed down as the popularity of mainline and liberal religion declined.28 With the continuing rise of Evangelical denominations, megachurches, religious broadcasting, and conservative politics in the 1980s and 1990s, some trade houses changed strategies and made new inroads into the field of religious publishing. Recently, several major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin, have launched Christian imprints in order to cash in on the boom in religiosity since 2001. One of the greatest successes in the religion field in the 2000s was The Purpose Driven Life, by megachurch pastor Rick Warren. Published by Zondervan, a HarperCollins division, The Purpose Driven Life sold 25 million copies between its release in 2002 and 2005.29
Protestant Book Distribution Protestant book publishing differed from other forms of postwar American publishing in several ways, but one of the most important differences was how the books were distributed.30 For most of the postwar era, Protestant books found their way into the hands of readers in three primary ways: through churches and religious institutions, through mail-order catalog firms, and through local Christian bookstores. Only a few titles reached the public through ordinary bookstores or department stores such as JCPenney. In the past ten years, however, with the advent of the megabookstores Borders and Barnes & Noble and the emergence of Internet book enterprises such as Amazon.com, religious books have found major new distribution points outside the three traditional outlets. P ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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The distribution efforts of religious institutions took myriad forms, including everything from parochial school textbooks and Sunday School materials, to free Bibles on street corners, to Christian book clubs. These outlets were largely volunteer driven and not heavily advertised. Publishers routinely depended on institutional structures to promote and distribute their books. For example, the massive volume of Sunday School books produced annually by Cook Ministries (the company that publishes the majority of the nation’s Sunday School curricula) was often bought by churches directly, and the books were used by the legions of volunteer Sunday School teachers across the nation. Mail-order catalogs have long served the Christian public. The giant firm of Christian Book Distributors (located in Peabody, Massachusetts) was the single largest retailer of Christian books in the 1990s. It was also the largest single customer for most Christian publishing houses. It reached the book-buying public through a Web site and a sophisticated barrage of mail-order catalogs. The third means of distribution was the Christian bookstore. Once largely “mom and pop” operations owned by individuals who wanted to introduce their local communities to Christian books, these stores have become increasingly well organized on both an individual and a national level. Two organizations arose after World War II to bring coherence and organization to this method of distribution. Christian booksellers and publishers banded together in 1949 to form the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA); in 1974 a smaller segment of these publishers most interested in the Evangelical market formed the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.31 Both of these organizations, which continued to operate in the new century, had their own periodicals, training material, and national conferences to help Christian publishers and booksellers sell Christian books (fig. 21.2). The vitality of Protestant publishing is reflected in the growth and influence
FIGURE 21.2. Christian Book Service, South Woodstock, Connecticut. Courtesy of Ruth Doughty. Photograph by Robert Sloat. 382
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of the older and larger of these organizations, the Christian Booksellers Association. The CBA’s first convention in 1950 had 279 registrants and forty-eight exhibitors, most from the Midwest. Christian booksellers had functioned almost entirely on the local level before that convention, and much of the gathering was given over to strengthening Protestant book distribution by bringing together those involved in the industry.32 By 1973 the CBA had become a worldwide organization, operating in 29 countries. The 1996 CBA convention “attracted 13,663 attendees, including 2,801 store representatives and 419 exhibitors,” and filled six acres of exhibit space.33 Ironically, traditional Christian bookstores were hurt by the boom in religious publishing and reading in the 1990s and 2000s. As Christian publishing and bookselling expanded into the general marketplace—including megabookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders as well as mass merchandisers such as Wal-Mart—CBA bookstores lost market share. In 2003 and 2004, which were terrific years for Christian book sales, more than 500 CBA stores closed. The mainstreaming of religious book sales was a mixed blessing for Christian publishing houses. They loved the access to new outlets for their popular books, but with the closing of Christian bookstores, they found it harder to sell their less-popular midlist and backlist authors.34
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Trends and Challenges in Protestant Publishing As American Protestant publishing entered the twenty-first century, several trends marked substantive changes in the industry. One of the unique and important aspects of Protestant publishing in the United States has always been its deep sense of mission. Unlike many other segments of the American book publishing industry, publishers who handled Protestant titles were often driven by motives that reached beyond considerations of profit margins and bottom lines. But as Christian publishing grew more lucrative, many inside the industry bemoaned an increasing tendency to value money over time-honored spiritual goals. Summing up this trend, one writer worried that “cut-throat competition, coupled with theological looseness, can lead to promotion of a new, watereddown, pop Christianity.” A clear case of this tension was revealed in the way the huge trade house HarperCollins chose to administrate Zondervan, which it acquired in 1988. Zondervan, one of the two largest Christian Evangelical publishers, was directed to emphasize “big sellers and cut down on the rest.”35 The tension between money and mission has long ranked as the primary concern of Christian bookstore owners.36 Even the Bible, which one scholar has termed the “battleship of the religious book business,” has changed significantly in the past fifty years.37 Bible P ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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publishing has undergone tremendous diversification, in both translation and packaging. The translation market was broadened significantly in 1952 with the much-heralded appearance of the Revised Standard Version. Following acrimonious debates over the reliability of that version, several other new translations appeared. The most important was the New International Version (1978).38 The New International Version became the most popular Bible in the United States in sales in the 1980s, eclipsing the dominance of the venerable King James Version (1611). Other Bible translations that proved tremendously popular include Today’s English Version (1966) and Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible (1971).39 The vast array of Bible translations—450 English translations are now available in the United States—fed another kind of diversification. More than 7,000 different editions of the Bible were available in the United States in the 1990s, more than half of them introduced after World War II.40 In addition to the wide array of translations of the Bible’s actual text, these editions included a variety of notes, commentaries, and illustrations. Some commentators wondered whether the trend toward diversification might undermine the credibility of a supposedly immutable book, while the cutthroat competition among Bible publishers to sell their edition of the Bible forced the return of thousands of unsold Bibles from stores.41 The growth of paperback books was another important trend in Protestant publishing over the past forty years. Before 1960 Protestant publishers produced few paperback titles, for several reasons: they wanted to make books on religion as durable and valuable as the topics they contained; they saw no great demand for paperback books; and they enjoyed greater profit margins on hardbound volumes. The trend toward paperback titles—common across the book publishing business—increased dramatically in the 1960s and gained even more momentum in the 1990s.42 By 2000 the Book Industry Study Group estimated that more than 60 percent of the religious books sold in America were paperbacks.43 As the population of the United States diversified ethnically and culturally, so did Protestant publishing. There had long been a small presence of African American Protestant publishers in the United States, most notably the publishing house of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). The AME Book Concern began its work early in the nineteenth century as the first American publishing house owned and operated by African Americans. In 1847 it began publishing the Christian Recorder, the oldest African American newspaper currently publishing in the United States.44 In the last decades of the twentieth century, the larger Evangelical publishing firms took more notice of the African American audience, but the number of titles remained small. 384
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More progressive in the realm of diversity were the denominational publishers. Many denominations started up new divisions of their publishing endeavors to reach new segments of their diversifying congregations. For example, the United Church of Christ’s Pilgrim Press introduced a line of books dedicated to what it called “multicultural/multiracial” issues, while Augsburg Fortress, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published its worship and liturgy books in Spanish. Evangelical Christian houses followed. Several firms, including Kregel Publications, Chariot Family Publishing, Thomas Nelson, and Zondervan, marketed Spanish titles, while other firms such as Tyndale marketed their titles in Spanish through Spanish House.45 Protestant publishing also quickly adapted to new forms of audiovisual media. Christian bookstores increasingly filled their shelf space with products ranging from greeting cards to music to videos. According to a 1998 survey of Christian bookstores, books represented only 39 percent of sales, while music and other gifts accounted for 36 percent.46 Protestant book publishers met the competition posed by new media by putting their books into digital formats (e-books and CDs), by tying printed products into music and video materials, and by creating Web sites to sell and complement their books. In 1999 Thomas Nelson produced more than 75 percent of its Bibles in electronic form and released its books in audio cassette formats or with video tie-ins.47 Christian bookstores also turned increasingly to the service of wholesalers to help control inventory flow. Christian bookstores had a long history of dealing directly with publishers in acquiring their books. As late as the 1970s, wholesalers accounted for only a small portion of Christian bookstore sales, approximately 15 to 20 percent, compared with 40 percent for trade publishers.48 But as Christian bookstores merged into larger chains, wholesalers came to play a larger role.49 While wholesalers make it easy for stores to order and reorder from many publishers at once, they also restrict the number and kinds of titles available to stores. Thus, the individuality of Christian bookstores and the titles they carried declined as large wholesale firms pushed the same titles to all of their customers. Furthermore, many wholesalers were not businesses run by Protestants who had a deep knowledge of the religious book market or cared about its mission.50 Finally, perhaps the most interesting trend in Protestant publishing was the dramatic rise in fiction titles. In its 1998 report on industry trends, the CBA stated that “over the past several years, Christian fiction has exploded in popularity, making it the top-selling category in many Christian stores.”51 Long an embattled genre among Protestants who saw little use for fiction in a world that so badly needed the Truth, fiction increasingly dominated Christian sales. P ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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And though Protestant fiction, when it could be found, had focused mainly on historical and romance novels, by the late twentieth century it had moved into other genres, including fantasy and science fiction.52
Case Study: Left Behind
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The burgeoning power of Protestant publishing in the United States is revealed in the success of the Left Behind series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (fig. 21.3). This series dominated the field of Christian fiction throughout the last half of the 1990s and the opening years of the twenty-first century. Many of the postwar trends in Protestant publishing intersected to make this book series amazingly popular among readers. In the early 1990s, author and theologian Tim LaHaye approached author Frank Peretti about coauthoring a book on the Rapture—the moment in time when true believers are taken to be with God while the earth is turned over to the forces of Satan and the Antichrist for a bloodcurdling seven-year reign. Peretti had already done well in the field of Christian fiction with several bestselling books, including This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989). But he turned down LaHaye’s offer. LaHaye then enlisted the help of another established Christian author, Jerry B. Jenkins, and out of that collaboration came Left Behind, the first book of the series, published in 1995 by Tyndale Publishing House.53 Any doubts about the rising importance or popularity of Protestant fiction disappeared in the face of the astonishing sales of this book and the series it
FIGURE 21.3. Jerry B. Jenkins (left) and Tim LaHaye were honored by the Evangelical Publishers Association in 2007 with the Pinnacle Award “for outstanding sales achievement for the Left Behind ® series (Tyndale House Publishers).” More than 65 million copies have been sold, introducing millions of new readers to Christian fiction. Left Behind ® products include sixteen titles in the adult series, juvenile novels, audio books, devotionals, and graphic novels. Photograph courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers. 386
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spawned. A one-book contract turned into a six-book series, as hundreds of thousands of copies of Left Behind flew off the bookstore shelves. Eventually, Tyndale expanded the deal into a twelve-book series over a nine-year period. The series’ popularity grew with each new installment, and individual titles climbed up the best-seller lists of Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times. Protestant fiction had found a new champion, with 60 million copies of the series in circulation by 2005. In a national survey conducted in 2005, the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion found that nearly one in five Americans had read a volume of the Left Behind series.54 The reasons for the popularity of the series are complex and enigmatic. The series’ basic premise is that Christ has raptured his church, and thus the stories revolve around those who have been left behind to inhabit the earth in a time when the Antichrist rules before Christ’s second coming. The authors of the series have attributed its success to the immense hunger for spiritual things in American culture, although certainly the end of the millennium, fears over Y2K computer problems, terrorism, and how these events fit into biblical prophecy have also helped the series sell.55 Books on biblical prophecy had long been popular in the United States, and this popularity was only enhanced by the approach of the year 2000. More than a hundred apocalyptic titles appeared in the United States in 1999.56 Books in the Left Behind series simply represented the most popular installments in an immensely popular genre. Readers themselves offered an array of reasons why they have enjoyed the Left Behind series. Nearly 2,000 readers of the series took the time to write their thoughts and send them to Amazon.com. The responses of these readers show just how diverse the series’ reading audience has been. Devout Christians as well as those with little religious background read the books. Some read them because they were good adventure stories, while others liked their romantic elements. Many readers were drawn by the epic struggle of good versus evil. Perhaps the most compelling drawing points of the books were their clear Christian message and how they made sense of the book of Revelation.57 Whatever the reasons, the immense popularity of the series testifies to the ability of a Protestant book to reach far beyond the usual readers of religious literature. The Left Behind series also demonstrates not only the persistence of Protestant publishing in the United States but also the many ways that Protestant publishing changed over the past fifty years. It has had wide distribution beyond Christian bookstores through commercial bookstores, Internet sites, and retailers such as Costco drugstores and Kmart.58 The series took seriously changes in technology by depending heavily on computer technology in its plot lines, as well as advertising itself with an impressive Web site, which got 80,000 hits a day in 1999.59 The Left Behind books also were smartly sold to a paperbackP ROT E STA N T B O O K P U B L I S H I NG
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saturated marketplace. Long before hardcover sales slumped, the books were released in paper format. The books could be found on audio tapes and were made into movies on videotape and DVD.60 The series also generated a vast array of ancillary products ranging from books on premillennial theology to music CDs to postcards. Finally, Left Behind’s publisher capitalized on the market’s growing awareness of multicultural audiences by translating the series into several languages including Spanish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Lithuanian. The tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind series in circulation provide but a single example of how Protestant publishing has endured as an important and vibrant force in the American print marketplace. Characterized by steady growth, an ability to adapt to new media technologies, and a flexibility to approach new audiences, Protestants showed that they continue to be not only a people of the Book but a people of many books.
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CHAPTER 22
Bilingual Nation Spanish-Language Books in the United States since the 1960s Ilan Stavans
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The expansion of Spanish-language publishing that occurred in the aftermath of the civil rights era raises a series of questions: Is it possible to talk about a Spanish-language publishing “industry,” a financially sophisticated trade with a center of gravity, a clear-cut production schedule, and marketing and distribution strategies? If so, how did it originate? Who is behind it? What kind of audience does it serve? What are the cultural forces it responds to?1 These questions are complex. Before attempting to answer them, it is important to establish a few coordinates that should be useful in understanding the context of postwar developments. These coordinates pertain to the use of Spanish north of the Rio Grande and the people who use it. The first concerns the language itself, el español. Unlike other immigrant tongues (German, Italian, Yiddish, Danish, Polish, Portuguese, etc.), Spanish has been a fixture of this country ever since the arrival of the conquistadors and missionaries to Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and California. In other words, to describe it as a “foreign” tongue is to fall into a trap. It is true that English is the national “unofficial” official language, a force that sooner or later ends up integrating whatever outside elements arrive. But Spanish has always been around and is likely to remain with us for a while. Its use almost everywhere has become second nature. Even so, el español has been in constant mutation in the United States. The tongue used by the Jesuit missionary and explorer of the southwestern desert Father Eusebio Francisco Kino in his Favores celestiales (Historical Memoir of Primería Alta), published in 1708, is not the same one used by the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí between 1881 and 1892 as he sent his dispatches about Coney Island, Harlem, and the Statue of Liberty to Latin American newspapers like La Nación in Argentina. Nor is it the one used by a translator of Esmeralda Santiago’s best-selling memoir When I Was Puerto Rican in 1993. Syntactically, they might appear the same. As a result of Spain’s colonial enter-
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prises, Spanish is made of a plethora of variants, each defined by history and geography. North of the Rio Grande, these varieties have sometimes coalesced into a single mishmash, distinguishable through a common grammatical base and a shared vocabulary, while in other settings they have remained apart and differentiated from one another. This might look like an insignificant point but when it comes to book publishing its impact is substantial. Readers are able to identify a volume’s provenance by looking only at its language and content, unless these elements are forcefully concealed. This fact implies the second coordinate, which has to do with the multiplicity at the heart of the Latino experience. Indeed, it is impossible to talk about Latinos as a single, homogenized minority. The group has been shaped by the arrival of diverse people from different national backgrounds: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Colombians, and so on. Each of these subgroups has its own idiosyncrasy. It is true that they all share certain commonalities: a linguistic base, a similar history and political and cultural landscape. But their differences are equally important: ideological tendencies change from one subgroup to another, as do their music, art, and cuisine. It is thus easier to talk about a sum of parts—e pluribus unum—rather than a whole when addressing Latinos. This, after all, is the largest minority in the United States. The Census Bureau has estimated that, by the year 2050, one out of every four Americans will have Hispanic roots. Although there have been Latinos in the country since the start, the rapid demographic growth has happened only since 1950, a result of the political and economic instability in the Americas and the growing need for cheap labor north of the Rio Grande. Up until the late eighties, Hispanics (that was the term in currency during the Nixon administration) did not exist as a minority. Instead, people talked about Chicanos (a term more politically charged than Mexican Americans), Cubans, and Puerto Ricans in the mainland. Each of these groups had its own profile and kept itself separate from other Spanish speakers. To a large extent, the consolidation of a Latino identity is the creation of the media. Television networks like Univisión and Telemundo make it their duty—it is in their best interest, after all—to stress that Latinos are “muchas voces pero una sola comunidad,” a symphony of voices but a single political unit.2 .
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While it is not the purpose of this essay to offer a full history of Spanish-language publishing in the United States, in order to understand the development of the last half century one needs at least a cursory appreciation of its prior development. As long as Latinos have been in the country, at least as defined today, they have produced books, although in earlier periods the actual manufacturing of 390
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such items took place outside the nation’s borders. At the outset, in 1535, Iberian explorers and chroniclers described the landscape and aboriginal population of what is today the Southwest. Among these early examples is Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación. Published in 1542 in Zamora, Spain, it is an account of the author’s wanderings between 1528 and 1536 across the continental United States. Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle would have an ongoing impact on the way Latinos would be represented: as primitive people awaiting a redeemer to define them in civilized terms. Not until the mid-nineteenth century would the book be physically published in the United States—in 1851, shortly after the Mexican-American War, in Washington, D.C., to be exact—in an English translation by Thomas Buckingham Smith. Successive translations, including one by Fanny Ritter Bandelier in 1904 known as Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, appeared after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Again, the attempt was presumably to offer a picture of who the Hispanic people were inside and outside of the country. In Spanish, there are Iberian and Mexican editions of Bandelier, but the book has never been published north of the Rio Grande. Other examples of foundational literature from the colonial period addressing the territories of populations controlled by the Iberian army, and published in Spanish, are Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida del Inca (The Florida of the Inca), the “Defender of the Indians” Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s Breve Relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Brief History of the Devastation of the Indies), Friar Marcos de Niza’s narrative of his sojourns in New Mexico, Pedro Castañeda de Nájera’s The Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado, and Friar Juan Agustín Morfi’s History of Texas: 1673–1779. Like Cabeza de Vaca’s, these titles have been translated into English, in part or in full, but no Spanish edition has ever been published in the United States. They have always been imported from abroad. This is significant because it points to a crucial feature of Spanish-language efforts from the 1960s onward. With an eye on profit, energy has been focused almost exclusively on contemporary literature rather than reprints. Even less dry, more poetic books like Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México (The History of New Mexico), an epic poem written in 1610, have had a similar fate. More important even has been the dissemination of Bibles in the Spanish colonies from 1535 to this day. Needless to say, the Old and New Testaments were an essential tool of indoctrination of the aboriginal population. But Spanish-language Bibles have never been published in the continental United States. In 1551 an edict by the Holy Office of the Inquisition forbade the translation of the Old and New Testaments into Spanish. Nevertheless the edict did not stop anyone from embarking on the projects. The earliest Spanish version used in the Americas is known as Biblia del Oso, translated by Juan Pérez de S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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Pineda and originally published in 1569 in Basel, Switzerland. Through the missions like the one in Saint Augustine, Florida, Iberian priests taught the Indians ethics and simultaneously brought them to the Christian faith. They predominantly used Pérez de Pineda’s version in their enterprise up until the age of independence in 1810, when Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Catholic priest, incited the population of New Spain (as Mexico was known in the eighteenth century) to secede from the Iberian Peninsula. Since then, a variety of other translations, for the most part produced in Spain, have come from outside. The most popular is the so-called Reina Valera, made in 1909, seen by millions of Catholics as “la palabra de Dios en español” (the word of God in Spanish).3 This circulation of imported Spanish-language texts had coexisted with Spanish-language newspapers and even print houses in various urban centers (New York, Albuquerque, San Antonio) before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). It is known that California and New Mexico had printing presses in 1834, producing works by Juan B. Hijar y Jaro, José Rómulo Ribera, J. M. Vigil, Luis A. Torres, and more important figures like the Chacón siblings, Eusebio (author of Hijo de la tempestad [Son of the Tempest]) and his brother Felipe Maximiliano.4 Roughly this is also the time when the enterprise of conquest of the Americas sparked the interest of thousands of readers in the United States as William Hickling Prescott published his immensely popular histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Yet those would not appear in Spanish until much later. Likewise, with the idea of Manifest Destiny and advent of the gold rush, the question of land possession in California became a significant subject for writers. María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, whose first novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, appeared anonymously in 1872, dealt with this topic in the now-classic The Squatter and the Don, considered the first Mexican American novel published in English. Yet in the 1880s the English-language book industry was still the best option to attract an audience. As the Spaniards left the southern continent, Spanish acquired the status of a marginal language. By the end of the nineteenth century there were works written in Spanish in the United States by Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles and refugees such as Eugenio María de Hostos, Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and Sotero Figueroa. But people whom we would describe today as Latinos felt more comfortable in English. Spanish was the language of home, a private language, not one to use to embark on a literary career. Thus, the oeuvre of Adelina “Nina” Otero Warren, William Carlos Williams, Bernardo Vega, Jesús Colón, María Cristina Mena, and Jovita González is in Shakespeare’s tongue.5 A link between the early and later parts of the twentieth century is Barcelonaborn American author Felipe Alfau. His odyssey is useful to understand the publishing dilemmas faced by Latinos in the twenties. Alfau immigrated to the 392
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United States with his family before the Spanish Civil War. For a while he wrote music criticism for La Prensa—in Spanish, of course. Then he embraced the dream of becoming a writer and committed himself to writing a novel. He felt the market in Spanish was a dead end, so he switched to English. His novel Locos: A Comedy of Gestures was finished in 1928, but he was unable to sell it until almost a decade later. It was published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1936. It is a proto-postmodernist exercise in the line of Borges, Nabokov, and Pirandello, although, with the exception of the last named, none of these authors had yet to write his magnum opus and make a mark in international letters. Switching to English made sense for Alfau because the immigrant Latino community in New York, where he lived, was not interested in the types of avant-garde explorations with which he was obsessed. As a result, the novel was well received but lacked a context in which to be read. And so it quickly went out of print, until 1988, when it was rediscovered by Dalkey Archive Press, a small publisher in Normal, Illinois, and was transformed into a classic. Alfau wrote another book in English, Chromos, but was unable to find a publisher for it. He also wrote poetry in Spanish. These did not see the light of day until the 1990s. Had Alfau stayed behind and survived the Spanish Civil War, it is possible that his career would have had a dramatically different trajectory. Writing books in Spanish in the United Status limited his aesthetic and intellectual scope. Yet choosing English put him in a difficult situation. English was not his native tongue. He was not part of the New York scene. Consequently, his literature would have to be that of an outsider looking in.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, the need for labor in the North American manufacturing sector and the political instability of Latin America prompted immigrants to move north in search of better economic opportunities. In technological as well as literary terms, the dawn of the Spanish-language publishing effort as we know it today dates back to the Mexican Revolution, which started in 1910 and lasted almost a decade, forcing thousands of refugees—the majority illiterate—across the border. Their presence in the southern states brought the need to educate and entertain them. Spanish-language theater became popular as well as ephemeral forms of literary entertainment, such as chapbooks and posters. Up until the Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots in California in the forties, such efforts proliferated. A number of city dailies, targeted to the Spanishspeaking community, published artistic expression. After World War II, the Latino minority began to expand in unforeseen proportions (fig. 22.1). The burgeoning of service and manufacturing industries in the United States and a corresponding demand for workers left agriculture in S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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FIGURE 22.1. La Prensa masthead, 14 April 1950, serving the expanding audience for Spanishlanguage newspapers in the immediate postwar years. Courtesy of Friedsam Memorial Library, St. Bonaventure University.
desperate need of cheap labor. Simultaneously, continuing instability was the rule in Latin America. These pressures influenced millions of people ( jíbaros in the Puerto Rican countryside, disenfranchised middle-class families under Fidel Castro’s communist regime, campesinos and urban dwellers from Mexico and Central America) to seek better lives in El Norte. The U.S. Census Bureau registered 7,453,089 Hispanics in 1960. In 1980 the number was already closer to 20 million. By the year 2000 it was more than 38 million. If at the dawn of the twentieth century the majority of Spanish-speaking Latinos was concentrated in California, Florida, and New York, by century’s end the population’s habitat was the entire United States, including Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska. Deep change accompanied such growth, beginning in the 1960s. As part of the civil rights era, Chicanos and, to a lesser extent, Puerto Ricans fought for their rights on a par with blacks, Filipinos, and other marginalized minorities. Led by César Chávez, who in turn gathered support from Dolores Huerta, Reies López Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” González, and others, the fight (El Movimiento) put the plight of the dispossessed agricultural workers in particular, and Latinos in general, on the map. The campaign included a quest for sense of legitimacy, even authenticity. Almost simultaneously a drive to change the classroom in public schools (and, later on, in private ones as well) took place, enabling the bilingual education movement to emerge (fig. 22.2). The program initially catered to Cuban 394
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FIGURE 22.2. Bilingual education in a public school classroom. Courtesy of Worcester, Massachusetts, Public Schools.
exiles seeking to stay in the country while also remaining loyal to their promise of return after the fall of Fidel Castro’s communism. There have long been bilingual programs in the United States, ensconced in parochial schools. The difference with the one established during the Kennedy administration was its federal support. Within a short period of time, various models sprang up around the country, each fostering a different type of student. All in all, though, the result was the emergence of a bilingual generation with a double loyalty. Often bilingual education is mistakenly perceived as taking place in a vacuum. In truth, Latinos already had the infrastructure—political, cultural, and technological— to consolidate the power surrounding Spanish. In the sixties, Spanish-language dailies in major urban centers (El Diario/La Prensa in New York, La Opinión in Los Angeles, and El Nuevo Herald in Miami) already held the attention of a solid portion of the market. One more ingredient needs to be added: the rise of ethnic studies programs in academia. As workers demanded their rights in America, students joined them in their struggle. The year 1968 was a watershed: the takeover of buildings at Columbia and University of California at Berkeley announced a new model in campus politics. Soon black and Chicano organizers demanded the establishment of courses devoted to their history, which until then had been mostly absent from the curriculum. In the early years, the preferred approach was to create independent, self-sufficient lines of academic inquiry defined by national background: courses on the Mexican American, Cuban, and Puerto Rican experiences in the United States. One needs to understand the development of Spanish-language publishing amid all these changes. Children, adolescents, and young adult audiences S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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made up of immigrants and their progeny sought books as entertainment and as a means to figure out their place in American society. Furthermore, it was universally recognized by members of the Latino minority that Latinos lacked intellectual outlets where they could reflect on their history and identity. Thus, El Movimiento inspired the publication of spontaneous magazines such as Con Safos and El Malcriado. A more sophisticated and more academic periodical, El Grito, a journal about Chicano history and culture edited by Octavio I. Romano, appeared from 1968 to 1974. More to the point, the movement gave rise to a number of publishing houses, including Arte Público Press and Bilingual Press, many of which grew out of magazine ventures. The name Arte Público is reminiscent of—and even a tribute to—a federally funded publishing effort in Mexico in the twenties still active today, known as Fondo de Cultura Económica. One of its masterminds was José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s minister of education and presidential candidate in 1929, known for his book La raza cósmica. The enterprise sought to provide editions of world classics at affordable prices to the masses. The objective of Arte Público Press has been similar: to make more outlets available for “ethnic” literature—for example, Latino works—and to create a wide audience for it. Its director, Nicolás Kanellos, began by founding an academically oriented journal, Revista ChicanoRiqueña, in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. (Eventually the journal became the Americas Review and appeared until 1999.) In 1979, a year before he moved to the University of Houston, Kanellos started Arte Público. Over the years, he has published authors such as Victor Villaseñor (Rain of Gold), Nicholasa Mohr (El Bronx Remembered), Luis Valdéz (Zoot Suit), and Miguel Piñero (Short Eyes). One of the most important aspects of the house more recently has been the decadelong U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project. Begun in 1991, it represents “the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index, and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960.” Several books by Arte Público are in bilingual format, including selections of Luis Pales Matos’s and Miguel Algarín’s poetry. The press has also made available the work of Villaseñor, Mohr, and Valdéz in Spanish editions. Among Arte Público’s biggest sellers in Spanish is Tomás Rivera’s migrant classic . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part), considered to be the most influential novel by a Chicano published in the second half of the twentieth century. Another important publishing institution is Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe. (Although issued irregularly, the journal associated with the press, Bilingual Review, has lasted more than thirty years.) The central figure behind the press is Gary Keller. Founded in 1973, Bilingual Press has published literary works, scholarship, and art books by or about Latinos in English, Spanish, and bilingually. The press has also kept itself alive through its Clásicos Chicanos/ 396
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Chicano Classics imprint. In addition, it distributes more than 1,000 titles by other presses. Other ethnic presses, smaller in size than Arte Público and Bilingual, have published significant books in Spanish. These include Tonatiuh-Quinito Sol (known by its acronym TQS), originally called Quinto Sol Publications and based in Berkeley, California. The editor in chief was Octavio Ignacio Romano, a professor of public health at the University of California who edited a significant anthology of the Chicano movement, El Espejo/The Mirror. In 1965 Romano launched TQS, which originally awarded an important prize, Premio Quinto Sol, consisting of $1,000 plus publication, to encourage Chicanos to write. Among the prizewinners was the classic Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, released in 1972. TQS also published other books by Anaya, including The Legend of la Llorona and The Silence of the Llano. In the late seventies and eighties, a group of academics led by Frank Janney founded Ediciones del Norte, based in Hanover, New Hampshire. The house published authors such as Luis Rafael Sánchez, Severo Sarduy, and Luis Valenzuela, who caught the tail end of the Latin American Boom of the seventies. Miami-based Ediciones Universal is a publisher and distributor of Spanish books active since 1965. With a catalog of more than a thousand titles, it specializes in Cuban and Cuban American authors. Its backlist includes classics by Cirilo Villaverde, José María Heredia, José Martí, Julián del Casal, Gastón Baquero, and Severo Sarduy. Among its most distinguished books is the Diccionario mayor de cubanismos, by José Sánchez Boudy, a massive lexicon of Cuban and Cuban American terms. Since the 1980s, outlets for Spanish-language publication that focus on poetry and literature have included Linden Lane Press, connected to the literary journal Linden Lane Magazine, which is published by Cuban poet Heberto Padilla and his wife Belkis Cuzá-Malé. Latin American Writer’s Institute (LAWI), a brainchild of Peruvian novelist Isaac Goldemberg, is based at Hostos Community College, a Manhattan branch of the City University of New York. LAWI is mainly committed to poetry in the original and translations into Spanish of American writers such as Billy Collins. On a semiannual basis it publishes the Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana. Latin American Literary Review Press, headed by Yvette Miller in Pittsburgh, was originally launched in 1980 as a scholarly magazine, Latin American Literary Review. The house has been devoted to bringing out volumes—at times in bilingual format—of Spanish-language classics and literature of merit from south of the Rio Grande. It focuses primarily on publishing English translations of creative writing and literary criticism as well as poetry books bilingually. Its authors include the Nobel Prize winner from Guatemala Miguel Angel Asturias, as well as Ezequiel S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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Martínez Estrada, Antonio Skármeta, José Bianco, Ricardo Piglia, and Benita Galeana. Latin American Literary Review also distributes an ambitious list of Spanish-language books (biography, history, music, economy, literary criticism, social sciences, children’s books), most of which were originally published in Spain. The press has published bilingual poetry collections by Chilean Marjorie Agosín and Salvadoran Hugo Lindo. The figures involved in the aforementioned publishing activities collectively envisioned the construction of a Latino literary heritage in English and Spanish. In order to accomplish that task, they also saw the need to release wide-ranging anthologies, several of which were only in Spanish, while others were in bilingual format or in English exclusively. The most notable titles among the Spanish and bilingual volumes were Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos (Linden Lane Press, 1988), edited by Carolina Hospital, Los paraguas amarillos: Los poetas latinos de Nueva York (Ediciones del Norte, 1983), edited by Iván Silén, and, more recently, En otra voz: Antología de la literature hispana en Estados Unidos (Arte Público, 2002), edited by Nicolás Kanellos. Publication of Spanish-language works has also occurred recently in Puerto Rico. Since the Jones-Shafroth Act was signed in 1917, giving Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship, the island retains the ambiguous status of a Commonwealth (in Spanish, Estado Libre Asociado). This situation promotes a divided identity in the population: because it shares a history similar to that of other Caribbean islands, and because Spanish is its national language, is Puerto Rico part of Latin America, or is it part of the United States, even though it is not officially a state of the union? Almost a century after the Jones-Shafroth Act, the island has a small publishing trade almost exclusively devoted to Spanish titles. Ediciones Plaza Mayor, which began in 1990 and has published works by jazz master Paquito D’Rivera and literary historian Mercedes López-Baralt, is one of a handful of such enterprises. Ediciones Huracán in Río Piedras, San Juan, founded in 1975, specializes in textbooks in Spanish on history, literature, and social studies. Among its authors are Mario Vargas Llosa (Contra viento y marea [Against All Odds]) and Rosario Ferré (La muñeca menor [The Youngest Doll]). The first publication of the University of Puerto Rico Press was Indologia (1927), a series of lectures by José Vasconcelos delivered on the campus. Its catalog includes the anthology El gran libro de la America judía (The Great Book of Jewish America) edited by Isaac Goldemberg, as well as Illusions of a Revolving Door, by Pedro Pietri, edited by Alfredo Matilla Rivas. Editorial Antillana is the publisher of the playwright René Marqués, author of the classic The Oxcart. All those publishing developments signal the emergence of what might be called a “bilingual nation.” In the seventies, the federal government’s efforts 398
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to enforce affirmative action and prevent discrimination in schools and in the workplace enhanced receptivity to Spanish-language publication. Subsequently, multiculturalism as a social philosophy placed its stamp on American culture. But these changes also need to be explained technologically. With the introduction of telecommunications and, more recently, the personal laptop, publishing became a much more democratic activity. The price for manufacturing a book decreased as expertise reached out beyond the New York publishing industry. One might be able to talk about the period as a populist age. This spirit has had a direct impact on Spanish books made in the United States. It has become possible to sidestep the entire editorial and printing procedure by publishing a book in Spanish through the Internet and immediately making it accessible to millions of readers.
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Yet, despite the creation of such institutions for Spanish-language publishing, Latino authors—in Spanish and English—were still largely ignored by the New York publishing industry up until the late eighties. There were a few exceptions, of course. Poetry in Spanish as well as English has been a fixture in college courses since the 1950s. Since the sixties, a number of major and minor houses such as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Viking, and Copper Canyon have produced important poetry titles, including anthologies such as Rubén Darío: Selected Writings (Penguin Classics), edited by Ilan Stavans; Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poetry (Viking), edited by Alexander Coleman; and Pablo Neruda: Later Poems (Grove), edited by Ben Bellit. The first English-language Mexican American novels were Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal and Chicano (1970) by Richard Vazquez, both issued by Doubleday. Piri Thomas’s memoir Down These Mean Streets, about Puerto Rican ghetto life in Harlem, had appeared in 1967 under the aegis of Alfred A. Knopf. And José Yglesia’s narratives about Cuba and Spain (The Goodbye Land, An Ordinary Life, etc.) were released by Pantheon around the same time. Still, those were isolated examples. The bestowal of the Pulitzer Prize on Oscar Hijuelos for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1989, however, dramatically changed the picture. Suddenly, major publishers such as Random House, Viking, and Henry Holt sought manuscripts—predominantly in English—dealing with Hispanic life in the United States. Established firms signed on Sandra Cisneros, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chavez, and Ana Castillo. The career of Sandra Cisneros illustrates this metamorphosis. Kanellos’s Arte Público published her debut coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street, in 1988, when Cisneros was thirty-four. After Cisneros finished her next book, S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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a collection of stories called Woman Hollering Creek, she retained a powerful New York agent, Susan Berholz, who sold the manuscript to Random House in a two-book deal: a hard-cover edition of the stories and a paperback reprint in the Vintage imprint of Cisneros’s debut novel. The package also included a Spanish version of The House on Mango Street, for which the New York publisher commissioned the Mexican femme de lettres Elena Poniatowska—also a Berholz client. It came out as La casa en Mango Street, although Kanellos had been reluctant to let go of the title. He perceived himself as the prime promoter of Latino literature and did not want to lose Cisneros. Legal wranglings resulted, and, much to his dismay, Kanellos finally surrendered the rights. Thus a best seller was born.6 In contrast to most of the so-called Latin American boom authors, almost no Latino writer had a literary agent in the 1980s. Berholz quickly became the agent du jour. From that moment on, Latinos merited more serious consideration among New York publishers, advances increased exponentially, and foreign rights became part of the contractual package. Only when this happened did Latino literature become a global phenomenon. Among the foreign rights were editions in Spanish. For example, after their publication in the United States, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, Loving Pedro Infante, and Caramelo were released in Spain and Latin America. They were also translated into other languages. The ascent of the literary agent in the Latino literary world was the first of several related phenomena. Trade publications were launched such as Críticas, an offspring of Library Journal published between 2000 and 2005. It folded as a print publication but survived in an online version. The database of Greenwood Publishing, The Latino American Experience 〈http://www.greenwood .com〉 was launched in 2007 with an attractive blog discussing various topics relating to Hispanics in the United States. The Guadalajara Book Fair, the prime publishing event in the Hispanic world as it pertains to Latinos, consolidated its status. Simultaneously, Spanish-language books—the majority translations of foreign authors—began to sell. Reaping the fruits of success, distribution companies, some of which had been active since the sixties, expanded to meet demand. Lectorum Publications, for instance, begun in 1963 and later owned by Scholastic Publishing, distributed more than 25,000 titles in 2007. Smaller entities, such as Linda Goodman’s Bilingual Publications Company, based in New York City, and Michael Shapiro’s Libros Sin Fronteras, based in Olympia, Washington, also ratified the status of Spanish-language books. The commitment of New York houses to Latino literature in the nineties likewise resulted in the launching of various imprints devoted exclusively to Spanish titles. By 2007 Latinos commanded $600 billion in annual consumer 400
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power, a number that was likely only to rise. Vintage Español, part of Random House, made a partnership with Grupo Santillana in Spain, agreeing to distribute Spanish-language novels from Latin America in megastores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. It also published Spanish translations of Latino novels. Other Spanish publishers such as Planeta also began to distribute their books in the United States. Penguin Libros bought the U.S. paperback rights for southof-the-border classics, among them novels by Juan Rulfo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes, and Angeles Mastretta. The strategy was to make more affordable Spanish-language editions for course adoption that would compete with direct imports. These efforts went through a series of ups and downs. Revenues at the end of the 1990s were not always what was expected, and several times the imprints appeared on the verge of being withdrawn. Then, in the early days of the new century, the market revived. HarperCollins started a new imprint exclusively devoted to Latino books in English, Rayo. Rayo’s advances to authors were notably higher than other presses’: between $75,000 and $100,000, sums previously unavailable to writers of this ethnic group. The imprint’s authors included journalist Jorge Ramos (No Borders), Victor Villaseñor (Thirteen Senses), and Alberto Fuguet (The Movies of My Life). The concept of releasing books in English and Spanish versions became attractive, especially when it came to popular titles in areas such as religion, self-help, and biographies of celebrities. Rayo also brought out Spanish versions of the autobiographical volumes of Pope John Paul II. Bibles in Spanish (especially a 1960 revision of the Reina Valera version, considered to be the equivalent of the King James in English and used by fundamentalist Baptist missionaries in their work in Latin American countries) appeared in inexpensive paperback editions. Other bestselling titles included Exito Latino, about venture capitalism, and, of course, Qué se puede esperar cuando se está esperando, a translation—or better, a reconceptualization—of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The latter was the harbinger of a new Spanish-language publishing trend: books with practical applications for the non-English-speaking woman. Some of these works exhibited the deficiencies of amateurish translation. The problem was not only the syntax but also the unsynchronized connection with the author’s national background. For instance, Juno Díaz’s Drown, about Dominican Americans in New Jersey, was done awkwardly by an Iberian translator. (His debut novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wau, was translated by the Cuban American writer Achy Obejas.) Despite such pitfalls, however, even smaller houses embarked on translation ventures. One such example is Siete Cuentos Editorial, the Spanish-language imprint of Seven Stories Press, a New York publisher of (well-translated) political titles in nonfiction and fiction. Its founding director was Juana Ponce de León, who edited the communiqués S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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of Subcomandante Marcos. Shortly after 2000, Siete Cuentos Editorial brought out new editions of several of Ariel Dorfman’s novels, memoirs, and plays, such as Death and the Maiden (La muerte y la doncella) and Looking South, Heading North (Rumbo al Sur, Deseando el Norte). It also issued Spanish translations of Noam Chomsky’s book 9/11 (11 de septiembre) and Howard Zinn’s The Other History of the United States (La otra historia de los Estados Unidos), as well as the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (Nuestros cuerpos, nuestras vidas). These books are available through online retailers as well as in bookstores visited by Latino customers with knowledge of Spanish.
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Two further developments are worth special attention. First, Spanglish, the hybrid tongue juxtaposing Spanish and English, used by millions of Latinos since the fifties, is increasingly a force in publishing. A number of texts written in Spanish in Albuquerque dating back to the end of the nineteenth century include loanwords. Conversely, Spanish vocabulary began to enter English after the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty. With the rise of bilingual education, however, the mixing of languages became a characteristic of Latino speech. There is not one single Spanglish but several: Cubonics, Dominicanish, Nuyorrican, and so forth. Each of these varieties is identifiable by the national and regional background of its speakers, as well as by class and age. With the help of the media—particularly radio, TV, and music—a standard Spanglish, one drawing from every variety, is in the process of formation. Spanglish is also used outside the United States, from Spain to Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Argentina. The first Spanglish poetry, fiction, and essays were published in the eighties. Among the pioneers were Ana Lydia Vega with her story “Pollito Chicken,” part of Vírgenes y mártires (Virgins and Martyrs, coauthored with Carmen Lugo de Filippi), Cecilio García-Camarillo with Talking to the Río Grande, and Gloria Anzaldúa with Borderlands = La Frontera.7 The trend accelerated quickly in the nineties when Giannina Braschi published with Bilingual Press her novel Yo-Yo Boing. This was the first bilingual novel written in a free-flowing style that went back and forth between Spanish and English. Braschi issued a manifesto called “Pelos en la lengua,” in which she explained her position in political terms. It partially reads: “El bilinguismo es una estética bound to double business. O, tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet. To be and not to be.” In 2003 I brought out Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, a dictionary with some 6,000 terms from various backgrounds (Cubonics, Nuyorrican, Dominicanish, Chicano, Cyper-Spanglish), to further the scientific study of the jargon. I also made a Spanglish translation of Don Quixote of La Mancha, part 1, chapter 1.8 Soon 402
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after, Susana Chávez-Silverman released her memoir Killer Crónicas, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, another full-fledged Spanglish volume. Since then, there have been children’s books, essays, teaching manuals, and other similar publications. For an American publishing house to bring out a book in this amorphous language is a risky venture into the unknown. It would not have been possible even twenty years ago, at a time when mixing languages was considered improper. Yet works by Rosaura Sánchez, Tato Laviera, Demetria Martínez, Junot Díaz, Rosario Ferré, and Jorge Ramos are part of the ongoing trend.9 Second, since the nineties a considerably larger number of titles designed for children and young adults has appeared. Arte Público is the only ethnic publisher to have an imprint devoted to those categories: Piñata Books. It has published titles such as Icy Watermelon/Sandia fría by Mary Sue Galindo and Waiting for Papá/Esperando a Papá by René Colato Laínez. But the marketability of these books has encouraged scores of publishers to release books in Spanish for these audiences. Almost every major New York publisher now brings out a couple of bilingual books for children or adolescents each year. Likewise, every significant Latino author, from Pat Mora (The Desert Is My Mother/El desierto es mi madre) to Luis J. Rodríguez (La llaman América), has at least one children’s book to his or her credit. Perhaps the most prolific of all is Gary Soto. Since the early nineties, when Soto abandoned his academic job in order to commit himself fully to writing, he has produced close to three dozen books for children and young adults, even sustaining the same character through several volumes, such as Chato Goes Cruisin’ and Chato and the Party Animals.
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In the aftermath of the civil rights era, an astonishing growth took place in Spanish-language book publishing in the United States. The demographic explosion of Latinos and the fact that, unlike other immigrant groups, they remain loyal to their mother tongue has created the incentive for publishers to invest in non-English books. But does this growth amount to the formation of what could be described as a Spanish-language book industry? How sizable an audience does it serve? How many Spanish-language readers were there north of the Rio Grande in 2003, for example, when the Census Bureau counted the population as being almost 40 million? What portion of it reads in Spanish and buys books? And what kinds of Spanish (Dominican, Ecuadorian, Panamanian . . .) do they use? Is a Spanish book by a Colombian author attractive to a Guatemalan in the United States? Writing and publishing for the immigrant market is indeed a tricky business, one affected by the “shadow” audience in the country of origin. This audience often does not see the work itself S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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yet it stands in the background of all foreign-language ventures. There is also the fact that Spanish speakers do not need to be exclusively Latinos. Scores of non-Latinos interested in the Hispanic world use the language regularly for a variety of purposes. In 1990 the Book-of-the-Month Club did a study to assess these markets. At issue was whether this venerable yet increasingly obsolescent institution at the crossroads of literature and commerce should start a Spanish-language club. Deciding that the Spanish-language audience was worth pursuing, the Bookof-the-Month Club bought the Lectorum Book Club, which had been launched in New York in the 1980s. Similarly, Univision tried to imitate the success of Oprah Winfrey’s television book club by starting book programs for Spanish speakers. Since the 1990s, English-language newspapers have also invested in Spanish-language ventures: for example, the Dallas Morning Star launched its supplement Al Día. Similarly, newspapers from the Americas (El Nuevo Día from Puerto Rico, as well as El Universal and Reforma from Mexico) expanded their distribution into the United States. Add to this the accessibility, from the mid-nineties onward, of online editions of Latin American newspapers, available everywhere. Yet the limitations of Spanish-language publishing in the United States become apparent by comparing print runs in Spanish and English. The average first print run of a midsize title in English by a mainstream New York house is 10,000 copies. If and when that house opts to release a Spanish version, its first print run is often a fraction of that number, between 2,000 and 3,000 copies. Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street was published simultaneously in English by Vintage, a division of Random House, in 1991. By 2007, the English version had been reprinted eighty times, whereas its Spanish counterpart was reprinted only seven times. Cisneros’s novel, according to the publisher, has sold well over a million copies in English. It is safe to assume that in Spanish the number is in the low five figures, probably not even 15,000 copies. Consider also the case of Isabel Allende, whose novels are instant best-sellers worldwide. In the United States alone, her novel La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), originally published in 1982, was reprinted thirty-seven times by 2004. In the Hispanic world, the title has been a perennial seller, but the Spanish translation—by Margaret Sayers Peden—has never sold more than 10,000 copies north of the Rio Grande. Similar contrasts between the English and Spanish might be elicited for Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and its Spanish counterpart, Los reyes del mambo tocan canciones de amor. However, when one considers Spanish-language book publishing as part of a trend designed to satisfy a growing market, there are signs that such investment is likely to have a long-range effect. American publishers used to 404
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commission Spanish-language translations themselves. They have come to the realization that it might be cheaper to have a publisher in Spain embark on the project, then buy the rights for the U.S. territory. But the handicap is that the English and Spanish editions cannot be released simultaneously, which might bring sales down. In sum, if Spanish-language book publishing in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century is any indication, it is clear that Latinos are not fully ready to abandon their mother tongue on the road to assimilation. Moreover, as Spanish increases its popularity north of the Rio Grande, it ratifies its quintessential role in the nation’s collective identity (fig. 22.3). Since the civil right era, the country has de facto become a “bilingual nation.” Cervantes’s tongue is still taught in universities as a foreign language, along with French, German, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Mandarin, among others. But is it appropriate to define it as “foreign” when a large percentage of the population uses it in its regular affairs? It is pertinent, by way of conclusion, to return to the questions posed at
FIGURE 22.3. A poster for the 2007 National Latino Writers Conference reflects the well-established presence of Spanishlanguage writers and readers in literary culture and American national identity. Courtesy of Kenesson Design, Inc. S PA N I S H - L A N GUAGE B O O K S I N T H E U NI TED STAT ES
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the outset of this essay. Since the sixties, it is indeed possible to talk about a Spanish-language publishing “industry” in the United States. Constituted by regional ethnic houses as well as divisions of major New York trade companies, it might be small in size when compared to English-language publishing but there is little doubt it is ambitious and financially sound, with identifiable marketing and distribution strategies. Books written originally in Spanish and also rendered into it have made their mark on North American culture. Is the explosion in book publishing of recent years, with origins in the nineteenth century, likely to be reversed? Are these efforts a foundation for the future? Or are they likely to vanish once Latinos assimilate in full? These challenges remain for Spanish-language publishers and readers alike.
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
PART III
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Reading, Identity, and Community
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Introduction
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In How to Read and Why (2000), the eminent American literary critic Harold Bloom offered an eloquent brief for reading as a solitary practice. Explicating selected works of authors ensconced in the Western canon (along with a few outliers), Bloom asserted that the purpose of reading “well” was to attain both pleasure and insight, which in turn permitted individuals “a more capacious sense of life.” As Bloom explained, “The ultimate answer to the question ‘Why read?’ is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.” By the same token, he voiced skepticism about the idea that becoming a more accomplished reader might benefit society at large. “Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood,” he cautioned, “by what or how you read.” Granting that fiction, poetry, and drama allowed readers to gain perspective on what he called “otherness,” Bloom nevertheless declared that “the pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social.”1 Bloom’s book was a product of its times: the author’s passion for the lifeenriching gifts of Shakespeare and Jane Austen coexisted with his dismay at what he saw as the excessively politicized ways of reading popular among his academic colleagues. Thanks to the incursions of multiculturalism, historicism, and gender studies, as well as a tendency to avoid works demanding “reflection,” high culture in the United States was, Bloom thought, “in some jeopardy.”2 Yet, for all its late twentieth-century resonances, How to Read and Why also belongs to a long tradition of advice to American readers. The genre includes not only the guides to Good Reading that frame chapter 23 (“The Enduring Reader”) but also a work that appeared slightly before the postwar story begins: Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940). Adler’s volume, which Bloom surely had in mind, has remained in print since its first publication. The tone and emphasis of How to Read a Book differs strikingly from Bloom’s. Adler established “rules” for readers to follow as they mastered a list of “great books” heavily weighted toward philosophy; Bloom focused on imaginative literature. Moreover, Adler regarded reading as a “kind of conversation” with the author and recommended actual conversations in “great books” discussion groups. The goal of reading, he claimed, was, finally, to safeguard democracy: “Reading the great books has been for nought,” Adler averred, “unless we are concerned with bringing about a good society.”3 As the overview in “The Enduring Reader” shows, themes of both self and
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society—sometimes in tension, sometimes overlapping—have permeated readers’ attitudes and behaviors throughout the period since 1950. Still, the very existence of the book-advice tradition in which Bloom and Adler participated—predicated as it is on a relationship between a reader and a critic or teacher—argues that even the isolated reading Bloom celebrated entails a social dimension. For all the appeal of his poetic sensibility (which the rulemaking Adler unfortunately lacked), Bloom’s insistence on regarding reading as bounded by the self seems misguided, and Adler’s outward-looking perspective (if not his specific political vision) closer to what readers in many contexts actually do. The essays in part 3 make that point by exploring the social as well as the personal uses of reading in several settings. In her exploration of the culture of print within Alcoholics Anonymous (chapter 24), Trysh Travis observes that an individual’s private, silent reading from the “Big Book” echoes the associations the text acquires as a shared object of study in AA meetings. The “language of the heart” that reading promotes within AA, Travis argues, enables isolated individuals to achieve “human connectedness” through the practices of empathy and identification. Priscilla Coit Murphy’s essay in chapter 25 moves from the explicitly therapeutic uses of print to the function of books in the political arena: specifically, the case of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Murphy examines the publishing history of Carson’s controversial investigation of pesticides in order to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between books and other media. She also describes the mediating function of news and opinion about books, the transformation of controversy into publicity, and the access to the mass audience the modern media system provides. The Silent Spring example demonstrates that these socially produced phenomena condition the experience of the private reader. Like Travis, Elizabeth Long focuses on an instance of reading as an activity of a formally constituted group. Like Murphy, she shows how reading can raise political consciousness. Her subject in chapter 26 is an African American women’s organization in postwar Houston, the Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club, that challenged racial stereotypes while fostering sisterly bonds among participants. The club’s members exemplify readers “turning to literature for purposes of their own,” in the process blurring the boundaries between “self-improvement and social progress.” In “Book Collecting and the Book as Object” (chapter 27), Robert DeMaria recounts the history of the networks linking private book collectors, even as he argues that the motives for building collections have grown more specialized and personal. Finally, in chapter 28 David Reinking locates reading in the brave new world of digital texts. Technological innovation, he comments, has modi410
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fied long-standing definitions of “reader,” “author,” and “book.” The solitary, temporally circumscribed, reflective approach that Harold Bloom named as the essence of reading well is at odds with the “more dynamic,” fluid properties of words on the screen. Yet Reinking contends that the digital environment may buttress as well as undermine the authority of the printed book. In the “post-typographic” future that Reinking imagines, Bloom’s and Adler’s stance as teachers advocating a single prescription for “how to read” may strike audiences as ill-adapted to the multiple formats and various circumstances in which they encounter books. Yet, whether they make meaning from the page or the screen, “post-typographic” readers will no doubt resemble the individuals who, after 1950, populated AA, the environmental movement, women’s groups, and collecting societies: they, too, one expects, will assimilate expert guidance to the socially inflected textual appropriations that reading always involves.
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CHAPTER 23
The Enduring Reader Joan Shelley Rubin
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Among the products of the post–World War II paperback revolution was a volume decidedly different from the racily packaged novels the paper format encouraged: a book issued by Pelican/Penguin entitled Good Reading: A Guide to the World’s Best Books (1947). First published in 1932 as a pamphlet assembled by the National Council of Teachers of English, Good Reading had undergone extensive revision before its paperback debut. Eventually it became a sporadic serial publication of the R. R. Bowker Company, which updated it periodically and brought out three editions in hardcover aimed at library sales. The late 1940s versions, however, provide a useful point of entry to the subject of American readers in the second half of the twentieth century. In certain respects, these works, containing lists of titles, brief essays recommending books on particular subjects, and more general commentary on the value of reading, fell squarely into the tradition of American self-culture manuals stretching back to William Ellery Channing and Noah Porter. As the inclusion of John Erskine and Clifton Fadiman as contributors made evident, however, an immediate antecedent of Good Reading was the “Great Books” movement, which Erskine had pioneered at Columbia University just after World War I. The “Great Books” curriculum consisted of a systematic, textbased approach to the “best” Western literature and nonfiction. The idea that one could sort good reading from bad was not in question. Another central premise of the “Great Books” ideology was that the best books were older texts that had survived generations of rereading because they addressed large questions about the human condition. Although they rejected the narrowness and rigidity of the Hutchins and Adler syllabus, the editors of Good Reading kept the “Great Books” orientation alive by sustaining the conceit of the malleable reader eager to acquire an education in the classics. The raison d’être for Good Reading’s various lists—many of which featured Shakespeare, the Bible, and nineteenth-century European philosophers—was the supposition that readers lacked both bibliographic information and evaluative standards and that they hungered for authoritative guidance.1 The growth in American higher education in the postwar period argues that
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that presumption was correct. So does the proliferation of “Great Books” seminars themselves, which enrolled 80,000 people outside of universities by 1948 and continued to flourish thereafter. Another testimony to the strength of the audience was the success of various broadcast ventures: “Invitation to Learning,” a “Great Books” offshoot that continued, unsponsored, throughout the 1950s on commercial radio; the classicist Gilbert Highet’s popular radio shows about literature during the same period; and Frank Baxter’s television programs on Shakespeare and The Written Word. Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan (1960), which offered “brief talks” about “the greatest writers of our Western tradition,” explicitly addressed “that great and growing army of intelligent men and women who in their middle years are penetrated by a vague, uncomfortable sense that the mere solution of the daily problems of living is not enough”; the large, approving response to an earlier version of the book, Fadiman observed, demonstrated that “despite what some communications tycoons believe, Americans respond more eagerly to the best than to the worst—provided the best is offered to them.”2 Reading, on the model informing all those projects, became not simply a means of self-improvement but also an opportunity to join the community of the well-read. Nevertheless, as is always true of prescriptive materials, Good Reading and the activities allied with it drew upon their creators’ anxiety (despite Fadiman’s assurance otherwise) that their audience was poised for (if not already engaged in) rebellion against their sound advice. As Fadiman’s allusion to “communications tycoons” suggests, one danger was that readers would forgo good books for the seductions of the mass media. Another concern grew out of the postwar debate over the value of liberal arts education in a society increasingly driven by science and technology. At the same time, Fadiman, Baxter, and other advocates of the dissemination of high culture were themselves the object of criticism as middlebrows proffering “misreading” to a populace bombarded with the “homogenized fare” endemic to industrial capitalism. For both the popularizers of good reading and their critics, the vision of the reader as member of a community shaded easily into the reader as member of a herd— running away from cultural authority in the first instance, running toward it for the wrong reasons in the second.3 Yet, even in the form most comforting to its proponents, the model of reading as an act entailing deference to shared standards and assumptions coexisted with a contrasting conception of the encounter with printed books: the idea of reading as an occasion for individual expression. In 1979, while serving as librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin offered a powerful plea for that alternative. Postulating a shift from a former “Age of Publishing” to “our Age of Broadcasting,” Boorstin condemned as shortsighted the position (which Kenneth Cmiel THE ENDURING READER
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chronicles in chapter 18) that libraries ought to provide information rather than reading. His larger point, however, was that the culture of news broadcasts and other electronic media had diminished the American public’s pursuit of “amusement” in favor of a search for “entertainment”—a term Boorstin connected to a passive, non-book-reading audience. Arguing instead for the “free and active spirit” the quest for knowledge engendered, Boorstin concluded by celebrating the “autonomous reader, amusing and knowledging himself,” who served as “the be-all and end-all of our libraries.” At the opening of the Library of Congress’s exhibit “A Nation of Readers” in 1982, Boorstin augmented that image by depicting the reading of books as a refuge from present-mindedness and from the constant barrage of public speech. “More than ever,” he declared, “each of us needs a private island where . . . only one person, each of us, is sovereign.” Yet, in Boorstin’s view, the achievement of privacy ultimately contributed to civic welfare: autonomous reading would “raise a citizenry who are qualified to choose their experience for themselves” and so preserve a “free people.”4 Boorstin’s portrait of the autonomous reader carried a number of implications. Coming from a figure whom scholars have associated with “consensus” approaches to American history, his outlook is notably open to difference and conflict. At the same time, the understanding of reading as an arena in which Americans enacted their right to think for themselves had a certain Cold War utility. Most striking, however, is Boorstin’s use of the word “autonomy” itself, which echoes David Riesman’s language in his best-selling critique of postwar mass consumer culture, The Lonely Crowd (1950; reissued 1961). Like Riesman’s autonomous individual, Boorstin’s ideal readers resisted the pressures of other-direction, following their own tastes instead of succumbing to what Riesman called “entertainment as adjustment to the group.” It is especially worth remarking that Boorstin endorsed reading as an exercise of private, personal, even resistant behavior while occupying the ranks of the “elite”; that is, like the evidence of readers seeking guidance from literary authorities, his comments undermine any simple story of ordinary people arrayed against critics, educators, and intellectuals who strove to control their reading practices.5 Good Reading’s deferential yet self-improving reader, on the one hand, and Boorstin’s autonomous yet civic-minded one, on the other, suggest the multiple needs, expectations, and behaviors that inflected the politics of reading in the second half of the twentieth century. Both constructs also underscore what Trysh Travis, in chapter 24, has called “reading’s paradoxical status as both deeply private and ineluctably social.” The ambivalent attitude toward literary authority those models entail is equally noteworthy. Of course, the tension between autonomy and deference, individualism and community, self-expression and conformity is an old story in American culture. Yet these competing, often 414
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intertwined ideals assumed new forms as Americans debated how to read, argued over reading instruction, mustered print in the service of politics, and reimagined their identities as readers in the era that encompassed the Cold War, the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the therapeutic preoccupations of the century’s last decades, and the digital revolution.
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Among the most memorable episodes embodying those tensions were two controversies involving poetry. The first was the storm of protest that erupted after the announcement in 1949 that the Library of Congress’s Fellows in American Letters had awarded the first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound, an anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. The Bollingen affair pitted eminent literary figures against their peers, but it was played out in the middlebrow Saturday Review of Literature, where some of the magazine’s readers not only insisted on the primacy of patriotism over art but also expressed resentment of the intellectual snobbery they attributed to Pound’s supporters. Eight years later, in the same pages, readers once more asserted their own capacity for judgment—in this case, about how as well as what to read—when they vociferously repudiated John Ciardi’s scorching review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s volume The Unicorn and Other Poems. Like the Bollingen contretemps, Ciardi’s attack made visible a reading public that was unruly as well as fractured, including a sizable percentage that rested “content in the knowledge that a critic’s opinion is not necessarily better than” an ordinary reader’s.6 The more consequential battle in the 1950s over the authority to prescribe reading practices, however, concerned not matters of literary interpretation but, rather, the acquisition of literacy in children. The appearance, in 1955, of Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read galvanized Americans into investigating the relative merits of phonics (decoding sounds) versus look-say (discovering meaning) methods (fig. 23.1). Flesch’s book, a brief for phonics, was notable for its sarcastic characterization of his opponents as pillars of the pedagogical establishment: well-placed faculty members at schools of education with lofty credentials and no common sense. (In that respect, he appealed to the same antiacademic impulses that Ciardi’s detractors evinced.) Although he invoked his own experts and adopted a blunt, know-it-all tone himself, Flesch simultaneously empowered parents to take reading instruction into their own hands; Why Johnny Can’t Read included a long section of exercises for use with children at home. For their part, professional educators faulted Flesch for confusing reading with comprehension and for overgeneralizing on the basis of questionable data.7 Both sides were still polarized in the late 1960s, when Harvard’s Jeanne Chall THE ENDURING READER
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FIGURE 23.1. Don Potter, a teacher at ACT Counseling Center, Odessa, Texas, uses the phonics exercises found in Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do about It (1955), which he found to be effective in teaching remedial reading. Potter retyped all the exercises in large print to teach from transparencies to groups of students. Photograph courtesy of Don Potter.
issued Learning to Read: The Great Debate, her Carnegie Corporation–funded review of the extant research. Chall recommended introducing phonics and the alphabet early in primary school. Her most interesting observation, however, was that she had tapped into “a much broader debate,” one she termed “ideological.” Flesch’s polemic predated the 1957 Sputnik launch, but the appearance, in 1961, of a book entitled What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t demonstrates how readily worries over reading instruction became entangled with deeper fears of Soviet domination. The 1967 addition of reading to the areas eligible for federal funding under the National Defense Education Act (1958) reflects the same Cold War thinking. In the context of Lyndon Johnson’s domestic social programs, moreover, the recognition, as Chall put it, that literacy was “the key factor in the attack on poverty” had made the question of “how to give children the right start” more than an “academic” one.8 But more-amorphous anxieties also shaped the phonics versus look-say controversy, producing strange bedfellows in the process. The association of looksay with progressive education, which rejected rote learning as poor training for democratic citizenship, made it appealing to liberals concerned with preserving individuality and self-expression in an age of conformity. Chall argued, on the other hand, that the initial supporters of phonics often belonged to an uppermiddle-class, college-educated, back-to-basics “elite” (even though she allied herself with their cause in order to aid the disadvantaged). Meanwhile, in their self-conception as an antiestablishment movement, the phonics people claimed that they stood for democracy. Yet, as the upheavals of the 1960s challenged other sorts of authorities, phonics, with its elements of uniformity and discipline, became an educational analog of a call for a return to “law and order.”9 416
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By the early 1970s, passions had quieted: publishers had begun producing classroom materials and teacher-training textbooks that restored phonics to widespread use. At the same time, as Jonathan Zimmerman has noted in chapter 17, the civil rights movement and the subsequent emphasis on multiculturalism spurred efforts to connect “good reading” in the early grades with texts that affirmed ethnic identity. Yet this equilibrium did not last. In the 1980s, many educators renewed the effort to base early reading instruction on comprehension by embracing the “whole language” movement. The inventive spelling, word guessing, and independent silent reading at the heart of the “whole language” approach—strategies predicated on respect for individualism rather than what one writer called the “bureaucratic” aspect of phonics—were guaranteed to rouse the ire of “back-to-basics” types. Although, in practice, many schools that enthusiastically instituted “whole language” and “authentic literature” programs later balanced them with a phonics component, the most recent round in the debate (to skip, for the moment, to the present) shows how politically charged (and paradoxical) the subject remains. Conservatives, usually the defenders of individual freedom against the incursions of government, continue to see themselves as opponents of progressive permissiveness and the school of education experts who endorse it; ironically, they have generally rallied around federal legislation to ensure that their alternative, a phonics-based curriculum called “Reading First,” prevails. Liberals reject the federal mandate, regard the more “natural” emphasis on look-say as resisting the imposition of authority and uniformity on children, and, according to their adversaries, ignore the gains inner-city schools have made by teaching phonetically. This is an ideological contest indeed, in which opinions on how to read are presumed to signal attitudes toward everything from the war in Iraq to racial difference.10 As Why Johnny Can’t Read continued to reverberate for Americans with a stake in children’s education, the fact that children grew up to become adolescents and then adults was not lost on the nation’s publishers, librarians, and policy makers. In 1970 concern about adult reading performance led to the first of many national studies of functional literacy (defined, variably, as, for example, the ability to complete application forms, read advertisements, or understand train schedules). Historians, noting the studies’ numerous flaws, have concluded that functional literacy probably improved between the 1940s and the mid-1970s, declined for a few years thereafter, and then picked up again in the 1980s. But the results—the 1970 poll estimated that 18.5 million Americans lacked enough literacy for “survival”—were alarming at the time. Another troubling development was a decline in high school students’ test scores beginning in the late 1960s, which critics blamed on the decade’s activism even though most of the drop actually occurred in the more quiescent 1970s. (Scores started THE ENDURING READER
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rising around 1978.) Adult illiteracy became enmeshed in distress about the growing socioeconomic gap between white and black Americans and about the nation’s future prosperity, given its growing dependence on technological skills.11 By the late 1970s, what investigators came to call adult “aliteracy”—“knowing how to read but not wanting to”—had also begun to command attention, especially among publishers and booksellers. Still, the vast majority of Americans—94 percent—reported reading books, magazines, or newspapers in the six months before May 1978. While the number of book readers was much smaller (55 percent), the “heavy” readers within that group—those who had read at least ten books in the same period—made up almost half of the total of the book-reading population. Book readers were slightly more likely to be women than men; they were predominantly white and more affluent than non– book readers. Seventy-five percent were under fifty. They generally chose fiction as “ ‘best for’ the pleasure and relaxation” they derived from reading, although those who read fewer books were more likely to read for “general knowledge” than the heavy readers were. Television absorbed the greatest share of the average American’s leisure hours, but it did not interfere with reading to the extent that publishing industry executives sometimes hypothesized: book readers and non–book readers in 1978 sat in front of the set for approximately the same amount of time.12 Yet the 1983 Consumer Research Study on Reading and Book Purchasing noted a decline in book readers to 50 percent, with the greatest drop among young adults, blue-collar workers, and people between fifty and sixty-four years of age. Furthermore, the 1983 survey noted that only 37 percent of nonwhites read books, and 15 percent read nothing. The 1982 and 1985 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), showed that the proportion of Americans who read “literature” was holding steady but not growing (the “literature” reader typically being a middle-aged, middle- to upper-class white woman living in a western or midwestern suburb). By the early 1980s, the personal computer had become an additional source of competition with print. These trends, together with the appearance of a federal report ominously titled A Nation at Risk, produced divided opinions about whether the United States could really be called “a nation of readers.” Observers who viewed positively the place of the book in American life pointed to the best sellers that captivated millions of people: the novels of Herman Wouk, John Irving, or Arthur Hailey. Their reassuring outlook depended on setting aside any expectation that most Americans should—or wanted to—peruse “good reading” in the service of becoming well-read according to Erskine’s or Fadiman’s criteria. Others bemoaned the “tiny readership for good books,” as 418
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the Viking editor Elisabeth Sifton put it in arguing that “the general culture is thinning out.” Allan Bloom’s diatribe The Closing of the American Mind (1987) was a more strident statement of that position. Sifton, however, dissociated “good” from the philosophical and literary canon, focusing instead on the lack of interest among young Americans in “serious” modern fiction. And many of those intent on shoring up what they saw as the book’s precarious position argued that “the fun, excitement, and stretching of the imagination are the pleasures that children should derive first from reading books, whether the author is Carolyn Keene or Louisa May Alcott.”13 The NEA’s 1992 survey of “literary reading,” a follow-up to its 1982 study, did not offer much cause for optimism. The percentage of Americans who read fiction, poetry, and plays declined in almost every demographic category over the ten-year period. The number of adults engaged in creative writing increased slightly, while the decrease in literary reading among women was less precipitous than among men. In addition, the percentage of African American literary readers rose from 42.3 to 45.6. But with educational levels and population rising, the overall picture was not encouraging to those who believed that engagement with literature was essential to the national welfare.14
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Regardless of the contradictory conclusions they permitted, all of these statistical measurements of reading frequency masked the ways in which those Americans who did read books employed them: what uses they were “good for” in people’s lives. Some of those uses were long-standing. The practices of reading for information, self-improvement, and civic betterment were facets of nineteenth-century American society; reading for entertainment and aesthetic pleasure became increasingly acceptable as evangelicalism waned. These motives held steady after 1950. The 1985 edition of Good Reading, which by then had dropped all the general essays the early versions had contained in favor of topical bibliographies, nevertheless reprinted the volume’s initial statement of purpose: “. . . to lead an increasing number of people to savor the great or significant books, both those that strive to light the dark places in our understanding of our complex world and our equally complex selves, and those that aim simply to delight.” While that long-lived formulation—with its allusions to self and others, knowledge and pleasure—has continued to describe many Americans’ attitudes toward reading up to the present, the culture of the midand late twentieth century presented opportunities for certain audiences to use print—and especially books—in historically specific ways.15 For young Americans who came of age in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the period, reading, politics, and community were inextricably linked THE ENDURING READER
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FIGURE 23.2. A demonstration at the University of Michigan in favor of a student-run bookstore, September 1969. Collection of the Vice President for Development, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
(fig. 23.2). As the sociologist Todd Gitlin has written, the parents of the white, middle-class adolescents who became the core of the New Left believed in the importance of familiarity with “high” culture as a component of success. The books and magazines on their coffee tables often provided their children’s first brush with the ethos of alienation and the mode of critical analysis that characterized much writing of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although, on the whole, rock ’n’ roll and film had more widespread impact in shaping their generation than print did, the future architects of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS (Gitlin among them), “read David Riesman and C. Wright Mills and Albert Camus and found in them warrants for estrangement.” Youthful encounters with periodicals ranging from Mad to the Village Voice also worked—in very different ways—to promote criticism of American consumer culture. The loneliness of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Kerouac’s Sal Paradise defined the self-images of many college students; as Kurt Vonnegut noted in “Why They Read Hesse,” Steppenwolf (which, along with Hesse’s other novels, sold millions of copies in the 1960s) offered readers the opportunity to identify with a figure profoundly “homesick” and searching for hope. These works (and many others) became, as Philip Beidler has put it, “scriptures for a generation.”16 But if certain texts disseminated and reinforced existential angst, they also created a community of the alienated, made up of those who had shared the heady experience of reading them. Furthermore, as Gitlin and others (such as the civil rights leader Bob Moses, who reread Camus in jail) accepted existentialism’s imperative to channel individual estrangement into collective action, they affirmed the power of reading to effect radical social change. The proliferation of the underground newspaper, about which James Danky writes in 420
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chapter 15, is the most obvious testimony to that assumption (which members of the “counterculture” also held), but Campfires of the Resistance, Gitlin’s anthology of poems by movement participants, expresses the same faith. Pamphlets and bibliographies accompanied speeches at the antinuclear demonstrations of the early 1960s. Students in the peace group that preceded SDS at Harvard “devoured books and articles both polemical and technical.” After SDS emerged—with the explicit purpose of overcoming “loneliness, estrangement, isolation”—discussing Marx, Paul Goodman, or Antonio Gramsci in a weekly study group became one way to realize that goal. The authorities who prescribed “good reading” in this context were sometimes professors with radical commitments, sometimes students themselves; suggestions about what to read often traveled by word of mouth. When, in the late 1960s, community disintegrated into in-fighting and violence, books remained essential as explanations of failure: “We were enthralled,” Gitlin writes, by “apocalyptic novels” like The Crying of Lot 49 and attracted to works that, like Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, “seemed to reveal the magnitude of what we were up against” (figs. 23.3 and 23.4).17 The New Left’s practices of reading collectively, as well as of distributing memos and position papers, were instrumental as well in the emergence of radical feminism late in the decade. In one sense, the “competitive intellectual
FIGURE 23.3. The lone reader: a student in the late 1960s encounters the defiant comic prose of Lenny Bruce. Photograph © Diana Mara Henry. THE ENDURING READER
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FIGURE 23.4. Collective reading: the SDS study group announcement includes assignments from works by Seymour Martin Lipset, C. Wright Mills, and Lenin on a Harvard University blackboard. Photograph © Diana Mara Henry.
mode” of the student movement “operated to exclude women as leaders.” Yet as women came to terms with their discriminatory treatment in SDS, they turned to print: most famously, Casey Hayden and Mary King’s “Sex and Caste,” read aloud at a national conference in 1965 and widely circulated thereafter. The ensuing “women’s liberation groups” read and exchanged manifestos, many of which made their way into magazines and newspapers; by 1970, women had also started scores of new journals dedicated to feminism. The founding of Ms. magazine in 1971, together with pressure for change at the Ladies Home Journal, Newsweek, and Time, enabled a wider readership to participate in the redefinition of women’s roles. One suburban housewife, isolated in her discontent, reported drawing “constant support from ‘all those unseen people’ about whom she had read” in Ms. In the 1970s, the activity of “consciousness raising” in small groups spread to encompass mainstream women. The sharing of personal experiences—rather than the study of texts—dominated their agenda, but reading the works the movement had produced had its place. In their collection of interviews with seventy-six feminists, Bonnie Watkins and Nina Rothchild discovered that “the importance of the printed word” was a common thread, in terms of both reading and the establishment of feminist bookstores. Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970) included a lengthy appendix 422
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beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)—both enormously influential in showing women that they were not alone—and ending with a “drop dead list” of antifeminist books. “You, sister, reading this,” Morgan wrote in her introduction, “I hope this book means something to you, makes some real change in your heart and head.” Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) offered the insight that, in Beidler’s words, “the conditions of reading and writing are in fact always political constructions of gender and power.”18 By the mid-1970s, the women’s movement had begun splintering into factions: to some, sexual politics meant socialism; to others, lesbianism; to still others, the development of assertiveness within existing social structures. Reading books (even in groups) likewise became, for many women, less an occasion for exposure to a communal vision than for the enhancement of individual skills and identity. Women’s literary clubs, which had burgeoned in the post–Civil War era, had long served that function, while nurturing a sense of solidarity with other women; during the Progressive Era, such clubs had incorporated an emphasis on improving society. Some African American clubwomen later sustained that goal. By the time the women’s club tradition intersected with the disintegration of second-wave feminism, however, most women’s reading groups, in Elizabeth Long’s phrase, exhibited no “integral connection to social reform.” This is not surprising, given that, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the political fervor of the 1960s and 1970s had dissolved into the more diffuse discontents of a nation in search of “healing” after Vietnam and domestic upheaval. The proliferation of self-help and twelve-step programs, part of America’s long fascination with therapeutic regimens, supplanted (though it did not erase) the impetus for revolutionary change. Thus, while some remained politically active, the participants in Long’s study of Houston’s book clubs in the late 1980s and 1990s, who were overwhelmingly middle-class, collegeeducated, white women, mainly derived psychological support and individual growth from reading with others while enjoying “the pleasures of the text.”19 Specifically, Long has maintained that joining a particular book group allowed women to define themselves “culturally and socially,” as well as to fill an intellectual gap in their lives. Socializing with peers, selecting books by consensus or vote, and discussing ideas together all reinforced the affiliation between reading and community, yet these aspects of women’s book groups, while at odds with the privacy Boorstin celebrated, were sources of “validation” and “even personal transformation” as they simultaneously strengthened social ties. Long’s subjects captured the contribution of book clubs to participants’ individuality in remarks such as “The group affirms me as a woman who thinks,” “I am a more confident person—self-image enhanced,” and “I have decided THE ENDURING READER
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to give myself the freedom I need to be a whole person.” Several of the groups Long studied sought to pursue “good” (or, in their terms, “serious”) reading, variously construed, and were keenly aware of literary critics’ judgments. Yet they typically disregarded formal, academic analysis, instead measuring the worth of a text by its ability to evoke readers’ identification with characters, thus enriching their “sense of themselves.” As Long has observed, “Women in reading groups are using literature and each other to stake out new subjective terrain.”20 Women romance readers in the mid-1980s were similarly focused on reading as something they did for their own well-being, even though their domestic circumstances afforded them only a transient feeling of freedom. As Janice Radway has shown, these women usually read in isolation from one another, occupying Boorstin’s “private island” and reveling in their time there. Romance fiction permitted escape from the present into another reality; more important, one of Radway’s signal contributions was to display how the act of reading, rather than any particular message of the text itself, gave readers respite from the household responsibilities that dominated their daily routine. Although surely not the texts Boorstin had had in mind, romance reading also fostered autonomy in another way: despite the formulaic nature of the genre, its champions developed standards for discriminating among “good” and “bad” romances in the face of the professional critic’s tendency to categorize all such works as “trash.” The women in Radway’s study nevertheless remained dependent on a type of communally valued expertise—not the cultural authority Fadiman represented but, rather, a local bookseller who linked her customers through a newsletter about recent releases.21 The scattered records of ordinary readers in the 1990s are likewise laden with the language of self-discovery, although, again, reading’s social functions remain salient (if far more amorphous than for the New Left or women’s groups). Shirley Brice Heath, the Stanford linguistic anthropologist, detected in interviews with “serious readers” wide agreement that literature made them “a better person”; a common sentiment was that “reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive—my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.” Echoing the ideology of Good Reading, the affluent, well-educated “lifetime” readers who were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1990 overwhelmingly named “pleasure” their motive for reading, with 38 percent observing that “inspirational” or “mind expan[ding]” books gave them “enhanced intellectual or spiritual understanding of the meaning of life or one’s role in life.” The data in the Book-of-the-Month Club survey are thin, but one finding—that no one genre or title produced more inspiration than any other—is telling, because it documents the capacity of readers to confer uplifting messages on texts of all 424
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sorts. From To Kill a Mockingbird, one respondent achieved “a sense of goodness and faith in humanity” as well as “a sense of calm.” Lord of the Rings “gave direction and shape” to another reader’s moral principles.22 The approximately 400 people who, in the late 1990s, replied to a California high school teacher’s call for letters to his students about the value of reading attest more fully to the persistent association of books with community participation (although, again, abstracted into a sense of linkage with others) and selfdevelopment. (The way the teacher framed his request undoubtedly elicited a disproportionate number of responses from the civic-minded.) A woman in her sixties recurred to the well-worn trope of the book as an “old friend” in asserting that she read “to understand more about the world.” Another woman declared, “A good book leads you into the lives and times of others. . . . I look upon it as an almost religious experience.” A teacher in Oakland praised the availability of works sensitive to ethnic and racial difference, which allowed one of her African American students to meet “people like herself and people she might never know.” At the same time, these respondents drew on the rhetoric of twentieth-century therapeutic culture in comments such as “you will feel yourself growing in ways you cannot imagine now.”23 Finally, given the lack of systematic studies, one of the best sources for assaying the uses Americans made of reading at the close of the century is the body of material the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky collected as part of his “Favorite Poem Project.” In 1997 Pinsky asked readers to submit to him the title of their favorite poem, together with a brief statement of the “personal meaning” the text held for them. Over the next year, he and his associates at Boston University received more than 17,000 letters and e-mails in reply. Consistent with the way Pinsky phrased the invitation, the responses stressed the power of poetry to evoke prior episodes in readers’ lives. Often informants noted that they identified with the voice, feelings, or scene the poem conveyed. For example, seven of the twenty-five individuals who chose “Little Boy Blue,” which Eugene Field wrote after his young son died, reported that they themselves had cared for a severely ill child or had lost to death a boy or girl whom the poem seemed to memorialize. But some readers also located the meaning of a text in the memories it prompted about the setting in which they had first learned it; as for Radway’s romance readers, to them the act of reading—for example, with a parent or lover—was more important than the poem’s intrinsic content. In addition, Pinsky’s correspondents made apparent the capacity of verse to furnish religious consolations and heightened spirituality: Whitman, one man wrote, “offers us great hope because he understands the beautiful and the Godlike quality inside” each person. Moreover, for all of their universalist potential, these religious uses of poetry also shade readily into the therapeutic conTHE ENDURING READER
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cern with healing—with what one reader called “self care and self love.” Taken together, the responses to Pinsky’s query compellingly reveal people remaking texts in light of both their inner emotions and the social relationships and cultural values that have shaped their reading experiences.24
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What is equally clear from the “Favorite Poem Project” database is that these individuals felt no obligation to defer to the canon of poetry that literary critics have enshrined in anthologies and textbooks; some, in fact, acknowledged that while a critic might not consider their selection “good,” the poem was good for them. Similarly, while the Book-of-the-Month Club poll distinguished “good” novels and classics from eight other fiction genres, the replies to a question about the availability of “good books” indicate that both the survey designers and their informants applied the term to any book that satisfied a reader’s interests. In some ways, this was simply the autonomous American reader going off in his or her own direction just as Ciardi’s Saturday Review audience had. Yet the demand for authoritative guidance from professional critics seemed to have eroded by the late twentieth century. R. R. Bowker issued Good Reading for the last time (the twenty-third edition) in 1990. The Book-of-the-Month Club first downplayed and, in 1994, eliminated its board of judges (reviving it recently in much attenuated form). While volumes of book advice continued to appear (notably Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why [2000]), they tended to be more personal than prescriptive; David Denby’s Great Books (1996), for example, is a participant-observer’s account of his reading “adventures” while auditing the latter-day version of Erskine’s Columbia University course.25 These developments may measure the effects of two trends within academic circles since the 1970s. First, as Harvey Teres notes in chapter 13, the combined impact of feminism and multiculturalism called into question the place of Western literature in the undergraduate curriculum. Historians and literary scholars demonstrated that “the canon” of “great” works was not fixed or timeless but, rather, had varied according to the culturally produced values of its constructors. In consequence, many academics came to regard “coverage” as both impossible and undesirable, along with any consensus about what it meant to be “well-read.” Second, the rise of “reader-response” theory, an outgrowth of the premise that language did not merely express but also produced reality, had similar implications for the idea that texts carried stable meanings that critics could help readers unlock. In the writings of “reader-response” or “reception” theorists, both individualism and community were prominent themes. Literature did not exist apart from the individual reader’s “negotiation” of it; in contrast to the formalist textual analysis it unseated, “reception” theory saw 426
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meaning as the result of the reader’s experience—drawing inferences, modifying assumption, making connections sentence by sentence. Furthermore, the process of reading was, on this model, an aspect of “deeper self-consciousness” and identity formation. Discussing the work of the German theorist Wolfgang Iser, Terry Eagleton has written, “It is as though what we have been ‘reading,’ in working our way through a book, is ourselves.” Yet, in Stanley Fish’s view, readers came to those insights equipped with the assumptions of the “interpretive communities” to which they belonged. Radway argued that her romance readers, who learned the same “strategies” because of their shared “social location,” were one such community. As a theoretical (and, Radway later claimed, “insufficiently theorized”) concept, “interpretive communities” lacked the concreteness of an SDS reading group, but scholars’ recourse to that language may have reflected their own political leanings at a time when “community” frequently denoted a rejection of capitalist self-interest. Certainly the emphasis on the reader had a democratizing effect on the critical enterprise: academics “appeared willing to share their critical authority with less tutored readers,” while personal feelings acquired legitimacy in textual explication. Beginning in Europe in the 1970s, scholarly investigation of reading in the past in order to recover the mentalities of ordinary people likewise promised a more democratic history of culture.26 How much the canon debates and reception theory (which received less publicity) trickled down to readers outside academia is hard to say. In the 1990s, however, large numbers of Americans who sought advice about “good reading” transferred their trust to some of those “less tutored” guides. Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore, promotes the titles it sells by quoting from newspaper reviews and blurbs about them, as well as from its in-house editors. But Amazon also instituted the customer review, which features the reactions of previous purchasers and rates the “products” with one to five stars. (It even offers an opportunity for visitors to the Web site to review the reviews by saying whether they were “helpful.”) The company, which has tried to personalize the Internet environment in a number of ways, started customer reviews in part to fill space. Nevertheless it tried as well to “create a sense of ‘community,’ ” the latter a key word in Amazon’s corporate vocabulary. Customer reviewers presume that they have equal, if not greater, authority than critics, reacting with annoyance if they feel misled by an expert’s endorsement. As one observer, likening the Internet in Amazon’s early days to “full-blown counter culture,” remarked: “It was breaking rules. It was about going against the grain. It really wasn’t about selling. Amazon really catered to that by letting people put up reviews of books.”27 Oprah Winfrey’s enormously successful book club, which she began in 1996 THE ENDURING READER
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as part of her daytime television talk show, has constituted an even more potent alternative to reliance on professional critics and reviewers. In 1999 an average of 13 million viewers watched the monthly book club segment, on which Winfrey (an African American who overcame illegitimacy, poverty, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and obesity) enthusiastically recommended a contemporary novel to her overwhelmingly female audience; almost a million Americans bought or read the book either before or a few weeks after each broadcast. In its first three years, Oprah’s Book Club created twenty-eight consecutive best sellers, making Winfrey not only the most influential individual in publishing but also “the most famous African-American woman the world has known.” Initially a club only metaphorically, it subsequently generated scores of face-to-face book discussion groups and gave members online pointers about how to conduct meetings. More important, the venture drew in large numbers of urban, bluecollar, and African American women, as well as middle-class white women who were not regular readers until Winfrey piqued their interest. In 2002, following a brouhaha with author Jonathan Franzen, who decided that appearing on the show would mark him as insufficiently literary, Winfrey suspended the club. The next year, however, a restructured club centered on “the classics” made its debut, offering viewers a selection approximately every other month.28 As several commentators have observed, the appeal of Oprah’s Book Club (at least in its earlier incarnation) rested on both Winfrey’s approach to reading and the types of books she and her staff promoted. On the one hand, Winfrey urged her audience to identify with the characters and situations they encountered in fiction. That “insistence on treating novels as springboards for self-reflection,” as D. T. Max called it, was both “therapeutic” and entirely in keeping with the confessional tone of the Oprah show’s other segments (and much of the rest of television). Oprah’s selections facilitated that treatment because they tended to deal with issues such as marital infidelity, family struggles, and triumph over illness. “The reason I love books,” Winfrey announced repeatedly, “is because they teach us something about ourselves.” Furthermore, Winfrey’s message was that readers should trust their own judgments, relying on their feelings about a text rather than on “authorities.” (Although obviously wielding great authority herself, Winfrey exuded effusive appreciation; no critical or negative remarks about books ever crossed her lips—or those of her guests.) In place of an academic preoccupation with a work’s formal features, Oprah’s Book Club (like reader-response critics) assumed that, in Cecilia Konchar Farr’s words, “good reading must be empathic and affective.”29 On the other hand, Winfrey balanced her understanding of reading as selfexploration with a keen awareness of reading’s social aspects. In the club’s original format, Winfrey staged a dinner party for the author of a selection and sev428
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eral of its readers; footage of the discussion around the table aired on the show. More than that, the show itself encouraged viewers to think of themselves as participating in a personal exchange with the novelist. In addition to trusting one’s own reading, Farr has stated, the “lesson” of Oprah is about “trusting others to expand that reading in conversation.” Less sympathetically, Farr has described Winfrey’s accomplishment as “a vast reeducation of readers to embrace serious contemporary novels in a nationwide group hug.”30 What escaped Jonathan Franzen (and Winfrey’s other detractors) is that she has also managed to balance literariness and commercialism, subverting distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture in the process. Her favorite writer, Toni Morrison, graces the high-culture canon; when Morrison’s Paradise proved too difficult for many in her audience, Winfrey had Morrison conduct a “master class” about it during which Morrison upheld a model of reading as explication: “If it’s worth writing, it’s worth going back to.” Other Oprah authors associated with serious literary fiction have included Edwidge Danticat, Ursula Hegi, Andre Dubus III, and Chris Bohjalian. Yet her picks have also included Anita Shreve, Wally Lamb, and Breena Clarke—writers disdained by intellectuals as producers of “pap.” Like older middlebrow enterprises such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, this eclecticism bestows a cultural stamp of approval on heterogeneous works, equalizing them while simultaneously permitting all of them to earn both “prestige” and “money.” Furthermore, the contribution of reading to certain social causes—for instance, the treatment of foster children—has not been eradicated by Winfrey’s therapeutic approach. As if summarizing more than fifty years of American readers’ expectations, Oprah’s Book Club has been, as Farr has written, “a little bit literature class, a little bit consciousness-raising group, a little bit motivational seminar.” Certainly it has empowered readers and reinvigorated the act of reading in an unprecedented way.31 Even so, the overall state of reading in America has continued to alarm observers since the 1990s. One cause of concern is the uncertain impact of the digital environment on the codex book. The most pessimistic diagnosis issued from figures such as Sven Birkerts, who foresaw the death of reading as a contemplative experience. In The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), Birkerts bemoaned the triumph of the database over historical context, of hypertext over linearity. His largest claim, however, was that the electronic age was destroying Boorstin’s private reader, engaged in “that slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self by way of another’s sentences.” Birkerts’s fears were not groundless. The founders of the Journal for MultiMedia History, for example, set out to offer essays “supplementing traditional text documents with graphics, audio, and video,” as well as interactive opportunities, that deliberately disrupted narraTHE ENDURING READER
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tive continuity. Experts on Web design such as Jakob Nielsen substantiated the tendency of online readers to scan pages rather than to proceed word by word, moving their eyes in an F-shaped pattern to catch key information. Most people, Nielsen asserted, want to “get in, get out, and move on with their own tasks.” Among educators, computers have expanded the definition of literacy itself to include facility with word processing, new communications technologies, and reading with the assistance of on-screen graphics and vocabulary aids.32 As publishers who invested in “electronic books” in the 1990s discovered to their dismay, the digital format has not replaced the printed book as a vehicle for literary or even historical content. More to the point, the loss of linearity that Birkerts decried has seemed worth sacrificing for greater access to primary sources that, as in the case of MultiMedia History, immediately deepen the reader’s understanding. Likewise, there is some evidence that computers can increase students’ reading comprehension. And for better or worse, educators note the benefits of integrating digital technology into elementary and secondary school classrooms so as to prepare American students for a social use of reading—to compete in a global, information-based, electronically connected marketplace—that seems essential for their future success. In the twenty-first century, Why Johnny Can’t Read has been figuratively displaced by Why Johnny and Janie Must Read off the Screen.
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If Good Reading and Boorstin’s 1979 speech, taken together, announced the tensions marking modes of reading in America during the second half of the twentieth century, two other artifacts may stand for the current state of affairs. The most recent NEA report, building on a study conducted in 2002, documented the “diminished role of voluntary reading” in America, especially for young people. Noting that the percentage of the adult population reading any books had dropped by more than 7 percent since 1992, it charted a decrease in literary reading at every educational level and within every ethnic group (although the rate of decline was slower for women). Dana Gioia, then the NEA’s chairman, argued that those trends had implications for both communities and individuals: they portended “substantial economic, social, and civic setbacks.” One must add that the NEA deliberately avoided specifying any causal connections between fewer book readers and a more passive citizenry, and that, in any event, as an activity reading encompasses far more than the perusal of bound volumes. Still, the NEA’s statistics are troubling to anyone who believes that literature enriches life.33 Another perspective emerges from Ex Libris (1998), by Anne Fadiman— who, conveniently for comparative purposes, is Clifton Fadiman’s daughter. 430
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Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays is nothing like a lifetime reading plan; its only allusions to “great books” are in the author’s offhand references to a volume of Homer or to her acquaintance with Erasmus. While those references— like her Latin title—do admit her to the company of the well-read on her father’s terms, Fadiman’s purpose is celebratory rather than instructional. She describes the ways in which books have colored her relationships with her family and friends; she treasures the book as physical object. She writes engagingly about her fascination with tales of polar exploration and about the memories that reading about food elicits. She repeatedly shows how books serve as tokens of love between her and her husband. From one vantage point, Ex Libris might thus be regarded as a further demonstration that readerly deference to critical authority is on the wane: Fadiman (echoing her father but, some might say, falling further) assumes the stance of the “common reader,” with no pretension to expertise. Yet Fadiman takes pains to distinguish the book from other objects of consumption; books, she insists, are not toasters but signposts to a life. Her essays contain no trace of reading as a therapeutic practice, no paeans to the growth books have permitted. Fadiman is an individual, private reader bent on fashioning a “whole”; she is also a thoroughly social reader, who, as she reads aloud or shares word games, appreciates print’s communal possibilities. Given the pessimism of the NEA report, however, the most significant aspect of Ex Libris may be its testimony to the pleasures of reading: the tactile rewards of turning worn pages, the delight in the sound of an apt phrase. Although in August 2007 one in four Americans reported having read no books in the previous year, Fadiman is a welcome example of a type of reader that, like the book itself, endures.34 Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
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CHAPTER 24
Reading the Language of the Heart The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous Trysh Travis
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In November 2001 the AA World Service Organization (AAWSO), the administrative arm of Alcoholics Anonymous, issued a new, updated edition of the central text of the fellowship—Alcoholics Anonymous, familiarly called “the Big Book” (fig. 24.1). The Big Book originally appeared in 1939; four editions, more than 100 printings, and several dozen translations later, the AAWSO estimates that more than 20 million copies have been distributed worldwide. This publishing phenomenon has developed over the past sixty years almost completely unremarked. Although journalist Nan Robertson noted in 1988 that “AA headquarters in New York is sitting atop a multimillion-dollar publishing empire that is growing bigger every year,” few people even think that books and reading play a part in the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous. The familiar image of AA centers on a coffee urn in a smoky basement meeting room; people introduce themselves with “Hi, my name is so-and-so and I’m an alcoholic” and depart with a murmur of the now-ubiquitous “thanks for sharing.” These snippets rightly suggest an oral, participatory culture rather than one oriented to reading and contemplation. But while oral tradition does shape much of the culture of AA, the group also supports a rich and thriving book culture.1 The reading culture that supports the “publishing empire” is—like the global fellowship of AA itself—diverse, idiosyncratic, and resistant to generalization.2 But one thing that binds its affiliates is its promotion of daily reading as a means to a better life, a prescription many individual AAs take very seriously. When the 2000 edition of Alcoholics Anonymous appeared, it was incorporated into its readers’ lives through a variety of individual and group practices, just as its predecessors had been. Many AAs begin or end their day reading a page or two from the Big Book, and while such reading is usually silent, in households with more than one recovering alcoholic, people will sometimes read aloud to one another. Some affiliates carry the book with them to refer to at difficult times during the day; others keep multiple copies for home, workplace, and car. Still
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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FIGURE 24.1. Annotated pages from the AA “Big Book.” Private Collection. Used by permission.
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others photocopy key sections and keep the pages folded into wallets or checkbooks. The small group meeting is the heart of AA life, and reading plays a central part in those meetings as well as in the lives of individuals. General interest or “discussion” meetings usually include a reading from the Big Book, sometimes of just a few paragraphs, but perhaps of several pages. One designated reader may perform this office, or it may be shared around the circle, with each person reading a paragraph. “Big Book Meetings” and “Step Study Meetings” focus more closely on the text; people take turns reading aloud from a selected section and then talking about its relevance to their lives. Underlining, notes, and cross-references—to a sponsor’s interpretation, to other AA literature, or perhaps to Bible verses—appear in the book’s margins as a result of both public and private close reading. Such commentaries join the phone numbers that AAs often scribble in one another’s books, forming a textual analog for the face-toface fellowship. Some AAs fashion protective needlepoint, leather, woven, or collage covers for their Big Books. These handmade covers, as well as decorative bookmarks inscribed with AA slogans or Big Book quotations, are perennial favorites at the raffles groups hold to cover the expenses of rent and coffee or to raise money for special events (fig. 24.2).
FIGURE 24.2. This leather cover for the AA “Big Book” was stained and stitched by hand and embossed with the owner’s sobriety date. Collection of Phil McG. Used by permission. 434
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The varied and complex roles Alcoholics Anonymous plays within the fellowship that bears its name confirms reading’s paradoxical status as both deeply private and ineluctably social. The Big Book is the practical talisman at the center of what Brian Stock has called a “textual community”; it “structure[s] the internal behavior of the groups’ members and . . . provide[s] solidarity against the outside world.” A latter-day version of the medieval heretics and reformers that constitute Stock’s textual communities, AA (in both its international and its local iterations) uses the text at its center not only to consolidate but also to enlarge its boundaries. What resembles private, inwardly focused devotional reading is also an expansive movement toward a kind of social cohesion. The physical community of readers within the AA group stands metonymically for a larger imagined community, one brought together and sustained by the pedagogy of empathy delineated by the Big Book.3
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Early Reading in Alcoholics Anonymous Alcoholics Anonymous began in Akron, Ohio, in 1935. Its founders were Bill Wilson, a sometime New York stock analyst just five months sober, and Dr. Robert Smith, a prominent physician whose habitual drunkenness had begun to imperil his practice. When the business prospect he was scouting in Akron fell through, a panicked Wilson was seized with the desire to drink. He blindly called a local clergyman, who introduced him to Smith. Over several pots of coffee and countless cigarettes, the two men discussed their troubled relationships with alcohol. Smith would later recall that at that meeting, Wilson “gave me information about the subject of alcoholism which was undoubtedly helpful. [But] of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language.”4 For Wilson as well, the sense of stumbling on a common language rooted in shared experience proved crucial. His sense of connection with Smith began with recognition: “I just talked away about my own case until he got a good identification with me, until he began to say, ‘Yes, that’s me, I’m like that.’ ” Once that commonality was established, “our talk [became] a completely mutual thing. I had quit preaching. I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me. This was it.”5 Their conversation was salutary as well as engrossing: one month after meeting Wilson, Smith took his last drink. Flushed with enthusiasm, the two men determined to establish a mutual help society through which reformed alcoholics could help one another. Wilson and Smith’s undertaking was shaped by the men’s affiliation with T HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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the Oxford Group, a “first-century Christian fellowship” founded in 1919 by Lutheran minister Frank Buchman and devoted to “world-changing through life-changing.” Its Oxford Group origins would have a lasting effect on the reading culture of AA. While Buchman championed an anti-intellectual, practical Christianity, and one of his favorite aphorisms was “study men, not books,” devotional reading played an important role in Oxford Group culture in both New York and Akron. Oxford affiliates read the Bible as part of a daily “Quiet Time,” a meditation period in which they listened for “Guidance”—God’s direction in matters large and small. Upon receipt, all Guidance was recorded in special notebooks for reflection, discussion, and application.6 Devotional reading was an important part of Quiet Time, albeit as the prefatory, rather than the central activity. Reading quieted the naturally willful spirit and helped to “draw [the] mind towards God.” In What Is the Oxford Group?, “A Layman with a Notebook” described the role of reading in Quiet Time. Using the Lord’s Prayer as an example, the layman laid out a specific hermeneutic, one that emphasized the need for “dwelling on and thinking out the complete and absolute meaning of each word and phrase with direct application to ourselves. If we are busy people we can take only two or three minutes over each word or phrase, but we could continue to discover in Christ’s simple Prayer of Surrender limitless meanings and implications we never thought existed.” Devoting “two or three minutes to each word or phrase,” Oxford readers certainly read closely and attentively. Their intensity, however, was directed to unusual ends.7 Oxford Group reading departed sharply from the normative mode of Bible reading espoused by mainline Protestant clergy in the early twentieth century. That reading, known as “higher criticism,” responded to the challenges modern archaeology and linguistics, as well as the physical sciences, posed to theology. It was active, critical, and intellectual. Baptist professor of theology William Newton Clarke, for instance, urged Bible readers to “frankly and fearlessly differentiate the Bible into its elements, Christian, Jewish, historical, traditional, and whatever they may be. . . . Set by itself that body of truth which our Savior taught concerning God and religion, and then give glory where glory is due. Put the Bible to its true use as a servant of Jesus Christ.”8 That Oxford Group Bible reading differed from the practice of liberal Protestants is not surprising. But the group departed from the standard reading modes of more fundamentalist Christian readers as well. The “Guidance” sought in Quiet Time could be very pragmatic: affiliates regularly claimed to receive advice on investments, love relationships, and the whereabouts of lost items as well as on more recognizably spiritual matters. But Oxford Group readers did not plumb their bibles for practical answers to the question “What Would Jesus 436
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Do?” nor for the traditional moral instruction common to charismatic Christian readers. Rather, they attended to textual detail—“the complete and absolute meaning of every word and phrase”—in order literally to lose themselves within the text. In stark contrast to the active reading practiced by both their liberal and their fundamentalist contemporaries, Oxford readers became passive in the face of the text and showed no interest in the Bible’s historical or contemporary contexts.9 Drawing on examples from a variety of mystical traditions, religious historian Paul J. Griffiths has elaborated an ideal of “read[ing] religiously, as a lover reads, with a tensile attentiveness that wishes to linger, to prolong, to savor.” The product of “attitudinal, moral, and cognitive” relations between readers and texts, rather than of theological dictates, Griffiths’s idea of “religious reading” captures the essence of Oxford Group Bible study. Like medieval mystics, Oxford Group readers sought to merge themselves with the text through a ritualized reading that disciplined the body and thus freed the soul. Following a reading practice similar to the monastic dilatatio, elevatio, and excessus (contemplation, elevation, and ecstasy) sketched out by Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century, Oxford Group readers treated words on the page as catalysts that dissolved the boundaries between God and the self, and thus allowed the joyous surrender of profane physicality to the eternal, infinite, and sacred. Dr. Robert Smith’s wife, Anne, articulated best the nature and purpose of this passivity: “The only effort we need to put forth is that of daily surrender and daily contact with Christ. We find release not by our own efforts but by what Christ does for us and in us when we open every area of our lives to him.” Seen in this light, the Bible’s value was alchemical; the physical act of reading combined with the mental processing of texts to facilitate an escape from the imprisonment of finite selfhood. This mystical mode of “religious reading” would remain present in AA long after the group split from its Oxford roots and declared itself a “spiritual” rather than a “religious” organization.10
Making the Big Book Wilson and Smith parted company with Frank Buchman and his followers in 1937 in order to focus their outreach more effectively on alcoholics. What they called their “little word of mouth program” had attracted about forty men in New York and Akron, but neither man was satisfied with this incremental growth.11 Determined to improve the efficacy of the group that now called itself “A Nameless Bunch of Alcoholics,” Wilson briefly fantasized about finding philanthropists to finance a chain of hospitals or a fleet of missionaries.12 Ultimately, however, he and Smith decided that a book describing their organizaT HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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tion would serve their purposes the best. A book could present the fellowship’s unique philosophy in a familiar format, and couch it in simple terms accessible to the average reader. A modest price tag—about the cost of a bottle of whiskey, because every drunk could afford that much—would enhance its populist appeal.13 By self-publishing the book, rather than bringing it out through an established trade house, Wilson and Smith figured they would secure a steady revenue stream, a crucial concern given that both men were teetering at the brink of poverty. Some of the Akron affiliates balked at the idea of a book, claiming that it was “a commercial venture”; others objected on the grounds that “the apostles themselves did not need any printed matter.” Wilson, however, won them over with a combination of entrepreneurial and missionary zeal. While he in fact did harbor hopes that the book would enjoy wide sales and a substantial profit, his largest ambitions were basically altruistic. As he remarked in a letter to a nonalcoholic friend, “I feel duty bound to get the book out, for men everywhere are entitled to know what we know as soon as we can get the information to them.”14 In an early address to the medical community, Wilson noted that “the 400 pages of Alcoholics Anonymous contain no theory. . . . Being laymen, we have naught but a story to tell.” His anti-intellectual posture was only somewhat disingenuous. Both the action-oriented Christianity of the Oxford Group and the Yankee pragmatism of AA’s cofounders mandated a simple, commonsensical approach to alcoholism. The book Wilson envisioned as he began writing was an extremely practical how-to manual, one that eschewed elaborate theories of why people drank in favor of a concrete strategy for how to stop drinking.15 With that end in view, the book developed a stark, Manichaean picture of the lives of the “subjects of King Alcohol, [the] shivering denizens of his mad realm.” It hammered on the (unproven but nevertheless compelling) theory that alcoholism was a progressive “disease” that led its victims inevitably toward the “twin ogres of madness and death.” Juxtaposed to this melodramatic teleology were equally frank and unambiguous claims for the power of old-fashioned American common sense against the forces of alcoholic narcissism: “First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. . . . Most good ideas are simple and this concept was the keystone of that new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom.” Wilson’s greatest claim for his program was not its original insights or innovative regimes but its efficacy. His sales pitch boiled down to the simple, “it works—it really does.” His conviction was crystallized in the name the group chose when they incorporated as a publishing company—“Works Publishing, Inc.”16 438
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This down-to-earth pragmatism was articulated repeatedly through every element of the book. The foreword described the fellowship’s desire to “show other alcoholics PRECISELY HOW WE HAVE RECOVERED”; the text later stressed that AA was “a useful program for anyone concerned with a drinking problem.” The first chapter, “Bill’s Story,” illustrated both the progressive, addictive nature of alcoholism and AA’s spiritual program for recovery through the example of Wilson’s life. Subsequent chapters with straightforward titles like “There Is a Solution,” “How It Works,” and “Into Action” reiterated the message in a plainspoken can-do rhetoric.17 What Wilson called the “backbone of the book” was chapter 5, “How It Works.” It centered on the neatly numbered list of twelve steps, the logic and pragmatism of which delighted Wilson. To him, the steps demonstrated that a seemingly monumental task like spiritual growth could be undertaken successfully by anyone with a modicum of common sense. Derived from the principles of the Oxford Group, the twelve steps were “broken . . . up into smaller pieces” so as not to leave “a single loophole through which the rationalizing alcoholic could wiggle out.” Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explained the rationale behind each step, explained how to take it, and explored the likely outcomes. Chapters 8 through 10 retained this frank and friendly tone but gave it an explicitly gendered cast: they chronicled the reactions that wives and other family members, as well as employers, would likely have to the newly sober alcoholic, and gave advice on how to rebuild relationships strained to the breaking point by years of abuse and neglect.18 The final chapter, “A Vision for You,” described the first links in what the cofounders hoped would be a “benign chain reaction” uniting men across the nation. It related the story of how Smith and Wilson met in Akron, and of their tentative outreach to the man commonly called “alcoholic number three.” It narrated the skepticism that presaged each early recruit’s realization that “the very practical approach to his problems, the absence of intolerance of any kind, the informality, the genuine democracy, the uncanny understanding” made the fellowship “irresistible.” The ideal reader would follow a similar path. Taking the book’s “clear-cut directions,” he would be convinced by its rational arguments, commit himself to sobriety and spirituality, and, with the help of the book, carry the message to other alcoholics. The chapter concluded on a ringing note: “Thus we grow. And so can you, though you be but one man with this book in your hand. We believe and hope that it will contain all you will need to begin.” In his grandest imaginings, Wilson saw the book as a how-to guide not merely for achieving sobriety but also for cultivating “Utopia . . . right here and now.”19 T HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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“The Help Which Printed Pages Give” Clarity, comprehensibility, and commonsense appeal were the qualities that most concerned Wilson when he began work on the book in the spring of 1938. It was an extremely arduous year. At every stage the manuscript was subject to critique and revision by the New York and the Akron meetings, and debate over the logistics of the publishing project, as well as over all the intellectual and philosophical issues that fed into it, dominated the New York group. As work on the manuscript dragged toward a conclusion, Wilson began to feel that it fell short of what he had hoped. At the same time, he could not help noticing that the preoccupation with the book project had changed the nature of the meetings. As a result, the infrequent occasions when a newly sober alcoholic came forward to tell his story, or when an old-timer recounted his own experiences to a new “pigeon,” stood out with increasing clarity in his mind. Within the confines of the AA group, the most powerful discourse was and always had been the personal story. While the book paid homage to the importance of such testimony by opening with “Bill’s Story,” aside from that tale of Wilson’s own experiences, the working draft contained nothing but theory. What was needed was a whole section of true-to-life testimonies, Wilson decided. They would “identify us with the distant reader in a way that the text itself might not,” and augment the simplicity and organizing power of the book’s first section. Writing to Smith, he declared with enthusiasm that a collection of first-person stories would be “the heart of the book.” Literary and psychological identification would form a crucible in which plain prose that told “How It Works” would be transformed into a mirror in which desperate alcoholics could recognize themselves. As he dispatched individual AAs in New York and Akron to commit their stories to paper, Wilson revised his text yet again to accommodate the new second half of the book and to explain how it should work in readers’ lives. Hoping that no one would find “these self-revealing accounts in bad taste,” he explained that “it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that [you] will be persuaded to say, ‘Yes, I am one of them too; I must have this thing!’ ”20 Extrapolating from his own experiences, Wilson was convinced that the stories of the men of AA could convey the nature of alcoholism and of recovery with a force that no merely expository prose could match. First-person narratives would recapitulate the transformative experience he and Dr. Bob had shared, the “completely mutual” sense of recognition sparked by encountering someone who “talked my language.” But Wilson was enough of a salesman to recognize that while the unadorned “language of the heart” might be convincing in a face-to-face encounter, it required refinement to compel identification 440
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on the printed page. With an eye to maximizing the personal stories’ impact, he hired a freelance writer and sometime creative writing teacher, former Collier’s editor Thomas Uzzell, to edit and polish the story section.21 Traditionally, the AA stories that make up the Big Book’s second half have been read as examples of latter-day Protestant spiritual autobiography. Religious historian Virginia Brereton, for example, has argued that while traditional converts are often moved to surrender themselves to God “through the aid of the Bible and converted friends, alcoholics come to this juncture through the literature of AA—especially ‘the Big Book,’ the AA ‘Bible.’ ” The structural similarities between the genres facilitate this comparison. Like most spiritual autobiographies, AA stories typically unfolded in three parts: the sinful life, rebirth, and evangelism, or what is called in the twelve-step parlance “what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now.” They describe, albeit in limited detail, the narrator’s social background and upbringing and his upward trajectory at work—usually in business or sales. Wartime activities, family, and community life are also touched on. Intertwined with this narrative, however, is the parallel story of the narrator’s progressive drinking: stories of speakeasies, blackouts, crime and infidelity, hospitalization, incarceration, and loss of livelihood and family are interspersed with attempts to go “dry” and failed “cures.” Usually right before death or involuntary commitment for “wet brain,” the narrator receives the AA message, has a “spiritual awakening,” and begins recovery. He then returns to marital and financial success, regains the respect of his community, and devotes his life to carrying the AA message. A typical conclusion reads, “Today I have Someone who will always hear me; I have a warm fellowship among men who understand my problems; I have tasks to do and am glad to do them, to see others who are alcoholics and to help them in any way I can to become sober men.”22 Ernest Kurtz has pointed out that the men whose stories appeared in the Big Book do not seem to have been very religious before their lives in AA: “Only thirteen of the twenty-eight stories indicated anything of . . . religious background . . . [only] ten revealed very intensive training.”23 However, the Protestant conversion narrative may still have provided a model for their stories. Its rhetorical stance and narrative structure are woven so tightly into the fabric of American literature and culture that it could easily have shaped the Big Book stories by osmosis if nothing else. But another narrative model, and perhaps a more direct one, seems to have been influential as well, namely the commercial confessional narrative made popular by Bernarr MacFadden’s tabloid True Story and its many imitators. Although it originally targeted a less-than-genteel audience of working-class women, by the late 1930s the tabloid tell-all had been fully incorporated into the T HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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genteel American mainstream. Many of its narrative strategies—direct address to the reader; detailed cataloging of both external bodily pleasures and internal shame; the incorporation into the story of a conventionally moral audience whose disapproving gaze unites the protagonist and the reader—had found a place in fiction and journalism far politer than what MacFadden published. By the end of the Depression, as Roland Marchand points out in Advertising the American Dream, the confessional style had also become one of the signature rhetorics of national advertising. In its purest, original form, the tabloid remained (and remains) a “woman’s genre.” But its later incarnations hailed both genders, and would have been well known to the middle-class urban professionals and tradesmen who were AA’s earliest adherents. To those men, the commercial confessional was just as familiar as the conversion narratives whose contours it mimics—if not more so.24 More than mere ubiquity, though, may have made the commercial confessional a model for early AA writers. As Roseann Madziuk has pointed out, the genre narrativizes the threats and promises the modern world makes to the vulnerable body; it is a story of the dangers and pleasures endemic to consumer culture. As such, it is well suited to relating the niceties of alcoholism, a particularly dramatic form of consumption gone out of control. Similarly, because early AA’s personal stories narrated their authors’ declines into embodiment and disempowerment—their falls from what historian Lori Rotskoff has described as a competent norm of breadwinner masculinity into a kind of feminization— a “woman’s genre” like the commercial confessional might have captured perfectly their newly (and uncomfortably) gendered subject positions. These deep structural elements of the genre make it uniquely homologous to tales of drunkenness.25 True Story’s popularity, Madziuk argues, resulted not only from its vivid narrativization of the dramas of women’s lives in the swirl of modern consumer culture but also from its ability to provide “a sense of hope and community by offering validation for the readers’ perspective.” Undoing the traditional hierarchical structure of confession that characterizes the church and the penal system, True Story confessions were a “model of dialogue across common values . . . [that] challenge[d] readers to learn from the lesson of experience offered by the narrator.” In other words, McFadden’s “true stories” validated and empathized with the experiences of their readers by presenting sympathetic protagonists with whom those readers could identify—the very thing Wilson wanted for his readers. It should come as no surprise, then, that he hired an editor with an intimate knowledge of how the commercial confessionals achieved that connection.26 Thomas Uzzell knew the confessional genre from a variety of angles. The 442
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glossy, mass-circulation Collier’s, where he worked as an editor, did not feature tabloid-style stories like those in McFadden’s magazines, but it was a premiere venue for the advertisements that made the genre familiar to millions of middleclass Americans. In addition, a few months before accepting the AA job, Uzzell had dissected “The Love Pulps” for Scribner’s magazine. Although the bulk of that article strove to distance the author and his genteel readers from the lowbrow pulps and their audiences, Uzzell actually had quite an affinity for the genre, as well as a professional craftsman’s respect for its workings. In his Narrative Technique: A Practical Course in Literary Psychology (1934), he pointed out that “these are the days of self-revealment [in which] modern knowledge has lighted many secret places of the heart.” Given the cultural climate, writers must be “psychologist[s] with an artistic purpose,” and literary “melodrama” was not only natural but in fact crucial, the only reliable means to achieve “the narrator’s main task [which] is to produce emotion in the reader.” Pulp confessionals turned this literary situation to a degraded end, he argued, but good writers could work self-consciously to put it into the service of well-crafted art.27 His job, as he saw it, was to upgrade the Big Book narrators by lending them a little artistry, to reformulate their “self-revealment” into meaningful “melodrama.” While he assured Wilson and his associates that “I spent last evening with the manuscript [and] . . . I found myself deeply moved,” something in the raw materials was missing: “The whole book needs the final shaping of a professional hand.” Without manuscript evidence, of course, we can only guess at the nature and extent of the “shaping” Uzzell ultimately gave the Big Book stories. His background, however, coupled with Wilson’s newfound belief that “ ‘identification’ [was] the main, if not the sole route to ‘getting the program,’ ” suggest that his revisions may have been extensive. This conjecture is borne out by Wilson’s recollection, years later, that the editing process was highly contentious, and that “the cries of the anguished edited taletellers” caused him “plenty of trouble.”28 But the stories ultimately succeeded in their task. Like McFadden’s confessionals, their revelations of “the secret places of the heart” bridged the impersonal modern landscape whose perils they narrated, compelling attention and identification in their readers. Thanks to a series of coincidences, the book concluded with a metacommentary on the power of “identification” and “the help which printed pages could give.” Just before going to press, Wilson sent multilithed copies of the manuscript to physicians and clergy—primarily for comments and criticism, but also in hopes of garnering publicity. One of these copies fell into the hands of a California man who, after reading it “cover to cover,” wrote in to share his own story with the New York office. A longtime chronic drunkard, he, like many AA T HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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FIGURE 24.3. “The more you mark it up the more valuable it gets” is the recommendation on a regionally produced flyer that encourages readers to annotate their “Big Books.” Valley Central AA. Private Collection. Used by permission.
members, had tried a variety of “cures” with no success. Alcoholics Anonymous, however, had changed all that. When “I returned from the sanitarium and your book was here waiting for me[,] I read, more than that I pored over it so as not to miss anything. I thought to myself, yes, this is the only way.” The first section of the book “made sense” and he “followed out the suggestions.” Most compelling, however, were “the personal stories” which were “very accurate as pertaining to my own experience; any one of them might have been my own story.” Seeing himself in the mirror of other alcoholics’ experiences, the California man believed himself at last to have found a community. He had already loaned his copy of the manuscript to another alcoholic, he wrote, and planned to share it with others at the sanitarium. His story, titled “The Lone Endeavor,” made a 444
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thrilling coda to the Big Book, encouraging all readers, in Wilson’s words, “to start out by themselves with only this book to aid them” (fig. 24.3).29
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Reading the Language of the Heart “The Lone Endeavor” suggests that part of Alcoholics Anonymous’s value lies in its ability to encourage emulative reading. Wilson may indeed have had such an end in mind. He knew the work of Richard Peabody, whose Emmanuel Movement promoted reading as part of its drunkard’s reform program. Peabody praised literature that “influence[d] the patient in a constructive manner . . . [such as]biographies and autobiographies of men who had become successful,” and he warned against “literature that dealt with the charms of hedonism, expounding a philosophy of ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ ” Both the original and the contemporary Big Book fit that mold. The book allows—invites, even—reading according to a rationale that sociologist Alfred Katz describes as “if he/she can do it, so can I.” Such emulation drives AA reading, Katz argues, and books are valuable insofar as they “become guidance texts for members progressing through the 12 steps.” The emulative function of AA reading was particularly important in the organization’s earliest years; before twelve-step philosophy and fellowship were widely and evenly dispersed across the United States, the stories in the Big Book both inspired and guided sobriety.30 Both then and now, however, the intensity and passion of Big Book reading—an intensity generated by the identification the stories spark—suggest that something more powerful than instruction and uplift animates and drives AA readers. Writing about early twentieth-century America, historian Warren Susman has suggested that the boom of the Jazz Age and the bust of the Depression led the average American in the 1930s to strive “first of all to find a commitment or a system of commitments that would enable him to continue, that would provide him with a mechanism to overcome his fears and his profound sense of shame.” Alcoholics Anonymous can be seen as one such historically specific “commitment,” and reading the Big Book was one way of making and renewing it. Like the discourses of hard and social sciences and popular arts that Susman maps, the book’s “language of the heart” provided “a new sense of common belief, common ritual observance, common emotional sharing that the psychological conditions of the era seemed to demand.”31 But while they are grounded in the specific history of early twentieth-century America, AA’s reading practices cannot be reduced to it. The textual community of AA has outlasted both Susman’s “age of culture and commitment” and its inheritor, “the age of anxiety,” suggesting that it may be part of a deeper and T HE “BI G B O O K” O F A L CO H O L I C S A NONY MOU S
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more long-lived historical development. In searching for and rejoicing in identification, AA readers practice a version of what rhetorician Wayne Booth calls “ethical criticism,” a centuries-old mode of reading that facilitates the union of the readerly self and its writerly other, a process that transforms and enriches both parties. For the ethical critic, the text sparks the “grandest of hunts we are invited to,” which is the “encounter of a story-teller’s self with that of the reader or listener.” That encounter, which Booth describes as a gift of friendship, constitutes the textual community not through analysis but through the gestalt of identification, which allows “ ‘our own’ thoughts [to] now become different from what they were. The author’s thoughts have at least in part become ours.” The psychic and affective charge of such a meeting of the minds reshapes every dimension of the reader’s life: “I discover that there are no clear boundaries between the others who are somehow outside and inside me and the ‘me’ that the others are ‘in.’ . . . I am a focal point in a field of forces . . . or, as we used to say, a creature made in the image of God and hence essentially affiliated—joined to others and more like them than different from them. To be joined, in other words, is my primary, natural condition.” Understood in this light, Big Book reading becomes not merely a method of “symbolic modeling.” Rather, it is also a pedagogy of empathy, paradoxically teaching its readers how to return to their “primary, natural condition” of human connectedness.32 Clearly, a powerful Christian dynamic of fallenness and redemption is at work within the textual community of Alcoholics Anonymous, despite the fact that, by the time the Big Book was published, AA had officially (if not wholeheartedly) moved beyond the biblical orientation of the Oxford Group. The fellowship retains that earlier group’s conviction that “religious reading” enables the isolated individual to dissolve into something larger and more powerful, but its emphasis on identification redefines and relocates the source of redemption. Not an omniscient God, but the AA community redeems the suffering, isolated alcoholic. The lived instantiations of that community—meetings, storytelling, and outreach—are its most familiar incarnations. But it is constituted as well by textuality, by a “language of the heart” that is not merely spoken, but written and read. Alcoholics Anonymous, the “Bible of AA,” enjoins its readers to acts of empathy and identification that extend their community through time as well as space, imaginatively encompassing the experiences of all the AAs who have come before and are likely to follow. While the day-to-day practices of individual AAs may include acts of reading alone or in private, even those solitary instances are acts of affiliation, demonstrating always, and inescapably, the communal dimension of reading.
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CHAPTER 25
Books and the Media The Silent Spring Debate Priscilla Coit Murphy
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Rachel Carson’s 1962 best seller, Silent Spring,1 emerged into a public arena already articulated through an elaborate and far-reaching mass media system. Her book’s career offers an illuminating demonstration of the unique yet integral functions of the book form with respect to the other media—the evolution of which fundamentally changed the public life of books.2 For the single voice seeking to communicate a message of public interest, publication of a book represented special access to that media system. For a media system confronted with a chaos of information, a book represented a special kind of opportunity for public discussion of an issue. To the extent that both the book medium and the full media system are concerned with exchange of public ideas and information, their social functions are complementary, synergistic, and highly interwoven. The Silent Spring debate illustrates these dynamics and suggests a different perspective from which to consider the social role and future of books. The first half of the twentieth century had seen the advent of radio, film, and television. By midcentury, book readers had also become consumers of information and experience through a burgeoning array of print, broadcast, and film media. Substantial changes had been wrought in how an author’s book-borne message might reach the public forum and what might happen to that message once there. The book publishing industry found itself challenged by a growing sense of competition for readers’ attention as well as by the rapid changes in promotion and distribution directly linked to the expansion of the media system. At the same time, institutional changes included shifts in the definition and practice of journalism, the professionalization of advertising and public relations, and evolving structural changes such as the rise of niche publishing. The midcentury media had come to constitute much more than mere loci for marketing or secondary distribution of excerpted text. Reciprocally, books came to constitute more than just commodities to be advertised or vendible intellectual property. The process by which a book-borne message reached the public forum was as complicated and as ramified as the types and numbers of
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other media. Authors bent on communicating their ideas to the public were confronted with issues of access and appropriate choice of medium, with an increasing need to understand the workings of the entire media system into which their message would be sent. The author of two best-selling books, The Sea Around Us in 1951 and The Edge of the Sea in 1955, Rachel Carson had earned a reputation for lyrical skill in nature writing (fig. 25.1). In 1958, however, her growing dismay at irresponsible and indiscriminant pesticide spraying programs against fire ants, gypsy moths, mosquitoes, and Dutch elm disease prompted her to undertake research intended first for a single magazine article and later a chapter in an anthology she would edit. She soon decided that an entire book was warranted and that she had to be its sole author, given the depth of the problem and the extent of her information. Her mission was to communicate the conclusions she had reached: that unexamined pesticide-use practices had already caused serious damage to the natural world; that continuation of those practices posed a severe threat to human and animal life as well as the environment; that business and
FIGURE 25.1. Rachel Carson at her microscope. By permission of Rachel Carson Council, Inc. 448
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government had been at best lax in informing themselves and the public about the potential hazards; and that the public needed to know all of this. Carson approached both William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, which had excerpted her earlier books, and her friend Paul Brooks, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin, which had published The Edge of the Sea. Shawn was interested in the project regardless of length, having already distinguished his era at the New Yorker by running increasingly long and serious articles, notably John Hersey’s book-length “Hiroshima.” Houghton Mifflin had an established reputation for its books on nature and conservation—of growing interest to postwar Americans with the time and money to cultivate suburban gardens and pursue outdoor activities. Moreover, Brooks, by then a close friend of Carson, was himself an avid nature lover, active with the Audubon Society and other conservationist groups. Thus, already professionally motivated to promote Carson’s project, he was also personally well positioned to support it at local and national levels. In the winter of 1961–62, following almost four years of enormous investigative effort and long hours of inspired but careful writing, parallel manuscripts for Silent Spring were submitted almost simultaneously to the New Yorker for three “Reporter-at-Large” segments in June 19623 and to Houghton Mifflin for publication as a hardcover book three months later. Between the appearance of articles and the publication of the book, Carson’s message drew increasing press attention, and Houghton Mifflin stepped up its already extensive publicity plans. At the same time, those who felt most attacked by Carson’s message, notably agricultural chemical producers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, rallied to counter her arguments. A lawyer for one chemical company contacted both the New Yorker and Houghton Mifflin attempting to obstruct publication, while the chemical industry trade association mounted its own $250,000 public relations campaign against book and author. Beginning with a July 1962 New York Times editorial of resounding praise for the articles and the forthcoming book,4 debate in the news media intensified over the summer, with the result that Silent Spring was known to both the press and a considerable segment of the public well before publication. Within three weeks after the official publication date of 27 September, Silent Spring was on best-seller lists, where it remained for thirty-two weeks.5 Over the next several months, editorials and reviews appeared in national and local newspapers, as well as newsmagazines, specialty magazines, and literary supplements. Local radio and television stations presented commentary, panel discussions, and call-in talk shows (a comparatively new format) on Silent Spring’s warnings. Although experienced in the customary requirements of book promotion, Carson herself declined most appearances for personal and T H E SILENT SPRING D E BAT E
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health reasons: she was innately reserved, made more so by some private trials; and she had learned during the writing of her book that she faced terminal breast cancer, a fact she kept to herself. Her supporters, however, among community and garden groups, naturalists, and conservationists—sometimes including editor Brooks—took up her cause in the public arena. Meanwhile, representatives of the chemical and agricultural industries appeared almost ubiquitously in the East, Midwest, and to a lesser extent California and the West, in venues as diverse as college lectures, book groups, and community meetings. The public outcry in reaction to the book drew responses in state and national legislatures, and the Kennedy administration undertook its own investigation. Attention at the national level had given way to more local activity by early spring of 1963, when CBS Reports prompted a resurgence of national public and political response with its prime-time broadcast, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.” Six weeks later to the day, the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee released a special report that was widely felt to vindicate Carson’s arguments, as Eric Sevareid dramatically reported on that evening’s CBS Reports update. Congressional hearings on pesticide use and policy began shortly thereafter. Carson died less than a year later in April 1964, but she and her book have been credited with inspiring popular environmentalism, including the development of the Environmental Protection Agency and the eventual banning of DDT in the United States. Authors like Carson and publishers like Houghton Mifflin did, of course, see the media as essential means to publicize a book and thereby sell it. In fact, a mid-twentieth-century author’s decision to use the book form included the expectation that a publisher would not stop at merely providing the printed, bound book to retailers but would further guarantee efforts to draw public attention through advertising and publicity. This authorial choice was not, however, solely a matter of financial gain. Although Rachel Carson was occasionally accused of “just wanting to sell books,” the accusation never stuck because her dedication to her message was so evident. In a real sense, the book medium was unique in permitting a lone author access to the American population not only of book readers but also of consumers of other media wherein the book would be advertised, reviewed, or discussed. Yet that lone author could remain philosophically independent, effectively protected from direct or indirect pressure from the advertisers who finance most other media forms. At that moment in book publishing history, publishing houses routinely subsidized important but potentially risky and unprofitable works with revenue from more certainly popular books. A dissident author with a sympathetic editor could thus remain relatively insulated from market pressure yet still hope to communicate directly with the general public. As Carson 450
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had once said, disgusted by an unhappy interaction with a magazine editor, “My proper field is books, where an author can call his soul his own.”6 Recognizing that her warnings about pesticides posed a threat of lost magazine advertising from food or chemical producers, she had abandoned, early on, any efforts to place the article in a general interest or women’s magazine. Only the New Yorker—renowned in the magazine industry for its separation of editorial and business offices, and enviably able to turn away advertising it did not want—could take on such a risk with impunity, as it often did under Shawn. For Carson’s publishers, there might have been risks in drawing fire from her critics, but taking on so dense a topic carried its own risk. Pesticide abuse was a particularly complex issue, one best presented in the medium providing sufficient intellectual time and space for full explanation: a book—or the bookequivalent in the New Yorker’s nearly complete devotion of three full issues.7 The book form allowed Carson’s skill as a writer to play out the intricacies of her arguments, and it also permitted inclusion of the literally weighty fifty-five pages of supporting documentation. It was as a book that Carson’s message was publicized, advertised, and—once published—reviewed. Could a well-written, well-researched newspaper feature or magazine article have performed the same function—synopsizing an issue in accessible form and stimulating debate thereon? First, as already noted, magazines and newspapers (the New Yorker excepted) offered neither the insulation—perceived or real— from advertiser pressure nor the broad publicity efforts then put forth in support of a book. Moreover, there were telling differences in rhythm, format, and impact between the text of the Silent Spring magazine series and the text in the book. At first pass, both appear to present virtually the same material. Both open with the same dramatic parable of an unnamed town afflicted by a spring without birdsongs, followed by exposition of the ravages of overused and misused pesticides, with explanations along the way about the complex biological processes involved and the implications for the future of earth and humanity. Terminology and analysis are essentially the same and in no way “dumbed down” in the magazine version, nor is the text very much shorter than the book’s. Nevertheless, there are some noteworthy differences in organization. The book’s second chapter, immediately following the parable, contains a clear and crucial disclaimer that Carson was not arguing for a complete ban on pesticides. The public’s first glimpse of Carson’s argument, however, was the vivid “silent spring” image in the 16 June New Yorker—but without the mitigation of that disclaimer. In keeping with journalistic rhythms, it had been delayed to the last installment two weeks later. Responding to that first impression, the chemical companies launched their vigorous rebuttal campaign, highlighted later in the summer by Monsanto Magazine’s searing parody of her opening parT H E SILENT SPRING D E BAT E
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able, “The Desolate Year”8—vividly depicting a repulsive, pesticide-less world overrun by insects and vermin. Along with several other industry articles and tracts, the parody was reprinted and widely circulated to editors, reviewers, broadcasters, and government officials, as well as directly to influential citizens. Yet even as the New Yorker articles appeared, critics were already aware that a complete book was forthcoming; and it was the book that worried them. They fretted about the size of the audience it could reach as a best seller and even more about the multiplicity of reviews, articles, and commentary it could generate.9 Less explicitly but more compellingly, they feared the authority the book form could command. As soon as the first New Yorker installment appeared, chemical company executives put researchers to work, exhaustively investigating whatever sources could be identified in the articles. While references had to be worked into the unfootnoted magazine text, the book would include full documentation; and urgent opposition requests for advance copies came to Houghton Mifflin in hope of quickly tracking down Carson’s sources. Much of the opposition’s efforts to discredit Silent Spring were directed at undermining Carson’s science, which was a difficult proposition once the book came out, given the impressive fifty-five pages of references—a degree of documentation on which reviews, editorials, and letters frequently remarked. In actuality, those pages were devoted to a form of endnotes rather than a true bibliography. References to pages in the text were often repeated, and one eagle-eyed critic accused Carson and her editor of padding the documentation with needless, space-taking repetition. Without second-guessing the design decisions made by Houghton Mifflin, one must still recognize the obvious: to achieve her purpose—to inform, alert, persuade, and mobilize her readership—both Carson and her publishers knew full well that credibility of both author and message was pivotal. Having elected to dispense with footnotes as too off-putting for the average reader, both Carson and Brooks had nonetheless deemed it absolutely necessary to make her formal research visible and documented. In doing so, they were drawing upon the inherent probity of the book form and underscoring it by including evidence of authority not found in other media. It was that probity that her opposition feared and strove to copy or undermine, that probity on which the media would rely, and therefore that probity on which Carson’s publishers sought to build. Potentially problematic passages were vetted by legal and scientific experts; and promotional strategies emphasized Carson’s scientific credentials (a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins), using corroborative quotations from other known experts and emphasizing her four years of research and those fiftyfive pages of references. Brooks’s personal dedication to Carson’s cause and 452
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his own connections in naturalist circles meant the availability of additional resources to deal with what he gleefully called the “super-ruckus.”10 By the time Silent Spring saw light as a book, it already had accrued weighty institutional support in political and cultural as well as economic terms. The public’s acceptance of Silent Spring’s message certainly was affected by perceptions about the credibility of Rachel Carson and her work, along with the cultural “value added” (as it has been termed) by her editors and publishers through their institutional standing and support. Even if the general public might not have been “brand conscious” of a specific publisher’s imprint, the stature of houses like Houghton Mifflin was communicated and understood in the look, feel, and retailing treatment of their books. Far from competing with each other, the New Yorker’s and Houghton Mifflin’s association with the same text brought mutual benefit or synergy: the institutional authority of each devolved to the other as cosponsors of Carson’s message, in the eyes of both media and public. Similarly, later appearances through the Consumers Union, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and various other magazines and syndicates contributed the weight of their own implicit imprimatur. Even so, the primacy of the book as medium of record was never in doubt, and it was the book around which the debate roiled. Editorials, columns, and letters to the editor almost universally referred to Silent Spring as a book; if the New Yorker series was ever mentioned, it was as secondary vehicle, despite its chronological precedence. Brooks’s “super-ruckus” had obviously arisen well before Silent Spring was available as a book subject to formal review, but once review copies became available, the debate moved into what may be called the reviewing culture. A culture of book reviewing has been recognized and discussed—largely in the context of critical studies and literary history, and often from the perspective of setting taste or canon, although the news value of book reviews in announcing publication has occasionally been considered as well. Yet the Silent Spring episode illustrates two additional functions of reviewing. First, for many—lay readers and busy scholars alike—the synopsis included in most reviews provides familiarization with and even interpretation of a potentially difficult subject. Second, reviewers of a controversial book usually take a position on the issues involved, even within an ostensibly objective evaluation of the book itself. A fair amount of the public debate on Silent Spring took place among the reviewers, who baited and answered each other in print and on the air. Indeed, reviewers were chosen on the basis of some form of expertise on Carson’s topic, and as such they became partisans themselves or surrogates for other partisans. The fact that reviews were still appearing fully a year after publication indicates that they were clearly intended not as guides to purchase and reading but as entries in an established, continuing exchange. T H E SILENT SPRING D E BAT E
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The media debate, however, was by no means confined to book reviewing. Beyond arguing among themselves, reviewers were responding to the full scope of media discussion, quite often citing editorials, opinion columns, radio and television programs, and readers’ letters. Reciprocally, their reviews were picked up and sometimes built upon in the general media discussion. Occasionally, a letter to an editor even complained that an editorial should have been labeled a review or vice versa. But by far the greatest notice of Silent Spring, its author, and its message took place outside the book pages, in the form of news and comment on that news (fig. 25.2). It is a truism of journalistic practice that issues are more difficult to cover than events; hence, issues are primarily discussed only when attached to events. The issue of pesticide abuse had in fact already been raised sporadically on certain opinion pages, notably in the New York Times. But the publication of Silent Spring gave the issue the status of an event—the arrival of a complex message in compact, concentrated form, complete with author-advocate. At the time, the phenomenon of the author’s book tour was still developing, and publishers’ publicity departments tended to focus more on parties at strategic book retailers than on media exposure of celebrity authors. Nonetheless, Carson and her book easily came to represent not just the advent of an interesting “read” but one full side of an evolving controversy. Moreover, the development of controversy multiplied the single event of publication into a series of events, such as lectures, community debates, and the like—all ready material for journalistic attention. Both sides instinctively understood the news value of such events, particularly as they provided a notably local and immediate flavor to the discussion. Individual efforts were brought to bear as Audubon Society and other conservation and wildlife groups undertook letter-writing campaigns to local and national government officials, making sure newspapers received copies. On the other side, trade association newsletters urged members to write to newspapers and magazines; and CBS News’ plans for its program on Silent Spring prompted a letter-writing campaign and the subsequent withdrawal of three advertisers—an action that drew its own press coverage. Silent Spring provided, at the very least, grist for the ever-ravenous media mill, including a digest of issues in which the news media might be interested but were ill equipped to address within the limits of their own formats and resources. The arguments raised and supported by the book constituted negotiable intellectual content, fair currency for public exchange on the issue. But beyond simply supplying that content and currency, Silent Spring had in fact initiated media discussion of a matter of public interest. Even though individual journalists might have raised the issue before, the publication of Silent Spring 454
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FIGURE 25.2. “Another Use for Silent Spring.” Cartoon by Gordon Brooks, Yankee, July 1963. Used by permission.
set an agenda item for the entire national and local media system, which in turn set the agenda for the public and the polity. The media’s focus on the book form of Silent Spring is not, however, completely explained by the advantages a book offered them as a newsworthy event and credible information source. The media attention also mirrored the public’s valuation of the cultural weight of the book form compared to other forms of communication. At a time when the New Yorker never published letters to the editor, nearly 500 letters were received in response to the Silent Spring series,11 the vast majority requesting some form of reprint. For them, the articles were not sufficiently portable, permanent, or exchangeable. Readers wrote that they intended to send copies to officials and friends, preferably without the “distracting” (as one put it) advertisements, cartoons, and fillers of a magazine. A great many said outright, “this ought to be a book.” Not only was a book more portable, permanent, exchangeable, and compact than three-magazineissues-worth of articles, but it also implicitly carried the proofs of probity: the trappings of authority (one writer wanted to send the president a “Moroccobound” copy); the imprimatur of a book publisher; and, as soon became evident, documentation not found in the magazine article. The exhortations of these writing readers are interesting for the fact that, although the readers themT H E SILENT SPRING D E BAT E
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selves had already read the text of Silent Spring, they nonetheless wanted it in book form. Even more intriguing was their impulse to send the book to others, intending thereby to insert themselves into the debate through the surrogacy of the book. Paradoxically, however, the actual possession or reading of the book was not a requirement for participation in the debate. The fact that somewhere a book existed—one vetted and approved by prestigious publishers, and one with fiftyfive pages of supporting material based on four years of research—meant that the media debate could take place using reference to the book and its author as authoritative stand-in for Carson’s side of the controversy. To reinvoke the economic metaphor, the intellectual probity and value reposing in Silent Spring— derived not only from Carson and her work but also from the publishing institutions involved—constituted a gold standard of intellectual capital on which the public exchange in the media (on this particular issue) could legitimately be based. Thus, because Silent Spring had been read by an important core group, including members of the media and certain energetic letter-writing readers, its message had a full existence in the public forum whether or not it was read by the general public, thanks to the dynamics of the extensive and complex media system. In fact, there were those entering into the controversy who were unabashedly proud to announce that they had not read it, did not intend to read it, but “disapproved of it heartily.”12 They, and others who had learned of the book’s arguments and the opposition’s rebuttals through the media, presumed sufficient familiarity with the book to be entitled to discuss it. The media debate had, furthermore, not only extended the reach of Silent Spring’s message but also ramified it well beyond the original, carefully delimited scope of the book’s text, through two complementary phenomena. First, each new mention of the book extended attention to the pesticide issue to those who had hitherto not heard about it. Those urging that the magazine articles “ought to be a book” largely based their suggestion on the remarkable belief that a wider audience would be reached were Silent Spring a book, even though the book’s initial print run was 100,000 copies—for the time an unusually large print run but a fraction of the New Yorker’s circulation of 400,000. Even taking the two figures together, one estimates that Silent Spring initially reached about a half-million readers—in the world of American mass media, a very small number. Yet the collective effect of the promotional efforts to publicize or refute the book and the diaspora of mentions, criticisms, and debate meant that the title Silent Spring was recognized and some portion of its argument understood by many millions more than the theoretical core of 500,000 readers—let alone the 100,000 first owners of the book. 456
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Second, each time a reviewer, commentator, or letter writer took up pen (or microphone), a new perspective was added, for good or ill. While those who wrote directly to Rachel Carson were acting as half of an author-reader dyad, those who wrote for public consumption were acting as interactive, integral parts of the media system itself, elaborating on Silent Spring’s message and acting fully in the public sphere. Writers of letters to the editor almost always added some personal context or experience, while also taking on the role of synopsizer and interpreter for other readers, urging them to read or dismiss the book and/ or take appropriate political action. Carson’s message about pesticide dangers, then, might have reached an individual member of the public in the traditional way, as written in the author’s own text in the Houghton Mifflin book or the New Yorker articles. But the message might also have reached that person as presented by another member of a garden or farm club, as recommended in a letter to a local editor, as condemned by a chemical industry lecturer, as reviewed by a book editor, or as rhapsodized upon by Eric Sevareid. Most significantly, it very likely reached that citizen through some combination of all these vectors. Receiving Carson’s message in the form of her text was thus only one of several possibilities, especially because the number of copies of Silent Spring in print after two years was still only about 1.2 million including paperbacks. Communication in book form thus afforded Carson relatively independent access to a media system able to involve an audience far larger than the community of book readers; and in the process that system had developed and ramified the book’s message to its own, content-hungry purposes, legitimized through the borrowed probity of the book form. As book historians confront the issue of the future of books, the irresistible question is whether something like the Silent Spring episode could happen again. One quick answer is that it has happened again, albeit in different fields and in different ways—for example, Unsafe at Any Speed or The Bell Curve. The fact that authors (including journalists, academics, and politicians) continue to seek the book form hoping to communicate special messages and provoke public debate attests to the perceived, unique social function of the book. Moreover, the idea that “controversy sells” seems to be more rather than less pervasive in contemporary media culture as evolved since 1962. So in theory the media should welcome any Silent Spring–like alarum. But an equally quick answer is that a Silent Spring could not happen again, for a number of reasons. First, an arguably unique confluence of circumstances existed in the early sixties, beginning with Carson’s particular abilities and the special support she had from leaders such as Stewart Udall and William O. Douglas, as well as the timing of publication in an atmosphere of unprecedented emphasis on science and technology with concurrently rising anxieties T H E SILENT SPRING D E BAT E
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about their impact. In hindsight, too, the heavy-handed reaction of Carson’s critics now seems a clumsy and unsophisticated public relations effort that only fanned the controversy—a learning experience for public relations strategists. Perhaps more relevant to this discussion, however, is the nature of the publishing culture of that time, which allowed Carson editorial, promotional, and political support from Shawn, Brooks, and their respective publishers to a degree seen less and less often in recent decades. Changes in publishing’s economic structure have meant that book publishing houses within media conglomerates have increasingly limited resources and, at best, compromised autonomy; and definitions of corporate mission and profit-center accounting no longer permit the same measure of risk subsidy welcomed by a 1960s Houghton Mifflin in the name of social conscience. Relatedly, Houghton Mifflin’s ability to take on the chemical industry might be difficult to replicate, insofar as some controversies “sell” better than others, and some are more expensively litigious than others. The very act of asking whether a Silent Spring could happen again, however, is more significant than any answer, because the question addresses the sociopolitical functions and relationships inherent in the book as a communicative medium. Predictions about the future of books have tended to focus on the book’s physical traits or on the reading act as affected by technology; yet asking about the prospects for another Silent Spring is not asking about reading on an electronic screen nor even about the prognosis for libraries and bookstores. More fundamentally, it is asking whether the book medium will still provide the same balance of independence, authority, and access to the mass audience for some future “lonely pamphleteer”13—or whether any other medium could function the same way and be valued by society in the same way. Further, it also would be asking whether an inevitably more complex and economicsdominated media system will have the same need to have social issues authoritatively explicated, digested, and in effect objectified as Silent Spring did for the hazards of pesticide abuse.
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CHAPTER 26
The Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club African American Women Readers
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Elizabeth Long . . . On 3 March 1949, as recorded in a frayed canvas-covered Sterling Account Book made for the F. W. Woolworth Company and priced at $1.00, “A small group of women met . . . answering the call of Mrs. Lulu White. The purpose was to form a Study Club which is to be under the Educational Committee of the NAACP.” The ten women who gathered named their group the Chat-AnHour Social and Cultural Club, decided on monthly dues (twenty-five cents) and meeting times (ten o’clock every first and third Thursday morning “for only one hour”), and resolved “that we could have some white friends come in some time and discuss certain problems confronting us. We shall also study and discuss books written by Negroes and about Negro life etc.”1 Although they rarely hewed to the intense schedule they mapped out for themselves—and it appears that they only once invited a white person to attend their meetings—this group of women continued to meet for more than twenty years. They studied not only literature but also a wide range of topics related to African American identity and contemporary race relations. Sometimes individuals reported on a particular subject to the group, while other meetings featured groupwide discussions or guest lectures. This, their central activity, was supplemented by a broad roster of visitors and correspondents, and by various kinds of social and cultural activism, both locally and nationally oriented. Lulu B. White founded the Chat-An-Hour club in the same year that her progressive politics forced her to retire from the position of executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP. Her dual roles as a political and a literary organizer provide insight into the connection between cultural practices and more public social and political action. Detailing their relationship in African American McCarthy-era Houston—as mediated by Lulu B. White’s own life and work—can illuminate the ways that the reading culture of the ChatAn-Hour Social and Cultural Club related to issues we might now label not
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only social but also political. This interrelationship remains an important one to consider given the vexed nature of post–civil rights America, where formal political equality coexists with de facto educational exclusion, residential segregation, and large differences in wealth and income along racial lines. Comparing the two aspects of Lulu B. White’s activism also raises questions about the relationship between knowledge and gender, for the historical record of White’s involvement with formal politics is much thicker than that of her allfemale literary endeavors. This issue is particularly salient because Mrs. White’s experiences and the activities of the Chat-An-Hour group point to important links between the better-documented narratives of legal progress, which often center on male leaders, and the stories of a community’s associational life and informal social networks. These show the critical role of women, whether in institution building, in socialization and the development of political culture, or in the daily acts of defiance that constituted skirmishes along the boundaries of segregation. Lulu B. Madison was born in 1900 to a prosperous farming family in the small northeastern Texas town of Elmo. She began college at Butler College, a coeducational school for African Americans founded by the East Texas Baptist Association in 1905 as the Texas Baptist Academy.2 Eventually she obtained her teaching certificate from Prairie View A&M, a historically black university. As Mrs. Erma Leroy, a younger NAACP colleague, said of her in those years: “She was not an ‘A’ student, and there wasn’t anything that would make you predict anything unusual about her career.” On the other hand, she already possessed immense personal charisma. As Mrs. Leroy recounted, “Back in high school, I knew her as Mrs. Julius White. She was tall, slender and beautiful, and I would just trail after and follow her down Main Street, never thinking that I would meet her and we would become friends.” Lulu Madison’s life changed after her marriage to Julius White, who was one of the charter members of the Texas chapter of the NAACP when it was founded in 1918. White was also the first president of the Harris County’s Negro Democratic Club and plaintiff in a number of cases for that organization in the fight for black voting rights. Apparently, Julius White’s political commitment drew his wife into race politics. His substantial income, garnered from a bar and from involvement in the “policy” or numbers rackets, certainly supported her financially in that work. For example, Julius supplied his wife with a legendary series of Cadillacs that she drove to the most remote regions of Texas on NAACP organizing campaigns. As Mrs. Leroy said, “Lula came in contact with and embraced the NAACP work, and the idea and aims of the NAACP work did something to her that changed the whole course of her life.”3 The stories that circulate about her show a woman of courage, warmth, and 460
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a penchant for direct action. Hearing of a man who was being held by whites as a slave in a chicken coop on an isolated farm, she drove to northeast Texas with union leader and civil rights activist Moses Leroy, and they brought him back to Houston and into freedom. Irritated by “For whites only” signs on drinking fountains at the airport when she went there to meet a visiting dignitary, she made it a point thereafter to tear such signs off every fountain she saw and to drink from them. Her battles for racial equality were undergirded by a sense of community that encompassed all races. When she heard of the explosion at the Monsanto plant in 1949 that devastated Texas City, her first response was to load up her car with medical supplies and drive straight over to do whatever she could for those in need. But she did not accept unequal treatment. The Sheriff of Wharton County once arrested her (in those days, blacks were routinely ticketed for driving through white areas) and warned her against ever coming back. In response, she drove back to Wharton County to talk to him, managed to persuade him that he should run for the legislature and that, because she admired him greatly (for what, the story does not say), she would help him. He did run, and she worked to defeat him.4 Certainly, Lulu B. White brought to her political involvement a rare combination of these personal gifts and more strategic institutional skills. She was, for example, a brilliant organizer. Often joining with Juanita Craft from Dallas, she crisscrossed the state in her signature Cadillac, holding inspirational meetings in churches and homes, knitting the small and often intimidated Texas branches into a powerful organization. Her membership drives brought Texas to the attention of the national NAACP leadership and made Houston the largest chapter in the South. White became president of that chapter in 1939, then the first paid executive secretary in 1942. Building on that organizational base, Lulu B. White and the Dallas businessman and activist Maceo Smith brought the state NAACP into national prominence during the long campaign of legal battles for voting rights and integration. They orchestrated a series of important constitutional victories in the Supreme Court cases of Smith v. Allwright, which finally outlawed the all-white primary in 1944, and Sweatt v. Painter, which was a landmark on the pathway to Brown v. Board of Education. That case began in 1946, when Heman Sweatt attempted to register for classes at the then all-white University of Texas Law School. The resulting 1950 Supreme Court decision started to batter down the “separate but equal” regime first established in Plessy v. Ferguson.5 Lulu B. White recruited and counseled Heman Sweatt and other plaintiffs; strategized with Texas liberals, both black and white; and maintained an active friendship with Walter White, Daisy Lampkin, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins at the national NAACP office. A F R I CA N A M E R I CA N WO M E N REA DERS
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Unfortunately, Sweatt v. Painter marked the beginning of a troubled time in Lulu White’s career with the NAACP. In 1949 Houston conservatives banded together to ban a text with “socialist tendencies” and to squelch the school lunch program because it was federally controlled. In 1951, with much fanfare, the Houston Minute Women were formed. By 1953 this group and other conservatives engineered the dismissal of a Houston deputy school superintendent under accusations of having communist affiliations (though later the FBI found him “clean as a whistle”). The Red scare had taken a firm hold in Houston.6 A woman of great personal courage, Lulu White may not have seen the wisdom of modifying her more institutionally expressed radicalism during those troubled times. She supported Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, founded a short-lived group called Citizens for Democracy that probably campaigned for Wallace, and was known to support leftists. She also followed the lead of the national NAACP at a time when the national staff underwrote political positions that were more radical than most Texas members desired.7 So in 1949, when journalist Carter Wesley, her old ally and friend, excoriated her for signing a petition protesting the jailing of a Daily Worker editor, she finally resigned from her position as executive secretary of the Houston NAACP.8 Since Mrs. Lulu White founded the Chat-An-Hour group in the same year that marked her resignation as executive secretary of the NAACP’s Houston branch, it is tempting to link the two events by more than chronology. It is possible, for example, that the study group may have served her as an alternative organizational base—which would account for the statewide ambitions she once expressed for the Chat-An-Hour idea. However, she continued to work for the NAACP and also with the Eastern Star and the Prairie View Alumni Association, so she did not lack for organizational scope. Moreover, the women in the Chat-An-Hour group were mostly somewhat older than she was, and although some were quite active in the community, they were not obvious candidates for NAACP recruiting drives. One of her younger NAACP colleagues, in fact, characterized the group as “older women who got together and discussed books,” which sounds quite apolitical.9 With what for most people would have been a surfeit of activism, perhaps Lulu B. White sought from the group some kind of relief in the quieter pleasures of reflective discussion and mutually supportive companionship with like-minded peers from among the community’s educated classes. From this vantage point, it is impossible to tell. In fact, the paucity of information about other group members in the public record is remarkable. Only two other founding members of the Chat-AnHour Club had connections to the public world of racial politics. The eldest, Mrs. C. N. Love, was the widow of one of Houston’s most outspoken and progressive journalists. Charles Norton Love had founded the city’s oldest black 462
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newspaper in 1893 and by 1902 became owner of the Texas Freeman, which he published until 1931, when it merged with the Informer. C. N. Love was also part of a group that in 1921 filed an injunction against the disenfranchisement of black voters in the Texas Democratic primary—a battle that was lost with the passage of a bill depriving blacks of party membership.10 The second, Miss Euretta K. Fairchild, who was the president of the “1906 Art and Charity Club,” served as a delegate to the 1915 regional meeting of the National Association of Colored Women, which convened in Houston that year. Miss Fairchild’s group and two other African American groups documented in the Houston Metropolitan Archives were pursuing a broad range of women’s Progressive Era activities. The major programs of the association in Texas were, according to one description, “reformatories, old folk’s homes, social settlements, nurseries, working girls’ homes, study of civics, needlecrafts and domestic science, development of social uplift work.”11 Among the topics covered at the 1915 meeting were “Our Girls: Do They Need Picture Shows? Should They Use Slang? How Can We Make Them Our Companions?” 12 Miss Euretta K. Fairchild may also have been active in San Antonio later in the century. A person of the same name was the only woman among the founding board members of the San Antonio Negro Chamber of Commerce in 1938 and was also on a Texas NAACP committee that, in 1946, met with officials from the University of Texas. At that meeting, the committee pressed for reforms in higher education, including “the establishment of a graduate and professional school in a large urban center in Texas.”13 Despite the paucity of information about members, it is possible to detail what the group accomplished—insofar as it is recorded in the minutes of its meetings. Even this rather sparse record shows how literary culture was deployed by one group of Texan black women in the mid-twentieth century and suggests that the links between different aspects of political and cultural life can be complex and multileveled. Moreover, the “reading culture” expressed in the minutes of the Chat-AnHour group is reminiscent of the kinds of identity work Elizabeth McHenry analyzed in earlier African American literary societies in her exemplary book Forgotten Readers. McHenry shows that before the Civil War, African American literary societies in northern, urban black communities became forums for discussions of racial and American identity. As she says, their members, drawn from the relatively small communities of free blacks, used these groups “for collective reading, writing and discussion to combat charges of racial inferiority, validate their call for social justice and alert their audience to the disparity between American ideals and racial inequality.”14 In such societies, developing “literary character” included not only literacy itself but also “morality, selfA F R I CA N A M E R I CA N WO M E N REA DERS
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discipline, intellectual curiosity, civic responsibility, and eloquence.” Members saw this as essential not simply as a private duty but as a collective effort crucial for the welfare and development of their community and its self-representation to the broader society as deserving of respect and political inclusion. In McHenry’s analysis, African American literary societies both before and after the Civil War deployed literary culture to critique racist stereotypes, to debate public concerns and devise strategies for contesting inequality, to instill pride in their community, and to both claim and demonstrate their rights to full citizenship. Yet after Reconstruction, when direct political agitation was definitively blocked, these groups appear to have been slightly different from their early nineteenth-century precursors. First, participants took for granted quite sophisticated interpretive skills among their members: acquisition of basic literacy was no longer in question. Second, they self-consciously used such literary societies as “an alternative space where they might publicly sort through the most pressing issues that they faced and debate the relative merits of different approaches to addressing them.” In other words, educated black Americans of the “leadership class” turned to literary societies as “places where racial consciousness and confidence could develop,”15 within a broader society that had first promised and then denied them the direct expression of political voice and participation. This work had special relevance for black women, who were excluded from public life by conventions of both race and gender. Formed not at the beginning of the Jim Crow era but sixty years later, when the edifice of segregation and disfranchisement was showing deep fissures, the Chat-An-Hour group differs somewhat from those characterized in McHenry’s work. For instance, rather than debating how best to address problems of racial exclusion, this group of Texan women undertook actions aimed at redressing wrongs and opening up the political process. Especially during its first few years, the Chat-An-Hour group was close to the NAACP, but even at that time the members’ political and social horizons were broader than those of one political group or even those of formal politics per se. Even so, there were broad similarities between the Chat-An-Hour group and the earlier groups McHenry discusses, both in their missions and in the ways they used their readings. Like the earlier African American literary societies, the Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club used literary culture to discuss public concerns and to both explore and represent to the broader community an identity that challenged racist stereotypes and demanded full citizenship. Also, like its precursors, the group moved rather fluidly between different popular and legitimate literary genres and focused its reading choices on questions of racial identity. Although the extant records of its activities shed little light on exactly how the women read, examining what they read within the range of their other accomplishments can 464
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elucidate their “reading culture” and how to understand the reading of nonhegemonic groups more generally. In the years before Mrs. Lulu White’s death in 1957, the group’s relationship to NAACP activities and agendas was very rich. It was in correspondence with W. E. B. Du Bois, the eminent scholar and editor of the NAACP publication the Crisis. The group also used meetings to announce NAACP rallies and marches, to collect contributions, to arrange for “On to Washington” buttons, and to organize subscriptions for tables at Houston NAACP functions. At one meeting the women listened with rapt attention to Mrs. Lulu White’s account of the funeral of Walter White, NAACP president, which she attended in New York City. The minutes of that meeting say that at the end of her account “we felt that we had been with her all the way.”16 They also discussed forming a Citizen’s Political Action Committee and urging Dr. John Davis to run for the city council as early as 1950, a tactic in line with the NAACP program for opening up the political process.17 So, to this degree the Chat-An-Hour group may have served as a channel for Lulu White’s immense political energies, or possibly as a recruiting ground and consciousness-raising organ.18 Yet both during their early years, when Mrs. White and the NAACP were central presences for the group, and after Mrs. White’s death and the organizational eclipse of the NAACP because of its difficulties in Texas and the more general shift away from lawsuits as the primary tactic for the civil rights movement, the women of the Chat-An-Hour group always undertook “political” activities beyond that one organization’s compass. In their first year, for example, they took up ideas about designing blotters with descriptions of famous African Americans for schoolchildren (both black and white) to use on their desks and discussed organizing Ralph Bunche Day for celebration in the schools. The women also deployed their group as a collective body to make symbolic statements both to the environing white society and within the African American community. For example, as a group they organized a tour of the Houston Fine Art gallery (now the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), visited an art exhibit at Foley’s Department Store, and took part in the River Oaks Garden Tour.19 And they decided to locate their meetings at the (then segregated) Carnegie Library—the same library that had been founded by Houston’s first white reading club some decades before. Reporting on that decision, and their negotiations with the librarian, the minutes record: “The Chairman stressed the idea of impressing upon the race that we are citizens.”20 These activities challenged the social boundaries of segregation and showed the women drawing upon their own social and cultural position within the African American community, as well as their status as readers, as “cross-cultural” currency to validate their claims for inclusion. A F R I CA N A M E R I CA N WO M E N REA DERS
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In what developed into a yearly tradition, members also attended Women’s Health Day at Texas Southern University (even now a predominantly black university) as a group, “sitting as a body,” each spring. There they heard varied presentations about health issues of special concern to the African American community. In 1950, for example, among the topics covered were tuberculosis, syphilis, heart disease, and cancer. Their appearance as a body of women community leaders at Women’s Health Day has a somewhat different performative dimension from their collective presence in predominantly white spaces. In this case, attending “as a body” added legitimacy to the event—and at once demonstrated solidarity with other women and underscored the importance of the topic for the black community as a whole. But both early and later in the group’s history, it was clearly also a reading and discussion group. The books and journal articles the women read and reported on mostly concerned African American identity. Books ran the gamut from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton, and The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter Woodson to a life of George Washington Carver and Inside Africa by John Gunther. It is clear that each of these works inspired interested discussion, for the minutes often note the fact if not the nature of discussion. During the meeting when Mrs. McCoy reviewed The Miseducation of the Negro, for example, the secretary wrote: “Comments were made and many worthwhile things were brought out.”21 But it is also clear that literature often took a back seat to the issues of the day. The minutes often record other topics of discussion before a note about the book under review: it usually came very much at the end of the meeting. And sometimes a reviewer had to wait for a meeting or two before there was room on the agenda for her book. At least once, this flavor is directly transcribed. On the meeting of 10 January 1957, after discussing their Christmas meeting, reporting on the illness of a member and raising money for flowers, and hearing Mrs. Dodson discuss her grandson’s acting career: “Because of the lateness of the hour, Mrs. White did not review ‘The Invisible Man’ written by Ralph Ellison, one of our own race. Mrs. White gave us an idea of what the book is about, that it deals with the spiritual feeling in the Negro, invisible because people refuse to see him. Mrs. White read the prologue, which was indeed interesting. She said the prologue was considered one of the most outstanding ever written.”22 The group took up that same book at a later meeting, when it was reviewed more fully by another member. It is interesting to note that this, one of the few evaluative comments about a book, shows deference to received critical opinion. This goes somewhat against the grain of the group’s tendency to choose reading without much regard to distinctions between high culture and more popular literary fare. On the other hand, the comment also notes the fact that an African American author 466
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had achieved pride of place in a generally white literary canon and is thus very much in line with the group’s concern for advancement of the race. The group also sponsored at least two poetry days, when members were “expected to bring two or more of their favorite poems and read them.” What is recorded in the minutes seems to imply a style of appropriation linked to the oral poetry recitations commonly inculcated in the schools of the nineteenth century, for in these meetings poetry was intended to be read aloud and probably from memory. The minutes indicate as well a mode of aesthetic appreciation stressing poetry’s capacity for daily celebration and inspiration rather than the detached and more purely “artistic” evaluative criteria of today’s academy. For instance, the minutes of the first poetry day begin: “The president, Mrs. Byars, spoke of inspiration received from Mr. Horn through a little book of poems that were used in the public schools of Houston when he was Superintendent.” Highlights of the meeting were recorded thus:
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Mrs. Byars read one from Dunbar [the first African American poet to win national critical acclaim]23 and one from Longfellow. Mrs. Webster read “What do we Plant When we Plant a Tree?” Mrs. White read “What it takes to be a Negro.” Mrs. Sanders read a spring poem from Dunbar and a song remembered from her childhood, also Dunbar’s “Candle Lighting Time.” Mrs. Cole read a poem, which was written by Mrs. Carrie Hines commemorating her wedding anniversary. . . . All enjoyed the favorite poem reading and decided to have poetry day more often.24 The borders between critically acclaimed literature and more informational or popular literary material do not appear to have been crucial for these group members, although it is clear that they were well aware of them. Because the question of race had such paramount importance, its elucidation made many kinds of material worthy of discussion, so much so that the minutes often record only an article’s subject, not its attribution. For instance, one meeting featured an Ebony article about “unusual things done by our folks in unusual fields”—including a Negro woman architect, and a Philadelphia violin maker, and an “article on the Negro in Alabama.”25 Other articles mentioned without their sources were about Haile Selassie’s visit to India, jazz and its influence on African American artists, and “ ‘Negroes’ Improvement in Family Life’ by Dr. Joseph Douglas, a great grandson of Frederick Douglas [sic].”26 The responses recorded in the minutes indicate a very interesting relationship between aesthetically defined genres or categories of literary evaluation and the identity issues that were most salient for the group. What in aesthetic or evaluative terms seems an unusual catholicity of taste—ranging from high to much more popular forms—can be explained by the fact that substantive A F R I CA N A M E R I CA N WO M E N REA DERS
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concerns, rather than purely aesthetic preoccupations, structured their reading choices. McHenry noted this quality of African American reading culture during the nineteenth century. Even the most elite literary circles among the black community combined social and educational prominence with reading practices that drew on literature as a resource for individual and collective exploration that could be linked to social action.27 This implies that analyses of reading practices must not overtly put them into a framework of social stratification and investigate how they vary by race, gender, religion, and other relevant positional markers. Such discussions must instead understand social stratification itself as a dynamic and at least somewhat open-ended set of practices and relationships that are always under negotiation within and between groups of people. Literature (and culture more generally) contributes to that historically contingent process in different ways depending on how different groups use literature within differing historical contexts.28 The Chat-An-Hour group’s lack of concern about policing the boundaries between legitimate and popular forms of writing seems to have sprung from a desire to understand—and change—the social situation of African Americans both in Houston and in general, a desire that moved beyond print culture altogether and also blurred the boundaries between study and action.29 For the women in this study group, reflecting on themselves and their world involved listening to a variety of lectures and reports—from fellow members and guests as well as from acknowledged experts—and often moving from information to a plan of action. Members gave biographical sketches of figures from George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington to Abraham Lincoln.30 They reported on the history of the NAACP, civil rights during Reconstruction, the Emmett Till and Asa Carter cases, and the integration of professional sports, as well as youth culture and the generation gap.31 Always interested in Africa, they heard one member discuss an artisanal project underway there and entered into correspondence about the exchange of handicrafts. Often, in less formal meetings, the women as a group would, in their words, “chat” about a particular topic. In this fashion, they gathered in 1955 to go over the ramifications of Brown v. Board of Education, as a year earlier they had taken up the word “Negro . . . as to how it is accepted or rejected. . . . The final decision was that we are just American citizens.”32 A distinguished roster of community figures also lectured to the group. For example, Dr. R. O. Lanier, president of Texas Southern University (then an exclusively African American institution), attended several meetings, speaking on topics from Albert Schweitzer and his work in Africa to the British Empire and the end of colonialism, a topic also addressed by Mr. Cavit. Mr. Adams discussed Langston Hughes; Mr. Biggers, a noted Houston artist, discussed 468
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art; Mrs. Nannie Aycock reported on the legal background for school integration (including the Hale-Aiken Bill), and the actual progress toward integration achieved in Texas colleges.33 Members and guests also reported on travel experiences: for example, a trip to a ranch in the Southwest owned by African Americans, or travels in Europe. Although the minutes are not always informative, one can extrapolate from the longer entries that issues of racial identity were salient here as well. For example, Mrs. Clay, who had visited a farm in Ontario, was reported as having “told of a bit of missionary work she had done in a friend’s home of another race.”34 And the minutes recording Mrs. Cole’s visit to Montreal, Canada, report: “She said there were 6,000 Negroes in Montreal and were just there as ants on a hill, with no organization. The only business a Negro could find was that of being a red cap.”35 Sometimes the sessions focused quite closely on black women, as was the case when a local entrepreneur reported on her catering business or when Mrs. Harris read an article on “the teenage girl of today compared to teenagers of her grandmother’s time.”36 Interestingly, African American women writers do not figure among the authors the Chat-An-Hour group discussed, so perhaps in this case the group accepted canonization processes that marginalized black women authors even more severely than their male counterparts. At their most descriptive, the minutes reveal meetings in which the boundaries between cultural, social, and political concerns were blurred and the group moved toward a synthesis of intellectual and more activist concerns. The meeting of 2 March 1950 is a particularly impressive example of this quality. Opening with the Lord’s Prayer, repeated in unison, the meeting became a free-form discussion because the invited speaker could not be present. The first topic was newspapers. People mentioned a newspaper published by Henry Clay Gray, “a gentleman and a scholar,” and speculated about why it had failed to “click with the masses” when other “inferior” papers were successful. Mrs. Byars then mentioned an article about the discontinuation of the Strand, a magazine that had featured articles by “many of our notables.” Mrs. Lulu White mentioned legislation on desegregating parks in Texas, and on her heels, Abraham Kazen, NAACP representative from Laredo, “spoke out in no uncertain terms against the separate but equal idea.” (The group was urged to send him letters of thanks for his remarks.) Mrs. Lulu White spoke again, giving “a resume of the NAACP meeting held in Marshall.” Next, attention turned to the U.S. Constitution: “Mrs. Sanders read an article on the 15th amendment with comments. Mrs. Byars took up the ten amendments giving conditions under which the first colonies became the United States.” After that, “Mrs. Sanders . . . called attention to the bad streets that are in sore need of attention and are really a seriA F R I CA N A M E R I CA N WO M E N REA DERS
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ous accident hazard. She was advised to report the same to the city council.” Next, “It was suggested that we call by Foley’s and view the art work, some of it being from some of our colored schools.” After discussing whom to send written invitations to for the next meeting, this meeting adjourned “after repeating the Mizpah.”37 As has been true of most women’s reading groups, whether black or white, the Chat-An-Hour Club displayed a spirit of sisterly solidarity. They held Christmas parties and picnics, and almost always mention their pleasant discussions “over the coffee cups” at the end of each meeting. But concern for fellow members is especially evident in acts of charity for ill members and remembrances for those who died. For instance, on 3 February 1955—a meeting centered on school desegregation—the club met at the home of Mrs. C. N. Love. “Mrs. Love is a charter member but is inactive because of ill health,” report the minutes, “but she is always happy to welcome her club members and other friends [who] pay her a visit.” After the members’ discussion, “The club served a lunch which they brought with them, and closed with a prayer and repeating the Mizpah, we bade Mrs. Love good-bye and promised to return soon. We were impressed by her wonderful spirit of cheerfulness.”38 As the years pass, notes of this sort increase in number—and the minutes grow scantier. In 1959, on the tenth anniversary of the group’s founding, a retrospective highlights not only the group’s history but also the warmth of its fellowship. “Our Christmas parties and chats over the tea cups at each meeting have helped us to know each other better and have kept the club alive and cheerful. All members present joined in the program to help bring to light everything of interest. All the chain lengths are good and strong, so we are strong enough to stay linked together for another ten years of service.”39 Unfortunately, there are only two remaining entries for the group in this notebook. The first, dated October 1969, marks the 20th anniversary of the group, celebrated with devotionals, a history, and a prayer “in memory of the deceased members and for the sick”—and also including “an appeal for the Marchers,” which brief note gave me the heartening feeling that the group’s tradition of activism, too, was still alive.40 The final entry, dated 22 February 1973 in a spidery hand, is an intriguing one. After the group agreed to continue its annual picnic (a tradition not mentioned until this entry) and decided to collect books and magazines for donation to hospitals and to send cards to members “in sickness or for sympathy,” it turned to the topic of black history. After hearing from Mrs. Ross on “The Purpose and Meaning of Negro History Week,” Mrs. Johnson engaged all the members in a discussion of “Let us know some of the contributions to Black History made by relatives of members of our Chat an Hour Club.” Here are recorded careers of teachers, technical engineers, superinten470
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dents of schools, laboratory technicians, law students, and the founder of a school of dance. Family pride, the rise of the black middle class—yes, certainly—but also a moving testament to a group of women who by their familial, cultural, and political work had helped to create a world in which their descendants could flourish. At a time when Texas white women’s culture clubs had subsided from their late nineteenth century and Progressive Era social activism into genteel benevolence and self-involved literary activity, this African American women’s study club used literary culture as a forum for negotiating race and gender and for supporting social action. Similarly, at a time when (in their different ways) the Great Books movement and the New Criticism were both formulating an aesthetics of art as timeless and relatively detached from any social and historical context, the Chat-An-Hour Club mobilized literature as a resource for urgent tasks of collective self-transformation and social change. Examining the reading culture of groups such as this one makes it quite clear that these women are not so much failing to achieve the standards of elite evaluation and appreciation but rather turning to literature for purposes of their own.41 Such purposes are related to their social position as members of a group that was excluded from the American mainstream but must also be related to their collective assertion that they deserved full inclusion politically, socially, and culturally. If the admittedly scant evidentiary record of a single African American book club can alert us to some implications of our nation’s social diversity for the nature of its diverse reading cultures, it can also point us toward considering the ways cultural processes undergird social movements and political mobilization. This may be particularly important for understanding women’s contribution to social and political activism, because women have often found it easier to participate in smaller and more intimate arenas than on the public political stage. In other words, it is evidence such as the frayed canvas notebook of minutes from the Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club that can keep historians of the book honest about the mixed and multiple uses of reading, the continuing tradition of a widespread American culture of self-improvement and social progress through reading, and the ways that sometimes political feeling motivates reading while at other times reading can move people to political action.
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CHAPTER 27
Book Collecting and the Book as Object Robert DeMaria Jr. .
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Modern American Styles of Book Collecting The post–World War II history of private book collecting in America is a story of increasing specialization and personalization. In contrast to the famous collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, late twentieth-century collectors are more often concerned with personal rather than civic, national, or global objectives. Like voting or marrying, book collecting has become more private. As one bookseller explains it, “Collecting old books . . . leads to personal growth because understanding them requires and develops [a] combination of intuition and knowledge,” and old books “can fill our imaginations and minds”; their presence, “with all their meanings and moods, enriches our lives.”1 Undoubtedly, value to the individual was always part of the lure of book collecting, but this is the part that has been most emphasized in recent years. As the reasons for collecting have grown more personal, collection building, even at the highest levels, has evolved from titanic efforts to rival the world’s greatest libraries into more modest and more personal attempts to complete a collection in one or another specialized area. The giants before the flood in American collecting were men such as Henry Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Joseph Widener, Robert Hoe, John Carter Brown, James Lenox, and Henry Clay Folger. Their stories are best told in Ruth Shepard Granniss’s chapters in The Book in America, Carl Cannon’s American Book Collectors and Collecting, and most recently in Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness.2 By contrast, even the most ambitious American collectors of the past fifty years have specialized mainly in a particular period or in the works of single authors and their circles. Their achievements will probably not be equaled by the next generation, just as theirs could not surpass those of the former generation. Only a collector such as William Scheide who inherits great pieces from earlier generations of his family can have a collection that rivals the scope of the best collections of earlier times.3 The reasons for the thematic change in book collecting may be partly cultural,
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but they are also economic. As William Reese, one of the great booksellers of the twentieth century, points out, after World War II it gradually became impossible for anyone to collect on the grand scale.4 Around that time the sums of money for grand collecting became widely unattainable, but, even more importantly, the books themselves became unavailable at any price. Especially since World War II, institutions have grown more prominent in the purchase of books, and their books rarely return to the market.5 A few libraries, such as the University of Texas, have spent enormous sums on books in the past fifty years, and many more have benefited from the gifts of private collectors.6 Not even the wealthiest institutions, however, can match the achievements of individual collectors like Huntington and Folger. No one could now gather the number of Shakespeare folios in the Folger Library (79 of the 204 extant copies), or the number of incunabula (pre-1500 printed books) in the Huntington Library. Although collecting on the grand scale is no longer feasible, it may also be true that it is no longer in keeping with the artistic styles of the times. The wealthy American barons’ style of collecting had affinities with their imperial corporate activities and perhaps with grand novels and epic movies of the times, works that tried to sum up everything. Many of the great barons (most notably Morgan) were not great book collectors in the modern sense: their collections were not expressions of their knowledge or of their sensibilities. They often delegated the details of collecting to booksellers and connoisseurs, while giving their names to empires of books that surpassed or incorporated the European book empires amassed in previous centuries. They were, in effect, movie producers rather than script writers or entrepreneurs rather than architects. In a way, they were doing battle with their financial peers of another era: Huntington outdid King George III and completed a phase of the American Revolution by collecting on American soil a greater number of early printed books than the British Library (one of George III’s pet projects). The era of Huntington and Morgan is past; collecting, like many other arts, has a more intimate face. The psychology of collecting now entails an individual desire for completeness and perfection more often than it does a quest for imperial dominance; hence, serious collectors have sought the areas and styles of book collecting in which, despite economic constraints, completeness and perfection are theoretically possible.7 From a purely intellectual standpoint, book collecting is a form of bibliography, another area in which thoroughness and completeness are desired, even if impossible, goals. Many collectors exhibit a sort of perfectionism in their approach to books and life, and this trait can be trained with equal if not more intensity on small rather than great themes. One very popular kind of diminished theme in modern book collecting is “high spots,” in which the collector tries to gather together one example of a B O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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first edition of as many great books as possible—Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), for example, a Shakespeare first folio (1623), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and so forth. This form of collecting is akin to the “cabinet” collecting of the late nineteenth century and resembles the genre of the miniature epic (like Pope’s Rape of the Lock), a world in a nutshell. Most knowledgeable book collectors spurn high-spots collecting, however, because it adds nothing to knowledge, either personal or civic; it is not bibliography. To a great degree, serious collectors also feel this way about their colleagues who seek to fill out one of the lists established by book clubs, such as the Grolier 100, of which there are many versions, or the Zamorano 80 (despite its extreme difficulty).8 As in other arts, there is a premium in modern book collecting on imagination. But there is also a demand that the collection create knowledge. As one writer on book collecting points out, part of the meaning of “collectible,” when applied to books, is that it adds to knowledge of the culture of the past.9
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Notable Book Collectors, 1945–2000 The most important collectors of the postwar period all have chosen themes less broad in scope, more responsive to personal interest, and more productive of knowledge than those that inspired the imperial and epic collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the most notable collectors in the post–World War II period are Michael Zinman, who in 2000 sent his important collection of pre-1800 American imprints to the Library Company of Philadelphia; the late Mary Hyde Eccles and her first husband, the late Donald Hyde, who built their magnificent collection around Samuel Johnson and his circle (fig. 27.1); the late Carter Burden, whose unsurpassed collection of modern books was bequeathed to the Morgan Library; Mark Samuels Lasner, who has given in trust his unparalleled private collection of late Victorian books and manuscripts to the University of Delaware; William Scheide, a thirdgeneration collector of early books; Robert Pirie, who specializes in Renaissance English literature; the late Gordon Ray, a Victorianist scholar-collector; T. Gimball Brooker, who collects early printed works, especially Italian incunables; Bernard Breslauer, another early printing specialist; Richard Gilder and Louis Lehrman, collectors of Americana, now on deposit at the New-York Historical Society; Julia P. Whiteman, whose collection focuses on rare bindings; Sandy Berger, a collector of William Morris and his circle; Louise Taper, whose collection of Abraham Lincoln materials is unmatched; and Frederick Koch, a specialist in late nineteenth-century literature and illustrations. Alongside such well-known figures are those whose drive for secrecy impels them not only to hide their names but also to hoard their materials. In the 474
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FIGURE 27.1. Mary Hyde Eccles at her desk surrounded by books. Courtesy of Robert DeMaria Jr. and Houghton Library, Harvard University.
extreme, this behavior not only costs the collector the admiration of the book world but also prevents the communication of knowledge. By contrast, accomplished collectors have achieved the bibliographic purpose of book collecting in a variety of styles. Mark Samuels Lasner, for example, has transformed himself into a source of knowledge as important as his collections by being forthcoming in conversation with many people in the book world, by personally preparing descriptive catalogs for exhibitions of his books, and by writing about his collecting interests in publications such as the Gazette of the Grolier Club. In Max Beerbohm: Books, Manuscripts, and Caricatures from the Library of Mark Samuels Lasner (Princeton University Library, 2 July–3 September 1991), Lasner describes twenty-five choice items in his vast collection. The items are arranged in chronological order beginning with the very rare Carmen Becceriense (A Poem for Mr. Becker, 1890), Beerbohm’s first separate publication. The exhibition proceeds through Beerbohm’s career, with highlights such as his most famous novel, Zuleika Dobson; A Christmas Garland, his collection of parodies of modern authors; and Around Theatres, a collection of Beerbohm’s essays edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Ten items are manuscripts: all are unique, and each is essential to a complete knowledge of Beerbohm. The copies of the printed books in this exhibition, unlike most copies of printed books, are also unique, or nearly so. Almost every printed item in the collection is an “association” copy that links the author either to friends or to other authors. The printed items in Lasner’s collection all reveal special knowledge because of additions to them.10 For example, Lasner’s first edition of Zuleika Dobson (1911) is a presentation copy from the author to his friend Wilfrid Phillips; on the front free paper Beerbohm—referring to the unpleasant typography—satirically jotted, B O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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“Mudie’s-young-men’s-eyesight edition.” Likewise, Lasner’s copy of the collection of essays Seven Men (1919) is a presentation copy to Beerbohm’s closest friend, Reginald Turner, who was the subject of the last essay in the collection. Its inscription reads, “For my dear Reg—hoping he won’t object to things said on pp. 317–320. Rapallo 1920.” These unique markings carry special knowledge in the context of a collection that is both bibliography and biography. The items are all of bibliographical interest but are also artifacts that permit a glimpse into the personal life and sensibility of the author. Beerbohm is the one author Lasner has collected in depth, but he follows similar principles in his broader collection of late nineteenth-century literature. He articulates the principles himself in his essay “Collecting Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.” Ascribing the origin of his passion to his admiration for the collection of Simon Nowell Smith, a former head of the London Library, Lasner says, “What he showed me was the direction I have since taken, to concentrate on a time frame rather than on a single author, to seek original condition, to appreciate the connections between one work of literature (or art) and another. The important thing was to try to recapture what the great collector Robert H. Taylor has called ‘the flavor of the period.’ If I could not live in the past, be it 1950 or 1880, I could somehow come closer to it, ‘clutching more firmly these relics from previous times.’ ”11 To “live in the past” is a personal goal; Lasner does not say he wants to preserve the past for posterity or build a monument to the past; he wants to taste it and experience it. This is a way of talking about collecting that marks it as part of the late twentieth century, while perpetuating the ancient idea that books allow one to converse with history. Michael Zinman’s character as a collector is entirely different from Lasner’s, although he has achieved equally remarkable results. Unlike Lasner, who grew up in a Victorian “cottage” with twenty-three rooms in the Connecticut countryside and was almost born into collecting late nineteenth-century artifacts, Zinman is a New York businessman (specializing in the sales of power plants and turbines) who has changed his collecting focus many times. As he said in a recent interview, he began by collecting “junk” as a child, although he was “interested in prints and books and things like that.”12 Around 1980 Zinman began collecting American printed materials from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, traditionally a focal point of interest for American collectors. Referring to Charles Evans (1850–1935), whose collecting enabled him to write the standard bibliography of early American printing, however, Zinman has asserted, “No one else had done it for about 100 years, not in the way I did.” The way he did it was to buy everything. Condition was not a consideration; he was not looking for collector’s copies or association copies; he did not mind buying duplicates. He got whatever he could and sorted it out later. 476
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Spreading his nets very broadly, Zinman brought in numerous pieces of uncataloged and unrecorded material. Unlike Lasner, he did not write about his activity or seek to solve the mysteries that he uncovered. Nevertheless, Zinman knew exactly what he was doing. As he put it, “Collectors create a puzzle and then look to solve it completely. . . . In my case it’s a little bit different. . . . My pleasure is in the process of providing information for others to answer.” High among the “others” in Zinman’s world are the librarians and patrons of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The purchase, at a very reasonable price, of more than 9,000 items in the Zinman collection has catapulted that venerable but underfunded institution to second place among all libraries in holdings of early American printed material (above Harvard and Yale, second only to the American Antiquarian Society). In a material sense, these institutions are the main places where the knowledge of colonial America resides. Zinman has collected things other than books, and he has bought and sold large collections many times. His most recent collecting interest is in the signs created and displayed by the homeless. What knowledge do such signs comprise? What personal achievement do they signify? The answers to these questions are not clear, but there would seem to be emergent knowledge here, and the satisfaction of preparing the ground for such knowledge is what Zinman seeks. (He has also set the standard cost of such signs, as a fellow bookman discovered recently when he attempted to buy one, as a present for Zinman, for less than the going price.) He has always enjoyed purchasing in massive quantities with a kind of speculative genius. Of all late twentieth-century collectors, he may have the greatest claim to imitating the epic style of greats like Huntington and Folger, but he operates on vast fields of ore rather than gems of established value. A third style of collecting, perhaps somewhere between Lasner’s and Zinman’s, was exhibited in the efforts of the late Carter Burden. He began collecting in 1973 in the broad area of American literature from 1870 onward, but in the late 1980s he began focusing on 600 of the authors on his initial list of 7,000.13 He rapidly amassed 80,000 volumes, in addition to several manuscript collections. He spread his nets widely but not so widely as Zinman, despite the size of his collection. He was after the works of particular authors whom he personally admired, such as Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. So much more has been printed in the modern era that even a massive collection contains a smaller percentage of all books published than do moderately sized collections of earlier material. (This is another reason why collecting on the grand scale of the nineteenth century is impossible today.) Unlike Zinman, Burden took very special care of his books, personally putting them in plastic covers and alphabetizing them for placement in an enormous room in his palatial New York City apartment. Among the treasures is a B O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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signed copy of The Sun Also Rises in which Hemingway suggests that some of the characters in the novel were drawn from life, but also states, “you would be surprised how much of the damned thing is invented.” The collection also contains a long series of letters by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon. Burden’s collection will be a civic treasure when the seals are broken (after Pynchon’s death), and surely a form of knowledge, but, like other great modern collections, it is also based on personal affinity and personal preferences.
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The Population of Book Collectors Book collecting is, of course, not limited to wealthy men and women, like those already mentioned in this essay, who have amassed important collections. In fact, a book collector of modest means might be a more imaginative and even a more discriminating collector than one with vast resources. This is especially true if one thinks of book collecting in the context of collecting in general. Social scientists working on the subject of collecting have arrived at various definitions of the practice, but they usually stress notions of selection, systematization, and some separation between the collectible value of the objects and their independent value (whether it is monetary or aesthetic), so that they may reside in relation to the other objects in the collection as part of the imaginative expression of the collector.14 In this view, collectors of modestly priced books may be truer collectors than the wealthy because it is easier for them to ignore the interfering factor of monetary value. However, it is difficult to get information about middle-class collectors. Even their numbers are hard to estimate, although Robert Rulon-Miller, a president emeritus of the Antiquarian Booksellers of America Association (ABAA), offers some plausible data. He uses estimates concerning the number of rare-book catalogs published each year and their approximate distribution to arrive at a rough figure of 186,000 for the number of individuals and institutions receiving catalogs on a regular basis from ABAA dealers. Adding the relatively small number of people who buy books exclusively from non-ABAA members, Rulon-Miller suggests that there are about 200,000 rare and antiquarian book buyers in America. How many of these buyers are systematic, selective, or deliberate enough to qualify as collectors is impossible to say. Yet, it is clear that these 200,000 buyers represent a wide range of collecting interests. Rulon-Miller says the collecting interests of book buyers are “as varied as the subject matter of books in general. The ABAA lists in its index of specialties over 300 subject areas. . . . I knew a collector . . . who was only interested in books on rat-catching. . . . You name a subject, any subject, and somewhere out there is a collector, or an institution who collects it, and a corresponding bookseller who knows something about it.”15 478
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The economics of book collecting is almost as hard to estimate as its demographics. In a recent report, the Book Hunter Press finds that in 1999 there were 7,095 used booksellers in America.16 This number may include some sellers excluded by Rulon-Miller, who estimates that there are 6,000 booksellers and that their combined annual gross income in 2000 was about $700 million. This figure does not include money spent at auctions, nor does it subtract money taken in from other dealers. Nevertheless, it provides a rough estimate of the amount spent on book buying in America at the time. The early part of the twentieth century is often spoken of as a golden age of collecting: numerous publications on collecting and the start of many clubs at the time attest to such claims, as do the extraordinary prices for books achieved at the famous 1929 auction of Jerome Kern’s collection (some of them not exceeded to this day). The vast sums spent by Morgan and Huntington make it likely that total spending, at least by individuals, was higher in those days (in adjusted dollars). Now there are probably more collectors and more diverse kinds of collections, but many people in the book collecting world complain that today’s new collectors lack the knowledge to select books intelligently. This complaint, if true, may be a result of an economy that has produced an upper echelon of the middle class, whereas earlier in the century the economy made fewer middle-class people “rich.” Another result of changing economic circumstances is increased opportunities for women collectors now, although men are still clearly more numerous and conspicuous. In the past, women were held back from collecting for the obvious reason that they had less control over family fortunes and expendable income. In addition, women were barred until recently from the book collecting clubs, which were an outgrowth of school and professional allegiances long inaccessible to women. The culture that allotted the library to men and the kitchen to women continues to have its effect, of course. Reading has long been for both sexes, but serious, intense reading has traditionally been a male activity, and collectible books are still associated with that form of reading in which wisdom for the ages is acquired. Now that collecting has spread to all forms of print and now that women have somewhat greater access to family funds and social clubs, it is reasonable to expect that women will become more prominent in the world of collectors, and there is some evidence of this on auction floors, at antiquarian fairs, and in the library of the Grolier Club.17
Communities of Book Collectors In addition to its economic footprint, the community of book collecting in America leaves its mark in many other ways. The numerous clubs for book colB O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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lectors all across the country provide one example. Among the most important of these are the Grolier Club in New York City, the Rowfant Club in Cleveland, the Book Club of California in San Francisco, the Zamorano Club in Los Angeles, Philobiblon in Philadelphia, and the Caxton Club in Chicago.18 Most of these clubs are still fiscally healthy and have kept up their membership, but exhibit some stresses and strains. Like many other kinds of social clubs, the book clubs have responded slowly to changes in the relations between the sexes in America. Their members are still predominantly male and old or middle-aged. Alterations in American domestic life in the late twentieth century account for some of the reasons clubs are under strain: younger collectors, like most people of the baby boomer generation, are often members of households in which both partners work and share domestic duties, precluding attendance at dinner meetings. Collecting clubs are therefore less social than in the past even when their membership remains strong. The advent of the Internet has further decreased contact among members of the book world, although it may have increased the number of collectors and dealers.19 The Internet makes it possible for collectors to avoid bookstores, and many collectors are naturally inclined to privacy, if not reclusiveness, in pursuit of their sometimes obsessive collecting interests. Particularly in the modern period collecting has become a form of self-expression, like writing or painting, and like those arts, it is most often practiced in solitude. Rather than going to shops and circulating in the book world, collectors can now in privacy ascertain the availability and value of a great many important books by surfing Internet connections such as Abebooks.20 Auction-house sales have also contributed to the reduced traffic in traditional bookshops, and they do not provide an alter-
FIGURE 27.2. An auction of art, press, illustrated books, and literature at the Swann Auction Galleries on 28 April 2008. This auction specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. The auctioneer is George S. Lowry. Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries. 480
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nate venue for interaction among collectors because many collectors are represented by agents at the auction (fig. 27.2). Book dealers participate in a rather vibrant social world, though it is sometimes riven by competition, but book collectors are increasingly rare in the social scene.
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An Exemplary Book Collecting Community Nevertheless, despite the isolating influence of the World Wide Web, the diminished importance of book collecting clubs, and the decrease of social contact in the shops, there are still healthy communities of collectors. The community of those who collect Samuel Johnson provides a good example. At the head of this community was, until her death in 2003, Lady Mary Eccles, formerly Mrs. Donald Hyde (born Mary Crapo). She and her first husband began collecting Johnson in the late 1930s, a little before the period under consideration in this volume.21 Had they started any later, it is doubtful that they could have succeeded to the great degree they did. Early on the Hydes purchased a very important collection of Johnsonian items from R. B. Adam of Buffalo; they also acquired a large share of the A. E. Newton collection at the sale of that important collector’s books. In a sense, they took over the stewardship of these two great collections, and in subsequent years the Hydes bought almost everything of interest that came on the market. Like most Johnsonian collectors, they expanded their holdings to include some of the writers in Johnson’s circle. Johnson’s great friend Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi became a special interest of Lady Eccles’s, and the collection is unrivaled in the number of letters between Johnson and Piozzi, his most important correspondent. The collecting style of the Hydes was certainly not to buy everything, like a Zinman, but at the height of their collecting activity, they were nearly as expansive. (Later, the quality of the material and its relation to cost became more important factors.) Like Lasner, they most wanted important material, but they did not mind getting multiple copies of many books. The collection has, for example, three copies of the book in which Johnson’s first publication appeared, John Husband’s Miscellany (1731); three of the first issue of his first book, Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735); and five of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, including two untrimmed copies, and one that belonged to Lord Chesterfield, the wealthy politician and patron of the arts to whom Johnson addressed the first issue of his Plan of an English Dictionary (1747). The British Library has only three copies.22 The Hydes not only amassed a great collection of Johnsonian books but also contributed very significantly to the life of the Johnsonian community. In 1953 they started a club called the Johnsonians, made up of scholars, book collecB O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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FIGURE 27.3. The library of the Grolier Club, New York City. Photograph by Jim Dow.
tors, book dealers, and others interested in Johnson. They held meetings in the early years at their home, Four Oaks Farm, in central New Jersey, and gradually expanded to larger venues, such as the Grolier Club (fig. 27.3). The club still holds a black tie dinner every year on or near Johnson’s birthday (18 September) and has a membership (by invitation only) that recently exceeded the long-established limit of 100. In addition to increasing communication among its varied membership of professional and amateur admirers of its hero, the club has helped spawn numerous other Johnsonian societies in the United States and abroad, including the Johnsonian Society of Southern California, the Johnsonian Society of the Northern Central States, the Johnsonian Society of Japan, and the Johnson Society of Australia. (There are at least two British Johnson societies—one based in London and one in Lichfield, Johnson’s place of birth.) Serious collectors make up a small percentage of the membership of these clubs, but they do join, and they do socialize at the annual Johnsonian meetings. Each Johnson society puts out its own newsletter annually, and there is, in addition, a Johnsonian News Letter that, founded in 1940, antedates the society newsletters and provides a model for them. Very early in its life, the original American Johnsonians organized a project to publish Johnson’s works 482
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in collaboration with Yale University Press. The edition has progressed slowly, but completion is expected in 2011. The Hydes built their Johnson collection partly in emulation of the accomplishments of earlier collectors, and they have in turn encouraged the collecting of Johnson among their peers and their youngers. It is partly through their influence that Johnson has attracted many other serious collectors who look up to Lady Eccles and have benefited from her knowledge and friendship, even as they became competitors of hers in the quest for choice items. Among people of their own generation with very notable collections were Herman Liebert, Arthur Rippey, and Lawrence Blackmon. The next generation of important collectors includes Loren Rothschild and Gerald Goldberg. Rothschild and Goldberg make an interesting contrast in styles of collecting: the Rothschild collection most resembles the Hyde collection in the fineness and beauty of its editions; Goldberg’s collection, on the other hand, is much broader in its inclusion of Johnsonian associations. In particular, Goldberg made a concerted effort to collect copies of all the books that Johnson is known to have reviewed in the periodical press and books to which Johnson subscribed. Goldberg has followed his instincts and spread his nets more widely, whereas Rothschild has more often set precise boundaries to his collection. In neither selectivity nor breadth does either collection rival the Hyde collection, but each contains Johnsonian knowledge unavailable elsewhere, and each is a personal expression of the collector’s interests and passions. As in the population of book collectors at large, among Johnsonian collectors the most ambitious and successful collectors are followed by numerous others with various interests. There are very highly expert collectors, such as the late Gwin Kolb, who has given the world’s most comprehensive collection of editions of Rasselas to the University of Chicago, and Donald Eddy, an important bibliographer who has thoroughly studied all the books reviewed by Johnson. There are young collectors, such as William Zachs of Edinburgh, and collectors who started fairly late in life but have amassed impressive collections: the most notable among these is Paul Ruxin of Chicago. Attorneys, such as Ruxin, are disproportionately represented among Johnsonian collectors, partly because of Johnson’s affinity for the law. As collecting has spread out into all areas of literature, societies associated with other authors have also arisen: the Aphra Behn Society, the Jane Austen Society, the Charles Dickens Society, the Wallace Stevens Society, to name just a few. These societies, like the Johnsonian societies, often include book collectors, although their populations also include scholars, enthusiasts, and amateurs of all kinds. Various impulses motivate the formation of these societies, but the infrastructure of them is built upon copies of the books written by their B O O K CO L L E C T I N G A N D T H E B O OK A S OBJ ECT
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heroes. The contents of the books and admiration of the author are important to these communities, but the books themselves—their actual physical presence—solidify the bonds, and they can do this even if they are largely unread. As the great collectors of the past century helped build the nation by transferring the literary wealth of the Old World to the New, modern collectors build smaller communities. They do this important work in the difficult context of a society that relies less and less on personal contact. Because the collectibility of a book is based on what it is, rather than a reading or representation of it, book collectors provide a material stay against the confusion of a world in which the virtual so often replaces the real.
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CHAPTER 28
Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-Typographic World David Reinking .
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Efforts to defend the codex book as the bastion of Western culture [are as if ] defending the wrapper would protect what is in the box. . . . These efforts to galvanize the codex book in the face of encroaching electronic expression miss the two basic points that should underlie such a campaign. . . . Before we fix on the book as the center of humanistic culture, shouldn’t we have a better idea of what books do to us and for us? . . . Having decided what we want to protect, how do we make sure it survives the movement from book to screen?1 This quotation from Richard Lanham alludes to what is arguably the predominant issue facing the future of the book during the period examined by this volume. Since the early 1980s, when microprocessors moved digital technologies into everyday use, there has been a relentless shift away from writing exclusively in the tangible, intransigent forms of ink and paper and toward the more ephemeral forms of digital texts. The power and pervasiveness of the digital revolution has been evident in how quickly it has transformed reading and writing by introducing new means and modes of written communication while making others obsolete. For example, only a few years after the introduction of word processing, the typewriter virtually disappeared. Likewise, e-mail has marginalized interpersonal and professional correspondence on paper. Yet, during this same period, there has been little basis to argue that the conventional printed book will disappear. In fact, through the turn of the millennium, more people than ever wrote, read, and bought printed books, while the market for digital books continued to be minuscule in comparison.2 (See chapter 2.) Nonetheless, there has been a strong intuitive sense that the digital juggernaut is not likely to stop at the cover of the conventional printed book. Scholars from various disciplines have engaged in speculation about its future3 as have commentators on popular culture.4 If it is difficult to argue that the book will disappear in the
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future, it is just as difficult to argue that new digital forms of writing and reading will have little effect on its future.
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A Crisis of Competing Paradigms Uncertainty about the future of books might be understood historically as competing paradigms, in which crisis results when old assumptions no longer fit new data and developments.5 Since the 1980s, there has been increasing evidence that the long-standing premises governing a typographic world do not map easily onto digital forms of reading and writing that define a posttypographic one. For example, traditional conceptions of copyright, intellectual property, and plagiarism are not readily applied to the unprecedented contingencies of disseminating information digitally. A noteworthy example is bestselling author Stephen King’s experiment that distributed a novella online, with the somewhat muted support of his publisher. When King subsequently proposed to sell a serialized story online directly to his readers, that experiment became his publisher’s worst nightmare. Although King’s own commitment to the conventional paradigm’s reward structure for writers eventually undermined his plan, others with less to lose—educators, scholars, and librarians— have embraced, sometimes militantly, the new freedoms of access and use made possible by digital media. (See chapter 9.) The breakdown of well-established concepts or the blurring of fundamental categories is also a mark of a period of paradigmatic crisis. For example, the distinction between reader and writer is less clear in a post-typographic world where digital texts tend to be naturally collaborative and interactive.6 As a case in point, the Institute for the Future of the Book has sponsored several projects that invite readers to interact with scholarly authors who post their preliminary drafts of book manuscripts online, essentially engaging readers in the construction of the book. Even what comprises a book has become less clear. Is the commuter who listens to the digitized text of a book read aloud really experiencing a book or simply an oral performance? Is the CD or DVD accompanying a college textbook a parallel book, an extension of it, or something else? What are the boundaries of the book when the textbook refers to, or its accompanying digital materials offer direct links to, various Web sites? Are e-books downloaded from the Internet and displayed on portable electronic devices with backlit screens still books? Can the device displaying the text be legitimately called a book? A technological innovation initiated during the 1990s extends the question further. Reminiscent of the palimpsest in an earlier era when writing materials were scarce and pages were overwritten with new texts, technicians seeking higher resolution for digital texts developed electronic inks embedded on 486
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FIGURE 28.1. The Kindle, introduced by Amazon in late 2007, receives and displays electronic books and newspapers on a hand-held screen. Among the claims for the battery-operated wireless device is that, at 10.3 ounces, it is lighter and thinner than a typical paperbook book. Courtesy of Amazon
paperlike pages where a variety of texts could be endlessly reconstituted. In 2007 Amazon.com, the online bookseller, released Kindle, the latest iteration in a string of digital reading devices aimed at moving books from page to screen (fig. 28.1). Using the concept of electronic print, Kindle claimed to have much higher resolution than previous technologies. Further, unlike previous devices, it used wireless cell phone signals to allow readers to download books conveniently in a variety of formats for a fraction of the cost of a printed book. Thus, it has become technologically feasible to imagine that each of us may one day soon own a device that might eventually look much like a conventional printed book but that could become any particular book almost instantaneously. Moreover, such an electronic book, as portable as any printed one, could make use of a variety of digital capabilities, including multimedia displays and links to almost any other texts such as newspapers, journal articles, and reference sources, assuming that these categories remain viable. If such a device becomes widely available and used, what would we call it? A book? Where would the book be? The device itself or some increasingly arbitrary unit of its ever-changing contents? Lanham’s challenge in the introductory quotation is one starting point for addressing such questions and for considering the future of the book in a posttypographic world. Without pretending to offer a comprehensive response, the discussion that follows explores some functions of books (and, more broadly, written communication) in order to consider their future within the paradigmatic shift from a typographic to a post-typographic world. It then examines VA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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what digital texts might do to and for us, emphasizing that the open-ended technologies of digital reading and writing represent an unprecedented opportunity to shape what books will become.
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What Does Written Communication Do to Us and for Us? Technology has always been intimately connected to modes of reading and writing and to their sociocultural effects. That is, the materials and the means available and widely used to create written texts dictate to some degree the nature of writing and reading and what role they play in shaping culture. Specifically, who writes and who reads what in what way for whom under what conditions and for what purpose are all promoted or constrained, if not strictly determined, by particular technologies of writing. The invention (an appropriately technological term) of the first syntactical writing in the fourth millennium BCE seemed to be prompted by a gradual shift in the rudimentary materials used to record the number of items traded. Later, scribes who wrote texts on scrolls frequently reiterated information because of the difficulty in rewinding the scrolls to review earlier portions of the text.7 Likewise, available technologies determine the extent to which diverse texts can be created and disseminated, which in turn may influence how readers approach texts. For example, approaches to reading texts may become more intensive or extensive when technologies make them relatively scarce or more plentiful.8 The important role of material technologies must be tempered, however, with the realization that writing is most fundamentally a tool of the human intellect operating in a social world. Literacy itself in one sense is a technology that may effect changes in intellectual functioning and how individuals relate to society, although the extent of those changes has been the subject of much debate and theoretical speculation.9 This perspective reminds us that, first and foremost, books, as one particular manifestation of written expression, are intellectual tools that serve the building of communities. In whatever form they might take, books, like any means of written communication, must serve our intellectual and social lives while to some extent nudging us in particular directions as a natural by-product of their constituent technologies. Such a view holds in balance the humanists’ instinctive bias against technology and the technophile’s tendency to value what can be done instead of what might be done to meet wellarticulated communicative and social goals.10 This view raises an important question about the future of books in a posttypographic world: can the intellectual and community-building functions of the book survive in a digital environment? Apologists for the conventional printed book such as Sven Birkerts have argued that the technological char488
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acteristics of digital media essentially undermine the fundamental intellectual and sociocultural benefits of conventional books and that those benefits may be irretrievably lost if books move into the digital realm.11 For example, he argues that the contemplative, personal reflection characteristic of reading books is not readily maintained in digital environments and that a shared cultural foundation is lost. Others such as Jay David Bolter and Allan C. Purves go so far as to suggest that the conventional printed book, while perhaps well suited to creating the monolithic cultural and intellectual traditions of the modern era, is not well suited to the more anarchic and fractionated intellectual and cultural landscape of a postmodern one.12 In an interesting twist on Orwellian themes, cyberage novelist Neal Stephenson offers a vision of how the multimedia book of the future might be a powerful tool for strategically shaping individual perspective and molding or resisting political movements.13 In short, to these writers the issue is not whether the book’s traditional role in building intellectual and cultural consensus can be moved to the screen, but whether in making that move the book may acquire characteristics more in tune with conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Another dimension of what reading and writing do for and to us is that all written texts interrupt the flow of time in the creation of meaning. Unlike speakers and listeners, writers and readers enjoy a temporal space for pause and reflection. Printed texts, especially books, represent this advantage taken to an extreme. A book, or at least the ideal of the book, invites discursive arguments that evolve slowly in their composition; employs abstract forms of language suitable for reflection without the nuance or distraction of diverse perceptual cues; and assumes an active, reflective reader to make sense of it. As Carla Hesse has written, “The critical distinction between ‘the book’ and other forms of printed matter is not [its] physical form . . . but rather the mode of temporality [emphasis in original] . . . which conceives of public communication not as action, but rather as reflection upon action.”14 That is not to say that the book’s physical form is inconsequential. A book is a physical representation of a circumscribed argument and it travels relatively well as a distinct representation of a particular author’s ideas and persona, which has had important historical and sociocultural consequences.15 The book’s physical distinctiveness and its portability have extended and reinforced its temporal claim on a well-defined reflective space for individual authors and readers who likewise have well-defined roles in the communicative process.16 Digital texts, on the other hand, are naturally inclined to erode this quiet, personal, circumscribed, reflective space, or at least to transform it into a more dynamic form. Digital texts are more naturally spontaneous, “noisy,” and ephemeral. They are much easier to produce, disseminate, approach, and reVA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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vise, and they lack the distinct boundaries that a book entails as a physical and conceptual entity. Further, digital texts naturally invite the use of diverse media and symbol systems, which enriches the diversity of written expression but at the same time complicates and transforms it.17 All of these characteristics work against the creation of a well-defined conceptual space for reflection with sharp temporal and physical boundaries between authors, readers, and texts. A major issue to consider, then, is whether it is possible, or, more importantly, desirable, to move the book to the screen in a way that preserves its inherent promotion of abstract reflection. Another relevant dimension of all reading and writing technologies is the degree to which the medium used to display written texts falls on a continuum from fixed to fluid. Fixity and fluidity are defined by three related concepts: malleability, accessibility, and multiplicity, which can be illustrated by comparing prehistoric writing on cave walls in southern France and a Web page on the Internet.18 The cave writing is high in fixity—it has remained available for millennia—but low in fluidity. It would have required considerable effort for the original writer to revise or update once it was produced (malleability) because the cave is obviously not amenable to the creation of portable (accessibility) copies (multiplicity). Digital texts, on the other hand, have highly tenuous fixity, as anyone who has lost a day’s writing to a computer crash can testify, but they have high fluidity. They can readily be copied and disseminated to intellectually and geographically diverse audiences, and they can easily be modified and updated, even perhaps by “unauthorized” (note the dual meaning here) individuals. Printed materials, most prominently books, have occupied a comfortable, unchallenged niche between these extremes. It might be argued that conventional books and other printed materials will and should survive on that basis. However, an important caveat complicates that argument. That is, this balance, along with its attendant concepts and unexamined assumptions, has been achieved more by default as a natural consequence of print technologies rather than by systematic analysis and conscious manipulation. Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued, for example, that the fixity of texts that accompanied the emergence of print technology in the fifteenth century created a new emphasis on recognizing the individual as an originator of texts, which gave rise to modern concepts of intellectual property, copyright, and plagiarism.19 Unlike print technology, digital technologies are open-ended in how we might imagine them being used to write, read, display, and disseminate textual meaning. As Arthur Ellis noted decades ago, the computer, which makes possible digital texts, is not a singular device with a limited set of applications and capabilities; it is a device that can become almost any device we choose to create.20 490
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Thus, digital technologies, when applied to the recording, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information, provide a means for imagining a broad expansion or restriction of fixity and fluidity and the attendant concepts of malleability, accessibility, and multiplicity. For example, the development of ASCII code was aimed at standardizing digital texts to improve both fixity and fluidity; encryption programs are aimed, among other things, at restricting multiplicity; and programs that act as “fire walls” are aimed at restricting accessibility. All of these examples are currently less than perfect in their implementation, but they illustrate that digital environments provide an unprecedented opportunity to shape, not simply to inherit, the consequences of a writing technology.
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What Do Books Do to Us and for Us? Among the many possible effects and functions of books, three warrant special attention because they have all entered into the debate about the future of the book. In addition, each leans toward the ideal of the book as “the bastion of western culture,” in Lanham’s words, not as just any collection of information and content that can be placed on pages and bound between two covers. Put another way, what is mainly at issue in considering the future of the book is not whether a phone book, a car repair manual, a hobbyist’s guide to planting a garden, or even a set of encyclopedias will survive in book form. Reference works (perhaps soon, even edited volumes such as this one) have already moved significantly into the post-typographic world and will probably continue to do so with relatively little fuss once the economic consequences for authors and publishers are resolved and once devices for gaining access to and reading such texts become more readable and portable. Access to this everyday, practical information has been largely usurped by the Internet. What most matters instead is the ideal of the book as a sociocultural artifact in the sense of Aldous Huxley’s observation that “the proper study of mankind is books.”21 First, books provide authoritative and reliable information. That characteristic is reflected in popular parlance by expressions such as “he wrote the book on it” or “this is a textbook case.” Books are, perhaps along with the academic journal, at least among academics, at the top of the informational food chain. Because, traditionally, books have required considerable time, energy, and resources to produce and disseminate, only the most worthy information is assumed to merit publication as a book. Of course, as has been pointed out by many writers of a postmodern bent, who has decided what is worthy has resulted in a literary canon dominated by dead, white males. One person’s appeal to quality is to another a form of censorship. Nonetheless, however imperfect the system may be in deciding who merits inclusion in the grand conversation VA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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of highly regarded texts, book publication has traditionally served as society’s arbiter of what is considered worth preserving. In considering how that value might be affirmed in digital texts, however, it is important to note that this role of the book has eroded beginning in the late twentieth century for reasons that are only indirectly related to the digital revolution. For example, using book publication as a mechanism to establish informational value relies on the relatively slow production of few books written by relatively few authors, which is in turn well suited to a system where publishing houses are relatively small operations run by bookish, intellectual connoisseurs. Today, on the other hand, a few major publishers, controlled by large multinational corporations, select books for publication as much for economic reasons as for their informational or aesthetic value. This emphasis on profit fuels the demand for and the production of a continual supply of new books and authors, which undermines the exclusivity that helped ensure the quality of information.22 (See chapters 2 and 12.) The shelf life of trade books, as Calvin Trillin put it, “is somewhere between milk and yogurt.” In the past thirty years, books have increasingly become a commodity and image-making device (e.g., to launch speaking tours, consulting services, or political campaigns), thus depreciating their capital as an authoritative source. That is not to say that particular books can no longer become influential. Given the surfeit of widely available books, however, influence comes primarily through celebrity status, often achieved, interestingly, through other media. As a result, it might be argued that books, beginning in the late twentieth century, were more likely to reinforce rather than shape the sociocultural landscape. For example, as John Maxwell Hamilton has pointed out, Oprah exerts as much influence on the success of a book as literary critics today, who themselves tend to approach reviewing books approvingly like “a counselor at a self-esteem camp.”23 Nonetheless, selling books in a digital environment has offset these trends somewhat. As chapters 5 and 23 note, online book sellers often make available to customers a grass-roots and democratic review process that invites all readers, regardless of status or expertise, to rate and review all books. Not only do books compete with each other in the marketplace; they also must compete with an increasing array of media and activities available for entertainment, recreation, and information. (See tables 12–14.) To television and film, the latter part of the twentieth century saw the addition of various new media such as video game players and a host of computer-based games and activities along with the expansion of other print media such as magazines often aimed at highly specific markets. To compete, publishers have sometimes redesigned books in the image of such media (e.g., textbooks that present informa492
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tion in formats that resemble magazines), further undermining the ambience of authority the book has traditionally possessed. Further, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the slow, deliberate filtering of information that traditionally contributed to the book’s authority has also been at odds with the rapid increase in the amount of information generated in all areas of inquiry. In that regard, the digital revolution has been both a cause, by enabling the collection and analysis of prodigious data, and a solution to this increase, by providing a means for rapid and widespread dissemination and ease of access. Gaining access to the most recent information today has been compared to trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose. The academic journal created in the seventeenth century was the first attempt to address the gap between information quality and timeliness.24 During the most recent period of the book’s history, however, even the academic journal has been considered too slow for keeping abreast of developments, especially in the hard sciences where teams of scientists working in laboratories around the world are making discoveries one day that influence their colleagues’ work the next. Thus, they use the Internet for information exchange, avoiding the conventional publication process entirely. (See chapters 19 and 20.) If the Internet is the Concorde of information exchange, the conventional academic journal has been a prop plane, and the book has traditionally been an ocean liner. And, just as these modes of travel have their advantages and charms, preserving the conventional book form or thinking about how it might be moved to the screen may depend upon our purposes for reading, writing, and obtaining information. At the same time, digital sources of information, particularly the Internet, have been much maligned for their unreliability. Simply because one can find much unreliable information in the vast relatively undifferentiated environment of the Internet does not necessarily mean that the authority of a book must inevitably be lost in a digital environment. Some trends indicate otherwise. For example, the burgeoning number of independent online academic journals during the 1990s suggests increasing use of and regard for online information.25 In fact, a more pragmatic and democratic definition of what is considered authoritative is easier to contemplate online. Online information might be validated more explicitly and neutrally than the printed book by revealing its source, who is using it, and how successfully it is being used. Ultimately, as historians of scribal publication have established in a different context, it may be counterproductive, even dangerous, to link the concepts of authority and reliability of information too closely to the technology used to disseminate it. The cues printed forms provide about their validity can be misleading and sometimes require high levels of literacy to decipher.26 For example, a book issued by a certain publisher may carry a clear set of assumptions about VA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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its content and the perspectives of its author and its targeted audience. Those who are unaware of the implied biases risk ascribing more authority to the information than it merits. This example is a subtle one compared to the more insidious efforts of some political and religious groups to elevate the stature of their ideas by publishing books that purposefully hide the author’s or sponsoring group’s identity. Mature readers seeking information on the Internet today may, of necessity, be wary and careful to evaluate and confirm the information they find. In that sense, books in the typographic world have been akin to the eminent lecturer to whom authority has been ascribed, but the dominant metaphor of the post-typographic world may be the seminar in which the authority and reliability of ideas are forged in the crucible of an inclusive debate. Such debates, however, are also occurring on the Internet about conventional printed books. Second, books are a valued form of aesthetic expression and pleasure. Throughout history, books have represented highly valued aesthetic qualities in both appearance and content, which are intertwined with their ability to evoke pleasurable emotional responses. The book is perhaps the quintessential objet d’art that has descended through the centuries as a unique blend of form, content, function, and evocativeness. We are simultaneously the offspring and the progenitors of the impulses exercised in the exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the medieval scriptorium. The religious zeal that glorified the content of the book by devoting much attention to its appearance remained evident in the period examined by this volume, although in muted form. The leatherbound classics or the aesthetic values exercised in the careful selection of fonts and layout by publishers such as Alfred Knopf are not as evident as they once were, but most readers continue to feel a strong affinity to the sensuous experience of a physically well-crafted and visually appealing book, the latter being especially evident in books for children. Likewise, what psychologists refer to as “paired associate learning” accounts for the fact that many readers associate the material form of the book with a lifetime of pleasurable experience, although that association may be giving way to a generation of readers absorbed in electronic media.27 The often-cited pleasure of reading an absorbing and aesthetically pleasing book in bed, on the beach, or on a long flight may be secondary to the book’s role as an intellectual tool and a cultural artifact, but it is real and must figure into speculation about if and how those qualities might be transferred to the screen, at least in the short term. Thus, the computer or other electronic devices for reading may need to be radically transformed. Computers during the 1980s and 1990s, with their Rube Goldberg configuration of plastic boxes, wires, and connectors, had virtually no aesthetic appeal, let alone portability. The desktop computer, as a device for 494
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reading books at least, has been compared to polyester, the miracle fabric of the 1960s. Functionally, polyester was everything a fabric should be, but few wore it. Early in the new millennium, however, there have been signs that computer manufacturers are moving beyond beefing up the internal power of their machines and discovering what automobile companies had discovered much earlier: style sells. For example, Apple Computer’s history of developing attractive minimalist styles for its computers and visually engaging user interfaces has received accolades for aesthetics as much as for technological prowess. Likewise, as Alberto Manguel has argued, there has always been a strong melding of ergonomic and aesthetic influences in determining the shape and form of devices for reading.28 Consistent with that tradition, since late in the twentieth century various digital devices referred to as e-books have been designed and marketed with the aim of capturing the ergonomic convenience and readability of conventional printed books while capitalizing on the capabilities of the computer, including downloading the text of conventional books through existing electronic networks. It is not difficult to imagine that eventually an aesthetic dimension may be associated with such devices. A more complex issue for the future of the book is whether written narrative, most prominently the modern novel, can move from the page to the screen. Will aesthetically pleasing and engaging narratives emerge in digital environments, and if so, will they supersede the conventional narrative forms of the book? Written narratives in books are implicitly linear with no overt participation of the reader in the story, which is a natural consequence of the book’s physical form and the assumption that independent readers will read pages sequentially. There are many examples of writers who have created nonlinear and more participatory narratives in books, ranging from James Joyce to writers of choose-your-own-adventure books for children. However, such writers are writing against the grain of a book’s form, and there are limits to how far such attempts can go given the technology of the book.29 Digital environments, on the other hand, more naturally invite nonlinear narratives in which a reader may participate more actively in determining where the story might lead. Several writers have experimented with hypertextual narratives, and some, such as Janet Murray, have begun to reflect on what the poetics of digital narrative might entail.30 None of these experiments has achieved widespread critical acclaim or popular appeal, but that may mean only that these efforts are incunabular. In the final analysis, those who have experimented with digital forms of narrative may be like sculptors who have been given a new stone, or type of clay, or metal in which to work, or, more accurately, like sculptors who have been given all three in a way that invites using them to integrate each one into multimedia constructions. Inevitably, aesthetic expression will emerge regardless of VA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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the particular technologies of writing and reading that come to be widely accepted, and it is unreasonable to argue that the book in printed form holds the deed on the aesthetics of narrative, especially if, as some have argued, narrative is hard-wired into the human psyche.31 Nonetheless, the psychological and social dimensions of experiencing narrative may naturally vary between the conventional book form and evolving digital forms. For example, the printed novel described as a page-turner can reduce the space for reflection during reading to nil, much as does an action movie, which led Bolter to characterize its readers as engaged in “anti-reading.”32 Likewise, the capabilities of digital media invite writers to create sensually rich narratives that unfold at the whims of readers (or viewers) who are engaged in a participatory, as opposed to a reflective, space. The extreme of this form of narrative has been imagined in science fiction as virtual realities where participants occupy the personas of avatars within imaginary worlds. Recent attempts to create such virtual realities on the Internet such as Second Life may be only crude precursors to that vision, although, for now, these virtual worlds do not seem compatible with the so-called serious novel that inspires rereading and reflection. Finally, the book is a genre of writing that encourages authoritative, linear, serious, and abstract arguments. Sitting down to write a book has meant invoking a different perspective from writing a letter, an editorial, a short story, or a journal article. One obvious difference is that the author of a book sits longer. A defining characteristic of the book is that it is the longest form of a single textual document. Not coincidentally, because in a typographic world length correlates with importance, it has also been the most prestigious genre for those who believe they have something worthwhile to contribute to the necessarily limited collection of published discourse. Consequently, writing a book encourages a single-mindedness of purpose and confers on authors a sense of authority that readers in turn accord them. For example, the academic thesis might be thought of as the model for the ideal of a book in a cultural sense. Advancing a thesis, perspective, or interpretation has been, in fact, the justification for writing a nonfiction book that aspires to be important and influential. That typically means making an argument sustained by as much supportive ammunition as can be mustered, with the assumption, of course, that others can write their own books if they wish to challenge one’s thesis. Tentativeness, self-doubt, and inhibition are seen as signs of weakness that may undermine an author’s case for publication and for the legitimacy of his or her ideas. Likewise, identifying the limitations or counterarguments to one’s thesis is usually grudging if it occurs at all. Instead, readers of books are left primarily to their own resources to test the veracity of an author’s message, typically by seeking out and reading other books addressing the same 496
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topic. The authoritative single-mindedness of the author who has been judged worthy of book publication also breeds a seriousness of purpose in writing and reading such books. Levity has not been prototypical to the cultural ideal of a book, and even when it is, it tends to take more culturally honored (i.e., serious) forms such as satire. The seriousness, even reverence, that accompanies the book as a physical object was poignantly illustrated in a scene from the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society when John Keating, a teacher at an exclusive prep school, directs his nonplussed students to rip out the scholarly preface from their poetry books and to toss the pages into a waste can. The scene works because the audience shares the students’ hesitation in carrying out such an irreverent act. A reverence toward books and a seriousness that it evokes are clearly socially constructed stances, but these stances are reinforced by the technological constraints associated with writing, producing, disseminating, accessing, and reading books. In addition, authors of books typically employ a linear logic and organization presented as a hierarchy of main topics and subtopics. The book as a genre of writing conforms to its physical form by having a beginning, middle, and end. Such writing takes much discipline to rein in the natural tendency to think by association, and the book is the highest and most discursive expression of that discipline. Readers are not necessarily expected to read only linearly, the index being a concession to nonlinear reading. Even so, nonlinear reading is in one sense an affront to the author’s efforts to develop a logical thesis. The book genre also naturally privileges the abstract over the concrete, because linguistic information in the form of the printed alphanumeric code takes center stage. Although there are books that foreground more concrete graphical information, the writer of a book does not typically start by searching through a file of pictures, maps, or diagrams. The ideal of the book is distinctly nonvisual in the sense that readers are expected to look through the text on the page, not at it, in search of deeper meanings. Or, as one writer has put it, the text is “the crystal goblet that contains the wine of meaning.”33 Thus, the ideal of the book gravitates toward the abstract and the discursive and tends to encourage a philosophical stance rather than a rhetorical one. These characteristics of the book genre have come to be culturally valued and might be cited as responses to the question of what books do to us and for us. But deciding which, if any, of these characteristics we wish to preserve if the book moves from page to screen is a more complex issue. Most fundamentally at issue is whether these characteristics are valued because they have become familiar and comfortable ways of conceptualizing writing and reading books or because they provide some inherent advantages over an alternative set of characteristics that might be imagined. What would be gained or lost if the book genre VA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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were transformed online to become less authoritative, less serious, less linear and hierarchical, and less abstract? Are the cogent arguments of a strongly argued, linearly constructed, and seriously presented thesis inherently better than an equivocal, divergent, exploration that does not take itself too seriously? These are more than rhetorical questions, because digital texts offer many technological capabilities that have potential to undermine the traditionally valued characteristics of the book as a genre. Digital texts are more naturally multivocal dialogues that resist the authoritative stance that is more natural when writers know that they are necessarily isolated from readers. For example, one wonders what the subtle effects on writing might be of the now common practice of authors adding their e-mail addresses to their publications. Similarly, the greater malleability of digital texts encourages an enlightened tentativeness that in turn encourages the testing of ideas in an interactive forum where revisions are always occurring. Thus, a writer in a digital environment is more likely to take the stance of writing to understand rather than writing to be understood. Digital texts also blur the physical and consequently the conceptual boundaries between texts, thus merging the lone author as idea maker into a vast network of competing ideas and perspectives. These qualities, when coupled with the ease of making associational links with diverse texts, create an environment that is more conducive to nonlinear writing and thinking. They also encourage authors to engage in a creative playfulness uncharacteristic of books. The digression, the caveat, and the epigram may be the mortar for building digital genres.34 In addition, the screen is a much more visually oriented environment for writing.35 Indeed, it is possible to imagine an author of a digital text starting with and foregrounding graphical information that might include animation, sound effects, speech, and video. Digital texts naturally inspire a visual rhetoric that moves alphanumeric text more to the margins. That it does is evidenced by the movement in the late twentieth century to include visual literacy in the educational curriculum.36 The post-typographic emphasis on the visual has already reflected back upon printed forms. A clear example is Wired magazine, which emerged as an intentional hybrid bridging the typographic and posttypographic world in the 1990s. In a visual sense, it is the textual equivalent of a heavy metal band, replete with graphical representations that overtly compete with the alphanumeric textual content. All this is to say that there is a major disjuncture between the natural tendencies created by the technologies of the conventional printed book and the emerging forms of writing that are most natural to digital environments. Trying to maintain some of the valued qualities of the book genre in a digital environment may mean that books in a post-typographic world will be sojourners in an increasingly alien land. It remains to be seen what qualities will endure, what 498
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qualities will fade, and what will become of the conventional book in a posttypographic world.
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Valuing Backward and Forward Lanham’s challenge is framed to look backward at what the printed book has offered culturally and then to invite us to consider what we value and what we might endeavor to preserve in the future. However, there is a complementary perspective that might help to shape the future of the book. We could take stock of the unique capabilities of digital texts as they are gradually being unveiled and then consider how those capabilities might be applied to compensate for the printed book’s limitations—limitations that are perhaps revealed only now that the status of the book has been challenged by other possibilities. That is, instead of beginning in the past, we could begin in the present or foreseeable future. We could ask, What do digital texts do, or what are they likely to do, to us and for us? Once we discover what we value or might value from the writing technologies of the post-typographic world, we might contemplate how to improve upon the forms of the passing typographic one. That exercise might lead us to imagine creating many kinds of books or multiple forms of the same book that are written or read differently by individuals in particular circumstances. To cite a current example, a conventional printed book read aloud to a child who sits on a parent’s lap creates one type of positive experience; however, the same book, when the parent is unavailable, provides different, but nonetheless important benefits, when read by a child independently on the computer screen where a click results in an audio pronunciation of any unfamiliar word. The reason it is possible to consider these and other types of writing and reading experiences is that for the first time in history the technologies available for writing and reading allow us to consider quite broadly what characteristics and capabilities of written communication we value under particular circumstances and, accordingly, to implement them. Texts made possible by digital technologies make available options of unprecedented range and power, thus enabling us to engineer the reading and writing experience for multiple purposes. But, in this new freedom there is ambiguity and perhaps a sense of loss. The concept of “bookness” may need to become more broadly conceptual and less associated with a physical manifestation of print technology. This shift may be difficult. Not only do digital technologies provide many new options for thinking about books, but there are few models for using those options purposefully. Likewise, in this period of uncertainty between a latent typographic and emergVA LU I N G R E A D I N G, W R I T I N G, A ND BOOK S
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ing post-typographic world, we have only a vague sense of what we might value beyond those qualities traditionally associated with books. Like any new technology, however, the ultimate effects and forms of a new writing technology take time to develop. Anxious novelists were not waiting in the wings for the printing press to appear. They emerged only after the technology of print was established and better understood and after audiences for creative fiction were available. One way to confront that ambiguity is to seek a middle ground between the old and the new. As the capabilities and potentialities of the digital texts emerge, we can apply them to furthering what we have always valued with familiar tasks and contexts. For example, the digital, multimedia encyclopedias, which at the end of the twentieth century became commonly available in schools, quickly replaced printed encyclopedias. These digital encyclopedias were readily accepted, in part, because they represented something familiar (i.e., an authoritative collection of diverse information that might be used for a school report) and something new that clearly enhanced previous capabilities (e.g., rapidly automatic Boolean searches for keywords within articles). At the same time they naturally evoked new possibilities (e.g., How might a video clip enhance a report and how might reports be constructed differently?). Likewise, the conventional printed volumes of the encyclopedia morphed in the twenty-first century into Wikipedia, a relatively new post-typographic source of textual information that valued immediacy and a democratic vetting of accuracy and reliability at the expense of fixity and privileged interpretation. That application would not have evolved into a popular, if not definitive, source of information if it did not serve real, valuable informational needs. As this example illustrates, seeing positive possibilities and potential futures is more difficult when the focus is exclusively on what we have valued and what we want to preserve of the past. It is also more difficult if we reject the possibility that the future might in some sense be better. It is especially difficult when digital texts are seen mainly as a threat to the long-standing values instantiated by printed books. Such views are especially shortsighted given that the traditional cultural and intellectual values embodied by printed books have been eroding steadily, independent of the digital revolution. In that sense, it might even be argued that moving the book into a post-typographic digital environment could be its salvation. That is, the possibility of preserving the concept of a printed book at least as a viable category of literate expression in a posttypographic world may lead to a more explicit understanding of its advantages and limitations as a genre and as a technology of writing and reading. Doing so will require addressing a complex array of social, cultural, economic, political, and legal issues and challenges that are likely to be resolved only through innovation and ad hoc attempts to experiment with new possibilities. In the final 500
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analysis, the issue of what should be valued in reading, writing, and books in a post-typographic world is not strictly a question of preserving and honoring the textual forms that we have known and that have served us for so long. Instead, it involves relishing the opportunity to enhance literate experience with the new technological options now at hand.
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Reading the Data on Books, Newspapers, and Magazines A Statistical Appendix Laura J. Miller and David Paul Nord
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Statistical trend data on the print media are not very reliable, especially when they stretch over half a century. The data in this appendix, therefore, should be considered rough estimates at best. Because advertising rates are based on audited circulation figures, the circulation data for newspapers and consumer magazines are probably the most reliable of the data reported in our statistical tables. Because of the enormous diversity in the book publishing and bookselling business and because of the policy of allowing bookstores to return unsold copies, the data on book sales are probably the least reliable. Over the six decades since the end of World War II, federal government agencies and industry trade groups have also changed how they collect and classify information, which makes trend studies difficult. These and other problems and anomalies are discussed in this introduction and in the notes to the tables. The Census Bureau in the Department of Commerce has been a major collector and disseminator of statistics on book publishing and bookselling in the postwar era and on newspapers and magazines as well. Since 1810 the decennial population census has collected information on manufactures, and every five years since 1947 the Census Bureau has conducted a separate Census of Manufactures, which gathers data on book, newspaper, and magazine publishing, such as numbers of establishments and employees, payrolls, and value of receipts. The Census Bureau’s Census of Business, which resumed in 1948 after a World War II hiatus, collected similar information on bookstores and retail book sales. The Census of Business was divided into three parts in 1972, and bookstores fell into the Census of Retail Trade. In the 1990s the Census of Manufactures and the Census of Retail Trade became part of the Economic Census, which continues to profile the American economy every five years in years ending in 2 and 7. Data from the various five-year censuses, from 1992 to the
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present, are available online at the Census Bureau’s Web site. Some of the key data on books, newspapers, and magazines published in the specialized manufacturing and business censuses have been republished in the Census Bureau’s annual Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, annual). Editions of the Statistical Abstract from 1878 to the present are available online. Other useful compendia of Census Bureau trend data are Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), also available online, and Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The Census of Manufactures and the Census of Retail Trade are the sources for tables 1, 2, and 7. Several other federal agencies, notably the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the Department of Commerce, have collected trend data on consumer spending on media products, including books, newspapers, and magazines. The BLS has gathered expenditure data since the 1880s; its current series of consumer expenditure sample surveys was launched in 1980. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s National Income and Product Accounts of the United States data go back to 1929. Data from the BLS and the BEA appear in tables 12 and 13. The most important private industry source for long-term historical statistics on book publishing is R. R. Bowker, whose founders launched the book trade journal The Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular in 1872 (renamed Publishers’ Weekly the following year) and the leading directory of book titles and publishers Books in Print in 1948. In 1956 Bowker began publishing a useful annual collection of statistical data on libraries and book publishing, including information on numbers and varieties of new book titles. This is the American Library and Book Trade Annual, later renamed the Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac. In 2001 the Bowker company was sold by its owner, Reed Elsevier, to Cambridge Information Group. A Reed Elsevier subsidiary kept Publishers Weekly, and the Bowker Annual was sold to Information Today. Both were still in publication in 2007. Bowker acquired Simba Information in 2003, which publishes detailed annual reports and studies on the book industry. Tables 3, 4, and 5 draw on data from the Bowker Annual and Publishers Weekly. Another important source for book industry statistics has been the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a trade association that has published the annual report Book Industry Trends since the late 1970s. Drawing on information from the federal government, from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and from other sources, Book Industry Trends reports data and makes sales esti504
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mates and projections for key sectors of the book business. For the 2006 edition of Book Industry Trends, the BISG extended its reach to many more small and midsized publishers through Web-based and telephone surveys of all owners of publications with ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers). The Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association, and the Association of American University Presses also collect and disseminate statistical data through their Web sites and printed publications. Tables 5 and 6 are based on BISG annual reports. Another useful compendium is the Subtext Perspective on Book Publishing: Numbers, Issues, and Trends, published periodically by Open Book Publishing, which also publishes the biweekly industry newsletter Subtext. Media marketing and media investment firms collect and sometimes publish data on book publishing and book sales, but they tend not to have compiled data on long-term historical trends. Moreover, much of their data is proprietary and unavailable to the public. Linda Scott discusses some of the sources for book marketing in chapter 4. For the twenty-first century, an important statistical source on book sales is Nielsen BookScan, which was launched in 2001 and by 2006 included books sales data from more than 6,500 retail locations across the country. Veronis Suhler Stevenson is an investment management company that specializes in media and communications. It publishes Communications Industry Forecast, an annual report that tracks consumer media use. Table 14 is based on Veronis Suhler Stevenson data. The standard source for long-term historical data on newspapers and magazines is N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, which traces its roots to the nineteenth century and which went through several title changes in the twentieth century, including the Ayer Directory of Newspapers, Magazines, and Trade Publications, the Ayer Directory of Publications, the IMS Directory of Publications, and the current Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media. The 140th edition of this classic directory was published by Thomson Gale in 2005. For newspapers, another important source of circulation information since 1959 is the annual Editor & Publisher International Year Book: The Encyclopedia of the Newspaper Industry. The regular January issue of the trade journal Editor & Publisher carried annual summaries before 1959. Data on magazine circulation and advertising since the 1990s can be found in the Magazine Handbook, an annual report published by the trade association Magazine Publishers of America. Ayer and Editor & Publisher are the sources for tables 9 and 10. Data from both government and private sources are incomplete and not always comparable over a time span as long as the postwar era. Census Bureau statistics on book publishing and bookselling suffer from several problems. R E A D I N G T H E DATA : A STAT I ST I CA L A PP ENDI X
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1. Number of Publishers. The Census Bureau bases its figures on “establishments,” a category that includes separate operations owned by a single “firm.” Such a definition makes sense for some types of businesses but is misleading for counting publishers. More problematic is the tendency of the Census Bureau simply to undercount publishers. The Census Bureau uses a narrow definition of what qualifies as a publisher and so excludes a large number of small presses, university presses, and the presses of nonprofit organizations. Small presses, including many shoestring operations run out of their owners’ spare rooms or garages, are especially likely to be overlooked. 2. Number of Bookstores. Stores that consider themselves bookstores but sell lots of sidelines (e.g., many religious bookstores) will not be classified as “bookstores” by the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics if books represent less than 50 percent of total sales. Such stores and their sales, therefore, do not show up in government figures. Furthermore, in the Censuses of Retail Trade for 1967 and later years, the numbers of bookstores with no paid employees were not reported. So, for the sake of comparability, the figures cited in table 7 include only bookstores that had employees with payroll. Obviously, that excludes many mom-and-pop stores. 3. Book Sales. The Census of Manufactures reported fairly complete numbers for books sold through 1977 (or at least for books the publishers thought they had sold). But after 1977 there were so many missing data for so many categories that we were not able to include in table 1 numbers of books sold for the censuses after 1977. The Census Bureau also issues monthly numbers on bookstore sales as part of its report on the retail sector. But these figures do not seem to be taken very seriously by members of the book industry, judging from the infrequency with which they are cited. Trade association reports tend to be more comprehensive and complete than government reports, but they have limitations as well. Statistics published by Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group include the following problems. 1. Numbers of New Titles. Though it has compiled the most useful data for the postwar era, for most of that time Bowker has routinely undercounted the number of new titles and editions, mainly because many publishers simply do not make their books known to Bowker. As Bowker has revised its procedures and reached out to include more publishers and books, the annual output of new titles reported in the Bowker Annual has sometimes jumped upward—not because of more production but because of more effort to report production. By 1997 Bowker had decided that new titles were so badly undercounted that they completely changed the way they compiled their lists. They switched from using their American Book Publishing Record database, which had counted only those books cataloged by the Library of Congress, to their Books in Print 506
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database, which included many more titles. (Under the old system, there would have been 61,700 new titles in 1997, but under the new system the 1997 figure jumped to 119,262.) Yet even the Books in Print database was (and is) far from comprehensive. In the 2000s Bowker further revised its methods of counting, and the numbers of titles soared yet again. (See the introduction to part 2.) 2. Classification of Book Titles. The book publishing industry has long used two different systems to classify new book titles. The classification scheme used by Bowker is represented in table 4, while the classification scheme used by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group is represented in table 6. (The ten broad categories in table 6 are broken down into subdivisions in AAP and BISG reports. See, for example, table 5, which looks inside the broad category “Religious.”) The Bowker categories go back to the days when book publishers were often more interested in libraries than in individual book buyers. They reflect traditional content and genre classifications. Data based on these categories are available from 1950 onward, but Bowker has from time to time refined its definitions for classifying books. Therefore, longterm trends, such as those reported in table 4 and in the 2006 edition of Historical Statistics of the United States, are rough at best. The AAP/BISG categories are based more on industry marketing and distribution channels than on actual use by consumers or libraries. As the industry has changed over the decades, these categories have become less apt. As just one example, the lines dividing professional books, college textbooks, and university press books grew increasingly fuzzy over the years. Some sectors of the industry—such as book clubs, mail-order books, and subscription reference books—changed dramatically as technology, marketing, and consumer habits changed. In the AAP/BISG classification scheme, “Mail Order” referred to books created specifically for the mailorder market, such as the old Time-Life series, not to the new Internet-driven mail-order business pioneered by Amazon.com. In the 2000s, “Mail Order” was merged with “Book Clubs” by the AAP, while “Audiobooks” and “E-Books” were added to the list. Meanwhile, the Book Industry Study Group dropped both categories. Besides changes over time, another source of uncertainty in the AAP/BISG classification scheme has been the fact that books produced for one market routinely have had secondary markets in other categories. In short, all of these categories are oddly arbitrary. Sometimes a change in method is completely elusive. Between 2003 and 2004, for example, the Book Industry Trends dramatically recalibrated its historical trend data and future projections for sales in school and college textbooks—without explanation. 3. Book Sales. In the book industry, most official sales figures have not come from retailers who actually sold to the end user. Rather the AAP compiles sales data from publishers who have a good idea of how many books they send out, R E A D I N G T H E DATA : A STAT I ST I CA L A PP ENDI X
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but not such a good idea about how many books eventually get sold, especially because both wholesaler and retailer are entitled to return unsold books at a later date. (The proverbial lament among book publishers is, Gone today, here tomorrow.) Additionally, there is again the problem of incomplete data. This has been the case especially for religious books because many evangelical publishing houses over the years have not reported sales data to the AAP. In 2005 the Book Industry Study Group published a report titled Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005). This study tracked tens of thousands of small presses across the country, many of which do book publishing as a sideline. Production and sales by these small firms have, in the words of the BISG, “been taking place under the radar of conventional tracking systems.” The surprising findings of Under the Radar encouraged the BISG to cast its annual data-gathering net much more widely. (See the introduction to part 2.) Nielsen BookScan is gradually becoming a more reliable source of retail sales data. By 2003 BookScan claimed to represent 70– 75 percent of the bookstore market, including major retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Costco (but not Wal-Mart). However, capturing data from the growing number of nontraditional outlets for books, from cookware stores to beauty parlors, will be very difficult for BookScan to accomplish. And BookScan does not address other sources of book sales, such as not-for-profit organizations that acquire books for sale or complimentary distribution to their members, or direct marketing via print, broadcast, and the Internet. 4. Book Prices. Average book prices reported by Bowker and reported in table 3 are list prices in an industry whose products are often sold at deep discount. Furthermore, average (mean) prices are skewed by extremely highpriced specialized works. As an example, in 2005 even the average price for a hardcover book in the category “Science” was $115.76. Many titles were priced much higher, of course; and that is true across the categories of professional and specialized works. 5. Proprietary Statistics. While many aggregate statistics for the book industry and other print media businesses are available to the public, much of the more detailed information is not. BookScan, for example, has shown no inclination to make even aggregate figures available to the public. Reports that are available for public purchase are priced so high that even most academic libraries do not acquire them. For example, the 2006 edition of Book Industry Trends from the Book Industry Study Group was priced at $750 for nonmembers of the BISG. And that was relatively cheap. Simba Information’s Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2006 was priced at $2,390. Helpful discussions of statistics on book publishing and bookselling can be 508
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found from time to time in trade journals such as Publishers Weekly and Bookselling This Week. See also Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodriguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), chaps. 1–2; Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), chap. 2; John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing: The Basic Introduction (New York: Continuum, 1993); John P. Dessauer, “The Growing Gap in Book Industry Statistics,” Publishing Research Quarterly 9 (Summer 1993): 68–71; Jean Peters, “Book Industry Statistics from the R. R. Bowker Company,” Publishing Research Quarterly 8 (Fall 1992): 12–23; and Hendrik Edelman and Halldor Bjarnason, “Statistics for the Publishing Industry: A Guide to U.S. Sources,” in The Book Publishing Annual: Highlights, Analyses and Trends (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1985).
TABLE 1. Book publishing in postwar America, 1947–2002
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Year
Establishments
Employees (in thousands)
Copies sold (in millions)
Receipts ($ in millions)
1947 1954 1958 1963
648 814 903 993
39.9 34.7 40.1 46.8
487 771 903 1,035
464 709 1,033 1,535
1967 1972 1977 1982
1,022 1,205 1,745 2,130
52.0 57.1 59.5 67.1
1,258 1,291 1,549 —
2,135 2,857 4,794 7,740
1987 1992 1997 2002
2,298 2,644 2,684 2,697
70.1 79.6 89.9 87.6
— — — —
12,620 16,731 22,648 26,204
Sources: Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Manufactures, 1954, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 1: General Summary and Major Groups 20 to 28 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1957), 27A-12; Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Manufactures, 1958, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 1: General Summary and Major Groups 20 to 28 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 27A-7 and 27A-18; Bureau of the Census, 1963 Census of Manufactures, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 1: Major Groups 20 to 28 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), 27A-25 and 27A-26; Bureau of the Census, 1967 Census of Manufactures, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 2: Major Groups 25 to 33 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 27A-6, 27A-25, and 27A-26; Bureau of the Census, 1972 Census of Manufactures, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 2: SIC Major Groups 27 to 34 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), 27A-6, 27A-31, and 27A-32; Bureau of the Census, 1977 Census of Manufactures, vol. 2, Industry Statistics, part 2: SIC
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TABLE 1. (continued ) Major Groups 27 to 34 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 27A-5, 27A-30, and 27A-31; Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Manufactures, Industry Series MC82-I-27A, Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Miscellaneous Publishing (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985), 27A-6, 27A-26, and 27A-27; Bureau of the Census, 1987 Census of Manufactures, Industry Series MC87-I-27A, Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Miscellaneous Publishing (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990), 27A-6, 27A-19, and 27A-20; Bureau of the Census, 1992 Census of Manufactures, Industry Series MC92-I-27A, Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Miscellaneous Publishing (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), 27A-7, 27A-8, 27A-20, and 27A-21; Bureau of the Census, 1997 Economic Census, Manufacturing, Industry Series EC97M-5111C, Book Publishers (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999), 7; Bureau of the Census, 2002 Economic Census, Information, Industry Series EC02-511-03, Book Publishers: 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 1. Note: Census figures for the book publishing industry are generally low because many small publishers and part-time publishers have never been counted in the censuses of manufactures. Furthermore, the figures for copies of books sold in 1972 and 1977 are incomplete. Census figures on copies sold are so incomplete after 1977 that they are not reported in this table. See table 6 for statistics drawn from another source, the Book Industry Study Group.
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TABLE 2. Concentration in American book publishing by largest firms, 2002
Total Four largest firms Eight largest firms Twenty largest firms Fifty largest firms
Establishments
Receipts ($ in thousands)
Receipts (% of total)
3,570 122 136 185 283
27,162,866 11,362,672 15,372,994 19,547,635 21,800,921
100 41.8 56.6 72.0 80.3
Source: Bureau of the Census, 2002 Economic Census, Information, Industry Series EC02-511-03, Book Publishers: 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 6. Note: In the economic censuses, an “establishment” is a single physical location at which business is conducted and/or services are provided. It is not necessarily identical to a company or firm, which may operate more than one establishment. A “firm” is a business organization or entity consisting of one or more domestic establishments (locations) under common ownership or control.
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TABLE 3. New book titles and prices, 1940–2005
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Average price in dollars Year
New titles and editions
Hardcover
Trade paperback
Mass-market paperback
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960
11,328 6,548 11,022 12,589 15,012
— — — — 5.24
— — — — 2.12 (1962)
— — — — 0.53 (1962)
1965 1970 1975 1980 1985
28,595 36,071 39,372 42,337 46,263
7.65 11.66 16.19 24.64 31.46
2.50 4.81 5.24 8.60 13.98
0.62 0.95 1.46 2.65 (1981) 3.63
1990 1995 2000 2005
46,743 62,039 122,108 174,092
42.12 47.15 60.84 67.37
17.45 21.71 31.07 31.69
4.57 5.85 5.77 6.68
Sources: American Library and Book Trade Annual, 1961 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1961), 74–75; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1963 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1963), 96; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1966 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1966), 58, 102–3; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1971 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1971), 70, 90–92; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1976, 21st ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1976), 178–85; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1982, 27th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982), 383–91; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information, 1987, 32nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1987), 411–21; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 1992, 37th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1992), 502–8; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 1997, 42nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1997), 505–11; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2002, 47th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2002), 548–52; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2004, 49th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2004), 508–13; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487–91. Note: The sharp increases in the numbers of new titles and editions in 2000 and 2005 represent changes in the method Bowker used to identify and count titles and editions. Before 1997 Bowker used its American Book Publishing Record database, which had counted only those books cataloged by the Library of Congress and thus had excluded considerable numbers of books. Later figures were based on Bowker’s Books in Print database, which is increasingly comprehensive. For further information on these changes, see Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2000, 45th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2000), 508–10; and Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487–88.
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TABLE 4. New Book titles by category, 1950–2005 Category
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2005
111 317 538 190 209
121 422 746 240 308
200 852 735 658 842
382 1,437 1,399 935 876
428 1,113 1,674 880 867
1,073 4,980 3,899 4,068 3,378
1,041 6,673 7,138 5,754 4,181
1,211 262 262 150 907
1,642 233 695 155 1,628
1,998 568 1,010 235 2,472
1,918 1,428 1,569 767 2,585
2,725 1,456 1,840 595 4,496
14,617 1,318 7,931 2,513 8,690
26,612 1,436 9,367 3,735 17,650
Language Law Literature Medicine Music
— 228 510 312 88
— 303 560 388 82
339 355 1,349 1,144 217
433 816 1,317 2,667 236
487 649 1,802 2,438 223
2,536 3,070 3,371 6,234 1,582
3,364 3,384 4,517 8,134 2,630
Philosophy and psychology Poetry and drama Religion Science Sociology and economics
380 453 626 499 447
496 404 983 833 651
843 973 1,315 1,955 3,867
1,097 962 1,635 2,551 5,876
1,350 826 2,005 2,276 6,146
5,556 2,479 6,206 8,464 14,908
8,206 6,573 10,790 8,684 17,519
Sports and recreation Technology Travel
153 366 221
233 574 372
583 930 848
808 1,923 413
721 1,687 365
3,483 8,582 3,170
4,991 8,097 3,616
Agriculture Art Biography Business Education
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Fiction General works History Home economics Juvenile
Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4-1051 to 4-1054; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2004, 49th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2004), 508; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007U, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487. The data in Historical Statistics are drawn from Publishers Weekly magazine and the Bowker Annual reports. Note: The sharp increases in the numbers of new titles and editions in 2000 and 2005 represent changes in the method Bowker used to identify and count titles and editions. Before 1997 Bowker used its American Book Publishing Record database, which had counted only those books cataloged by the Library of Congress and thus had excluded considerable numbers of books. Later figures were based on Bowker’s Books in Print database, which is increasingly comprehensive. For further information on these changes, see Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2000, 45th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2000), 508–10; and Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487–88.
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TABLE 5. Religious book publishing, 1985–2005 1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
New titles
2,211
2,005
2,914
6,206
10,790
Copies sold (in millions) Bibles, etc. Other books
18.9 122.6
22.8 114.9
26 .7 128.7
25.1 145.7
70.6 185.0
Sales ($ in millions)
536.7
788.0
1,036.2
1,246.9
2,293.6
Religious bookstores
4,126
3,850
4,026
4,029
2,741
Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4-1053 and 4-1054; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2004, 49th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2004), 508; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2006, 51st ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2006), 541; Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487; Book Industry Trends, 1995 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1995), 2-6 and 2-7; Book Industry Trends, 1996 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1996), 2-7; Book Industry Trends, 2002 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2002), 37, 40; Book Industry Trends, 2006 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2006), 10, 13. The data in Historical Statistics are drawn from Publishers Weekly magazine and the Bowker Annual reports. Note: The sharp increases in the numbers of new titles and editions in 2000 and 2005 represent changes in the method Bowker used to identify and count titles and editions. Before 1997 Bowker used its American Book Publishing Record database, which had counted only those books cataloged by the Library of Congress and thus had excluded considerable numbers of books. Later figures were based on Bowker’s Books in Print database, which is increasingly comprehensive. For further information on these changes, see Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2000, 45th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2000), 508–10; and Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2007U, 52nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2007), 487–88. Meanwhile, in the 2000s the Book Industry Study Group also made several changes in its methods of estimating and forecasting book sales. Each issue of Book Industry Trends includes a “methodology” chapter.
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TABLE 6. Book sales by category, 1985–2005 (numbers sold, in millions) Category
1985
1990
1995
2000
Trade books Mass-market paperbacks Book clubs Mail order Religious
576 .6 429.8 132.9 125.2 141.5
730 .7 488.8 110.6 142.6 137.7
850.9 487.9 120.8 97.7 155.4
903.9 471.3 143.1 65.3 170.8
2,263.5 573.7 — — 255.5
Professional University press Elementary and high school College Subscription reference
125.7 16.1 245.0 120.2 1.0
148.6 15.8 218.7 149.7 1.1
165.4 17.7 246 .6 155.0 1.2
186.7 31.0 333.6 186.3 1.2
278.9 24.5 176.8 76.5 —
1,914.0
2,144.3
2,297.6
2,493.2
3,078.9
Total
2005
Sources: Book Industry Trends, 1991 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1991), 2-7; Book Industry Trends, 1996 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1996), 2-7; Book Industry Trends, 2002 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2002), 40; Book Industry Trends, 2006 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2006), 13. Note: Incorporated in 1976, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is the industry’s chief trade association for policy, standards, and research. For further information on book categories and survey methods used by the Book Industry Study Group in its annual report, Book Industry Trends, see the introduction to this appendix. In the 2000s the BISG made several changes in its methods of estimating and forecasting book sales. For example, in 2004 the BISG revised the “elementary and high school” and “college” categories sharply downward. Thus, the 2005 figures in this table represent a change in method more than an actual decline in these categories. Each issue of Book Industry Trends includes a “methodology” chapter.
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TABLE 7. Bookstores in postwar America, 1954–2002
514
Sales ($ in thousands)
Year
Bookstores
Paid employees
1954 1958 1963 1967 1972
1,728 1,675 2,164 2,960 4,991
8,301 10,168 12,439 18,010 28,703
138,714 178,399 264,586 427,590 853,853
1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002
7,589 9,355 11,076 12,887 12,363 10,860
42,788 58,125 72,334 92,480 121,473 133,484
1,722,316 3,132,989 5,115,507 8,014,885 12,375,058 15,060,984
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TABLE 7. (continued ) Sources: Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Business, 1954, vol. 1, Retail Trade—Summary Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1957), 1–6; Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Business, 1958, vol. 1, Retail Trade—Summary Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 1–8; Bureau of the Census, 1963 Census of Business, vol. 1, Retail Trade— Summary Statistics, part 1: U.S. Summary (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), 1–8; Bureau of the Census, 1967 Census of Business, vol. 1, Retail Trade—Subject Reports, U.S. Summary (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 1–7; Bureau of the Census, 1972 Census of Retail Trade, vol. 2, Area Statistics, part 1: U.S. Summary (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), 8; Bureau of the Census, 1977 Census of Retail Trade, vol. 2, Geographic Area Statistics, part 1: U.S. Summary (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), 11; Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Retail Trade, Geographic Area Series, RC82-A-52: United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 4; Bureau of the Census, 1987 Census of Retail Trade, Geographic Area Series, RC87-A-52: United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1989), 12; Bureau of the Census, 1992 Census of Retail Trade, Geographic Area Series, RC92-A-52: United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), 12; Bureau of the Census, 1997 Economic Census, Retail Trade—Industries Ranked by Growth in Sales 1992–1997 〈http://www.census .gov/epcd/ec97sic/RANKUSG.HTM〉; Bureau of the Census, 2002 Economic Census, Industry Statistics Sampler, NAICS 451211: Bookstores 〈http://www.census.gov/econ/census02/data/industry/E451211 .htm〉. Note: The Census Bureau counts as bookstores only those establishments whose primary business is bookselling. The figures reported in this table include only those establishments that had paid employees and payrolls. For the Census Bureau, an “establishment” is a single physical location at which business is conducted and/or services are provided. It is not necessarily identical to a company or firm, which may operate more than one establishment.
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TABLE 8. U.S. paper consumption, 1940–2004 (tons in millions) Year
Newsprint
Printing and writing paper
1940 1950 1960 1970
3.7 5.9 7.4 9.8
2.9 4.5 6.9 11.1
1980 1990 2000 2004
11.4 13.4 12.9 10.8
16.1 25.5 33.0 32.7
Sources: Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 546; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), 676; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2007), 557. Data collected by American Paper Institute and American Forest and Paper Association.
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TABLE 9. Newspapers and periodicals in postwar America, 1940–2005 Newspapers
Periodicals
Year
Dailies
Weeklies
Weeklies
Monthlies
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
2,060 2,004 1,894 1,860 1,854 1,843 1,838
10,860 10,430 9,794 9,126 8,979 8,989 8,903
1,399 1,359 1,443 1,602 1,580 1,716 1,856
3,466 3,506 3,694 3,782 4,113 4,195 4,314
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1999 2005
1,819 1,744 1,701 1,788 1,710 1,647 1,452
8,824 7,159 6,811 8,420 9,011 7,471 6,659
1,918 1,716 1,367 553 513 388 —
4,087 3,985 4,088 4,239 4,067 3,447 —
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Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4-1057 to 4-1058; Editor & Publisher International Year Book 2006: The Encyclopedia of the Newspaper Industry, part 1: Dailies, 86th ed. (New York: Editor & Publisher, 2006), vii; Editor & Publisher International Year Book 2005: The Encyclopedia of the Newspaper Industry, part 2: Weeklies, 86th ed. (New York: Editor & Publisher, 2006), viii. Data in Historical Statistics are drawn from various issues of Ayer Directory of Newspapers, Magazines, and Trade Publications and from Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media. Note: The 2005 figures, drawn from Editor & Publisher, are not exactly comparable to the earlier figures, drawn from Ayer’s and Gale.
TABLE 10. Newspaper circulation, 1940–2005 (in thousands) Year
Morning
Evening
Sunday
Year
Morning
Evening
Sunday
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
16,114 19,240 21,266 22,183 24,029 24,107 25,934
25,018 29,144 32,563 33,964 34,853 36,251 36,174
32,371 39,680 46,582 46,448 47,699 48,600 49,217
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1999 2005
25,490 29,400 36,400 41,300 44,300 46,000 46,123
35,165 32,800 26,400 21,000 13,900 10,000 7,222
51,096 54,700 58,800 62,600 61,500 59,900 55,270
Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4-1056 to 4-1057; Editor & Publisher International Year Book 2006: The Encyclopedia of the Newspaper Industry, part 1: Dailies, 86th ed. (New York: Editor & Publisher, 2006), vii. Data in Historical Statistics for the years 1940–99 are drawn from various issues of Editor & Publisher International Year Book.
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TABLE 11. Newspaper audience penetration, 1970–2005 (as % of total adult population)
Year
Weekday readers
Sunday or weekend readers
1970 1980 1985 1990
77.6 66.9 64.2 62.4
72.3 67.4 65.1 67.1
Year
Weekday readers
Sunday or weekend readers
1995 2000 2005
64.2 55.1 51.6
72.6 65.1 59.6
Source: Media Information Center 〈http://www.mediainfocenter.org/〉, a Web project of the Media Management Center, Northwestern University. The data are based on consumer surveys by W. R. Simmons & Associates Research, Inc., 1970; Simmons Market Research Bureau Inc., 1980–97; and Scarborough Research, 1998–2005.
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
TABLE 12. Consumer spending on recreation and for books, magazines, and newspapers, 1940–2005 ($ in billions)
Year
Total recreation expenditures
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
3.8 6.2 11.2 14.6 18.5 26.9 43.1 70.5 116.7 187.6 284.9 401.6 585.7 746.9
Book and map expenditures (% of recreation) 0.2 0.5 0.7 0.9 1.1 1.7 2.9 3.6 6.5 10.6 16.2 23.1 33.7 41.8
(5.3) (8.1) (6.3) (6.2) (5.9) (6.3) (6.7) (5.1) (5.6) (5.7) (5.7) (5.8) (5.8) (5.6)
Magazine and newspaper expenditures (% of recreation) 0.6 1.0 1.5 1.9 2.2 2.7 4.1 6.4 12.0 15.9 21.6 26.2 35.0 42.1
(15.8) (16.1) (13.4) (13.0) (11.9) (10.0) (9.5) (9.1) (10.3) (8.5) (7.6) (6.5) (6.0) (5.6)
Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3-253 to 3-254; Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts Tables, table 2.5.5, “Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Expenditure, 2000 and 2005,” 〈http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/index.asp〉. Data in Historical Statistics are also drawn from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s National Income and Product Accounts of the United States. Note: In consumer spending surveys, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis includes in the category “recreation” a wide range of expenditures, including print and electronic media, computer products, spectator admissions, toys and games, sports vehicles and equipment, hobby equipment and admissions, clubs and organizations, gambling, etc.
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TABLE 13. Expenditures per consumer unit for entertainment and reading, 1980–2005 ($ per year)
Year
Total consumer expenditures
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
16,723 23,490 28,381 32,264 38,045 46,409
Entertainment and reading expenditures (% of total) 838 1,311 1,575 1,775 2,009 2,514
Reading expenditures (% of entertainment)
(5.0) (5.6) (5.6) (5.5) (5.3) (5.4)
114 141 153 163 146 126
(13.6) (10.6) (9.7) (9.2) (7.3) (5.0)
Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3-274 to 3-275; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures in 2001, Report 966 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, April 2003), 3; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures in 2005, Report 998 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 2007), 3. Data in Historical Statistics are also drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Surveys. Note: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has collected data on consumer spending for more than a century; the current series of Consumer Expenditure Surveys began in 1980. The current studies involve both diary surveys and interview surveys of a representative national sample of consumer units. A “consumer unit” is defined as a household of one or more individuals who share major expenses. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures in 2005, Report 998 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 2007), 3–6. The category “entertainment” includes expenditures on fees and admissions, media equipment and services, pets, toys, playground equipment, etc.
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TABLE 14.
Year
Total media
1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
3,307 3,252 3,391 3,492 3,809
Media use, 1985–2005 (hours per person per year) Consumer books (% of total) 80 95 99 109 106
(2.4) (2.9) (2.9) (3.1) (2.8)
Consumer magazines (% of total) 110 90 84 135 116
(3.3) (2.8) (2.5) (3.9) (3.0)
Daily newspapers (% of total) 185 175 165 180 168
(5.6) (5.4) (4.9) (5.2) (4.4)
Sources: Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2006 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2006), 736; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999), 580; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), 568. The data in the Statistical Abstracts are based upon Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Communications Industry Forecast, annual. Note: Estimates of media usage were derived from ratings data for broadcast, cable, and satellite media plus survey research and consumer purchase data for print media, movies, video, video games, recorded music, and the Internet. Usage data for print media and most electronic media are based on activities of adults over the age of eighteen. Usage data for radio, recorded music, movies in theaters, video games, and consumer Internet are based on activities of adults and children over twelve.
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NOTES
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CHAPTER 1 General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age 1. The Gerould Statistics: An Historical Compilation of Data from Academic Libraries in the United States and Canada, 1907/08–1961/62, ed. Robert E. Molyneux, 2nd ed. (1998), 〈http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/libsites/gerould/〉 (12 April 2008); Association of Research Libraries, “Annual Editions of the ARL Statistics,” 〈http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/ arlstats/preveds.shtml〉 (12 April 2008). See also Albert Henderson, “The Bottleneck in Research Communication,” Publishing Research Quarterly 10 (Winter 1994–95): 8. 2. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 15, 27, 118, 190– 91, 228. 3. John Keane, On Communicative Abundance (London: University of Westminster Press, 1999); Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 25. 4. Michael Lewis, Next (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 17–18. 5. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, Report 46 (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts Research Division, June 2004), 34, 39. 6. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 150. 7. Linton Weeks, “The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep,” Washington Post, 14 May 2001, C-01. 8. Jonathan Galassi, quoted in Craig Lambert, “High Type Culture,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 1997, 41. This seems to be a common refrain. Charles McGrath, book editor of the New York Times Book Review, made the same remark: “We used to talk about books the way people talk about movies today.” See David Kirkpatrick, Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Books Study Committee (New York: Authors Guild, 2000), 9. 9. William Miller, The Book Industry: A Report of the Public Library Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 5. 10. David A. Bell, “The Bookless Future,” New Republic, 2 May 2005, 31. 11. Miller, Book Industry, 3. 12. James T. Farrell, “The Fate of Writing in America” in Farrell, Literature and Morality (New York: Vanguard Press, 1947), 43. 13. Elizabeth Long, “The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing,” Book Research Quarterly 1 (Winter 1985–86): 6. 14. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 13–14. 15. See Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005).
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16. Michael Korda, Another Life (New York: Random House, 1999), 94. 17. Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 21. 18. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950), 234. 19. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990), 134; and Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 60–61. 20. Quoted in Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1. On the publishing history of Goldwater’s book, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 6–9, 13, 61–68. 21. From the Michigan Daily, 22 September 1960, cited in Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 150. 22. See John Cassidy, “Going Long,” New Yorker, 10 July 2006, a review of Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (New York: Hyperion Books, 2006). 23. Louise B. Russell, The Baby Boom Generation and the Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1982), 22–23. 24. See Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942, 1953, 1993, 2002, 2003). See also Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, D.C.: Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1993). 25. Edwin Kieser Jr., “The G.I. Bill May Be the Best Deal Ever Made by Uncle Sam,” Smithsonian, 25 November 1994, 129–39. A more skeptical view of the GI Bill observes that African American veterans in the South were denied the bill’s benefits by racial discrimination and poor administration. See David K. Onkst, “First a Negro . . . Incidentally a Veteran: Black World War Two Veterans and the G.I. Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944–1948,” Journal of Social History 31 (Spring 1998): 517–44. Also, the bill obviously provided support primarily to men, not women. Women represented a higher proportion of students in higher education in 1940 (40 percent) than in 1950 (25 percent) or even 1959 (33 percent). See Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 110. 26. Epstein, Book Business, 61. 27. Ibid., 67. 28. See Kenneth Elzinga, “The Eleven Principles of Economics,” Southern Economic Journal 58 (1992): 861–79. 29. Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 230–41, 281–82, 351. 30. Peter Givler, “University Press Publishing in the United States,” in Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newman (New York: Wiley, 2002). 31. Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 265–66, 276. 520
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32. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 180. 33. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 89–93, 309–10. 34. Edward Alwood, Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007). 35. Mark. J. Rozell, Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy, and Accountability, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 39. 36. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 172. 37. Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6. 38. “Attorney General’s Report to the President Pursuant to Executive Order 13392, Entitled ‘Improving Agency Disclosure of Information,’ ” 16 October 2006, 2, 〈http://www .usdoj.gov/oip/ag_report_to_president_13392.pdf〉 (12 April 2008). 39. Federal agencies and departments with FOIA officers are listed on the U.S. Department of Justice Web site. The Office of Information and Privacy in the Department of Justice provides information and guidance to other federal agencies on FOIA compliance. 40. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Politics of Civility,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 263–90, quotation at 263. 41. Korda, Another Life, 205. 42. Molly M. Ginty, “Our Bodies, Ourselves Turns 35 Today,” Women’s Enews, 12 August 2004, 〈http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1820〉 (12 April 2008). See also Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 43. Linda Bird Francke with Lisa Whitman, “Growing Up with Judy,” Newsweek, 9 October 1978, 99. 44. Julie Salmon, “Judy Blume, Girls’ Friend, Makes a Move to the Movies,” New York Times, 8 April 2004, E-1. 45. Annie Gottlieb, “A New Cycle in ‘YA’ Books,” New York Times Book Review, 17 June 1984, 24. 46. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (London: Museum Press, 1955), 379: “For some children, television has one good effect, in contrast with crime comic books, which have none. . . . Television gives a feeling of belonging. . . . Children get the feeling not only that they are taken into the adult world on the screen, but share the same entertainment with older children and adults—even with the neighbors! This is of course totally different from the solitary overheated entrancement of comic-book reading.” Marjorie Heins takes up Wertham and many subsequent crusades that justified censorship on the grounds of alleged harm done to children by exposure to sexual content in printed, filmed, televised, and Internet-transmitted content. See Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 52–54. On the anti-comics crusade, see also David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). 47. Rudolph Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read (New York: Harper & Row, 1955). This work was on the best-seller list for more than thirty weeks and received widespread newspaper N OT E S TO PAG E S 10 – 1 4
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serialization. See Jeanne S. Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (New York: McGrawHill, 1967), 3. 48. Louis Menand, “Cat People,” New Yorker, 23–30 December 2002, 148–54. 49. Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51. 50. Ibid., 53. 51. Ibid., 75. 52. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 88–89. 53. Henry Carrigan, “Reinventing American Religion,” PW Religion Update, 16 March 1998, 54–59. 54. Daniel Radosh, “The Good Book Business,” New Yorker, 18 December 2006, 54–59, quotation at 54. 55. See David Kirkpatrick, “The Book-of-the-Month Club Tries to Be More of the Moment,” New York Times, 28 June 2001, B1, B5; and BooksOnline, 〈http://www.booksonline .com/〉 (12 April 2008). 56. See Diane Ravitch, The Language Police (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 57. Epstein, Book Business, 4–5. 58. Ibid., 43. 59. Edwin B. Parker, “The Effects of Television on Public Library Circulation,” Public Opinion Quarterly 27 (1963): 578–89. 60. Bridget Kinsella, “The Oprah Effect,” Publishers Weekly, 20 January 1997, 276. See also Alex Kuczynski, “Winfrey Breaks New Ground with Magazine,” New York Times, 3 April 2000, C1. 61. See Motoko Rich, “Potter Magic Has Limited Effect on Youngsters’ Reading Habits,” New York Times, 11 July 2007, A1. 62. See E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). 63. Doreen Carvajal, “Virtual Publishing: From Arthur Clarke to Psoriasis Tales,” New York Times, 7 February 2000, 1. See also David D. Kirkpatrick, “A Stephen King Online Horror Tale Turns into a Mini-Disaster,” New York Times, 29 November 2000, C1. 64. Anthony Grafton, “Future Reading,” New Yorker, 5 November 2007, 50–54, quotation at 51.
Part I. Technological, Business, and Government Foundations: Introduction 1. See tables 1 and 3. The 1947 figures on book titles are from American Library and Book Trade Annual, 1961 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1961), 75. 2. “Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Rebounded Slightly in 2006,” news release, 31 May 2007, R. R. Bowker online, 〈http://www.bowker.com〉; Book Industry Trends 2006 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2006), 10 and 13. 3. Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005). See the statistical appendix in this volume for a discussion of book statistics. 522
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4. Alan B. Albarran, Media Economics: Understanding Markets, Industries, and Concepts, 2nd ed. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2002), 178; Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 16–18, 37; Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 5–6, 126; Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (New York: Verso, 2000), 117–21. For a far less gloomy view of consolidation in the book business, see Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodríguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10–15; and Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 64–65. 5. Under the Radar, 7, 15, 20–21. 6. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 47–49. 7. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 4, 11–12. 8. Judith Rosen, “The Espresso Machine Debuts,” Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2006, 4. 9. Epstein, Book Business, xii.
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CHAPTER 2 The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry 1. Thomas L. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 8; Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 526; John R. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 314–15; Michael Ermarth, ed., Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays and Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xviii– xxvii. 2. Albert Muto, The University of California Press: The Early Years, 1893–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 174–75; Tebbel, Great Change, 43–44; Gerard R. Wolfe, The House of Appleton (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 372. 3. Tebbel, Great Change, 144; August Frugé, A Skeptic among Scholars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 128. 4. Tebbel, Great Change, 122. 5. A. Wayne Anderson, Wiley: 175 Years of Publishing (New York: John Wiley, 1982), 146. 6. Roger Burlingame, Endless Frontiers: The Story of McGraw-Hill (New York: McGrawHill, 1959), 379–82. 7. Curtis G. Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad: Neglected Ambassadors (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984), 21–27; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 21–22, 192–93. 8. Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 17–42, 45–51; Frugé, Skeptic, chap. 8; Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 1977), 174–81; Saunders, Who Paid, 244–47; André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2000), 62. N OT E S TO PAGE S 2 6 – 31
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9. Anderson, Wiley, 149–51; Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 10–11; Burlingame, Endless Frontiers, 379–80; Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 292–93; Ken McCormick Papers, 163.11, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Tebbel, Great Change, 11, 110, 122, 471, 523, 547; William Murray, Adventures in the People Business: The Story of World Book (Chicago: Field Enterprises, 1966), 215–24. 10. Anderson, Wiley, 174; William Jovanovich, Now, Barabbas (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 41. 11. Gene R. Hawes, To Advance Knowledge: A Handbook on American University Press Publishing (New York: American University Press Services, 1967), 8, 109–13. 12. J. Hayden Boyd and William S. Lofquist, “New Interests in Old Issues: Antiprotection and the End of the Manufacturing Clause of the U.S. Copyright Law,” Publishing Research Quarterly 7 (Winter 1991–92): 23; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information (New York: R. R. Bowker), 8 (1963): 76–77; 17 (1972): 191; 27 (1982): 441–45; 37 (1992): 511; Anderson, Wiley, 167; Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 5; Exman, House of Harper, 293; Jovanovich, Now, Barabbas, 41. In the 1990s the Bowker Annual changed its name slightly to the Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac. 13. Exman, House of Harper, 262; Jovanovich, Now, Barabbas, 38; Peter Schwed, Turning the Pages: An Insider’s Story of Simon and Schuster, 1924–1984 (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 216. 14. Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 6; Burlingame, Endless Frontiers, 382; Schwed, Turning the Pages, 216, 227–28; Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 21, 92. 15. UNESCO, Index Translationum (New York: UNESCO, 1948–81). 16. Ermarth, Kurt Wolff, xxvi; Geoffrey T. Hellman, “Publisher,” New Yorker, 20 November–4 December 1948, reprinted in Portrait of a Publisher, 1915–1965, 2 vols. (New York: The Typophiles, 1965), 2:87–88; Benjamin Huebsch, “Alfred A. Knopf,” in Alfred A. Knopf: A Quarter Century 1915–1940 (privately printed), reprinted in Gerald Gross, ed., Publishers on Publishing (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1961), 306–7, and “Publisher: Con Spirito, Con Gusto,” in Hellman, Portrait of a Publisher, 2:37. 17. Muto, University of California Press, 185. 18. Adolph Kroch, “To Alfred Knopf from a Bookseller,” in Hellman, Portrait of a Publisher, 2:39–44; Brian Freemantle, CIA (London: Michael Joseph, 1983), 188–89. 19. Anderson, Wiley, 176–77, 237–39; Burlingame, Endless Frontiers, 382; UNESCO, Index; Wolfe, House of Appleton, 372; Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 17–51. 20. Schwed, Turning the Pages, 167–68; Tebbel, Great Change, 471. 21. Leo N. Albert, “Multinational Publishing,” in International Publishing Today: Problems and Prospects, ed. O. P. Ghai and Narendra Kumar (Delhi: Bookman’s Club, 1984), 45; Joost Kist, “The Netherlands in the European Community,” Book Research Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1990): 13. 22. Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 89–91, 147–48, 269, 272; “An Important Anniversary,” News from Cambridge, April 2000, 1; Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 15–16; Gayle Feldman, “Going Dutch,” Publishers Weekly, 21 June 1991, 19–26. 524
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23. Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad, 10–11. 24. Literary Market Place, 1987, 232; Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, October–November 1988, 12–15; Albert N. Greco, “Mergers and Acquisitions in Publishing, 1984–1988: Some Public Policy Issues,” Book Research Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1989): 34–35; Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodríguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 89–90. See also Fred Kobrak and Beth Luey, eds., The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992). 25. Albert N. Greco, “The Market for U.S. Book Exports and Imports, 2005: Dynamic Changes,” in Bowker Annual 51 (2006): 524–25, 532; Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 27–28. In 2005 Chinese publishers bought the rights to 3,932 American books, while American publishers acquired 16 Chinese books, according to the New York Times. See Jascha Hoffman, “Comparative Literature,” New York Times Book Review, 15 April 2007, 27. 26. Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford, 1998), 145; Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, chap. 1. 27. Dan Lacy, “From Family Enterprise to Global Conglomerate,” Media Studies Journal 6 (Summer 1992): 3; Tebbel, Great Change, 468. 28. Eden Ross Lipson, “Jean Karl, 72: A Publisher of Books for Children,” New York Times, 3 April 2000 (obituary); Little, Brown and Company, One Hundred and Twenty-Five Years of Publishing, 1837–1962 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 64, 66–67; Madison, Book Publishing, 438, 442, 468; Charles Scribner Jr., In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 53–54; Tebbel, Great Change, 477–81. 29. Exman, House of Harper, 277; Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), xvii–xviii; Bennett Cerf, At Random (New York: Random House, 1977), 152–54; Schwed, Turning the Pages, 167–68; Tebbel, Great Change, 471. 30. Bowker Annual 8 (1963): 60–61; 13 (1968): 65; 19 (1974): 183; 22 (1977): 324; 27 (1982): 393; 37 (1992): 509. See also Marjorie N. Allen, 100 Years of Children’s Books in America: Decade by Decade (New York: Facts on File, 1996); and Judith S. Duke, Children’s Books and Magazines: A Market Study (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1979). 31. Deidre Johnson, “Keeping Modern amid Changing Times: The Bobbsey Twins— 1904, 1950, 1961,” Book Research Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1990–91): 31–42; Susan Ferraro, “Girl Talk,” New York Times Magazine, 6 December 1992, 62–63, 86, 98; Jim Milliot, “Digital Copyright Concerns Lead 2005 Publishing News,” Bowker Annual 51 (2006): 23; “J. K. Rowling’s Seventh and Final Harry Potter Novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” to Be Published on July 21, 2007,” news release, Scholastic Inc., 1 February 2007. 32. Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 125; Tebbel, Great Change, 485, 486, 530. 33. Ted Hipple, “Young Adult Literature and the Test of Time,” Publishing Research Quarterly 8 (Spring 1992): 12; Barbara Bader, American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (New York: Macmillan, 1976). 34. Violet J. Harris, “ ‘Have You Heard about an African Cinderella Story?’: The Hunt for Multiethnic Literature,” Publishing Research Quarterly 7 (Fall 1991): 23–36; Donald Franklin N OT E S TO PAGE S 3 4 – 36
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Joyce, Gatekeepers of Black Culture: Black-Owned Book Publishing in the United States, 1817– 1981 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 85, 88, 92–93. 35. The Association for Library Service to Children, through the American Library Association, issues annually The Newbery and Caldecott Awards, which lists the winners from the first (in 1922 and 1938, respectively) to the present. J. M. Wood and N. K. Duke, “Inside ‘Reading Rainbow’: A Spectrum of Strategies for Promoting Literacy,” Language Arts 74 (February 1997): 95–106; “Wishbone Educational Philosophy Stresses Compatibility of Reading and Television,” news release, Public Broadcasting Service, 〈http://www.pbs.org/ wishbone/philosophypr.html〉 (3 March 2001). 36. “McGuffey Was Never Like This,” Fortune, December 1959, 109. 37. Scribner, In the Company, 44–45; Exman, House of Harper, 299–302; Tebbel, Great Change, 167. 38. Literary Market Place, 1986, 217–19; 1987, 232–34; Tebbel, Great Change, 503–8; Dan Lacy to Beth Luey, 7 November 2000. 39. Jovanovich, Now, Barabbas, 16. 40. Bowker Annual 13 (1968): 114–17; 14 (1969): 260–65; Tebbel, Great Change, 526. 41. Bowker Annual 27 (1982): 34–35; Greco, “Mergers and Acquisitions,” 29; Literary Market Place, 1988, 242–44. 42. Book Industry Trends, 2006 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2006), 153–54; Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 34–35. 43. Joan DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); David L. Elliott, ed., “Social Studies Reform and Social Studies Textbooks,” special issue, Publishing Research Quarterly 8 (Winter 1992–93); Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1980); Edward B. Jenkinson, Censors in the Classroom (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979). 44. Gayle White, “Home Schooling Appeals to All Faiths,” Publishers Weekly, 15 July 1996, 27–28. 45. Bowker Annual 8 (1963): 64; 27 (1982): 393; 37 (1992): 509. 46. Joseph Ben-David, American Higher Education: Directions Old and New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 1; Clark Kerr, “Higher Education Cannot Escape History: The 1990s,” in An Agenda for the New Decade, ed. Larry W. Jones and Franz A. Nowotny (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 6; Alain Touraine, The Academic System in American Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 115. 47. Clark Kerr, The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960–1980 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), xiii; Ben-David, American Higher Education, 1; Kerr, “Higher Education,” 6; Touraine, Academic System, 115; Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution, 2nd ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 23. 48. Cass Canfield, Up and Down and Around (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 324–25. 49. Anderson, Wiley, 151, 172, 174–75, 183, 193–94, 218, 228–29. 50. Donald Lamm, “A Brief History of W. W. Norton & Company,” typescript, 4 October 1993; Lamm to Beth Luey, 22 October 1996. 51. Book Industry Trends, 2006, 175–77; Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 99–100, 126–30; Kate Douglas Torrey, “Downloads, Copyright, and the Moral 526
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Responsibility of Universities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 June 2007, B16. See also John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), chaps. 8–9. 52. Computed from figures in Bowker Annual 8 (1963): 60–61, 66; and 37 (1992): 509, 511. 53. Touraine, Academic System, 132; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1993, tables 149, 417, 975. 54. Walter P. Metzger, “The Academic Profession in the United States,” in The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings, ed. Benton R. Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 124, 154. 55. Hawes, To Advance Knowledge, chaps. 1 and 2; Peter Givler, “University Press Publishing in the United States,” in Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newlin (New York: John Wiley, 2002); Association of American University Presses, Directory (New York: AAUP, 1982–92). 56. Irving Louis Horowitz, Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 193; Jack Meadows, “Too Much of a Good Thing? Quality Versus Quantity,” in The International Serials Industry, ed. Hazel Woodward and Stella Pilling (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1993), 25. 57. Computed from figures in Bowker Annual 8 (1963): 60–61; 17 (1972): 172; 27 (1982): 393; and 37 (1992): 509. 58. Book Industry Trends, 2006, 131; Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 68–77; John B. Thompson, “Survival Strategies for Academic Publishing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 June 2005, B6–B9. See also Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, chaps. 4–7. 59. Greco, “Mergers and Acquisitions,” 33; Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, 60; John Tagler, Elsevier Publishing Co., to Beth Luey, 22 March 2000. 60. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 5–6, 73–74; Schiffrin, Business of Books, chap. 1. 61. Book Industry Trends, 2006, 27–29. 62. Schiffrin, Business of Books, 73–74; Ken Auletta, “The Impossible Business,” New Yorker, 6 October 1997, 50–63. 63. Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 29–30. 64. Thomas L. Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982), 36; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 31–33, 50–54; Steve Hare, ed., Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors, 1935–1970 (London: Penguin, 1995), 148–50. 65. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 125; Clarence Petersen, The Bantam Story: Thirty Years of Paperback Publishing, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam, 1975), 13. 66. American Library and Book Trade Annual (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1960), 34; Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 169; Bonn, Under Cover, 42; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 44, 47. 67. Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 9–10; Bonn, Under Cover, 47–50; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 48–50, 93–96, 102–9, 115–18, 158–63; Petersen, Bantam Story, 12, 17. 68. Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 133–53. N OT E S TO PAGE S 40 – 4 4
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69. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 149–50. 70. Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 11–12, 26, 32–34, 59, 84. 71. Ibid., 29; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 168; Petersen, Bantam Story, 13, 24; Schwed, Turning the Pages, 163. 72. American Library Annual 1 (1956): 83; Bowker Annual 6 (1961): 53; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 266. 73. Bonn, Under Cover, 53; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 147. 74. Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 32. 75. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 210. 76. Bonn, Heavy Traffic, 12–13, 51–53; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 153–55, 160–63, 273; Petersen, Bantam Story, 37. 77. Bonn, Under Cover, 76–77; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 363–65. 78. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 363–65; Margaret Ann Jensen, Love’s Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984), 38, 40, 57, 322–24; Schwed, Turning the Pages, 270; Eva Hemmungs Wirten, Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1998), 45–47. See also Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), chap. 1. 79. Bowker Annual 5 (1960): 33; 21 (1976): 180. 80. Bowker Annual 6 (1961): 55; 8 (1963): 59; 12 (1967): 46. 81. Bonn, Under Cover, 60–62; Canfield, Up and Down, 231; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 125– 26, 208–10; Petersen, Bantam Story, 111–14; Sutcliffe, Oxford, 272. 82. American Library Annual 5 (1960): 34; Canfield, Up and Down, 225; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 267; William H. Lyles, Putting Dell on the Map: A History of the Dell Paperbacks (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 20. 83. Book Industry Trends, 2006, 27. 84. Ibid., 3–4, 28. 85. Ibid., 29. 86. Schwed, Turning the Pages, 227–28; Scribner, In the Company, 92. 87. Cerf, At Random, 278–79, 282–83; Scribner, In the Company, 173; Tebbel, Great Change, 160, 167. 88. Canfield, Up and Down, 231; Exman, House of Harper, 299. 89. Bowker Annual 17 (1972): 74; 21 (1976): 195; 22 (1977): 330; 23 (1978): 315. 90. Anderson, Wiley, 191; Cerf, At Random, 278; Tebbel, Great Change, 219–20, 226. 91. Wolfe, House of Appleton, 374–77. 92. Unless otherwise noted, information on mergers and acquisitions in the following section comes from the Bowker Annual; Literary Market Place; Greco, “Mergers and Acquisitions”; and Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, chap. 3. 93. Thomas L. Bonn, “Uneasy Lie the Heads: New American Library in Transition,” Book Research Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1989): 3–24; Linda E. Connors, Sara Lynn Henry, and Jonathan W. Reader, “From Art to Corporation: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and the Cultural Effects of Merger,” Book Research Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1985–86): 40–41; Schwed, Turning the Pages, 80, 84; Scribner, In the Company, 175–78. 94. Epstein, Book Business, 33. See also Lacy, “Family Enterprise,” 9–10. 528
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95. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Literary Family Feud inside Bertelsmann,” New York Times, 15 January 2001; Schiffrin, Business of Books, 76. 96. Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005), 15–15, 26–27. 97. Joyce, Gatekeepers, 79–101. 98. Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 439 U.S. 522 (1979), disallowed businesses from writing down the value of their inventories for tax purposes unless the sales price of individual items had been reduced. For book publishers this decision made it more costly to maintain a “backlist”—that is, to keep books in print and in stock. With a reduced income stream from backlist sales, publishers had an incentive to add more new titles each year and to dispose of them quickly. 99. Givler, “University Press Publishing”; Book Industry Trends, 2006, 132; Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, 148–59; “University Presses Rebound; Find Success in Niche Markets,” news release, R. R. Bowker, 16 June 2005. 100. Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 10–15. 101. Marian Wood, “Is Publishing Dead?,” Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, 25 February 2001. Epstein argues that more good books are now being published and read. See Epstein, Book Business, 13–14. See also Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce, 144–53. Patrick Henry explores print-on-demand in chapter 3. 102. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Mark Crispin Miller,“The Crushing Power of Big Publishing,” Nation, 17 March 1997; Schiffrin, Business of Books, chaps. 3–4. 103. For contrasting views by editors who experienced the same corporate takeover, see Epstein, Book Business, and Schiffrin, Business of Books. See also Wood, “Is Publishing Dead?” 104. Canfield, Up and Down, 202. 105. For examples, see Canfield, Up and Down; Cerf, At Random; and Hellman, Portrait of a Publisher. This argument is nicely summarized in Lawrence J. Kirshbaum, “Up from the Slush Pile,” a review of Epstein, Book Business, New York Times Book Review, 4 February 2001. A thorough analysis of these phenomena as they affected midlist books may be found in David D. Kirkpatrick, Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Study Committee (New York: Authors Guild, 2000). 106. Anderson, Wiley, 204. 107. “Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Rebounded Slightly in 2006,” news release, R. R. Bowker, 31 May 2007; Bowker Annual 51 (2006): 516; Under the Radar, 26.
CHAPTER 3 Book Production Technology since 1945 1. Victor Strauss, The Printing Industry: An Introduction to Its Many Branches, Processes and Products (Washington, D.C.: Printing Industries of America, 1967), 8. 2. Fred Dahl, Book Production Procedures for Today’s Technology (Wappingers Falls, N.Y.: Inkwell Publishing Services, 2001), 1. N OT E S TO PAGE S 49 – 55
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3. Helmut Kipphan, ed., Handbook of Print Media: Technologies and Production Methods (Berlin: Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg, 2001), 1107. 4. Edward Webster, Print Unchained: Fifty Years of Digital Printing, 1950–2000 and Beyond; A Saga of Invention and Enterprise (West Dover: DRA of Vermont, 2000), 3. 5. Strauss, Printing Industry, 126. 6. Michael Bruno, Frank Romano, and Michael Riordan, Pocket Pal: A Graphic Arts Production Handbook, 19th ed. (Memphis: International Paper Company, 2003), 54. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Raymond N. Blair, ed., The Lithographers Manual, 7th ed. (Pittsburgh: Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, 1983), 3:5. 9. J. Michael Adams and Penny Ann Dolin, Printing Technology, 5th ed. (Albany: Delmar/ Thompson Learning, 2000), 51. 10. Bruno, Romano, and Riordan, Pocket Pal, 94. 11. Frank J. Romano, Pocket Guide to Digital Prepress (Albany: Delmar Publishers, 1996), 119. 12. Adams and Dolin, Printing Technology, 184. 13. Richard Sasso, Publishing Timeline, 2000: A Chronology of Publishing and Graphic Arts Events (Hawley, Pa.: QBC Publishing Systems, 2000), 193. 14. Adams and Dolin, Printing Technology, 204–5. 15. Sasso, Publishing Timeline, 2000, 238. 16. Blair, The Lithographers Manual, 1:9. 17. Sasso, Publishing Timeline, 2000, 198. 18. Dahl, Book Production Procedures for Today’s Technology, 290. 19. Webster, Print Unchained, 200. 20. T. J. Tedesco, ed., Binding, Finishing, and Mailing: The Final Word (Pittsburgh: GATFPress [Graphic Arts Technical Foundation], 1999), 9. 21. Kipphan, Handbook of Print Media, 658. 22. Ibid., 689. 23. Webster, Print Unchained, 50. 24. Adams and Dolin, Printing Technology, 366. 25. Romano, Pocket Guide to Digital Prepress, 296. 26. Webster, Print Unchained, 190. 27. Kipphan, Handbook of Print Media, 977. 28. Patrick Henry, “HP Charts the Expanding Universe of ‘Print 2.0’ and the ProfitMaking Opportunities It Will Create,” 6 September 2007, WhatTheyThink.com, 〈http:// members.whattheythink.com/evt/07/ge07/ge07henry2.cfm〉. 29. Webster, Print Unchained, 206. 30. Andrew Tribute, “Printing Books Where People Buy Them: A Real Opportunity at Last?,” 6 December 2005, WhatTheyThink.com, 〈http://members.whattheythink.com/ expertrow/tribute46.cfm?printer=pr〉. 31. Judith Rosen, “The Espresso Machine Debuts,” Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2006.
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CHAPTER 4 Markets and Audiences 1. Per capita book consumption was calculated by dividing the total unit sales of books in 1954 and 2005 (drawn from tables 1 and 6 in this volume) by the U.S. population in those years. Population figures are drawn from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999), table 1411; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2007), table 2. See also William Miller, The Book Industry: A Report of the Public Library Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949); and Albert Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005). 2. Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf, People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits (New York: Book Industry Committee, Book Manufacturers’ Institute, 1946). 3. Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and Carl F. Kaestle, “Literacy as a Consumer Activity,” in Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880, ed. Carl F. Kaestle et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 166–73; Helen Damon-Moore and Carl F. Kaestle, “Surveying American Readers,” in ibid., 192–94; Statistical Abstract, 1999, table 1426; Statistical Abstract, 2007, table 214. 4. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1958 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1958), table 1004; Statistical Abstract, 2007, table 956; Virginia Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1994); Robert Dahlin, “Gardening: Roses Are Red, Grasses Are Green,” Publishers Weekly, 3 March 2000; Trade Book Publishing, 1998 (Stamford, Conn.: Simba Information, 1998), 99; Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, Inc., Excerpt of Selected Findings from the Consumer Study on Reading and Book Purchasing (Darien, Conn.: Book Industry Study Group, 1978), 101. 5. Stedman, Tinsley, and Kaestle, “Literacy,” 166–73. Damon-Moore and Kaestle, “Surveying American Readers,” 196–97. 6. Dan Lacy, “Social Change and the Library,” in Libraries at Large: Tradition, Innovation, and the National Interest, ed. Douglas N. Knight and E. Shepley Nourse (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1969), 8; Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 25; Beth Luey, “Leading the Public Gently,” Book History 2 (1999): 218–53; Charles Scribner Jr., In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 125–49. 7. Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 153; Lacy, “Social Change”; Jean D. Grambs, The Development of Lifetime Reading Habits (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1954). 8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950), table 11; Statistical Abstract, 2007, table 33. 9. Stedman, Tinsley, and Kaestle, “Literacy,” 154; Scribner, In the Company, 107, 110; Nancy Larrick, A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958); Cerf, At Random, 157, 159; Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf, People and Books: A Study of Reading and Book-Buying Habits (New York: Book Industry Committee, 1946); 1983 ConN OT E S TO PAGE S 7 2 – 7 6
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sumer Research Study on Reading and Book Purchasing (Darien, Conn.: Book Industry Study Group, 1984), 135–36. 10. Leading National Advertisers (LNA), (New York: Competitive Media Reporting, 1999). 11. Miller, Book Industry, 109. 12. Cerf, At Random, 217, 252; Whiteside, Blockbuster Complex, 25–29; “Touched by an Oprah,” People, 20 December 1999. 13. David D. Kirkpatrick, Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Books Study Committee (New York: Authors Guild, 2000), 39. 14. Orion Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–1931 (New York: National Association of Book Publishers, 1931); Miller, Book Industry, 96. 15. Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 16. Thomas L. Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982); Markets and the Media (New York: W. R. Simmons and Associates Research, 1994). 17. Whiteside, Blockbuster Complex, 21. 18. Ibid., chap. 7; Cerf, At Random, 157; Scribner, In the Company, 101. 19. Grambs, Development, 19–23; Larrick, Parent’s Guide, 49–50. 20. Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995), 153–58. The editors and I thank Christine Jenkins for bringing this information to our attention. 21. Scholastic: Special Anniversary Issue, 22 October 2005, 5–7. See also Jack K. Lippert, Scholastic, a Publishing Adventure (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1979). 22. John Dessauer, Book Publishing: What It Is, What It Does (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), 112–15. 23. Kirkpatrick, Report to the Authors Guild, 11; Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford, 1998), 145; John Dessauer, “Too Many Books?,” in The Business of Publishing: A PW Anthology, ed. Arnold W. Ehrlich (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1976), 21– 22. 24. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 37–38; Whiteside, Blockbuster Complex, 42–43, 48. See also Dessauer, “Too Many Books?” 25. Kirkpatrick, Report to the Authors Guild, 28, 42. 26. Paul Doebler, “The Big Boom in Remaindering,” in Ehrlich, Business of Publishing, 288; Margaret Langstaff, “Bargain Books: They’re in the Money,” Publishers Weekly, 29 September 1999, 52; Nancy McCord, “Bargain Books: What Makes This Business Work?,” Publishers Weekly, 22 August 1994. 27. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodríguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 86–89; Roger Smith, “The Rising Tide of Returns,” in Ehrlich, Business of Publishing, 232– 50; Trade Book Publishing, 1998, 22. 28. Paul Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77 ( January 1972): 639–59. 532
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29. Dessauer, Book Publishing, 116–17; Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 38–40; Jon Harden, “Publishers Can Use Market Research to Sell More Books,” in Ehrlich, Business of Publishing, 179–82; Miller, Book Industry, 21. 30. MRI Market Summary Reports (New York: Mediamark Research, 1998); Markets and the Media (New York: W. R. Simmons and Associates Research, 1985); Markets and the Media (1994); John McIlquham, ed., The Gallup 1985 Annual Report on Book Buying (Princeton, N.J.: Gallup Organization, 1985). See also Link and Hopf, People and Books; Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, Excerpt of Selected Findings; and 1983 Consumer Research Study. 31. Link and Hopf, People and Books. Link and Hopf defined “active readers” as those who had read a book in the past month. 32. Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, Excerpt of Selected Findings. 33. Damon-Moore and Kaestle, “Surveying American Readers,” 170–92; 1983 Consumer Research Study. 34. McIlquham, Gallup 1985 Annual Report, 23; Markets and the Media (1985 and 1994). 35. Trade Book Publishing, 1998, 128; Radway, Reading the Romance, 36–43. 36. G. Robert Carlsen, Books and the Teen-Age Reader (New York: Bantam, 1967), 23– 28. 37. 1983 Consumer Research Study; Trade Book Publishing, 1998, 6. 38. MRI Market Summary Reports. 39. Markets and the Media (1985 and 1994). 40. MRI Market Summary Reports. For the National Endowment for the Arts studies, see Joan Shelley Rubin, chapter 23 in this volume.
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CHAPTER 5 Selling the Product 1. Elizabeth Long, “Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 600. 2. William Miller, The Book Industry: A Report of the Public Library Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 89–90, 147. 3. John P. Dessauer, “Book Industry Economics in 1984,” Book Publishing Annual (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1985), 105. See also “Changes in Distribution Viewed at N.Y.U. Course,” Publishers Weekly, 18 November 1957, 28–30. 4. American Book Publishers Council, The Situation and Outlook for the Book Trade (New York: American Book Publishers Council, 1951), 35. 5. See, e.g., Irwin D. Wolf, “Is Prestige an Adequate Substitute for Profit?,” Publishers Weekly, 2 June 1951, 2294–99. 6. American Book Trade Directory, 15th ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1961). 7. Jerome P. Frank, “Waldenbooks at 50: America’s Biggest Book Chain Aims to Turn More Browsers into Buyers,” Publishers Weekly, 29 April 1983, 36–41. 8. For this account of Waldenbooks’ development, see, e.g., ibid.; “ ‘K-books?’ How Walden Could Help Kmart,” Chain Store Age, General Merchandise Edition, September 1984, 88, 93; John Mutter, “Bankruptcy Updates: Brentano’s, Hastings, A & W,” Publishers N OT E S TO PAGE S 85 – 95
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Weekly, 7 October 1983, 16; John Mutter, “Waldenbooks to Be Sold to Kmart Chain,” Publishers Weekly, 3 August 1984, 15–16; Stephen J. Sansweet, “Carter Hawley to Sell Walden Book Unit to Kmart; General Cinema Ends Option,” Wall Street Journal, 23 July 1984, 2; “Walden, Dalton Neck and Neck for Top Revenue Spot,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 8 June 1981, 1–3; “Waldenbooks Agrees to Acquire Coles’ U.S. Stores,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 3 August 1987, 1, 9; Nancy Yoshihara, “Carter Hawley Committed to Sell Book Chain,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1984, IV:1. 9. For the early years of B. Dalton, see, e.g., “B. Dalton, Bookseller Opens in a Suburb as Subsidiary of Dayton’s,” Publishers Weekly, 29 August 1966, 332–34; “B. Dalton, Bookseller Opens in St. Louis Area,” Publishers Weekly, 20 February 1967, 137–38; “Minneapolis Department Store to Open String of Bookshops,” Publishers Weekly, 9 May 1966, 70. 10. “Dayton Corporation Acquires Pickwick Book Shops,” Publishers Weekly, 29 April 1968, 59; “Four Major Bookstore Chains Plan 125 New Stores in ’76,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 3 May 1976, 1–2; “Walden, Dalton Neck and Neck.” 11. On the Barnes & Noble–B. Dalton merger and subsequent acquisitions, see, e.g., “Barnes & Noble Acquires Trademark from HarperCollins,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 14 January 1991, 7–8; “Group Headed by Barnes & Noble to Acquire Dalton,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 1 December 1986, 1, 7–8; John Mutter, “A Chat with Bookseller Len Riggio,” Publishers Weekly, 3 May 1991, 33–38; Allene Symons, “Barnes & Noble to Buy B. Dalton; Will Become Largest Chain,” Publishers Weekly, 12 December 1986, 17, 23. 12. See, e.g., “Waldenbooks Goes Beyond Low Prices,” Chain Store Age, General Merchandising Trends, March 1985, 21–22; “Dalton Closes Pickwick Discount Book Chain,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 23 June 1986, 1, 7–8; “Competition Causes Discounting ‘Price Wars’ among General Bookstore Chains,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 4 November 1985, 1, 5–6. 13. Laura J. Miller, “Cultural Authority and the Use of New Technology in the Book Trade,” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 28 (1999): 297–313. 14. Paul D. Doebler, “Areas of Major Change in the Book Industry Today,” in John P. Dessauer, Paul D. Doebler, and E. Wayne Nordberg, Book Industry Trends, 1978 (Darien, Conn: Book Industry Study Group, 1978), 24. 15. My own calculation based on figures from “B. Dalton Boosts Lead over Waldenbooks in Bookstore Chain Ranking,” BP Report on the Business of Book Publishing, 13 June 1983, 1–3, and U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Retail Trade: Preliminary Report Industry Series: Book Stores (Industry 5942) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, April 1984). It should be noted that these figures represent bookstore sales only and do not include book sales from other kinds of outlets. When the latter are factored in, the market share of the chains would be reduced accordingly. 16. See Laura J. Miller, “Shopping for Community: The Transformation of the Bookstore into a Vital Community Institution,” Media, Culture & Society 21 (1999): 385–407. 17. See Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 18. See the annual American Book Trade Directory. 19. See, e.g., “Bookstop Expanding Presence in Texas Book-Selling Market,” BP Report 534
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on the Business of Book Publishing, 19 August 1985, 2–3; “Supermarket Format Propels Bookstop,” Chain Store Age, General Merchandise Trends, December 1987, 57–60. 20. See, e.g., “K Mart’s Fast Move in Book Superstores,” Mergers & Acquisitions, January– February 1993, 48; John Mutter and Maureen O’Brien, “Walden Parent Kmart Buys Borders Chain,” Publishers Weekly, 12 October 1992, 8; “New Shops,” Publishers Weekly, 12 March 1973, 52. 21. Barnes & Noble, Inc., Form S-3, Initial Public Offering Prospectus (28 September 1994); Borders Group, Inc., 1995 Borders Group, Inc. Annual Report (1996); John Holusha, “Kmart to Sell Its Control of 3 Chains,” New York Times, 17 August 1994, C3. 22. “Independents Lose Market Share in 1995, Chains Gain,” Bookselling This Week, 24 June 1996, 1; NPD Group, Inc., and Carol Meyer, 1997 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1998). This set of annual surveys tracks purchases of adult trade books in units sold. It defines the category “chain” to mean the largest national bookstore chains; during the 1990s, that list went from including about a dozen companies down to four. Market share not accounted for by a chain or independent is made up of sales through used bookstores, book clubs, warehouse clubs, discount stores, food and drug stores, and other outlets. 23. “Opening ’98 Bookstore Sales Down; Independents’ ’97 Market Share Drops,” Bookselling This Week, 13 April 1998, 1, 4. Unlike the previous studies cited, this survey looks at dollar sales (rather than book units) in bookstores (rather than in all outlets). 24. Richard Howorth, Independent Bookselling and True Market Expansion (Tarrytown, N.Y.: American Booksellers Association, 1 May 1999), 2; “In Fact . . . ,” Bookselling This Week, 11 May 1998, 1. 25. See American Booksellers Association, Inc., et al. v. Houghton Mifflin Co., Inc., et al., 94 Civ. 8566 ( JFK) (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 1994); American Booksellers Association, Inc., et al. v. Barnes & Noble, Inc., et al., No. C-98–1059 WHO (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, 2001) in which the American Booksellers Association contested publishers’ granting differential terms to chains and independents. 26. Ipsos-Insight, 2002 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2003), 65. 27. Lee Werblin, “Supermarkets and the Rack Jobber,” Publishers Weekly, 19 June 1954, 2650–51; M. M. Zimmerman, The Super Market: A Revolution in Distribution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 236–57. 28. Steven M. Zeitchik, “Online College Bookstore Launched,” Publishers Weekly, 24 August 1998, 9; Steven M. Zeitchik, “Second Online College Bookstore Launched,” Publishers Weekly, 12 October 1998, 14; Steven M. Zeitchik, “Follett Launches Online Store,” Publishers Weekly, 4 January 1999, 20. 29. Ipsos-Insight, 2002 Consumer Research Study, 65. 30. Peter de Jonge, “Riding the Wild, Perilous Waters of Amazon.com,” New York Times Magazine, 14 March 1999, 38; Steven M. Zeitchik, “If You Advertise (Heavily), They Might Come,” Publishers Weekly, 17 August 1998, 21. 31. David Sheff, “Net Seller,” Yahoo! Internet Life, January 2000, 88. 32. Barnes & Noble, Inc., Barnes & Noble 1995 Annual Report (1996), 2. N OT E S TO PAGE S 101– 6
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CHAPTER 6 The Right Niche: Consumer Magazines and Advertisers 1. “Time Inc. Cites Television, Postage Rates in Retiring Life Magazine after 36 Years,” Wall Street Journal, 11 December 1972. Collier’s, once a significant mass-circulation rival, had ceased publication in 1956, but its demise was largely unrelated to television. See Hollis Alpert, “What Killed Collier’s?,” Saturday Review, 11 May 1957, 9–11. 2. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 54. 3. Budd Leslie Gambee Jr., Frank Leslie and His Illustrated Newspaper, 1855–1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1964), 10–21. 4. Peterson, Magazines, 57. 5. See R. Krishnan and L. C. Soley, “Controlling Magazine Circulation,” Journal of Advertising Research 27 (August–September 1987): 17–23. 6. Antoon J. van Zuilen, The Life Cycle of Magazines (Uithoorn, the Netherlands: Graduate Press, 1977), 166–67. 7. See “Look Is Bigger Than Life” (advertisement), New York Times, 31 May 1969. See also Stephen Holder, “The Death of the Saturday Evening Post, 1960–1970: A Popular Culture Phenomenon,” in New Dimensions in Popular Culture, ed. Russell B. Nye (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 78–89; and Michael Mooney, “The Death of the Saturday Evening Post,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1969, 73–75. 8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 810; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1980 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), 204. 9. Amy Janello and Brennon Jones, The American Magazine (New York: Harry Abrams, 1991), 7. See also Seymour Lieberman, How and Why People Buy Magazines (Port Washington: Publishers Clearing House, 1977). 10. Stanley R. Greenfield, interview by David Abrahamson, 19 December 1990, New York. 11. Philip H. Doughtery, “Ebony, Near 25th Birthday, Is Fat on Ads,” New York Times, 26 April 1970. 12. Philip H. Doughtery, “Essence Is Continuing to Gain,” New York Times, 11 April 1975. 13. The authors would like to express appreciation for the assistance of Julia Kagan, a longtime magazine editor who has held executive positions at several major consumer magazines, for sharpening our understanding of changes in the industry, particularly since the 1960s. 14. Eric Pace, “The Gloss Fades from Magazines,” New York Times, 10 January 1982; David Carr, “Technology & Media: Nimble Magazines Adjust to Fast Pace,” New York Times, 16 December 2002. 15. Deirdre Carmody, “The Lessons of Recession Help Magazines Lure New Readers and Advertising,” New York Times, 12 July 1993. 16. Stacie Hamel, “Top Titles, Iowa Roots,” Omaha World Herald, 5 October 2003. 17. See Meredith Corporation, 〈http://www.meredith.com〉. 536
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18. Anthony Bianco et al., “The Vanishing Mass Market,” Business Week, 12 July 2004, 60. This article explores advertising’s shift toward micromarketing—targeted advertising—in response to fragmentation of both “consumer markets” and the “mass audience.” 19. Marco R. della Cava, “ ‘Salon’ Does What It Wants/But What Celebrated Webzine Needs Is to Survive Wave of Dot-com Failures,” USA Today, 18 June 2001. 20. AdAge FactPack 2005: A Supplement to Advertising Age, 28 February 2005, 14, 〈http:// mobile.adage.com〉. 21. Jon Fine, “Google a Threat to Targeted Magazines,” Advertising Age (Midwest regional edition), 31 May 2004, 55. 22. Jon Fine, “Magazines Finally Form Battle Plan,” Advertising Age, 9 August 2004, 25. 23. David Carr, “Technology and Media; Nimble Magazines Adjust to Fast Pace,” New York Times, 16 December 2002. 24. Notable exceptions were large associational magazines like AARP: The Magazine, formerly Modern Maturity. Published by the AARP, an association for people older than fifty, this magazine led the consumer field in circulation in the early twenty-first century. 25. Carr, “Technology and Media.” 26. See Susan Thea Posnock, “The E-volution of E-delivery,” Folio, 1 August 2004, 8. 27. Jon Fine, “Circ Model Cries for Hard Choices,” Advertising Age, special report, 15 March 2004, S-2. 28. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) commissioned Northwestern University’s Media Management Center to conduct a “Magazine Reader Experience Study,” which explored multiple dimensions of magazine reading experience and the relation of that experience to responses to ads. The study was featured in 2004 on both organizations’ Web sites (MPA, 〈http://www.magazine .org/home/〉, and ASME, 〈 http://www.magazine.org/editorial/〉) and in a special advertising supplement, “Magazines 2004,” in Advertising Age, 26 April 2004, M8. 29. A 19 September 2004 letter originating with Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization, and signed by sixty-one professors noted efforts by advertisers “to turn ads into articles” and asked the American Society of Magazine Editors to “draw a clear line against aggressive advertiser intrusion into story content.” “Journalism Profs Call for New Rules to Stop Advertisers’ Threat to Press Freedom,” 〈www.commercialalert.org〉. 30. “A Free Press for China,” Financial Times (London, England), 4 March 2004.
CHAPTER 7 Wounded but Not Slain: The Orderly Retreat of the American Newspaper 1. Douglas Waples, The People and Print: Social Aspects of Reading in the Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 149; The Continuing Study of Newspaper Reading, Summary of Studies 1 to 42 Inclusive (New York: Advertising Research Foundation, 1941); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 218, 224. 2. “The Press and the People—A Survey,” Fortune, August 1939, 64, 70; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up N OT E S TO PAGE S 1 15 – 19
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His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944); Wilbur Schramm and Ray Huffer, “What Radio Means to Middleville,” Journalism Quarterly 23 ( June 1946): 174–75. See also Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and Carl F. Kaestle, “Literacy as Consumer Activity,” in Kaestle et al., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 169, 171, 172; Helen DamonMoore and Carl F. Kaestle, “Surveying American Readers,” in ibid., 188; Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page, 258–76. 3. James N. Rosse, James Dertouzos, Michael Robinson, and Steve Wildman, “Economic Issues in Mass Communication Industries,” in Federal Trade Commission, Proceedings of the Symposium on Media Concentration, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978), 1:73. 4. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1937), chap. 10; Carl Sessions Stepp, “Now and Then,” American Journalism Review 21 (September 1999): 65. 5. Mark Ethridge, address, 20 February 1956, Mark Ethridge Papers, box 2, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; “One-Newspaper Town,” Fortune, August 1947, 103. 6. Stories from the Courier Record (Blackstone-Crewe, Va.), 15 October 1948, the Davenport Times-Tribune (Davenport, Wash.), 21 October 1948, and the Hollidaysburg Register (Hollidaysburg, Pa.), 5 November 1948, reprinted in Lester L. Hawkes, Your Front Page (Madison: Campus Publishing, 1949), 27, 46, 47. See also John Cowles, “The American Newspapers,” in America Now: An Inquiry into Civilization in the United States by 36 Americans, ed. Harold E. Stearns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 358–59. 7. Gerald Ford, “Reasons I Read the Home-Town Newspaper—G. R. Press,” handwritten notes for memoir, “Materials from the Writing of A Time to Heal, 1977–79,” copy in Gerald Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Mich. 8. Simeon Booker, Black Man’s America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 144; “The Fair Lady of Milwaukee,” Time, 1 February 1954, 48. 9. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), 2:915–16. 10. Simeon Booker, “The New Frontier for Daily Newspapers,” Nieman Reports 9 ( January 1955): 12. 11. Carl T. Rowan, Breaking Barriers: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 61; Oswald Garrison Villard, The Disappearing Daily; Some Chapters in American Newspaper Evolution (New York: Knopf, 1944), 24; Myrdal, American Dilemma, 2:908–11, 914–23. 12. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 148. See also Myrdal, American Dilemma, 2:915. 13. Warren Breed, “Social Control in the Newsroom: A Functional Analysis,” Social Forces 33 (May 1955): 326–35; Leo C. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), chap. 10. 14. Russell Baker, The Good Times (New York: Penguin, 1989), 77. 15. Booker, “New Frontier,” 13. 16. Baker, Good Times, 48–49; Joan Blair and Clay Blair Jr., The Search for JFK (New York: Berkley, 1979), 371. 17. In 1941 newspapers owned about one-fourth of all radio stations. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, 538
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“The Daily Newspaper and Its Competitors,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 219 ( January 1942): 41. 18. Harvey J. Levin, Broadcast Regulation and Joint Ownership of Media (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 53–54. Although newspaper affiliation fell to about one-third of all stations by the late 1950s, it remained common. See Herbert H. Howard, “Group and Cross-Media Ownership of TV Stations: A 1989 Update,” Journalism Quarterly 66 (Winter 1989): 785–92. 19. George W. Parker, “Newcomers Welcome in Detroit TV Boom,” Editor & Publisher, 23 October 1948, 40. 20. Charles Hamilton of the Richmond News-Leader in American Society of Newspaper Editors [ASNE], Proceedings of the 1955 Annual Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Washington, D.C.: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1955), 102. See also “Television No Threat, Michigan Group Told,” Editor & Publisher, 29 January 1949, 9; Campbell Watson, “Renaissance of Newspaper Seen in Experts’ Forecast,” ibid., 14 February 1959, 9. 21. In 2002, 53.8 percent of all dailies were published in the morning. Newspaper Association of America, Facts about Newspapers, 2003 (Arlington, Va.: Newspaper Association of America, 2003), 12. 22. Alex S. Jones, “Plight of Weaker Newspapers,” New York Times, 12 November 1983, 1, 23; Rosse et al., “Economic Issues,” 1:74. 23. The cities are Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Ft. Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. 24. John Seigenthaler, comments in Federal Trade Commission, Proceedings, 2:525; James Dertouzos, “Media Conglomerates: Chains, Groups, and Cross-Ownership,” in ibid., 2:473– 74; “The Big Money Hunts for Independent Newspapers,” Business Week, 21 February 1977, 56–60, 62. 25. John Morton, “Farewell To More Family Dynasties,” American Journalism Review, October 1995, 68; Susan E. Tifft, “American Journalism Loses Another Family,” Wall Street Journal, 14 March 2000, A30; John C. Busterna, “Trends in Daily Newspaper Ownership,” Journalism Quarterly 65 (Winter 1988): 831–38. 26. Elizabeth MacIver Neiva, “Chain Building: The Consolidation of the American Newspaper Industry, 1953–1980,” Business History Review 70 (Spring 1996): 26–27, 40–41. 27. John Morton in ASNE, Proceedings of the 1986 Annual Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 233. 28. Some critics blamed Wall Street. When some newspaper groups became publicly traded corporations, it was assumed that financial analysts demanded consistently high earnings. This explanation, however, does not explain why privately held companies often behaved in the same manner. See, e.g., Rick Edmonds, “Public Companies No Worse Than Private,” Poynteronline, 5 December 2002, 〈http://www.poynter.org〉. 29. Gene Roberts, Thomas Kunkel, and Charles Layton, eds., Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 8–9; Jacques Steinberg, “Sunday without Favorite Comic? Not So Funny,” New York Times, 22 August 2004, 1, 17. Several chapters in the Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton collection examine the effects of corporate ownership on the quality of the nation’s dailies. See also Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), chap. 4; William B. N OT E S TO PAGE S 1 2 2 – 2 3
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Blankenburg and Gary W. Ozanich, “The Effects of Public Ownership on the Financial Performance of Newspaper Corporations,” Journalism Quarterly 70 (Spring 1993): 68–75; David C. Coulsen and Anne Hansen, “The Louisville Courier-Journal’s News Content after Purchase by Gannett,” Journalism Quarterly 72 (Spring 1995): 205–15. 30. Quoted in William Glaberson, “Newspaper Owners Do the Shuffle,” New York Times, 19 February 1996, C1, C4. 31. “Why Newspapers Are Making Money Again,” Business Week, 29 August 1970, 36–38, 40; Charles Whited, Knight: Publisher in the Tumultuous Century (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988). 32. Russell Baker, “What Else Is News?,” New York Review of Books, 18 July 2002, 4; Susan Paterno, “Whither Knight-Ridder?,” American Journalism Review, January–February 1996, 19–27; Philip Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), chap. 10. See also Alex S. Jones, “KnightRidder Tries to Balance Profits and News,” New York Times, 7 August 1989, C1, C28; Felicity Barringer, “Fear of Cutbacks Rattles Papers in Philadelphia,” ibid., 23 October 2000, D1, 19. 33. Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer in ASNE, Proceedings 1955, 28. 34. Stephen Hess, International News and Foreign Correspondents (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 95. See also Stepp, “Now and Then,” 72–73. 35. Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton, Leaving Readers Behind, 7. 36. James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 188, 234; David Shaw, “Surrender of the Gatekeepers,” Nieman Reports 48 (Spring 1994): 3–5. 37. Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton, Leaving Readers Behind, 9. 38. Ken Auletta, “Synergy City,” in Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton, Leaving Readers Behind, 245. 39. Mike Royko, “New, Improved Journalists Forget about Politicians’ Right of Privacy,” Milwaukee Journal, 18 August 1992, A13. See also Peter A. Brown, “Catch the Wave,” Campaigns & Elections 8 (September–October 1987): 31, 35; David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, “Journalists: Who Are They, Really?,” Media Studies Journal 6 (Fall 1992): 69, 70, 71. 40. See Stephen Hess, The Washington Reporters (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), esp. 135–37. Compare with Weaver and Wilhoit, American Journalist, 75, 77, 101. Self-censorship had not, to be sure, disappeared. See Andrew Kohut, “Self-Censorship: Counting the Ways,” Columbia Journalism Review, May–June 2000, 42–43. 41. James L. Aucoin, “The Re-emergence of American Investigative Journalism, 1960– 1975,” Journalism History 21 (Spring 1995): 3–15; James Boylan, “Declarations of Independence,” Columbia Journalism Review, November–December 1986, 29–45. 42. Herbert Brucker, “Is the Press Writing Its Obituary?,” Saturday Review, 25 April 1959, 11, 37; Turner Catledge, My Life and “The Times” (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 211; John Herbers, “Judgmental Reporting,” Nieman Reports 48 (Winter 1994): 3–5; Tom Wicker, “The Tradition of Objectivity in the American Press—What’s Wrong with It,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 83 (1971): 83–100; Bernard Roshco, Newsmaking (Chi540
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cago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 48–53. On the origins of more interpretive newspaper reporting, see Kevin G. Barnhurst and Diana Mutz, “American Journalism and the Decline in Event-Centered Reporting,” Journal of Communication 47 (Autumn 1997): 27–53. 43. David Ignatius in Washington Monthly, January–February 1999, 27. See also Gerald Lanson and Mitchell Stephens, “ ‘Trust Me’ Journalism: The Hidden Dangers of Increasing Analysis and Interpretation in the Daily Press,” Washington Journalism Review, November 1982, 43–47; Stephen Klaidman, “All the News That’s Fit to Interpret,” Forbes Media Critic 1 (Summer 1994): 56–63. 44. Figures are based on the top fifty markets. See National Newspaper Association, Readership Statistics, 〈http://www.naa.org〉. See also Felicity Barringer, “Fissures in Sunday Papers’ Pot of Gold,” New York Times, 6 November 2000, D1, 12. 45. Dave Barry, “Next: Attack Vending Machines,” New York Daily News, 4 May 2002. 46. Stepp, “Now and Then,” 19. 47. Steven H. Chaffee, Xinshu Zhao, and Glenn Leshner, “Political Knowledge and the Campaign Media of 1992,” Communication Research 21 ( June 1994): 317–18. 48. Brent Staples, “Citizen Sengstacke,” New York Times Magazine, 4 January 1998, 27; Nichole M. Christian, “Heirs Try to Keep a Black Press Heritage Alive,” New York Times, 9 March 1998, C8; Kathy Bergen, “Black Newspapers Fight for Life,” Chicago Tribune, 4 August 2002, 5:1. 49. L. F. Palmer Jr., “The Black Press in Transition,” Columbia Journalism Review 9 (Spring 1970): 32, 35–36. 50. Leo Bogart, Press and Public: Who Reads What, When, Where, and Why in American Newspapers, 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), 23. 51. On the advantages of newspaper over broadcast reporting, see Phyllis Kaniss, Making Local News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); David C. Coulson, Charles T. Cyr, and Stephen Lacy, “Covering City Hall,” Quill, July–August 1999, 17–21; Jill Geisler, “Blacked Out,” American Journalism Review, May 2000, 34–40; Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 63–67. 52. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1959 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959), 520, 825. On the early years of commercial television, see James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948–1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 53–55. 53. [Harvey Zorbaugh and C. Wright Mills], A Report on the Impact of Television in a Major Metropolitan Market (New York: Puck, 1952), 9, 17. 54. Mark Ethridge, address, 20 February 1956, Ethridge Papers, box 2; Marquis Childs, “Crisis in Communication,” Nieman Reports 10 ( July 1956): 3. 55. Denver Post, 1 April 1955, 22; Atlanta Constitution, 1 April 1955, 22. 56. John A. Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ’n’ Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 48; Broadcasting, 3 October 1955, 94. 57. Chilton R. Bush, News Research for Better Newspapers, 5 vols. (New York: American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, n.d.), 1:11. 58. One of the first signs of this new order came in September 1956, when NBC moved The Howdy Doody Show, which had aired weekdays at 5:30 (ET), to Saturday mornings. It was N OT E S TO PAGE S 1 2 5 – 2 8
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replaced by reruns of a situation comedy, I Married Joan. Stephen Davis, Say, Kids! What Time Is It? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 189–90. 59. Denver Post, 1 April 1991, 6E; Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1 April 1991, C8–9. Newscasts on Atlanta’s channels 2 and 11 in April 1991 cut away at 5:30 to air People’s Court and Golden Girls respectively and then returned for more local news. 60. Robert T. Bower, The Changing Television Audience in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 33–34. See also John P. Robinson, “Television and Leisure Time: A New Scenario,” Journal of Communication 31 (Winter 1981): 124–26. 61. Robinson, “Television and Leisure Time,” 126. 62. John P. Robinson, “The Audience for National TV News Programs,” Public Opinion Quarterly 35 (Autumn 1971): 403–5; John P. Robinson and Mark R. Levy, The Main Source: Learning from Television News (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986). 63. ASNE, Proceedings of the 1982 Annual Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 171. See also John P. Robinson and Leo W. Jeffries, “The Changing Role of Newspapers in the Age of Television,” Journalism Monographs, no. 63 (September 1979), 8–9, 18. 64. Bower, Changing Television Audience, 109–11. 65. Suggestive in this regard is a 1960 survey asking the “broken set” question, that is, what would those polled do if their TV did not work. Except for the least educated, most of those questioned listed reading as the most likely substitute to television viewing. Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television: A Study of Audience Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 102–3. 66. Denver Post, 1 April 1991, 6E; Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1 April 1991, C8–9. 67. Edwin T. Vane to John Porter, 21 November 1960, William R. Butler to Sydney H. Eiges, 15 December 1960, NBC Papers, box 149, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; James N. Rosse and James N. Dertouzos, “The Evolution of One Newspaper Cities,” in Federal Trade Commission, Proceedings, 2:461, 463; ASNE, Proceedings 1982, 162. 68. Bogart, “Newspapers in Transition,” Wilson Quarterly 6 (1982): 65; ASNE, Proceedings of the 1973 Annual Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 202; Emily Yoffe, “The ‘Star’ Winks Out,” New Republic, 15 August 1981, 16–18. 69. David Carr, “In Print, Staring Down a Daily Worry,” New York Times, 22 May 2006, D6; John P. Robinson, “The Changing Reading Habits of the American Public,” Journal of Communication 30 (Winter 1980): 143–44, 147. 70. Dennis Holder, “Ruth Clark’s Newspaper Forecast: Hard News Will Reign,” Washington Journalism Review 5 (December 1983): 27. A late 1980s survey indicated that about half of teenagers in households that subscribed to newspapers read them. James Warren, “Teens Tuning Out Newspapers,” Chicago Tribune, 28 April 1989, 1:3. 71. David Shaw, “For Papers, Generation Is Missing,” Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1989, 1. 72. George Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 91–92; Leo Bogart, “The Return of Hollywood’s Mass Audience: How a Social Institution Adapts to Technological Change,” in Surveying Social Life, ed. Hubert J. O’Gorman (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 491. 73. ASNE, Proceedings 1966, 179. Wolfe’s observation has been confirmed by subsequent 542
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research. See Wolfram Peiser, “Cohort Trends in Media Use in the United States,” Mass Communication & Society 2 (Spring–Summer 2000): 185–205. 74. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 12; Dwight Macdonald, “A Caste, A Culture, A Market,” New Yorker, 22 November 1958, 58, 60. 75. Robinson and Jeffries, “Changing Role,” 8–10, 13; Guido H. Stempel III and Thomas Hargrove, “Mass Media Audiences in a Changing Media Environment,” Journalism Quarterly 73 (Autumn 1996): 556; Shaw, “For Papers, Generation Is Missing,” 1, 14; David T. Z. Mindich, Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 Don’t Follow the News (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 76. ASNE, Proceedings 1966, 170, 171; Michael Oreskes, “Profiles of Today’s Youths: Many Just Don’t Seem to Care,” New York Times, 28 June 1990, A1, A11. On the increasing disconnection of adolescents from adults in the 1960s, see Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 201–5, 228–33. 77. Judith Martin, “The Terrible Teens,” Washington Post, 15 November 1985, H1, H12. 78. Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind the New York Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 510–19; John Morton, “The Times of Your Lifestyle,” Washington Journalism Review, June 1982, 12. 79. ASNE, Proceedings 1978, 142–43. On the retreat from the public sphere generally, see Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 80. Lee Hills, address to shareholders, Knight Ridder, First Quarter Report, 31 March 1979, 11. 81. ASNE, Proceedings 1978, 132. On Clark’s findings and influence, see Ruth Clark, Changing Needs of Changing Readers (Reston: American Newspaper Publishers Association, 1979), 3. See also Evan Cornog, “Let’s Blame the Readers,” Columbia Journalism Review, January–February 2005, 43–49. 82. Robinson, “Changing Reading Habits,” 146–47; Robinson and Jeffries, “Changing Role,” 16–17. A 1998 survey indicated that 42 percent of those ages eighteen to twenty-four said they had read a magazine the previous day compared to 26 percent saying they had looked at a newspaper. 83. ASNE, Proceedings 1994, 135; ASNE, Proceedings 1978, 139; Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 185–88. 84. Stepp, “Now and Then,” 62, 65, 66. 85. B. G. Yovovich, “Dailies Are Poised to Go Back to the Basics,” Advertising Age, 7 November 1983, M-42. 86. Steve Crosby of the Courier & Journal (Lafayette, Ind.), quoted in Howard Kurtz, “Yesterday’s News: Why Newspapers Are Losing Their Franchise,” in Frank Denton and Howard Kurtz, Reinventing the Newspaper (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1993), 103; Felicity Barringer, “Concerns on Space and Revenue Spur Growth of Paid Obituaries,” New York Times, 14 January 2002, C7. N OT E S TO PAGE S 130 – 3 2
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87. Newspaper Association of America, Facts about Newspapers, 2003, 5. Research is less conclusive regarding the impact of rising subscription and newsstand costs on newspaper circulation. See Frank Denton, “News Styles and Lifestyles: How Americans Stay in Touch with Their Communities” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1996), 77–83. 88. Wayne A. Danielson, Dominic L. Lasorsa, and Dae S. Im, “Journalists and Novelists: A Study of Diverging Styles,” Journalism Quarterly 69 (Summer 1992): 445. See also Howard Kurtz, “Suddenly Everyone’s a Critic,” Washington Post, 3 October 2005, C1. 89. Mary Walton, “The Selling of Small-Town America,” American Journalism Review 21 (1999): 43. See also James D. Squires, Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers (New York: Times Books, 1993), 66, 70–71, 88–91, 134–35. On the decline of reportage of organized labor, see “Lost in the Margins: Labor and the Media,” Extra, Summer 1990. Charging publishers with practicing a kind of demographic Darwinism is not entirely supported by circulation data. If less well-to-do Americans wanted to continue to read papers, then those dailies that ostensibly coveted their patronage, notably New York’s Daily News and Post, should have prospered; they did not. In fact, many consumers were helping to decide for publishers that they should aim their product upward. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Topless Tabloids of Gotham,” New Yorker, 22 February and 1 March 1999, 121–29; Jim Sleeper, “NYN RIP,” New Republic, 21 and 28 August 1995, 23. 90. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Newspaper Daily Circulation Down 2.6 percent,” New York Times, 8 November 2005, C8. 91. Tom Zeller Jr., “A Generation Serves Notice: It’s a Moving Target,” New York Times, 22 January 2006, 3:1, 4; Project for Excellence in Journalism, Executive Summary, The State of the News Media 2006 (Washington, D.C.: Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2006), 15. See full report at 〈http://www.journalism.org/〉. 92. Nicholas Lemann, “Right Hook,” New Yorker, 29 August 2005, 34–39. 93. Jennifer Saba, “Evening the Score,” Editor & Publisher, November 2005, 38–40, 42, 44–46. 94. Floyd Norris, “Does Anyone Want to Buy a Newspaper?,” New York Times, 18 November 2005, C1; Executive Summary, State of the News Media 2006, 1, 15–16. 95. Katharine Q. Seelye and Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5 Billion,” New York Times, 13 March 2006, A1; Katharine Q. Seelye, “McClatchy To Resell 12 Papers It’s Buying,” ibid., 14 March 2006, C1, 6; Katharine Q. Seelye, “Answer: Chopper, Shopper, Show Stopper,” ibid., 22 May 2006, D1, 6. 96. Frank Ahrens, “A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, and It’s Online and HyperLocal,” Washington Post, 4 December 2006, A1; Jon Fine, “Gannett’s New Lease on News,” Business Week, 26 February 2007, 28; Barb Palser, “Preparing for the End: Newspapers Should Be Planning for a Print-Free Future,” American Journalism Review, April–May 2007, 64. 97. John Morton, “Facing the Future: Newspapers Are Making Necessary Changes to Endure in the Internet Era,” American Journalism Review, April–May 2007, 68; Geneva Overholser, On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change (Philadelphia: Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 8–9, 21; Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper, chaps. 11–12.
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CHAPTER 8 Government Censorship since 1945 1. U.S. v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 7 F. 2d 705 (2d Cir. 1934); James C. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail (New York: Free Press, 1961), 69. 2. Edward de Grazia and Roger K. Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors, and the First Amendment (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982), 55. 3. On Victorianism, see Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for SelfControl in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1999), chap. 3. 4. Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942). 5. Richard S. Randall, Freedom and Taboo: Pornography and the Politics of the Divided Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5–6. 6. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29–30. 7. Ibid., 162. For a classic on public attitudes about civil liberties at the time, see Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York: Doubleday, 1955). A Republican, Stouffer lost his government clearance after the publication of this disturbing book. 8. Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 339–40. 9. See also the discussion of the suppression of Scientific American, in Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 197–8. Fried, Nightmare in Red, 34. 10. Marjorie Fiske, Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 65–66, quoted in Louise S. Robbins, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939–1969 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 11. See Louise S. Robbins, The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). 12. See Fried, Nightmare in Red, 188. 13. See Michal R. Belknap, Cold War Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). 14. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951). 15. Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957). 16. Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 50–55. 17. Burstyn v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952). 18. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957). 19. Nicholas Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova, 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), 265. 20. On public opinion, see Herbert McClosky and Alida Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe about Civil Liberties (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983). 21. Randall, Freedom and Taboo, 176. On the support structure, see Charles R. Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). N OT E S TO PAGE S 13 5 – 4 2
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22. Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography and Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987), 202; Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966); Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, 378 U.S. 577 (1964); Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (New York: Bantam, 1970). 23. See Stuart Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order (New York: Longman,1984); Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 13 (1973); Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497 (1987). 24. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971). 25. New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964); New York Times v. United States and Washington Post v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). 26. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). 27. Snepp v. United States, 444 U.S. 507 (1980). 28. U.S. v. Progressive, Inc., 467 F. Supp. 990 (W.D. Wis. 1979); Judith Schenck, “The New Seditious Libel,” in Freedom at Risk: Censorship and Repression in the 1980s, ed. Richard O. Curry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 29. Robbins, Censorship and the American Library, 122. 30. See Donald Alexander Downs, More than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 31. Pacifica Foundation Station WBAI(FM), 56 FCC 2d, at 97–98. 32. FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). On the politics and law of this complex movement, see Heins, Not in Front of the Children, chaps. 4 and 5. 33. See, e.g., Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 114 S. Ct. 2445 (1994); Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727 (1996). 34. Reported in James Weinstein, Hate Speech, Pornography, and the Radical Attack on Free Speech Doctrine (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 208. 35. William Noble, Bookbanning in America: Who Bans Books—and Why? (Forest Dale, Vt.: Paul S. Eriksson, 1990), 234. 36. Wall Street Journal, 8 January 1998, editorial page. Eugene Volokh, “How Harassment Law Restricts Free Speech,” Rutgers Law Review 47 (1995): 563. 37. Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, Inc. v. American Coalition of Life Activists, 290 F. 3d 1058 (2002); Rice v. Paladin Press, Inc., 128 F. 3d 233 (4th Cir. 1997); Byers v. Edmonson, 712 So. 2d 681 (1998); “Incitement Suit against Stone, ‘Natural Born Killers’ Dismissed,” New Media and the Law 2 (2001): 22. 38. See John B. Harer and Steven R. Harris, Censorship and Expression in the 1980s: A Statistical Survey (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 9, 118–19; Karolides, Bald, and Sova, 100 Banned Books, 287–89. 39. New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747 (1982). 40. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 122 U.S. 1389 (2002). 41. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 117 S.Ct. 2329 (1997). 42. See United States v. American Library Association, Inc., 539 U.S. 194 (2003). 43. See “Porn Webcasters Bush-Whacked?,” Wired, 13 June 2006, 〈http://www.wired .com/culture/lifestyle/news/2006/06/71134〉 (12 April 2008). 44. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 81–123. 546
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45. Of the multitude of works, see Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); and Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46. Karolides, Bald, and Savo, 100 Banned Books, 333–406. 47. American Bookseller’s Association v. Hudnut, 771 F 2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). See Donald Alexander Downs, The New Politics of Pornography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Final Report, Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Justice, 1986). 48. Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 49. On all these matters, see Donald Alexander Downs, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (New York: Free Press, 1998). 50. “NCAA, Rutgers Women’s Coach Blast Imus,” MSNBC, 6 April 2007, 〈http://www .msnbc.msn.com/id/17982146/〉 (12 April 2008). 51. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, Public Law No. 107-56, 115 Stat. 272 (2001). 52. See, e.g, “ALA President Michael Gorman Responds to House Passage of PATRIOT Act Reauthorization Bill,” American Library Association Web site, 7 March 2006, 〈http:// www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=News&template=/ContentManagement/Content Display.cfm&ContentID=119138〉 (12 April 2008). 53. Public Law No. 109-177, 120 Stat. 192 (Reauthorization Act, 9 March 2006); Doe v. Gonzales, 500 F. Supp. 2d 379 (2007). 54. “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis,” report of an AAUP Special Committee (2003), 20, 〈http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/crisistime.htm〉 (12 April 2008). 55. See, e.g., Robert M. O’Neil, “Academic Freedom in the Post-September 11 Era: An Old Game with New Rules,” in Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century: How Terrorism, Governments, and Culture Wars Impact Free Speech, ed. Evan Gerstmann and Matthew J. Streb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 43–60; and Donald Alexander Downs, “Whose Ox Is Gored? Free Speech, the War on Terror, and the Indivisibility of Rights,” Good Society 14, nos. 1–2 (2005): 72–79. 56. See James Davison Hunter, The Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
CHAPTER 9 American Copyright Law since 1945 1. See generally Marshall A. Leaffer, Understanding Copyright Law, 4th ed. (New York: Lexis/Nexis, 2005). 2. Steven E. Siwek, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2004 Report, prepared for the International Intellectual Property Alliance (Washington, D.C.: Economists, Incorporated, 2004). N OT E S TO PAGE S 1 48 – 52
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3. Text of the Berne Convention (and other international conventions relating to copyright), together with a brief commentary on its provisions, can be found in Marshall A. Leaffer, International Treaties on Intellectual Property Law, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs Books, 1997). 4. An indispensable collection of studies on the development of copyright law in the first half of the twentieth century is the Copyright Society of America, Studies on Copyright: The Arthur Fisher Memorial Edition (South Hackensack, N.J.: Fred Rothman, 1963). 5. See U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, H. Rep. 94-1476, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., 1976. Known in copyright circles as the “House Report,” this document provides basic legislative history, and its influence is felt whenever the Copyright Act is interpreted by scholars, judges, or practitioners. 6. 17 U.S.C. § 107. 7. Sony Corp. of American v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). 8. Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, 99 F. 3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996). 9. Jane C. Ginsberg and John M. Kernochan, “One Hundred and Two Years Later: The U.S. Joins the Berne Convention,” Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts 13 (1988): 27–31. 10. Final Report to the Ad Hoc Working Group on U.S. Adherence to the Berne Convention, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts 10 (1986): 513. 11. Marshall A. Leaffer, “Protecting American Intellectual Property Abroad: Toward a New Multilateralism,” Iowa Law Review 76 (1991): 273–308. 12. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 557 U.S. 186 (2003). 13. For a comprehensive overview of digital issues, see National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Policy in the Information Age (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000). 14. See Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property Rights on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001). 15. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Washington D.C.: Information Infrastructure Task Force, 1995). 16. Academic writing on the subject tends to take a critical view of current legislative trends. Typical is Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). Lessig presents a pessimistic view of how copyright law and information policy have led to a decline of the “cultural commons” in the digital age.
CHAPTER 10 U.S. Government Publishing in the Postwar Era 1. Government Printing Office, 100 GPO Years: 1861–1961 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 132–40. 2. Robert E. Kling Jr., The Government Printing Office (New York: Praeger, 1970), chap. 2. The statutory basis for federal printing and publishing is codified in Title 44 of the United States Code. 548
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3. Kling, Government Printing Office, 46; Government Printing Office, 100 GPO Years, 151. 4. Kling, Government Printing Office, chaps. 4–5. 5. Peter Hernon and Harold C. Relyea, “Government Publishing: Past to Present,” Government Information Quarterly 12 (1995): 315–18; Stephen W. Stathis, “The Evolution of Government Printing and Publishing in America,” Government Publications Review 7A (1980): 377–90. 6. Peter Hernon, Harold C. Relyea, Robert E. Dugan, and Joan F. Cheverie, United States Government Information: Policies and Sources (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2002), chap. 15. See also “Symposium on Federal Depository Libraries: Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century,” Government Information Quarterly 15 (1998): 11–85; and “A Symposium on Depository Library Partnerships at the Turn of the Millennium,” Government Information Quarterly 17 (2000): 271–348. The Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office also maintained networks of depository libraries. 7. INS v. Chadha, 462 US 919 (1983). 8. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 73–78. 9. General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, GAO-01-428 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, March 2001), 5. 10. Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Subscriptions, Edition 266 (Winter 2003). 11. John V. Richardson Jr., “The United States Government as Publisher since the Roosevelt Administration,” Library Research 4 (1982): 224–27; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 132–33; General Accounting Office, Information Management: Dissemination of Technical Reports, GAO-01-490 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, May 2001), 3. See also National Technical Information Service Web site, 〈http://www.ntis.gov〉. 12. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 31, 134; General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 5– 6. See also Kurt N. Molholm, “The Defense Technical Information Center: Expanding Its Horizons,” Government Information Quarterly 12 (1995): 331–44; Bernard M. Fry and Eva L. Kiewitt, “The Educational Resources Information Center: Its Legal Basis, Organization, Distribution System, Bibliographic Controls,” Drexel Library Quarterly 10 (1982): 63–78; and Educational Resources Information Center Web site, 〈http://www.eric.ed.gov〉. 13. Hernon and Relyea, “Government Publishing,” 318–19; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 346; Donald O. Case and Kathleen Welden, “Distribution of Government Publications to Depository Libraries by Optical Disk,” Government Publications Review 13 (1986): 313–22. 14. Government Printing Office, 1994 Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), 30–32; Hernon and Relyea, “Government Publishing,” 318; General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 52–53. 15. 44 U.S.C. § 1901. For a snapshot of U.S. Government Web sites in 2000, see Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and John A. Shuler, U.S. Government on the Web: Getting the Information You Need, 2nd ed. (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2001). 16. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, chap. 13. See also Joseph W. N OT E S TO PAGE S 16 8 – 7 2
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Duncan and William C. Shelton, Revolution in the United States Government Statistics, 1926–1976 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978). 17. Government Printing Office, GPO/2001: Visions for a New Millennium (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991), i–ii. 18. Government Printing Office, 1994 Annual Report, 25; General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 6–7; Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 78–79. See also the GPOAccess Web site, 〈http://www.gpoaccess.gov〉. 19. Office of the Vice President, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less, Report of the National Performance Review (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993); Office of the Vice President, Access America: Reengineering through Information Technology: Report of the National Performance Review and the Government Information Technology Services Board (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1997); Office of Management and Budget, E-Government Strategy: Simplified Delivery of Services to Citizens (Washington, D.C.: OMB, February 2002). 20. General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 5. 21. Robert C. Bering, Finding the Law (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1995); L. Ray Patterson and Craig Joyce, “Monopolizing the Law: The Scope of Copyright Protection for Law Reports and Statutory Compilations,” UCLA Law Review 36 (April 1989): 719–814. 22. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 30–31, 36–37. 23. Ibid., 33–34, 38. See also USA.gov Web site, 〈http://www.usa.gov〉. 24. Guardian of Heritage: Essays on the History of the National Archives, ed. Timothy Walch (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1985), 46, 56–59. See also Donald R. McCoy, The National Archives: America’s Ministry of Documents, 1934– 1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 25. Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), chaps. 5 and 8; Patricia Daukantas, “Records Agencies Face a Digital Tsunami,” Government Computer News, 4 June 2001. See also the NARA Web site, 〈http://www.archives.gov〉. 26. General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 10; National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination (Washington, D.C.: NCLIS, January 2001), 2–3. 27. Permanent Public Access Working Group, A Report on Meetings Hosted by the U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999–2000 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2001); Government Printing Office, Biennial Report to Congress on the Status of GPO Access (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, December 2001); Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Government Printing Office and the National Archives and Records Administration, August 12, 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003). Later, the “Cybercemetery of Former Federal Web Sites” was hosted by the University of North Texas, 〈http://govinfo.library.unt.edu〉. Another federal agency concerned with the preservation of online documents is the Library of Congress. See its Web site THOMAS, 〈http://thomas.loc.gov〉. 550
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28. Government Printing Office, A Strategic Vision for the 21st Century, December 1, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 1; Government Printing Office, Authentication, white paper (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, October 2005); “GPO Authenticates Federal Budget by Digital Signature,” news release (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 4 February 2008). 29. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 150–54, 157–58; Harold C. Relyea, “Security Classification Reviews and the Search for Reform,” Government Information Quarterly 16 (1999): 5–27. See also Daniel P. Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 30. Athan G. Theoharis, introduction to A Culture of Secrecy: The Government versus the People’s Right to Know, ed. Athan G. Theoharis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 4. See also Philip H. Melanson, Secrecy Wars: National Security, Privacy, and the Public’s Right to Know (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2001). 31. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 389; “An Order to Destroy a CD-ROM Raises Concerns among University Librarians,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 March 2002, A34. 32. Hernon et al., United States Government Information, 170–78. 33. General Accounting Office, Information Management: Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications, 7, 64–65.
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Part II. Forms and Institutions of Mediation and Subsidy: Introduction 1. Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19–21; Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy,” College Composition and Communication 49 (May 1998): 165–85. 2. John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 99–100. See also Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newlin (New York: John Wiley, 2002). 3. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, 93–94; Albert N. Greco, Clara E, Rodríguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 76–77. 4. Cathy N. Davidson, “Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 October 2003, B7. 5. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5, 158–60. 6. Karin N. Kiser, “Courting the Spanish Reader: Publishers Hope Profits Are Found in Translations,” Publishers Weekly, 16 January 2006, 24, 28–29. 7. Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005), 15, 20, 26; Greco, Rodríguez, and Wharton, Culture and Commerce of Publishing, 153–55, 191.
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CHAPTER 11 Building on the 1940s 1. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), esp. 40–61. 2. Dear Donald, Dear Bennett: The Wartime Correspondence of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer (New York: Random House, 2002), 107, 130, 145–46, 153. 3. John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), 214–16. 4. “Confidential to the Publishing Industry—Not for Publication Dec. 28, 1942,” Council on Books in Wartime Records, box 5, folder 2, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. (hereafter CBW Records). 5. “Revised Draft of Operational Memorandum for Books,” n.d. [ca. August 1944], Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter NACP). 6. Frederic G. Melcher, “Editorial: Europe Hungry for Books,” Publishers Weekly, 13 October 1945, 1755; Sidney Sulkin, “The OWI and Book-Hungry Europe,” New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1945, 7. 7. Trysh Travis, “Books as Weapons and ‘The Smart Man’s Peace’: The Work of the Council on Books in Wartime,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 60 (1999): 362. 8. Robert O. Ballou, A History of the Council on Books in Wartime, 1942–1946 (New York, 1946), 3–6, 32–53; Travis, “Books as Weapons,” 358. 9. See John Jamieson, Editions for the Armed Services, Inc.: A History (New York: Editions for the Armed Services, ca. 1948); and John Y. Cole, ed., Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984). 10. Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942– 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), esp. 55, 110–11. 11. Rebecca West, “Books for Liberated Europe,” English-Speaking World 26 (December 1943–January 1944): 3–6. 12. Rinehart to W. Warder Norton, 9 March 1944, box 338, W. W. Norton II Papers, Columbia University Library, New York. 13. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing 4:635–37; Ballou, History, 5. 14. “Mr. Kerr’s remarks at organization luncheon of Council on Books in Wartime,” Record Group 208, entry 339, box 1695, NACP. 15. Ballou, History, 83–94; Kerr to Norton, 26 April 1944, box 32, folder 4, CBW Records. 16. A. Ben Candland to Arthur Myers, 4 February 1944, Record Group 208, entry 465, box 2953, NACP. 17. “Revised Draft of Operational Memorandum for Books,” n.d. [ca. August 1944], Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, NACP. 18. “Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting,” 14 September 1944 and 4 May 1944, both box 2, folder 7, CBW Records. 19. Kerr to Norton, 26 April 1944, box 32, folder 4, CBW Records. 20. Ibid. 552
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21. Guinzburg to Kerr, 29 April 1944, Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, NACP. 22. Ballou, History, 87–89; Winkler, Politics of Propaganda, 65–71. 23. Kerr to Rex Stout, 9 December 1944, Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, NACP. 24. Kerr to William Sloane, 4 October 1944, ibid. 25. “Revised Draft of Operational Memorandum for Books,” n.d. [ca. August 1944]. 26. Paul Brooks, “Books Follow the Jeep,” Publishers Weekly, 8 December 1945, 2528. 27. OWI in the ETO: A Report on the Operations of the Office of War Information in the European Theatre of Operations January 1944–January 1945 (London: Office of War Information, 1945), 45. 28. Sulkin, “The OWI and Book-Hungry Europe,” 7. 29. “Memorandum on OWI Overseas Book Operations for Consideration at Book Conference held at Office of War Information, October 3, 1944,” box 39, folder 6, CBW Records. 30. “Take a Bow: Harold Guinzburg,” Publishers Weekly, 3 February 1945, 634–36; Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939– 44, paperback ed. (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 1999), 64–65. 31. Althea Chantre to S. T. Williamson and E. Trevor Hill, 4 August 1944, transcribing cable from Hamblet/Guinzburg, Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, NACP. 32. Kerr to Chantre, text for cable to Guinzburg, 20 April 1944, ibid. 33. Milton B. Glick to Kerr, 4 January 1945, Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2951A; Hamblet/Mackaye to Williamson/Candland/Foulke/Kerr/Hill, 25 January 1945, Record Group 208, entry 464, box 2949, NACP. 34. “Agenda and Minutes, P.W.E./O.W.I./P.W.D. Tripartite Committee, Overlord Plan,” FO 898/375, [British] National Archives, Kew; Monthly Progress Report, 27 March 1945 to 27 April 1945, Record Group 208, entry 413, box 2201, NACP. 35. “Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting, Overseas Editions, Inc.,” 15 February 1945, box 3, Norton Papers II, Columbia; Ballou, History, 90. 36. Brooks, “Books Follow the Jeep,” 2529. 37. “Memorandum on OWI Overseas Book Operations for Consideration at Book Conference held at Office of War Information, October 3, 1944,” box 39, folder 6, CBW Records. 38. “Revised Draft of Operational Memorandum for Books,” n.d. [ca. August 1944]. 39. Richard J. Walsh to David Lloyd, 12 November 1945, box 204, folder 1, John Day Papers, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 40. See Curtis G. Benjamin, U.S. Books Abroad: Neglected Ambassadors (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984); and Wilson P. Dizard Jr., Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004). 41. O. H. Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–1931 (New York: National Association of Book Publishers, 1931). There has been no later similarly comprehensive report, but Robert Frase published several articles and chapters that, considered together, may be the nearest equivalent for a survey of the 1950s. They include Robert W. Frase, “The Book Trade,” Current Economic Comment 14 (May 1952): 42–59; Robert W. Frase, “Economic Trends in Trade Book Publishing,” in Harold K. Guinzburg, Robert W. Frase, and Theodore Waller, Books and the Mass Market (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1953); Robert W. N OT E S TO PAGE S 19 0 – 95
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Frase, “The ‘Cheney Report’ Thirty Years Later,” an introduction to O. H. Cheney, Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–1931 (repr., New York: R. R. Bowker, 1960); Robert W. Frase, “Book Publishing,” Library Trends 10 (October 1961): 249–53. 42. For a fuller discussion of these threats and opportunities, see Dan Lacy, “Books and the Future: A Speculation,” in Bowker Lectures on Book Publishing (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1957), 336–64. 43. Alfred Stefferud, The Wonderful World of Books (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953); Jean Preer, “The Wonderful World of Books: Librarians, Publishers, and Rural Readers,” Libraries and Culture 32 (1997): 403–26. 44. For an account of library censorship and the collaboration of the Council in opposing it, see Louise S. Robbins, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939–1969 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 45. Richard McKeon, Robert K. Merton, and Walter Gellhorn, The Freedom to Read: Perspective and Program (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1957). 46. Dan Lacy, “Obscenity and Censorship,” Christian Century, 4 May 1960, 540–43. 47. For a fuller discussion of these policies and programs, see Dan Lacy, “The Role of American Books Abroad,” Foreign Affairs 34 (April 1956): 405–17. 48. Robert W. Frase, “Tariffs and Other Trade Barriers: The U.S. Experience,” Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science 30 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1980), 120–27. 49. American Books Abroad: A Report of a Conference Called by the National Book Committee, Princeton, N.J., September 29–30, 1955 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1956); Peter Jennison, American Books in the Near East, Central Africa, and Asia: Report of the Second Conference on American Books Abroad, Arden House, Harriman, N.Y., October 31–November 1, 1957 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1957). 50. Jean D. Grambs, The Development of Lifetime Reading Habits: A Guide for Schools and Libraries for Encouraging Children, Especially Teenagers, to Develop the Habit of Reading (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1954). 51. Jacob M. Price, ed., Reading for Life: Developing the College Student’s Lifetime Reading Interest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959); Ralph W. Conant, ed., The Public Library and the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956); James Cass, ed., Books in the Schools (New York: American Book Publishers Council, 1961). 52. Nancy Larrick, A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958); G. Robert Carlsen, Books and the Teen-Age Reader: A Guide for Teachers, Librarians, and Parents (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 53. Dan Lacy, “Social Change and the Library: 1945–1980,” in Libraries at Large: Tradition, Innovation, and the National Interest, ed. Douglas M. Knight and E. Shepley Nourse (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1969), 3–22. 54. Robert W. Frase, “Five Years of Struggle for Federal Funds,” Publishers Weekly, 21 January 1974, 64–67. 55. Richard P. Kleeman, The More Things Change: A Selective History of the AAP Freedom to Read Committee, 1970–1996 (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Publishers, 1998). 56. American Library Association, Commission on Freedom and Equality of Access to In554
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CHAPTER 12 Editorial Vision and the Role of the Independent Publisher 1. André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (New York: Verso Press, 2001), 5. 2. Conversation between Dan Simon and Mattia Carratello, October 2005, Frankfurt, Germany. 3. Herbert Mitgang, “Profiles: Helen Wolff,” New Yorker, 2 August 1982, 54. 4. Schiffrin, Business of Books, 17. In 1998, the year that Bertelsmann, the $20.5 billion German publishing conglomerate, acquired what was left of the Pantheon imprint with its purchase of Random House, it was revealed that Bertelsmann had published “a wide range of Hitlerian propaganda” and had lied about its involvement with Nazism. See also Lynn Hirschberg, “Nothing Random,” New York Times Magazine, 20 July 2003, 32. 5. Schiffrin, The Business of Books, 24. 6. Mitgang, “Profiles: Helen Wolff,” 42. 7. “Publishing Voices,” Publishers Weekly, 19 March 1982, 26. 8. Schiffrin, Business of Books, 25. 9. Mitgang, “Profiles: Helen Wolff,” 64; and today the Helen and Kurt Wolff imprint continues at Harcourt, under the inspired editorial direction of Helen Wolff ’s onetime assistant Drenka Willen, perhaps the best literary imprint among the majors, publishers of José Saramago among many other international masters. 10. “Publishing Voices,” 26. 11. Ibid. 12. Center for Book Culture, interview with John O’Brien, 〈http://www.centerforbook culture.org〉. 13. Ibid. 14. The Feminist Press is similarly linked with the City University of New York, as was the New Press for much of its first decade; Marlboro Press is joined to Northwestern University. 15. Center for Book Culture, interview with John O’Brien. 16. “The Publisher’s Profession,” in Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays and Letters, edited with a foreword by Michael Ermarth, translated by Deborar Lucas Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5. 17. Conversation between Dan Simon and Solatoroff by phone from Seven Stories Press, New York, to Solatoroff ’s home on Long Island. 18. Conversation between Dan Simon and Sara Bershtel by phone from Seven Stories Press, New York, to the offices of Metropolitan Press, New York, April 2004; conversation between Dan Simon and Kurt Vonnegut at Vonnegut’s home in New York on the occasion of Vonnegut’s eighty-third birthday, 11 November 2005.
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C H A P T E R 13 Literary Culture, Criticism, and Bibliography 1. Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism,” in Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf, 1953),
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71. 2. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 1. 3. Two notable postwar moments of contention are described in Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Genteel Tradition at Large,” Raritan 35 (Winter 2006): 70–91, episodes that are also cited in Rubin, chapter 23 in this volume. 4. Theodore Morrison, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference: The First Thirty Years (1926–1955) (Middlebury, Vt.: Middlebury College Press, 1976). The most famous writer associated with Bread Loaf, though never officially on the faculty, was Robert Frost, who came to live on the edge of the campus. 5. Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 97–99. 6. James Laughlin, “Some Irreverent Literary History,” in Random Essays: Recollections of a Publisher (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell Limited, 1989), 221–24. The editorial relationship between Laughlin and Pound is described in Gregory Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 7. The introduction by S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Press Reader, 1951–2001 (New York: Grove Press, 2001), fills out this brief summary. Rosset’s direct role ended in the early 1980s. Episodes of discretion are noted in James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), chap. 6. See also Donald Downs’s discussion of censorship in chapter 8 in this volume. 8. “Mr. Ransom, without my knowing it was he, took the curse off graduate studies in that old stronghold [ Johns Hopkins] of Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, philological lore, and the learned note.” Gerrit H. Roelofts, “Prophet, Priest, and King,” in John Crowe Ransom, Gentleman, Teacher, Poet, Editor, Founder of “The Kenyon Review”: A Tribute from the Community of Letters, ed. D. David Long and Michael R. Burr (Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon Collegian, 1964), 22. 9. Not everyone who wrote for the Kenyon Review wanted to be thought of as a “New Critic,” e.g., Yvor Winters; and Ransom himself repudiated the term. A broader view is sketched in Marian Janssen, The Kenyon Review, 1939–1970: A Critical History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). 10. Grant Webster, The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 41; and for a useful survey of the “Tory formalists,” as he terms them, see part 2, chaps. 3–6. Brooks and Warren also wrote a much less influential book, Understanding Fiction (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1943). Rubin describes Understanding Poetry in Songs of Ourselves, 157–59. 11. Quoted in Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 279. Ruland’s is the best account of the interwar articulation of a native literature. 556
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12. Philip Rahv, “The Cult of Experience in American Writing,” Partisan Review 7 (1940): 412–24; Rahv, “American Intellectuals in the Postwar Situation,” in Image and Idea (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1957), 222, 223, 224 (an essay originally appearing in a Partisan Review symposium of 1952, “Our Country and Our Culture”); Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 13. Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 135; Faulkner also cited (p. 136) Joyce and Mann as influences. 14. F. O. Matthiessen, The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), ix, xxi, xv, xvi. 15. In the 1940s, the contributors to the Kenyon Review overlapped with contributors to Partisan Review; Ransom and a few of his close friends, like Cleanth Brooks, may have connected their criticism with Christianity, but the dividing lines between the two journals were not religious or ethnic or political in the usual meanings of those terms. 16. Two key manifestos of disengagement from the cultural Left and its social realism were Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (1939): 34–49, and Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America” (1940; 1944), revised and reprinted in Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953). See also Hugh Wilford, “The Agony of the Avant-Garde: Philip Rahv and the New York Intellectuals,” in American Cultural Critics, ed. David Murray (Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 33–48; Harvey M. Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Webster, Republic of Letters, part 3, for an overview of the group that calls into question its ethnicity. A characteristic expression of anxiety about anti-intellectualism is voiced in Randall Jarrell, “The Intellectual in America,” in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 3–15. 17. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 161. 18. Laughlin, “Some Irreverent Literary History,” 222–23. 19. Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, 111–12, 84–85; Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959), 281. 20. A useful introduction to the advent of “theory” is Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); quotation at xxv. 21. A story partially told in Robert Dale Parker, The Invention of Native American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 22. Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the U.S.,” in The Writer’s Experience, ed. Ralph Ellison and Karl Shapiro (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1964), 10–11. 23. William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 181, 176–77, and chap. 5; James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 24. Gates’s point of view is sketched in essays gathered in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition” (1990). N OT E S TO PAGE S 2 2 7 – 3 2
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25. Jacques Derrida, “La Democratie ajournée,” in L’Autre cap (Paris: Minuet, 1991), 103. 26. Rubin, “The Genteel Tradition at Large,” 70–91. 27. F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an “English School” (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 68. 28. Billy Collins, Sailing Alone around the Room (New York: Random House, 2001), 16. 29. Denis Donoghue, “The Practice of Reading,” in What’s Happened to the Humanities, ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 123. 30. Louis Menand, “College: The End of the Golden Age,” New York Review of Books, 18 October 2001, 44. 31. Ibid. 32. Kernan, What’s Happened to the Humanities, 4–5. 33. Menand, “College,” 44. 34. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Denver: Swallow, 1954), 137. 35. Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Knopf, 1999). See especially chap. 6, “Cultural Criticism and the Transformation of Cultural Authority.” 36. U.S. Census Bureau. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, 121st ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2001). 37. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997), 506. 38. Kammen, American Culture, 146. 39. André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (London: Verso, 2000), 2–3. 40. See Ken Auletta, “Leviathan,” New Yorker, 29 October 2001, 50–61. 41. N. W. Ayer & Sons Directory (Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer & Sons, 1951); Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, 135th ed. (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2001). All circulation figures are paid unless otherwise indicated. 42. Lawrence C. Wroth, “Lathrop Colgate Harper: A Happy Memory,” PBSA 52 (1958): 161–72. 43. A. S. W. Rosenbach was also a notable collector; for descriptions of him and many others see Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 140, American Book Collectors and Bibliophiles, First Series (Detroit: Gale, 1994), 87, 89, 109, 223, 225, and its sequel, vol. 187 (Detroit: Gale, 1997), 257, 259. See also Robert DeMaria’s discussion of collecting in chapter 27 in this volume. 44. Frederick R. Goff, “The Preparation of the Third Census of Incunabula in American Libraries,” PBSA 64 (1970): 275–81. 45. Ruth S. Grannis, “What Bibliography Owes to Private Book Clubs,” PBSA 24 (1931): 14–33. 46. A useful retrospective account is David McKitterick, introduction to Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1928; repr., Winchester, England: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994). 47. See, e.g., F. P. Wilson, “Shakespeare and the ‘New Bibliography,’ ” in The Bibliographical Society, 1892–1942: Studies in Retrospect (London: The Society, 1945), 129. 48. W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” SB 3 (1950–51): 19–36. 558
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49. Clifford K. Shipton, “Bibliotheca Americana,” PBSA 62 (1968): 351–59. 50. See G. Thomas Tanselle, The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1993), which includes a listing of his publications. 51. Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). Useful as a summary of this book and of tensions in its wake is David L. Vander Meulen, “The History and Future of Bowers’s Principles,” PBSA 79 (1985): 197– 219. 52. Jacob Blanck, “Problems in the Bibliographical Description of Nineteenth-Century American Books,” PBSA 36 (1942): 124–36. The British scholar Philip Gaskell added a section on machine-printed texts to A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 53. Clifton Waller Barrett, “Some Bibliographical Adventures in Americana,” PBSA 44 (1950): 17–28. 54. Bowers’s efforts to qualify “definitive” are on view in “Scholarship and Editing,” PBSA 70 (1976): 161–88. 55. Fredson Bowers, ed., The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1, The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), xxix, xxiv, xxv. Bowers also prepared “Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors,” SB 17 (1964): 223–28. Ironically, the apparatus of The Scarlet Letter did not identify shifts in “accidentals” because of the costs involved in doing so, a point I owe to Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986; 3rd ed., 1996). Hinman’s major work was The Printing and Proof-Reading of the Shakespeare First Folio, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 56. Fredson Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 1–34, an argument he repeated in many other places. 57. William A. Jackson, “The History of Bibliography in America,” in The Bibliographical Society, 186. Even in 1945 this statement may have exaggerated the situation. 58. The scope of this activity is suggested in the brief sketches of collectors in The Grolier, 2000 (New York: Grolier Club, 2000). See also Nicholas A. Basbanes, Patience and Fortitude: Wherein a Colorful Cast of Determined Book Collectors, Dealers, and Librarians Go About the Quixotic Task of Preserving a Legacy (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001). 59. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Editing of Historical Documents,” SB 31 (1978): 1–56. 60. Too numerous to cite in this essay, Tanselle’s efforts have been published in SB and occasionally collected in books; especially useful are his essay-reviews of work in the field. The bibliographies in William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (New York: MLA, 1985; rev. ed., 1999) offer a quick way into the recent literature; see also D. C. Greetham, ed., Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (New York: MLA, 1995). 61. Reactions to King Lear are summarized, tendentiously, in Gary Taylor, “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 19–60. 62. Joseph Grigely, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), chap. 1 for the Hitler-eugenics-Bowers associations; G. Thomas N OT E S TO PAGE S 2 47 – 51
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Tanselle, “Textual Criticism at the Millennium,” SB 54 (2001), 47 n. 76, for the male editor– female manuscript statement; and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), for homophobia and the Cold War as contexts. That the makers of the New Bibliography disagreed among themselves on crucial points is emphasized in Paul Werstine, “Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing,” Text 13 (2000): 27–54, a reference I owe to Meredith McGill. 63. Evidence against any connections is abundant, including the protests of latter-day bibliographers against the ahistoricism of the New Criticism. The absence of personal connections and of any shared agenda, i.e., bibliography as impinging on literary criticism, is evident in Webster, Republic of Letters. 64. Immensely useful for placing him in context is the introduction to D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); quotations at 3, 4, 6. 65. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; repr., 1999), 28. 66. G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,” SB 44 (1991): 83– 144. 67. Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 68. Hans Zeller, “A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts,” SB 28 (1975): 231–64. 69. John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). 70. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. J. V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1969; repr., New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101–20. 71. See, e.g., Margaret de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255–83. 72. University Microfilms evolved into University Microfilms International and, eventually, into ProQuest, with a vastly expanded agenda of textual reproduction; Readex is now part of NewsBank. 73. See in particular Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. 74. D. F. McKenzie, “History of the Book,” in The Book Encompassed: Studies in TwentiethCentury Bibliography, ed. Peter Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 290–301.
CHAPTER 14 Magazines and the Making of Authors 1. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1981), “Appendix 2: From Fitzgerald’s Ledger,” 525–43. 2. Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus, Noonday Press, 1964), 126–27. 560
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3. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), 333–39; Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt Brace, Harvest Book, 1993), 346. 4. Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), 3–75. 5. Carol Polsgrove describes Baldwin’s rise to public prominence in Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 6. Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 252. 7. Harold Hayes, introduction to Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (New York: McCall’s, 1969), xvii–xxiii. 8. Polsgrove describes this transformation in It Wasn’t Pretty, which also takes up topics explored in subsequent paragraphs—the role of Esquire in Tom Wolfe’s and Gay Talese’s careers and Rust Hills’s approach to fiction editing. 9. Tom Wolfe, “Girl of the Year,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), 171. 10. Rust Hills to Saul Bellow, 8 May 1958, Rust Hills Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 11. See Nadine Gordimer Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 12. Nadine Gordimer to Victor Gollancz, 4 June 1964, Gordimer Mss., Lilly Library. 13. Sterling Lord to Carol Polsgrove, 30 July 2001, in possession of the author. 14. Gloria Steinem, quoting Sey Chassler, former editor in chief of Redbook, in “Sex, Lies and Advertising,” Ms., July–August 1990, 27. 15. Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, 244–45. 16. Rust Hills, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular: An Informal Textbook, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 181–84. 17. For the description of developments after the 1960s, the author relies on her own experience as writer and magazine editor during this period and also on conversations and email exchanges with other writers and editors, especially Colin Beavan, Kristen Kemp, John Searles, Phyllis Levy, Julia Kagan, and Jeffrey Seglin. 18. For an informal survey of what magazine editors were looking for in excerpts when they did run them, see Paul Nathan, “Farewell to Serial Killer Deals,” Publishers Weekly, 15 June 1998, 32–34. 19. Martin Arnold, “Making Books: The Article as Book,” New York Times, 22 June 2000.
CHAPTER 15 The Oppositional Press 1. Definitions of terms like “underground” vary considerably. Paul Krassner of the Realist, itself an oppositional publication, says there was only one truly underground paper in America: the Outlaw, published illicitly at San Quentin Prison. See also James P. Danky, ed., Undergrounds: A Union List of Alternative Periodicals in Libraries of the United States and Canada (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), vii. 2. On the process of cultural absorption, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: BusiN OT E S TO PAGE S 2 57 – 6 9
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ness Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 3. See Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 4. Harvey Levenstein, “The Worker/Daily Worker,” in The American Radical Press, 1880– 1960, ed. Joseph Conlin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 242. 5. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . . : The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 89. 6. Conlin, The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, 641. On the 1950s as a period of “renaissance” for Leftist thinking, see Isserman, If I Had a Hammer. 7. Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 88. 8. Harvey Levenstein, “National Guardian,” in Conlin, The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, 662. 9. On the Beats, see David D. Hall, chapter 13 in this volume. See also Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie, eds., The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History (Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart Book Press, 1978); Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley: Conari Press, 1996); Lisa Phillips, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995). “Zines,” the latest incarnation of self-expression, literary and otherwise, are described in Stephen Duncombe, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997). 10. Ben H. Bagdikian, foreword to David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1981), 13. 11. Ron Lichty, ed., The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Alternative Publishing (New York: Alternative Press Syndicate, 1976), has a section on legalities that gave advice to would-be publishers. 12. The Village Voice (1955–) had many of these elements, including editors like John Wilcock who later worked on the Los Angeles Free Press, but is more properly seen as part of the Beat era. Similarly, Liberation (1956–77) and Ramparts (1962–75) contained articles that were later reprinted in the alternative press but reflected earlier sensibilities in terms of layout and organization. For more on the alternative press, see Ken Wachsberger, ed., Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, vol. 1 (Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993); Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); and Robert J. Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). 13. Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms, 165. 14. Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 158–74. 15. Andrea Chesman and Polly Joan, Guide to Women’s Publishing (Paradise, Calif.: Dustbooks, 1978), 1. 16. On the impact of Friedan, see Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 562
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17. Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1970); Woman to Woman (Oakland, Calif.: mimeographed edition of 1,000 copies, 1970). 18. Some of the significant feminist presses that began in the early 1970s included the Feminist Press (which published classroom texts and reprints of classic texts by women); the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, Calif.; the Iowa City Women’s Press (which began in 1972 and later became Aunt Lute Book Company); Diana Press (which began as a print shop in Baltimore in 1972 and later moved to Oakland); and Daughters, Inc. (which began in 1972 in Vermont). 19. One measure of the growth in women’s publishing is found in the chronological index to Women’s Periodicals and Newspapers from the 18th Century to 1981 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 341–75. 20. NOW had formed three years earlier, in 1966. 21. On the early years of the feminist press, see Carol Seajay, ed., Feminist Bookstore News (San Francisco, 1976–2000). On feminist journals, see Amy Farell, “A Social Experiment in Publishing: Ms. Magazine, 1972–1989,” Human Relations 47, no. 6 ( June 1994): 723; and Carol Anne Douglas and Fran Moira, “off our backs: The First Decade, 1970–1980,” in Voices from the Underground, ed. Ken Wachsberger, vol. 1 (Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993). 22. Carol Seajay, “Twenty Years of Feminist Bookstores,” Ms., July–August, 1992, 60–63; Ashlea Halpern, “Sisters in Struggle: Feminist Bookshops Fight to Survive against the Onslaught of the Chains,” Punk Planet, May–June 2003, 100–105. 23. For a case study of lesbian-feminist community building through bookstores, see Saralyn Chesnut and Amanda Gable, “ ‘Women Ran It’: Charis Books and More and Atlanta’s Lesbian-Feminist Community, 1971–1981,” in Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 24. See also Katharine T. Adams, “Built Out of Books: Lesbian Energy and Feminist Ideology in Alternative Publishing,” Journal of Homosexuality 34, nos. 3–4 (1997): 113–29; Katharine T. Adams, “Paper Lesbians: Alternative Publishing and the Politics of Lesbian Representation in the United States, 1950–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1994); and Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984). 25. The most significant feminist academic journals included Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (University of Chicago Press); Feminist Studies (University of Maryland); Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (University of Colorado, Boulder). See Patrice McDermott, Politics and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 26. One indicator of the perilous state of feminist bookstores was the demise in 2000 of Feminist Bookstore News, founded in 1976, and the transformation of one of the nation’s oldest feminist bookstores, New Words (founded in 1974 in Cambridge, Mass.) from a forprofit operation to a community center in 2003. See New York Times, 23 June 2003. 27. Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1995). For sociological perspectives on the gay press, see Harold Corzine Jr., “The Gay Press” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1977), and Alan N OT E S TO PAGE S 2 7 7 – 80
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Winter, “The Gay Press: A History of the Gay Community and Its Publications” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1976). 28. See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 108– 25. 29. Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 56. 30. Ibid., 82–153. 31. The circulation of such ephemeral publications is very difficult to determine. Rodger Streitmatter notes that the 1972 issue of Our Own Voices: A Directory of Lesbian and Gay Periodicals lists 150 publications. 32. On the role of the press in lesbian activism, see Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104–30; and Katharine T. Adams, “Built Out of Books: Lesbian Energy and Feminist Ideology in Alternative Publishing,” Journal of Homosexuality 34 (1997): 113–29. 33. The main exception to this was the Advocate, which actively avoided cooperating with other gay papers, attempted to lure advertisers from them, and did little to inform its vast circulation adequately about the AIDS crisis. 34. Reflective of this oversight is the title of John A. Andrews’s study of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom: The Other Side of the Sixties (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 35. Rodger Streitmatter, “Conservative Media: A Different Kind of Diversity,” American Journalism 16 (Fall 1999), is an uncommon and much-needed effort. 36. Scholarly literature on the Right has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Among the most important works are Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, eds., Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Publications, 2000); and Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995). 37. On McVeigh and The Turner Diaries, see Carol M. Swain and Russ Nieli, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 271.
CHAPTER 16 The Black Press and Radical Print Culture 1. Pamela Newkirk, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 64–65. 2. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 366, 389. 3. Freedom’s Journal (New York), 16 March 1827. See Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007); and Jane Rhodes, “Race, Money, Politics and the Antebellum Black Press,” Journalism History 20 (Autumn–Winter 1994): 95–106. 564
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4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Freedom’s Journal, 16 March 1827. 5. I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, Mass.: Willey, 1891); Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Collier Books, 1965); Frederick G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States (1920; repr., College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1968), 4, 67, 72; Chicago Defender, 24 February 1917; Christian Recorder, 1 February 1917, as cited in Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States, 72. 6. On Garvey, see Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 78–82, 90–92, 99–112; Theodore G. Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1973), 19–38; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 103–6; Elliot Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois: Protagonist of the Afro-American Protest,” in Black Leaders in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 77–83; Briggs quoted from Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation, 125; Richard Digby-Junger, “The Guardian, Crisis, Messenger, and Negro World: The Early 20th-Century Black Radical Press,” Howard Journal of Communications 9 (1998): 264. 7. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 190. 8. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967; repr., New York: Quill, 1984), 565. 9. Ibid., 225–39, 231; Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation, 37. 10. See Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 31, 145. 11. Julius E. Thompson, The Black Press in Mississippi, 1865–1985 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 40–61. 12. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 286–7; Charles A. Simmons, The African American Press: A History of News Coverage during National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827–1965 ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), 102. 13. Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation, 19–37; also see discussion in Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14. Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 165. 15. On Nation of Islam theology, see C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 67–80; Bush, We Are Not What We Seem, 143. 16. E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 189–90; Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 129–33, Schuyler quote 142. 17. “The Blackman’s Future,” Muhammad Speaks to the Blackman 1, no. 1 (1960). 18. In Mattias Gardell, Countdown to Armageddon: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of N OT E S TO PAGE S 2 87 – 95
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Islam (London: Hurst, 1996), 72–73, the author examines numerous declassified FBI files that outlined this campaign. 19. Ibid, 142; Malcolm X, quoted in William W. Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 118. 20. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 61–62; Gardell, Countdown to Armageddon, 63–64, 83. 21. Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, 1, 18–19. 22. On the influence of Malcolm X, see Bush, We Are Not What We Seem, 181–92. On the origins of the Black Panther Party, see Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1918); and Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey Newton (New York: Random House, 1970). 23. For a more detailed discussion, see Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007). For more general discussion, see John Downing, Radical Media: The Political Experience of Alternative Communication (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 24. Black Panther Black Community News Service, 25 April 1967. 25. On visual culture of the Black Panther Party, see Erika Doss, “Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s–1990s,” Prospects: An Annual of American Studies 23 (1998): 484. 26. Black Panther Black Community News Service, 20 July 1967; Black Community Bulletin, San Francisco edition, August 1970. 27. Seale, Seize the Time, 180; Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America (New York: Free Press, 1989); records of the airline complaints are in the Huey P. Newton Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library, Stanford, Calif. 28. John Woodford, “Messaging the Blackman,” in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, ed. Ken L. Wachsberger, 2 vols. (Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993), 1:91–98. 29. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 332; Christian A. Davenport, “Reading the ‘Voice of the Vanguard’: A Content Analysis of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1969–1973,” in Jones, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 193–207. 30. Note that the readership data for the Sun-Reporter Group is not audited circulation; this information is obtained from the publication’s Web site, 〈http://www.sunreporter .com〉. 31. Anna Everett, “The Black Press in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 248.
CHAPTER 17 Where the Customer Is King: The Textbook in American Culture 1. Hillel Black, The American Schoolbook (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 146. 2. Jack Nelson and Gene Roberts Jr., The Censors and the Schools (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1963), 122, 125; Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, Biological Science: 566
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An Inquiry Into Life (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Biological Science, 1963), xviii; Black, American Schoolbook, 155. 3. Black, American Schoolbook, 157; George E. Webb, The Evolution Controversy in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 190; Paul F. Boller Jr., Memoirs of an Obscure Professor and Other Essays (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992), 28–29; Paul F. Boller Jr., “High School History: Memoirs of a Texas Textbook Writer,” Teachers College Record 82 (1980): 317; “Recommended Guidelines for Multi-Ethnic Publishing in McGraw-Hill Book Company” (typescript, n.d. [1968?]), Schomburg Clipping File 004.909-5, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 4. John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 440; Wilbur Schramm, “The Publishing Process,” in Text Material in Modern Education, ed. Lee J. Cronbach (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955), 133–34. 5. Black, American Schoolbook, 34; Jeanne S. Chall and James R. Squire, “The Publishing Industry and Textbooks,” in Handbook of Reading Research, vol. 2, ed. Rebecca Barr, Michael L. Kamil, Peter B. Mosenthal, and P. David Pearson (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 122–23; James M. Reid, An Adventure in Textbooks, 1924–1960 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1969), 165, 157–58, 121. 6. Sherry Keith, “Determinants of Textbook Content,” in Textbooks in American Society: Politics, Policy, and Pedagogy, ed. Philip Altbach, Gail P. Kelly, Hugh G. Petrie, and Lois Weis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 63–64; “Publisher’s Sweepstakes,” Teacher Magazine 10 (1998): 17; “A Pot of Gold for Publishers of Textbooks,” New York Times, 26 May 1998, D1–D4. 7. James R. Squire and Richard T. Morgan, “The Elementary and High School Textbook Market Today,” in Textbooks and Schooling in the United States, ed. David L. Elliott and Arthur Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 111; Alexander Stille, “The Betrayal of History,” New York Review of Books, 11 June 1998, 16; Arthur Woodward, “Do Illustrations Serve an Instructional Purpose in U.S. Textbooks?,” in Learning from Textbooks: Theory and Practice, ed. Bruce K. Britton, Marilyn Binkley, and Arthur Woodward (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), 122; Harriet Tyson-Bernstein and Arthur Woodward, “19th-Century Policies for 21st-Century Practice: The Textbook Reform Dilemma,” in Altbach et al., Textbooks in American Society, 96. 8. Chall and Squire, “The Publishing Industry,” 126–27; Jeanne Chall and Sue Conrad, “Textbooks and Challenge: The Influence of Educational Research,” in Elliott and Woodward, Textbooks and Schooling, 61–65; Sandra Stotsky, Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason (New York: Free Press, 1999), 13–14; Caroline B. Cody, “The States and Textbooks,” in The Textbook Controversy: Issues, Aspects and Perspectives, ed. John G. Herlihy (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1992), 90; Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, eds., Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998), 314; Stille, “The Betrayal of History,” 17. 9. Squire and Morgan, “The Elementary and High School Textbook Market,” 107; Michael Apple, “Regulating the Text: The Socio-Historical Roots of State Control,” in Altbach et al., Textbooks in American Society, 8; Kenneth K. Wong and Tom Loveless, “The PoliN OT E S TO PAGE S 305 – 8
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tics of Textbook Policy: Proposing a Framework,” in Altbach et al., Textbooks in American Society, 31–32. 10. Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Knopf, 2003), 107–9; Joan DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 125, 129; Stephen Arons, “Lessons in Law and Conscience: Legal Aspects of Textbook Adoption and Censorship,” in Language, Authority, and Criticism, ed. Suzanne deCastell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke (London: Falmer, 1989), 213; “Big Drive for Balance,” Time 88 (August 19, 1966): 53; Tyson-Bernstein and Woodward, “19th-Century Policies,” 96; Stephen Bates, Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Our Schools (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 218–23; Stotsky, Losing Our Language, 76–77. 11. John D. Marshall, “The Politics of Curriculum Decisions Manifested through the Selection and Adoption of Textbooks for Texas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1985), 116, 285, 270, 284. 12. Ibid., 288, 267, 291, 298, 303–4; DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read, 141. 13. “Negro Image Seen Blurred in Textbooks,” New York Post, 24 August 1966, Schomburg Clipping File 004.909-4, Schomburg Library; Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High School History Texts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 39–40; Paul Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), 87–88. 14. David M. Donahue, “Serving Students, Science, or Society? The Secondary School Physics Curriculum in the United States, 1930–65,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (Fall 1993): 345, 335–41; Peter B. Dow, Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 3; Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook, 81; Physical Science Study Committee, Physics (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1960), v. 15. Black, American Schoolbook, 139, 141; Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, Biological Science, xvii; Donahue, “Serving Students, Science, or Society?,” 346–48; Webb, Evolution Controversy, 188. 16. Dow, Schoolhouse Politics, 34; Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1979), 185. 17. Dow, Schoolhouse Politics, 135, 159–62. 18. Ibid., 170, 197; Ann Dodson to James J. Kilpatrick, 30 July 1975, “Education (2 of 4)” folder, box 2, accession 6626-g, James J. Kilpatrick Papers, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 19. Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 84–85; Building America, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1947); Building America, Eighth Grade, State of California, rev. ed. (n.p., n.d.), 3:29; Ingrid Winther Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney and the ‘Parasitic Menace’: Anti-Communist Legislation in California, 1940– 1949,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 202–3. 20. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 81, 85, 93; James Truett Selcraig, The Red Scare in the Midwest, 1945–1955: A State and Local Study (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 79–82; E. Merrill Root, Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks (New York: Devin-Adair, 1958), 3, 11; Nelson and Roberts, Censors and the Schools, 53, 55, 147. 568
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21. Frank Abbott Magruder, American Government: A Textbook on the Problems of Democracy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1949), 709; Zimmerman, Whose America?, 86, 101; Selcraig, Red Scare in the Midwest, 82; Nelson and Roberts, Censors in the Schools, 164; Jerome L. Himmelstein, To The Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 43–44. 22. Himmelstein, To The Right, 15–27; “Transcript of speech, Robert Skaife” (n.d.), enclosed with A. E. Johansen to Lucille Cardin Crain, 26 November 1952, folder 11, box 54, Papers of Lucille Cardin Crain, Knight Library, University of Oregon, Eugene; Building America, 2:162. 23. Building America, Eighth Grade, State of California, 28–29; “What Is Taught Your Children,” Educational Reviewer 2 (15 October 1950): 1. 24. Jonathan Zimmerman, “Brown-ing the American Textbook: History, Psychology, and the Origins of Modern Multiculturalism,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (2004): 46, 52–55; Howard E. Wilson, Intergroup Relations in Teaching Materials (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1949); Gary B. Nash, “Multiculturalism and History: Historical Perspectives and Present Prospects,” in Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique, ed. Robert K. Fullwinder (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 185; “Negro Image Seen Blurred In Textbooks.” 25. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 111, 113; Nelson and Roberts, Censors in the Schools, 168–74; Black, American Schoolbook, 115–18; John W. Caughey, John Hope Franklin, and Ernest R. May, Land of the Free: A History of the United States (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1966), 3. 26. Black, American Schoolbook, 119; “By What Authority,” Philadelphia Bulletin, 17 July 1960, “Schools—Philadelphia—Textbooks—1960 and Prior” folder, box 209, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Clipping Collection, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia; Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 298–303; Zimmerman, Whose America?, 107–8, 116. 27. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 434; Black, American Schoolbook, 117–18; “Educators Turn to a Balanced Teaching of Negroes’ Role in American History,” New York Times, 8 August 1968, Schomburg Clipping File 003.560-6, Schomburg Library. 28. “Big Drive for Balance”; Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman, Molding the Good Citizen, 36– 37; Bates, Battleground, 220, 215. 29. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 14; Kathy Kelly Epstein and William F. Ellis, “Oakland Moves to Create Its Own Multicultural Curriculum,” Phi Delta Kappan 73 (1992): 635–38. 30. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997), 115–16; Catherine Cornbleth and Dexter Waugh, The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 159; Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 9–11; David L. Kirp, “Textbooks and Tribalism in California,” Public Interest 102 (1991): 27–28. 31. Edward B. Jenkinson, The Schoolbook Protest Movement: 40 Questions and Answers N OT E S TO PAG E S 314 – 2 0
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(Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1986), 67; James Moffett, Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 18–21; Louise Adler, “Curriculum Challenges in California,” Record in Educational Administration and Supervision 13 (1993): 10–20; DelFattore, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read, 170–73. 32. Frank Edward Piasecki, “Norma and Mel Gabler: The Development and Causes of Their Involvement Concerning the Curricular Appropriateness of School Textbook Content” (Ph.D. diss., North Texas State University, 1982), 1–2, 40–47; Bates, Battleground, 55– 56; Jenkinson, Schoolbook Protest Movement, 55–57; Moffett, Storm in the Mountains, 39. 33. Moffett, Storm in the Mountains, 11, 110; Edward B. Jenkinson, Censors in the Classroom: The Mind Benders (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 22; Bates, Battleground, 245–48; Claudia Johnson, Stifled Laughter: One Woman’s Story about Fighting Censorship (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1994), 41. 34. Jonathan Zimmerman, “Relatively Speaking,” New Republic, 6 September 1999, 13–14; Bates, Battleground, 205; Webb, Evolution Controversy, 217, 221–22; “City Schools Bar Three Textbooks Said to Endorse Creationism,” New York Times, 24 June 1982, A1. 35. Webb, Evolution Controversy, 251; “City Schools Bar Three Textbooks”; Lee Burress, The Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship in the Public Schools, 1950–1985 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1989), 94–95, 108; Keith, “Determinants of Textbook Content,” 49; Fitzgerald, America Revised, 101; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, chap. 5; Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory (New York: Basic, 1992), 144–46; Ruth F. Earls, Joanne Fraser, and Bambi Sumpter, “Sexuality Education—In Whose Interest?,” in Sexuality and the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices of Sexuality Education, ed. James T. Sears (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 316; Stille, “The Betrayal of History,” 15. 36. Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); Larry Cuban, Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Arthur Woodward and David L. Elliott, “Textbook Use and Teacher Professionalism,” in Elliott and Woodward, Textbooks and Schooling, 178–82; “A Pot of Gold For Publishers,” D1. 37. “Teachers Fight for Darwin’s Place in U.S. Classrooms,” New York Times, 24 November 1998, F3; Epstein and Ellis, “Oakland Moves to Create Its Own Multicultural Curriculum,” 637; Stotsky, Losing Our Language, 195; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 5. 38. Burress, Battle of the Books, 107. 39. Nelson and Roberts, Censors and the Schools, 186, 189.
CHAPTER 18 Libraries, Books, and the Information Age 1. Committee on Post-War Planning of the American Library Association, Post-War Standards for Public Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1943). 2. Robert Leigh, The Public Library in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 25; on communication, see Kenneth Cmiel, “On Cynicism, Evil, and the Discovery of Communication in the 1940s,” Journal of Communication 46 (Summer 1996): 88–107. 570
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3. Leigh, Public Library, 223; Mary Rothrock, “Libraries in a New Age,” Library Journal 71 (1 September 1946): 1079. 4. The Library Inquiry is often interpreted as conservative and elitist. See, e.g., Douglas Raber, Librarianship and Legitimacy: The Ideology of the Public Library Inquiry (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997). I have found fairly conservative voices in some of the reports—notably Bernard Berelson’s—but I have also found a modestly liberal tint in much of the Library Inquiry’s work, particularly in Robert Leigh’s summary volume. For an assessment closer to mine and different from that of his book, see Douglas Raber, “Everything Old Is New Again,” American Libraries 30 (September 1999): 52–55. 5. Alvin Johnson, The Public Library—A People’s University (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1938); Harold Laski, “The Library in the Post-War World,” Library Journal 70 (1 May 1946): 383–85. 6. Marion Grady, “Book Houses or Modern Communications Centers?,” School and Society 64 (5 October 1946): 233–35. 7. Johnson, Public Library, 19; Leigh, Public Library, 14. 8. Carleton Joeckel and Amy Winslow, A National Plan for Public Library Service (Chicago: American Library Association, 1948): 107, 105. 9. For a portrait of midcentury public librarians, and not an entirely flattering one, see Alice Bryan, The Public Librarian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). On the timidity of librarians, see p. 43. Bryan’s book was part of the research produced by the Public Library Inquiry. 10. Louise S. Robbins, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939–1969 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 29–104. 11. R. A. Sawyer, “Book Selection in the Reference Department of the New York Public Library,” College and Research Libraries 6 (December 1944): 20–22. 12. Guy Lyle, The Administration of the College Library (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1949), 330; also see, Louis Round Wilson and Maurice F. Tauber, The University Library: Its Organization, Administration, and Functions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 7–18, 302–81. 13. J. D. Bernal, “Information Service as an Essential in the Progress of Science,” in Report of the Proceedings of the 20th Conference of Aslib (London: Association of Information Management, 1945), 20. Also see J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939), 292–308; J. D. Bernal, “Preliminary Analysis of Pilot Questionnaire on the Use of Scientific Literature,” in Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 21 June–2 July, 1948, Report and Papers Submitted (London: Royal Society, 1948), 589–637. Also see S. C. Bradford, Documentation (London: Crosby, Lockwood, 1948), 106–21. On the American context, see Irene Farkas-Conn, From Documentation to Information Science (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 99–149. 14. Fremont Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Its Solution (New York: Hadham Press, 1944), 93. 15. For the proceedings of this influential conference, see Barbara Evans Markuson, ed., Libraries and Automation (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1964). 16. On computer projects on campuses, see Rowena Swanson, Move the Information . . . N OT E S TO PAGE S 3 2 7 – 31
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A Kind of Missionary Spirit (Arlington, Va.: Office of Aerospace Research, U.S. Air Force, 1967), 8. 17. Edith Patterson Meyer, Meet the Future: People and Ideas in the Libraries of Today and Tomorrow (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 3; President’s Science Advisory Committee, Science, Government, and Information: The Responsibilities of the Technical Community and the Government in the Transfer of Information (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963). Bart Holm, How to Manage Your Information (New York: Reinhold Book Corporation, 1968), 155; Leonard Karel, Charles J. Austin, and Martin M. Cummings, “Computerized Bibliographic Services for Biomedicine,” Science 148 (May 1965): 766. 18. Walter Carlson, “The Research Library in a Challenging Age,” Special Libraries 55 (1964): 11–15; Marjorie Griffin, “The Library of Tomorrow,” Library Journal 87 (15 April 1962): 1556–57; “Libraries: How Not to Waste Knowledge,” Time, 3 September 1965, 57. Also see A. W. VanderMeer, “Fear of the New Media,” ALA Bulletin 55 (October 1961): 798–802. 19. Leon Carnovsky, “The Role of the Public Library: Implications for Library Education,” in The Intellectual Foundations of Library Education, ed. Don Swanson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 27, 39; “The Library of the Future: A WLB Symposium,” Wilson Library Bulletin 39 (November 1964): 233; for another example, see M. P. Schofield, “Libraries Are for Books,” ALA Bulletin 56 (October 1962): 803–5. 20. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). On scientists and books, see p. 13. 21. H. S. White, “To the Barricades! The Computer Is Coming!,” Special Libraries 57 (1966): 631–35. 22. Meyer, Meet the Future, 12. Also see, for example, the widely discussed 1967 essay by C. Walter Stone, director of libraries at the University of Pittsburgh. Stone expressed great enthusiasm (and remarkable prescience) about the computerization of libraries. At the same time, however, he argued that libraries would still “enjoy the world of books.” C. Walter Stone, “The Library Function Redefined,” Library Trends 16 (October 1967): 183. 23. For just one example of what was a common theme, see Oscar Handlin, “Libraries and Learning,” Atlantic Monthly 213 (April 1964): 103. 24. Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information—1967 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1967), 30; Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information—1969 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1969), 6, 28–29. 25. American Library Association, The Library and Information Networks of the Future (New York: Griffiss Air Force Base, 1963), 5–9. 26. “Libraries: How Not to Waste Knowledge,” 52, 57; “Information Explosion Hits Our Libraries,” Readers Digest 88 (April 1966): 153–55. 27. Kenneth Clark, “Role for Librarians in Relevant War against Poverty,” Wilson Library Bulletin 40 (September 1965): 42–47; Michael Harrington, “An Unconditional War,” Wilson Library Bulletin 38 ( June 1964): 835–39; Herbert Gans, “Access Survey from the Social Scientist’s Perspective,” Wilson Library Bulletin 38 (December 1963): 336–41. 28. Molz quoted in “The Metropolitan Public Library—A Symposium,” Wilson Library Bulletin 40 ( June 1966): 925. 29. See Alfred Kahn et al., Neighborhood Information Centers: A Study and Some Proposals (New York: Columbia University School of Social Work, 1966). 572
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30. See “A Mission Statement for Public Libraries: Guidelines for Public Library Service, Part I,” American Libraries 8 (December 1977): 615–20. 31. Nader is quoted in “Battle on the Budget,” Library Journal 98 (15 March 1973): 836; Marilyn Gell, “The Politics of Information,” Library Journal 104 (16 September 1979): 1736; “Libraries Shed Stodgy Image,” U.S. News and World Report, 24 December 1973, 75. 32. Lolly Parker Eggers, A Century of Stories: The History of the Iowa City Public Library, 1896–1997 (Iowa City: Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation, 1997), 265–81. 33. “Libraries Shed Stodgy Image,” 75. 34. Eggers, Century of Stories, 288. 35. David Wasserman, The New Librarianship: A Challenge for Change (New York: W. W. Bowker, 1972). 36. Kenneth David, “The Selling of the Library,” Publishers Weekly 216 (13 August 1979): 26. 37. Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information—1978 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1979), 4. 38. Susan Wagner, “Books and Library Funds: A Continuing Crisis,” Publishers Weekly 203 (30 April 1973): 36; “Libraries’ Lament,” New Republic, 12 May 1973, 12–13. By this time libraries received federal money from many sources. While Nixon called for an end to federal support for public and university libraries under the Library Services Act in 1974, at the same time he slated a 37 percent increase for medical libraries in the separate Medical Library Assistance Act. See R. Kathleen Molz, Federal Policy and Library Support (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 16. 39. See Richard De Gennaro, “Escalating Journal Prices: Time to Fight Back,” American Libraries 8 (February 1977): 69–74. 40. The Berkeley statistics were drawn from the “Volumes Added/Gross” statistics in Cumulated ARL University Library Statistics, 1962–63 through 1978–79, compiled by Kendon Stubbs and David Buxton (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1981), n.p.; on the decline in the early seventies, I used the “volumes added” columns in Academic Library Statistics, 1973–74 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1974), n.p. 41. William Baumol and Matityahu Marcus, Economics of Academic Libraries (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1973); on the “irrelevancy” of research libraries, see Vincent Giuliano et al., Into the Information Age: A Perspective for Federal Action on Information (Washington, D.C.: American Library Association, 1978). 42. Richard De Gennaro, “Austerity, Technology, and Resource Sharing: Research Libraries Face the Future,” Library Journal 100 (15 May 1975): 917–23; Donald Redmond, Michael Sinclair, and Elinore Brown, “University Libraries and University Research,” College and Research Libraries 33 (November 1972): 447–53; Michael Moran, “The Concept of Adequacy in University Libraries,” College and Research Libraries 39 (March 1978): 85–93. 43. Richard De Gennaro, “Impact of On-Line Services on the Academic Library,” in The Online Revolution in Libraries, ed. Allen Kent and Thomas Galvan (New York: Dekker, 1978). 44. For one overview, see Herbert Dordick, Helen Bradley, and Burt Nanus, eds., The Emerging Network Marketplace (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981). N OT E S TO PAGE S 33 5 – 40
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45. F. W. Lancaster, “Whither Libraries: or, Wither Libraries,” College and Research Libraries 39 (September 1978): 345–57; Vincent Giuliano, “A Manifesto for Librarians,” Library Journal 104 (15 September 1979): 1837–42. 46. Quotations are from comments by Richard Boss at panel discussion “Changing Objectives in Research Libraries,” in Association of Research Libraries, Minutes of the EightyThird Meeting, January 19, 1974 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1974), 11; for another example, see Richard De Gennaro, “Shifting Gears: Information Technology and the Academic Library,” in Libraries and Information Science in the Electronic Age, ed. Hendrik Edelman (Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1986), 23–35. This was first given as a talk in 1983. 47. Anne Woodsworth et al., “The Model Research Library: Planning for the Future,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 15 (1989): 134. 48. Miriam Drake, “Information Systems Design: The Librarian’s Role,” Wilson Library Bulletin 61 (October 1986): 21. 49. Six campuses were chosen as sites to work on the first phase of the Digital Research Initiative. They were the University of Illinois at Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan. 50. Ann Okerson and Kendon Stubbs, “The Library ‘Doomsday Machine,’ ” Publishers Weekly 238 (8 February 1991): 36–37; Jeffrey Young, “In the New Model of the Research Library,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 October 1997, A27. 51. Patricia Battin, “Technology and the Humanities,” in The New Library Legacy: Essays in Honor of Richard De Gennaro, ed. Susan A. Lee (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), 1. 52. Stephen Akey, “McLibraries,” New Republic, 26 February 1990, 12–13; Patrice Higonnet, “Scandal on the Seine,” New York Review of Books, 15 August 1991, 32–33. Also see Stephen R. Graubard and Paul LeClerc, eds., Books, Bricks, and Bytes: Libraries in the Twenty-First Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1998), another collection largely, but not universally, devoted to defending the book. For a hostile review of this book from a university librarian, see Michael Keller, “Libraries in the Digital Future,” Science 281 (4 September 1998): 1461–62. For one of the most thoughtful and historically informed humanities commentaries on the research library, see Marian Constable, “The University Library at the Turn of the Century,” Chronicle of the University of California 4 (Fall 2000): 139–56. 53. Nicholson Baker, “Discards,” New Yorker, 4 April 1994, 64–85; Nicholson Baker, “Deadline,” New Yorker, 24 July 2000, 42–61; also see his book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001). 54. For a summary of these debates, see Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 55. For some of the larger critiques of the university, see David Noble, “Digital Diploma Mills, Part I: The Automation of Higher Education,” October 86 (Fall 1998): 107–18; Jennifer Washburn and Eyal Press, “The Kept University,” Atlantic Monthly 285 (March 2000): 39–53. 56. Jacqueline Seewald, “Rustle of Pages vs. Clicks of Mouse,” Christian Science Monitor, 18 September 1998; Laura Miller, “www.claptrap.com,” New York Times, 15 March 1998. 57. Quoted in Geoffrey Nunberg, “The Place of Books in the Age of Mechanical Repro574
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duction,” in Future Libraries, ed. Howard Block and Carla Hesse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17. 58. For examples of this tactile, sensuous defense of the book against the computer, see Andrei Codrescu, “The Might of Bytes,” Architecture 88 ( January 1999): 154; William Gass, “In Defense of the Book,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 299 (November 1999): 45–52. 59. Jay David Bolter, Writing Spaces: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Eastgate Systems, 1991). (I have consulted the CD-ROM version of this text.) 60. “Cambridge Public Joins the Internet,” Library Journal 119 (August 1994): 18–19; “All Booked Up,” U.S. News & World Report, 7 April 1997, 16; for the Clinton administration, see National Telecommunications and Information Administration (U.S. Dept. of Commerce), “Connecting the Nation: Classrooms, Libraries, and Health Care Organizations in the Information Age,” ( June 1995). 61. “Making a Library Current and a Magnet for the Community,” New York Times, 25 May 1994; “Bustling Queens Library Speaks in Many Tongues,” New York Times, 31 May 1998; “File This under Shock, Future,” U.S. News & World Report, 12 July 1999, 48. 62. “Bringing Libraries into the 21st Century,” New York Times, 30 October 1994; “Moving Light Years from Dewey Decimal,” New York Times, 14 November 1995. 63. See “Libraries Will Spend Almost $2 Billion on Books in 1999,” Library Journal 120 (September 1995): 104–5; “Libraries Succeed at Funding Books and Bytes,” Library Journal 124 ( January 1999): 50–53. See also Mary Chelton, “Read Any Good Books Lately?,” Library Journal 118 (May 1993): 33–38; Jennie Flexner, “Readers and Books,” Library Journal 118 ( July 1993): 88; Susan Nall Bales, “Technology and Tradition: The Future’s in the Balance,” American Libraries 29 ( June–July 1998): 82–86. 64. Nicholson Baker’s critiques started with the new San Francisco Public Library. See also “Chicago Friends Lose Round in Weeding Battle,” American Libraries 32 (November 2001): 24–25. 65. “Poll Finds Library Use on Rise,” American Libraries 27 (February 1995): 15; “Bricks, Books, and the Web: Towns Redesign the Library,” Christian Science Monitor, 10 May 2001; “The Public Library Renaissance,” Library Journal 123 (1 December 1998): 6. 66. Norman Oder, “The New Wariness,” Library Journal 127 (1 January 2002): 55–58.
CHAPTER 19 Science Books since 1945 1. Michael White and John R. Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, updated ed. (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2002). 2. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). 3. John Maddox, “The Big Big Bang Book,” Nature 336 (1988): 267; Michael Rodgers, “The Hawking Phenomenon,” Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 2 (1992): 231–34. 4. Pierre Fayard, La communication scientifique publique: De la vulgarisation à la mediatisation (Lyon: Chronique Sociale, 1988); Bernard Schiele, ed., When Science Becomes CulN OT E S TO PAGE S 3 4 3 – 47
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ture: World Survey of Scientific Culture (Proceedings I) (Boucherville, Quebec: University of Ottawa Press, 1994); Bernard Schiele and Réal Jantzen, eds., Les territoires de la culture scientifique (Lyon and Montréal: Press Universitaires de Lyon and Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2003). 5. Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Warren Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965); Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). 6. William D. Garvey, Communication: The Essence of Science—Facilitating Information Exchange among Librarians, Scientists, Engineers and Students (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979). 7. David A. Kronick, A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technological Press, 1665–1970, 2nd ed. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1976); Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Antoinette Miele Wilkinson, The Scientist’s Handbook for Writing Papers and Dissertations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991). 8. Robert Day, How to Write & Publish a Scientific Paper, 5th ed. (Phoenix: Oryx, 1998). 9. CBE Style Manual Committee, CBE Style Manual: A Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers in the Biological Sciences, 5th rev. and expanded ed. (Bethesda, Md.: Council of Biology Editors, 1983). 10. American Society for Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, Author’s Guide and Style Manual for ASA, CSSA and SSSA Publications (Madison, Wis.: American Society for Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, 1968); Janet Dodd, ed., The ACS Style Guide (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1992). 11. Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication of the National Academy of Sciences–National Academy of Engineering, Scientific and Technical Communication (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1969); National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1959); Royal Society, The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 21 June–2 July 1948: Report and Papers Submitted (London: Royal Society, 1948); Marcel C. LaFollette, “Scientific and Technical Publishing in the United States, 1880– 1950,” in Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, vol. 4 of A History of the Book in America, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 234–59; Eugene Garfield, “In Truth, the ‘Flood’ of Scientific Literature Is Only a Myth,” Scientist 5, no. 17 (1991): 11. Derek J. de Solla Price first explored the exponential growth of science in Science since Babylon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 12. Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20, no. 3 (1990): 519–39; Bruce V. Lewenstein, “From 576
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Fax to Facts: Communication in the Cold Fusion Saga,” Social Studies of Science 25, no. 3 (1995): 403–36; Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, eds., Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985). 13. The original Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, published in 1913 by the Chemical Rubber Company, had grown by 1973 to become the base of a publishing program so full that the Chemical Rubber Company sold its manufacturing activities to concentrate on publishing; in 2003, the CRC Press became part of the Taylor & Francis group of scientific journals and book publishing companies, 〈http://www.crcpress.com/corphistory.asp〉 (10 July 2003). 14. Mary Ellen Bowden, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Robert V. Williams, eds., History and Heritage of Science Information Systems (Proceedings of a Conference) (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1999); W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden, eds., The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 2004). 15. Eugene Garfield, Arnold Thackray, and Jeffrey L. Sturchio, “Oral History of Eugene Garfield” (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation/Beckman Center for History of Chemistry, 1987), 40 pp. 〈http://www.isinet.com/aboutus/〉 (8 January 2004). 16. Thomas F. Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 35–74. 17. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael Sokal, and Bruce V. Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 18. The field of physics and its subdisciplines had the best-developed system, originally housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, now based at Cornell University, 〈http://www .arxiv.org〉. 19. H. H. Hess, “History of Ocean Basins,” in Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington, ed. A. E. J. Engel, H. L. James, and B. L. Leonard (Boulder, Colo.: Geological Society of America, 1962), 599–620. 20. Robert V. Blystone and Kimberly Barnard, “The Future Direction of College Biology Textbooks,” BioScience 38, no. 1 (1988): 48–52. 21. The growth of the U.S. scientific and technical community is documented in the Science and Engineering Indicators series of reports issued biennially by the U.S. National Science Board, the governing body for the U.S. National Science Foundation. 22. Mary Jo Nye, “From Student to Teacher: Linus Pauling and the Reformulation of the Principles of Chemistry in the 1930s,” in Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Authors, ed. Anders Lundgren and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Canton, Mass.: Neale Watson Publications, 1999). 23. Charles Holbrow, “Archaeology of a Bookstack: Some Major Introductory Physics Texts of the Last 150 Years,” Physics Today 52 (March 1999): 50–56. 24. Edward Yoxen, “Speaking Out about Competition: An Essay on ‘The Double Helix’ as Popularisation,” in Shinn and Whitley, Expository Science, 163–81. 25. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Ledyard Stebbins, 94, Dies: Applied Evolution to Plants,” New York Times, 21 January 2000, B9; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutional Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press N OT E S TO PAG E S 3 49 – 5 3
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of Harvard University Press, 2002); Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 26. Robert C. Kerber, “Elephantiasis of the Textbook,” Journal of Chemical Education 65, no. 8 (1988): 719–20. 27. Robert V. Blystone, Kimberly Barnard, and Sarah Golimowski, “Development of Biology Textbooks,” BioScience 40, no. 3 (1990): 300–303. 28. John C. Bailar Jr., “First Year College Chemistry Textbooks,” Journal of Chemical Education 70, no. 9 (1993): 695–98. 29. Kohlstedt, Sokal, and Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America; Jack S. Goldstein, A Different Sort of Time: The Life of Jerrold R. Zacharias, Scientist, Engineer, Educator (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 30. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Benchmarks for Science Literacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989); National Research Council, National Science Education Standards (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996). 31. The Texas controversy and related efforts to teach creationism and “intelligent design” elsewhere in America waxed and waned over the last four decades of the twentieth century. They continue as this essay is completed: see the National Center for Science Education’s Web site, 〈http://www.ncseweb.org〉, for current information. 32. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 33. Thomas S. Kuhn, Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1884–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). See also Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Keay Davidson, The Death of Truth: Thomas S. Kuhn and the Evolution of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). For just one example of the commentary on Kuhn, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn: Paradigm Shifts in Art, Theory, and Science (New York: Guilford Press, 1997). 34. For reactions to Carson, see Priscilla Coit Murphy, chapter 25 in this volume, and Lawrence Lessing, “The Three Ages of Science Writing,” Chemical and Engineering News, 6 May 1963, 88–92; Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Julian Simon, The Economics of Population Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Priscilla Coit Murphy, What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 35. Gerald Holton, Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 36. Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Was There Really a Popular Science ‘Boom’?,” Science, Technology & Human Values 12, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 29–41. 37. Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900– 1999 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2001). 38. Data compiled by research assistant Diane Renbarger, “New York Times Bestsellers, 1945–2000” (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), and maintained in a database by the author. 39. Thomas M. Lessl, “Naturalizing Science: Two Episodes in the Evolution of a Rhetoric of Scientism,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 4 (1996): 379–96. 578
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40. Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: J. Wiley, 1999), 321. 41. Ibid.; William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). 42. All sales figures drawn from the annual compilations from Publishers Weekly. 43. Maddox, “The Big Big Bang Book”; Rodgers, “The Hawking Phenomenon.” 44. The first book in the series was Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 45. Felicity Barringer, “Cancer-Drug News Puts a Focus on Reporters and Book Deals,” New York Times, 8 May 1998, A11; Carlin Romano, “Agent of Eggheads,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 September 1995, D1; and John Brockman, The Third Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 46. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Sex—The Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000). 47. Fears about an “antiscience” culture were widely circulated in the mid-1990s; see, e.g., Holton, Science and Anti-Science, and Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 48. Davidson, Carl Sagan; Poundstone, Carl Sagan. 49. Jim Giles, “The Man They Love to Hate,” Nature 423 (2003): 216–18; Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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CHAPTER 20 U.S. Academic Publishing in the Digital Age 1. This chapter is based on John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 2. John Cox, “The Great Journals Crisis,” Logos 9, no. 1 (1998): 31. 3. For a detailed account of the origins and development of JSTOR, see Roger C. Schonfeld, JSTOR: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 4. For a recent example see Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, and Matthew Rascoff, University Publishing in a Digital Age (New York: Ithaka, 26 July 2007), available at 〈http://www .ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing〉. 5. A good example of this was the sudden appearance of Google as a significant player in the field of book publishing in 2004, with the advent of Google Book Search and the Google Print Library Project. These initiatives involved a major investment by Google in the digitization of book content acquired from publishers (in the case of Google Book Search) or from libraries (in the case of the Library Project). However, these investments had less to do with publishing than with Google’s efforts to strengthen its position vis-à-vis its main competitors in the search engine field, such as Yahoo and MSN. In the publishing world, Google’s initiatives were highly controversial. Many publishers welcomed Google Book Search, which they saw as a low-risk way to gain publicity for their books and to drive up sales, but they were deeply apprehensive about the Google Library Project. In 2005 both the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers launched a class-action lawsuit against N OT E S TO PAGE S 3 56 – 74
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Google for infringement of copyright. After years of negotiations, the parties reached a settlement in late 2008. If approved in federal court, the deal would provide readers access to millions of in-copyright books under conditions that would compensate publishers and authors.
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CHAPTER 21 The Perseverance of Print-Bound Saints: Protestant Book Publishing 1. Cheryl A. Forbes, “Unlisted Bestsellers,” Christianity Today, 23 June 1972, 40. In the last decade Publishers Weekly has taken more notice of religious publishing. Its coverage of the annual Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) convention often surpasses anything that appears in religious periodicals. 2. Allan Fisher, “Evangelical-Christian Publishing: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Going,” Publishing Research Quarterly 14 (Fall 1998): 3; Martin E. Marty, John G. Deedy, David Wolf Silverman, and Robert Lekachman, The Religious Press in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), vii, 16. 3. Chris Hall, “What Hal Lindsey Taught Me about the Second Coming,” Christianity Today, 25 October 1999, 83; Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5–6. 4. Michael F. Stitzinger, “Evangelical Religious Publishing: An Examination, Analysis, and Comparison of Selected Publishers of Evangelical Materials” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1984), 40–41. See also Steve Rabey, “Despite Recent Breakthroughs, Most Christian Books Don’t Make Best-Seller Lists,” Christianity Today, 17 February 1984, 45–46. The “National Religious Bestseller List” would become the “CBA Bestseller List” or, as Publishers Weekly would come to call it, “Evangelical Christian Bestsellers.” 5. Hall, “What Hal Lindsey Taught Me,” 84. 6. George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the Nineties (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 14, 46; American Piety in the 21st Century: New Insights to the Depth and Complexity of Religion in the U.S. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Institute for Studies in Religion, September 2006), 4. 7. Under the Radar: A Breakthrough, In-Depth Study of the Book Industry’s Underreported Segments and Channels (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005). For a discussion on the complexity of the category “religious books,” see John R. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 589–90. 8. Judith S. Duke, Religious Publishing and Communications (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1981), 152–53, 160; John P. Ferre, “Searching for the Great Commission: Evangelical Book Publishing since the 1970s,” in American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, ed. Quentin J. Schultze (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Academic Books, 1990), 100– 101; Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing,” Book History 2 (1999): 207–17. 9. Bowker Annual: Library and Book Trade Almanac, 2004, 49 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 2004): 508; Bowker Annual 51 (2006): 516; “Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Rebounded Slightly in 2006,” news release, R. R. Bowker, 31 May 2007. See “Reading the 580
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Data on Books, Newspapers, and Magazines: A Statistical Appendix” in this volume, and the notes to the tables there for comments on Bowker’s research methods. 10. Book Industry Trends, 2005 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005), 10, 13; Book Industry Trends, 2006, 10, 13. 11. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 113; Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 437. 12. Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, eds., The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1997), 86; Eileen W. Lindner, ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1999 (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1999), 349. 13. Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 260; Glazier and Shelley, Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, 238–42, 274–77. 14. For a good overview of the massive printing enterprise of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, see Jehovah’s Witnesses: Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1993), 556–615. 15. Distribution statistics for The Book of Mormon can be found on the Church of Latterday Saints Web site, 〈http://www.lds.org/newsroom/〉. A good general treatment of Mormon publishing can be found in Larry Stahle, A Lasting Impression . . . A Press for All the World: A History of Deseret Press, 1850–1980 (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Press, 1980); and Eleanor Knowles, Deseret Book Company: 125 Years of Inspiration, Information, and Ideas (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1991). 16. Richard Behar, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” Time, 6 May 1991, 55; Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures (Boston, Mass.: First Church of Christ Scientist, 1994), cover. 17. These figures are rough estimates, drawn from membership rolls rather than polling data. The figure for 1945 is from Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1947 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 61. In 1945 the Statistical Abstract included only bodies with 50,000 members or more. Of course, many people adhere to Protestant beliefs but never formally join a church, while others are members of a church but do not adhere to any standard definition of Protestantism. The figures for 1997 are from Lindner, Yearbook, 337–51; and Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1998), 8–9, 72. Other treatments of the changing nature of Protestantism in the United States include Gallup and Castelli, The People’s Religion; American Piety in the 21st Century; and Dean R. Hoge and David A. Roozen, eds., Understanding Church Growth and Decline: 1950–1978 (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979). 18. Book Industry Trends, 2000, part 2: 4. 19. Since its founding in 1816, the American Bible Society has distributed some 4 billion Bibles and parts of scripture. Noll, A History of Christianity, 404. The DeMoss Foundation has published and distributed millions of copies of their heavily advertised Power for Living. See Randy Frame, “Millions Respond to National Evangelistic Media Blitz,” Christianity Today, 3 February 1984, 42–43; David Van Biema, “Who Are These Guys?,” Time, 9 August 1999, 52–53; and W. W. Vardell, special services manager, Gideons International, personal correspondence with the author, 25 October 1999. N OT E S TO PAGE S 37 8 – 7 9
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20. Most of these denominations were involved in publishing long before they established their own publishing houses. For example, Baptist books and pamphlets littered the American landscape in the 1700s, even though the Baptist General Tract Society was not founded until 1824. John P. Dessauer, Paul D. Doebler, and Hendrik Edelman, Christian Book Publishing and Distribution in the United States and Canada (Tempe, Ariz.: Christian Booksellers Association, 1987), 26–47. For a good overview of denominational publishing in the United States, see Carolyn W. Baldwin, “Denominational Publishing: A Study of Major Protestant Church-Owned Publishing Houses in the United States” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1971). 21. Fisher, “Evangelical-Christian Publishing,” 3–11. 22. George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984), viii; George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 4–5. 23. James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6; David Kucharsky, “The Year of the Evangelical ’76,” Christianity Today, 22 October 1976, 12–13; Donald Tinder, “Why the Evangelical Upswing?,” Christianity Today, 21 October 1977, 10–12; “Back to That Old Time Religion: Gaudy and Vital, U.S. Evangelicalism Is Booming,” Time, 26 December 1977, 52–58. 24. George Gallup Jr., Religion in America, 1977–1978 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Religious Research Center, 1977), 49; George Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1982 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1982), 31; Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 248. See also Stitzinger, “Evangelical Religious Publishing,” 10–16. 25. Hunter, Evangelicalism,7; and Dessauer, Doebler, and Edelman, Christian Book Publishing, 93–145. 26. Histories of some of these firms include Allan Fisher, Fleming H. Revell Company: The First 125 Years, 1870–1995 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Fleming H. Revell, 1995); Gene A. Getz, MBI: The Story of Moody Bible Institute (Chicago: Moody Press, 1969); Sam Moore, American by Choice (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998); Ken Taylor, My Life: A Guided Tour (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1991); and The Baker Book House Story: Fortieth Anniversary, 1939–1979 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1979). 27. Fisher, “Evangelical-Christian Publishing,” 4–5. 28. Stitzinger, “Evangelical Religious Publishing,” 17. See also “Publishing in an Age of Mergers,” Christian Century, 16 November 1977, 1051. 29. Book Industry Trends, 2005, 93; Book Industry Trends, 2006, 81–82. 30. For general discussions of Protestant book distribution, see Lee Gessner, “Bookselling in the Religious Marketplace,” in Inside Religious Publishing, ed. Leonard George Goss and Don M. Aycock (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991); and Jim Carlson, “Religious Book Distributors,” in ibid. 31. A brief history of the early years of CBA is Jerry B. Jenkins, Twenty-Five Years of Sterling Rewards in God’s Service (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1974). 32. Ibid., 15, 19. 33. Gene Edward Veith, “Whatever Happened to Christian Publishing?,” World Magazine, 12 July 1997, 1; CBA Information about Our Association and Industry (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Christian Booksellers Association, 1998), 1; Dessauer, Doebler, and Edelman, Christian Book Publishing, 108–11. 582
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34. Book Industry Trends, 2005, 94; Book Industry Trends, 2006, 81. See also Kimberly Watson, “Amazon Launches Christian Store,” Publishers Weekly, 6 September 1999, 12. 35. Veith, “Whatever Happened to Christian Publishing?,” 1, 3. 36. Dessauer, Doebler, and Edelman, Christian Book Publishing, 80. 37. Stitzinger, “Evangelical Religious Publishing,” 79. 38. The most astute analysis of the appearance and impact of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 39. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “More People Curling up with the Good Book,” USA Today, 27 May 1998, D2. Today’s English Version was published by the American Bible Society. Its New Testament came out in 1966, and the entire Bible was completed by 1976. Seventy-five million copies of the New Testament had been distributed by 1987. “Today’s English Version and the Good News Bible: A Historical Sketch,” 12, typescript in archives of the American Bible Society, New York, RG 53, box 2. For a history of The Living Bible, see Taylor, My Life, 227–80. 40. “Test Your Bible Knowledge,” Publishers Weekly, 9 October 1995, 63; Noll, History of Christianity, 402. For a partial listing of English translations, see Margaret Hills, The English Bible: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Testament Published in America, 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society, 1962). 41. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures, 145–55; Doreen Carvajal, “The Bible, a Perennial, Runs into Sales Resistance,” New York Times, 28 October 1996, D1. 42. Duke, Religious Publishing, 157–58, 220; Stitzinger, “Evangelical Religious Publishing,” 24–26; Chandler B. Grannis, “Data on Paperbacks in Religious Book Publishing,” Publishers Weekly, 8 February 1965, 103; Chandler B. Grannis, “Religious Publishers View Mass Market Paperbacks,” Publishers Weekly, 18 February 1974, 45. 43. Book Industry Trends, 2002, 40. 44. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions 7th ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 399; Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 29. 45. All of these Christian publishing houses maintain Spanish-language Web sites as well as book lists. On Thomas Nelson’s Spanish-language projects, see Karin N. Kiser, “Courting the Spanish Reader: Publishers Hope Profits Are Found in Translations,” Publishers Weekly, 16 January 2006, 24. 46. Fisher, “Evangelical-Christian Publishing,” 5–6. 47. Sally E. Stuart, Christian Writers’ Market Guide, 1999 (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1999), 13; Jim Milliot, “Publishing Sales Inch Up at Thomas Nelson,” Publishers Weekly, 19 July 1999, 78. 48. Duke, Religious Publishing, 104–5. See also Ferre, “Searching for the Great Commission,” 106. 49. See Fisher, “Evangelical-Christian Publishing,” 6. 50. Ingram, a secular wholesaler, took a larger role in distributing religious books to both Christian and trade bookstores in the 1990s. See “Spring Arbor Says It Won’t Be Absorbed,” CBA Marketplace, October 1999, 16, 30; and “Ingram Fulfillment Service Powers Up,” ibid., 32. 51. CBA Information about Our Association, 5. N OT E S TO PAGE S 383 – 85
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52. Protestant fiction has been around since the early nineteenth century. Although certain fictional works gained widespread popularity in the United States, it has only been relatively recently that Protestant publishers have dedicated such a large percentage of their lists to fictional works. Works that tell the story of American Protestant fiction publishing include David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Ralph Allison Carey, “Best Selling Religion: A History of Popular Religious Thought in America as Reflected in Religious Best Sellers, 1850–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1971); Barbara A. Stedman, “The Word Become Fiction: Textual Voices from the Evangelical Subculture” (Ph.D. diss., Ball State University, 1994); Jan Blodgett, Protestant Evangelical Literary Culture and Contemporary Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997); and Penelope J. Stokes, The Complete Guide to Writing and Selling the Christian Novel (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1998). 53. Paul C. Gutjahr, “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader-Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America,” Book History 4 (2002): 216. 54. Cindy Crosby, “Left Behind Fuels Growth at Tyndale House,” Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2001, 18; Steven Waldman, “No Wizard Left Behind: Harry Potter and Left Behind Are More Alike Than You Might Think,” Slate, 18 May 2004; American Piety in the 21st Century, 19. 55. Kenneth L. Woodward, “The Way the World Ends,” Newsweek, 1 November 1999, 67+; Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More. 56. Kelly Ettenborough, “Readers Snapping Up Revelation Series” Arizona Republic, 4 August 1999, A1. 57. Gutjahr, “No Longer Left Behind,” 218–33. 58. “Pricing Fuels Assassins Release Controversy,” CBA Marketplace, October 1999, 14, 24; Mark D. Taylor, “Open Letter to Christian Stores,” ibid., 10. 59. For statistics on the popularity of the Left Behind Web site, see Ettenborough, “Readers Snapping Up Revelation Series,” A1. 60. Lori Smith, “Left Behind Movie Skips Theaters for Church Release,” Religion BookLine, 26 October 2005; Amy Sullivan, “Jesus Christ, Superstar: When Hollywood Stopped Making Bible Movies, Right-Wing Christians Took Over,” Washington Monthly 36 ( June 2004): 48.
CHAPTER 22 Bilingual Nation: Spanish-Language Books in the United States since the 1960s 1. In Encyclopedia Latina: History, Culture, and Society in the United States (Danbury, Conn.: Grolier/Scholastic, 2005), 3:406–17, the entry on publishing is divided into two: “Publishing, English-Language” (by Valerie Menard) and “Publishing, Spanish-Language” (by Erika Hernández). The latter surveys some of the questions raised in this essay. 2. See Ilan Stavans, The Hispanic Condition: The Power of a People (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). 3. I discuss the role of Bibles and the colonial enterprise in the Americas in “La imaginación restaurada,” El español en el mundo: Anuario del Instituto Cervantes (Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 2004), 107–25. 584
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4. In Speaking for Themselves: Neomexicano Cultural Identity and the Spanish-Language Press, 1880–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), Doris Meyer for the first time reproduced in book form some of the works of these nineteenth-century authors. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández-Olmos, in the anthology The Latino Reader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 114–31, translated a fragment of Eusebio Chacón’s Son of the Tempest. See also Anthony Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and (but before the period covered in this essay) Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Richard Chabrán and Francisco García, Chicano Periodical Index: A Cumulative Index to Selected Chicano Periodicals between 1967 and 1978 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), brings the research to a more recent time. 5. An overview of the Latino literary tradition from the colonial period to World War II appears in Ilan Stavans, Collins Q&A: Latino History and Culture (New York: Collins, 2007). 6. See my essay “Sandra Cisneros: Form over Content,” in The Essential Ilan Stavans (New York: Routledge, 2000), 41–46. 7. An interesting assemblage of reflections on the switch by Latino authors from Spanish to English is How I Learned English, ed. Tom Miller (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2007). 8. Ilan Stavans, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), includes an extensive bibliography on the topics of code switching and code mixing, hybrid languages, bilingual education, and the history of the Spanish language in the United States. 9. A representative selection of Spanglish literary pieces appears in Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge, ed. Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). See also Wáchale!: Prose and Poetry about Growing Up Latino in America, ed. Ilan Stavans (Chicago: Cricket Books, 2001).
Part III. Reading, Identity, and Community: Introduction 1. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), 19, 22, 142, 195. 2. Ibid., 187. 3. Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), 4–5, 236–37, 364.
CHAPTER 23 The Enduring Reader 1. Atwood H. Townsend, Edwin B. Knowles, Ann Rothe, and Robert C. Whitford, eds., A Guide to Good Reading, Prepared by the Committee on College Reading (New York: Hendricks House, Farrar, Straus, 1948), 87, 203. 2. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 191; Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Scholar and the World: Academic N OT E S TO PAGE S 392 – 413
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Humanists and General Readers in Postwar America,” in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, ed. David A. Hollinger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 73–103; Clifton Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1960), 17, 18, 20, 25. 3. Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan, 20; Rubin, “The Scholar and the World,” 77; Ernest Van den Haag, “Of Happiness and of Despair We Have No Measure,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956), 528–29; Gilbert Seldes, “The People and the Arts,” in ibid., 84–85. 4. Daniel Boorstin, The Republic of Letters (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1989), 49, 61, 62. 5. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 149. 6. Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Genteel Tradition at Large,” Raritan, Winter 2006, 82. 7. Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do about It (New York: Harper, 1955). 8. Jeanne Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 2, 7, 290–92; Arther [sic] S. Trace Jr., What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t (New York: Random House, 1961). 9. Chall, Learning to Read, 290–92. 10. Charlotte Allen, “Read It and Weep,” Weekly Standard, 11 July 2007, 22–32; Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms (New York: Arbor House, 1986). 11. Carl Kaestle et al., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 111, 131, 134. 12. Samuel S. Vaughan, “The Community of the Book,” Daedalus 112 (Winter 1983): 96; Reading in America 1978, ed. John Y. Cole and Carol S. Gold (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 54, 56, 63–64. 13. 1983 Consumer Research Study on Reading and Book Purchasing (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 1984), 93, 97, 111; Nicholas Zill and Marianne Winglee, Who Reads Literature?: The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers (Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1990), 16–18; William B. Goodman, “Thinking about Readers,” Daedalus 112 (Winter 1983): 77. 14. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004), contains comparative data from the NEA’s 1992 study. 15. Arthur Waldhon, Olga S. Weber, and Arthur Zeiger, eds., Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers (New York: Bowker, 1985), xiv. While we have as yet no full account of what Americans were reading in the postwar period, the discussion that follows makes a start at that project. 16. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 31; Kurt Vonnegut, “Why They Read Hesse,” in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 109–11; Philip Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the Sixties (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 225–51. 17. Gitlin, The Sixties, 84, 87, 89, 106, 148, 246. 586
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18. Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1979), 105, 109, 208–10, 227–28; Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003); Bonnie Watkins and Nina Rothchild, In the Company of Women (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1996), xxiv, 20; Robin Morgan, comp., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Random House, 1970), xxxvi; Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation, 147. 19. Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 48–49, 70, 73. 20. Ibid., 92, 93, 109, 111, 157. 21. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 92–93. 22. Heath’s research is quoted in Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s, April 1996, 49; Survey of Lifetime Readers (Prepared for the Library of Congress, Center for the Book and Book-of-the-Month Club) (Mansfield Center, Conn.: Information Analysis Systems Corp., 1990), 3, 6, 20. 23. Jim Burke, I Hear America Reading (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999), 22, 63, 70, 75. 24. Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 396–98. 25. Survey of Lifetime Readers, 11; David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 26. Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to PostStructuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xii–xiii, 223; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 75–77, 79; Radway, Reading the Romance, 8. 27. Robert Spector, amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 131– 32. 28. Katrina Bell McDonald, Embracing Sisterhood: Class, Identity, and Contemporary Black Women (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 160. 29. D. T. Max, “The Oprah Effect,” New York Times Magazine, 26 December 1999, 36– 37; Cecilia Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005), 47. 30. Mary R. Lamb, “Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club,” in Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 255–80; Farr, Reading Oprah, 1, 49. 31. Max, “The Oprah Effect,” 39–40; Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, “My Case of Oprah Envy,” Washington Post, 6 April 1997, C0 1; Farr, Reading Oprah, 49. 32. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), 146; Journal for MultiMedia History, 〈http://www.albany .edu/jmmh/〉; Jakob Nielsen, “Are Users Stupid?,” 4 February 2001, Alertbox 〈http://www .useit.com/〉. 33. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, Executive Summary N OT E S TO PAGE S 42 3 – 30
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(Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007), 4–5; Leah Price, “You Are What You Read,” New York Times Book Review, 23 December 2007, 19. 34. Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).
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CHAPTER 24 Reading the Language of the Heart: The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous 1. Nan Robertson, Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Morrow, 1988), 102. On the oral culture of AA, see Edmund B. O’Reilly, Sobering Tales: Narratives of Alcoholism and Recovery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); and George Jensen, Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). 2. In addition to Alcoholics Anonymous, AAWSO publishes biographies of AA’s founders, a history of the organization, and collections of philosophical, devotional, and organizational materials. The Trustees’ Literature Committee oversees the writing, printing, and distribution of some fifty pamphlets on AA topics; in 1944 a separate office within the WSO began publication of a monthly magazine, The AA Grapevine, which since 1995 has also appeared in Spanish (La Viña). The facts presented here about AA’s publishing culture come from research in the fellowship’s archives and interviews with the professional staff of the New York General Service. My observations about the reading culture, however, are gleaned from my attendance at open AA meetings from 1995 to the present. (An “open” meeting welcomes anyone; “closed” meetings are only for those who identify as recovering alcoholics.) In researching this project, I have tried to attend as many, and as many different types of meetings as possible. My sample, however, is in no way scientific, and I have never intended for it to be. 3. Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 90. 4. All citations to the Big Book, unless otherwise noted, are from the thirteenth printing of the first edition, New York: Works Publishing, 1950. Citations to Alcoholics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (New York: AA World Services, Inc., 1957) appear hereafter as BB and COA. BB, 192 (emphasis in original); COA, 68, 70 (emphasis in original). 5. COA, 68, 70 (emphasis in original). Both Matthew J. Raphael and Robert Thomsen note that the cofounders’ origins in rural Vermont made communication easy for them. Their common “language was Vermontese,” Raphael points out. See Matthew J. Raphael, Bill W. and Mr. Wilson: The Legend and Life of AA’s Co-Founder (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 104. See also Robert Thomsen, Bill W. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 240. 6. Bill Pittman, AA: The Way It Began (Seattle: Glen Abbey Books, 1988), 129; Walter H. Clark, The Oxford Group: Its History and Significance (New York: Bookman, 1951), 109. 7. Dick B., Anne Smith’s Journal, 1933–39: AA’s Principles of Success (Kihei, Maui, Hawaii: Paradise Research Publications, 1992, 1998), 72; What Is the Oxford Group? By the Layman with a Notebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 47. 588
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8. Timothy P. Weber, “The Two-Edged Sword: The Fundamentalist Use of the Bible,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 108. 9. Clark, Oxford Group, 29. 10. Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix, 41; Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 93; Dick B., Anne Smith’s Journal, 67. 11. Thomsen, Bill W., 240. While AA has never been closed to women, in its earliest years it was a de facto men’s club, due partly to the greater stigma attached to women’s drinking, and partly to male AA’s concerns that women in the fellowship would provoke behavior that would jeopardize their sobriety. The first woman AA was Florence R.; her story “A Feminine Victory” appeared in the first edition of the Big Book but was excised in the second edition, as she relapsed into drinking and died an apparent suicide. By the mid-1940s, women had been more fully incorporated into meetings across the country, and the second edition of the Big Book contained eleven women’s stories and twenty-six from men. For a detailed discussion of women in AA, see Michelle McClellan, “Lady Lushes: Women Alcoholics and American Society, 1880–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1999); for an excellent gendered history of alcoholism and sobriety, see Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post World War II America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 12. COA, 165. 13. Interview, Vinnie M., 19 September 2001. 14. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (New York: AA World Services, 1957), 153; COA, 14; Wilson to Frank Amos, 26 September 1938, box 59, folder “1938,” Alcoholics Anonymous Archives, AAWSO Offices, New York. 15. Wilson is quoted in O’Reilly, Sobering Tales, 129. 16. BB, 165; COA, 70; BB, 75, 100. Works Publishing, Inc. became AA Publishing, Inc. in 1953, and then AA World Services, Inc. in 1957. Wilson’s conviction about the program’s utility remains at the center of AA culture today, enshrined in the slogan “It works if you work it.” 17. BB, vii (emphasis in original), 29 (emphasis added). 18. COA, 159, 161. 19. COA, 70, 72; BB, 175, 39, 177, 26. 20. COA, 164; Wilson quoted in Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Educational Materials, 1979), 330; BB, 40. 21. Thomsen, Bill W., 215. AA’s official sources credit Uzzell as editor of the whole manuscript, but archival correspondence (box 59, folder C, Alcoholics Anonymous Archives) between Wilson and a Peekskill, N.Y., woman named Janet Blair suggest that she edited the book’s first section. 22. Virginia Brereton, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800– Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 112; BB, 70, 264. 23. Kurtz, Not-God, 73. 24. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, N OT E S TO PAGE S 4 36 – 4 2
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1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 53–56. For a history of MacFadden’s publishing empire, including True Story and its many spin-offs, see Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the 20th Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 255–308. On the ubiquity of tabloid style, see John Cawelti, “The Evolution of Social Melodrama,” in Marcia Landy, ed. Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); on the gendered address of contemporary tabloids, see Maureen Honey, “The Confession Formula and Fantasies of Empowerment,” Women’s Studies 10 (1984): 303–20. 25. Roseann Madziuk, “Confessional Discourse and Modern Desires: Power and Pleasure in True Story Magazine,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 18 ( June 2001): 174–93; Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks, esp. 61–86. 26. Madziuk, “Confessional Discourse,” 180, 191. 27. Thomas Uzzell, Narrative Technique: A Practical Course in Literary Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923; repr., 1934), xix, xxix, 19, 43; Thomas Uzzell, “The Love Pulps,” Scribner’s 103 (April 1938): 36–41. 28. Hank P. to Bill W., 5 January 1939, box 50, folder C, Alcoholics Anonymous Archives; Kurtz, Not-God, 89; COA, 164. Wilson also claims in COA that “the story section of the book was complete in the latter point of January, 1939,” which flatly contradicts the archival evidence. 29. BB, 393, 395, 396. The “Lone Endeavor” described here was removed in the second printing of the Big Book because the AA office lost contact with the author and could no longer vouch for his sobriety. 30. Pittman, AA, 106; Alfred Katz, Self-Help in America: A Social Movement Perspective (New York: Twayne, 1993), 36–37. 31. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 198, 207. 32. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8, 69, 140, 239 (emphasis in original); Katz, Self-Help, 36.
CHAPTER 25 Books and the Media: The Silent Spring Debate 1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 2. Analysis is based on the author’s What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), drawing on materials archived in the Rachel Carson Papers, Yale Collection in American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., ©2000 by Roger Christie, used and cited by kind permission of Frances Collin, Literary Agent; all rights reserved. Cited below as Carson Papers. 3. Rachel Carson, “Reporter-at-Large: Silent Spring,” New Yorker, 16 June 1962, 35–40ff.; 23 June 1962, 31–36ff.; and 30 June 1962, 35–42ff. 4. “Rachel Carson’s Warning,” New York Times, 2 July 1962, 28. 5. The official total of number of weeks on the New York Times list might well have been higher were it not for a strike against the paper during the winter. 590
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6. Rachel Carson, letter to agent, Marie Rodell, 18 April 1956, box 104, Carson Papers. 7. On the booklike effect of the New Yorker’s long articles, see Trysh Travis, “The New Yorker: From Heroic Journalism to the ‘Gentlest of Magazines,’ ” in “Reading Matters: Book Men, ‘Serious’ Readers, and the Rise of Mass Culture, 1930–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998). 8. Monsanto Chemical Company, “The Desolate Year,” Monsanto Magazine, October 1962, 4–9. 9. In particular, see issues of Chemical and Engineering News for July through November of 1962; also, “How Do You Fight a Best-Seller?,” Printers’ Ink, 30 November 1962, 42. 10. Paul Brooks, editor in chief, Houghton Mifflin, in a letter to Rachel Carson, 1 December 1959, box 87, Carson Papers. 11. Letters archived in New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Thanks to Condé Nast for permission to use them. 12. “My text this afternoon is taken from the Globe Times of Bethlehem, Pa., a news item in the issue of October 12th: After describing in detail the adverse reactions to Silent Spring of the farm bureaus in two Pennsylvania counties, the reporter continued: ‘No one in either county farm office who was talked to today had read the book, but all disapproved of it heartily.’ ” Rachel Carson, speech, Women’s National Press Club, 5 December 1962, box 101, Carson Papers. 13. Reference is to wording of a 1938 Supreme Court ruling that “liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher.” More recently, Philip Meyer wrote that “the book author has become the modern equivalent of the lonely pamphleteer,” in “Accountability: When Books Make News,” Media Studies Journal 6 (Summer 1992): 138.
CHAPTER 26 The Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club: African American Women Readers 1. This notebook is housed in the Houston Metropolitan Archives, Houston, Texas. It is the source for all the information about the Chat-An-Hour Club’s reading and discussions cited here. 2. On her birthplace and birth date, see Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900–1957, Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University, no. 81 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999). On Butler College, see The Handbook of Texas Online (a joint project of The General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and The Texas State Historical Society) at 〈http://www.tshaonline.org/〉. 3. Interview with Mrs. Erma Leroy, 7 July 1994. 4. Ibid. 5. Michael Lowery Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937–1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1984), 39–107. 6. James E. Buchanan, comp. and ed., Houston: A Chronological and Documentary HisN OT E S TO PAGE S 451– 6 2
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tory 1519–1970, American Cities Chronology Series, ed. Howard B. Furer (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1975), 46–47. 7. In the course of Sweatt, the national NAACP office decided to move wholeheartedly against segregation in principle. From their vantage point in New York, this may have looked reasonable, but it was a plan that seriously troubled many Texas members. By standing with the national office on this issue, Mrs. Lulu White seriously jeopardized relations with many Texas NAACP stalwarts, including elder statesman Maceo Smith. She regarded them as too conciliatory. But her own personal courage—and relatively privileged position—may have put her out of step with her constituency as well as her peers. 8. Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas,” 176. 9. Interview with Mrs. Erma Leroy, 7 July 1994. 10. Howard Jones, The Red Diary: A Chronological History of Black Americans in Houston and Some Neighboring Harris County Communities—122 Years Later (Austin: Nortex Press, 1991), 54, 61, 84, 86. 11. Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 194. 12. Jones, The Red Diary. 70. 13. For reference on San Antonio’s Negro Chamber of Commerce, see 〈http://www .alamocitychamber.org/〉. The information on the NAACP’s meeting in 1946 is drawn from The Informer, 5 March 1946, and found at 〈http://www.law.du.edu/russell/lh/sweatt/inf/ HI-030546.html〉. I am presuming that Euretta K. Fairchild from San Antonio may be the same person as Euretta K. Fairchild from Houston, although this may not be the case. Despite intensive research at the Houston Metropolitan Archives, I was unable to find any information about the women in the Chat-An-Hour Club except for Mrs. Love, Miss Fairchild, and Mrs. Lulu B. White. Gender and race intersect to produce this absence. The biographical sources on African Americans in Houston are thin, especially for women, because their activities were often not conducted in the formal sphere of public politics. For instance, Houston’s Red Book mentions only one woman—the wife of a minister who established a kindergarten in his church and died tragically at the age of thirty-six—and lists only those women’s organizations that were female auxiliaries of male fraternal organizations. 14. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of AfricanAmerican Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 41. 15. Ibid., 158, 183. 16. Minutes, Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club, 10 March 1955. 17. Minutes, 9 February 1950. 18. She was apparently always recruiting. Mrs. Leroy (interview, 7 July 1994) said that, upon hearing that she “was not gainfully employed,” Mrs. Lulu White asked Moses Leroy’s permission, then approached the young Mrs. Leroy to recruit her for driving with her on organizing trips around the state. Those long hours in the Cadillac were Mrs. Leroy’s induction into a lifetime of social activism. It is hard to know how studied Mrs. White’s use of the group for NAACP business was, for several reasons. First, the other members, who wrote and read papers on NAACP topics and researched and discussed desegregation more generally, appear to have been anything but passive recipients of Mrs. Lulu White’s ideas. Second, although the NAACP accent begins to disappear after the mid-1950s, when she died, that 592
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was also the period when the Texas NAACP was charged with barratry and entered a period of organizational eclipse—one from which it never really recovered, because the civil rights movement began to shift to other organizational tactics. It is, however, interesting to see the group, after not meeting from June to December 1950, immediately upon regrouping, begin to take on support activities for NAACP functions in schedules for the next month. 19. Minutes, 5 January 1955; 2 March 1955; and 10 March 1955. The River Oaks tour, now called the Azalea Trail, is organized by the Garden Club of one of Houston’s most prestigious residential areas. 20. Minutes, 19 January 1950. 21. Minutes, 9 February 1950. 22. Minutes, 10 January 1957. 23. Born in Dayton to a poor family in 1872, Dunbar died at the age of thirty-three acclaimed by critics and literary figures such as James Whitcomb Riley and William Dean Howells. His work often dealt with the difficulties black Americans faced and their struggles for equality. “The Life of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,” 〈http://www.plethoreum.org/dunbar/ biopld.asp〉. 24. Minutes, 25 April 1957. 25. Minutes, 8 November 1956. 26. Minutes, 22 November 1956; 13 December 1956; and 24 January 1957. 27. See Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 273–86. 28. See my Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) for more discussion of this issue. Clearly, white women’s groups also use literature, and the process of discussing it in small groups, to elucidate questions of identity. Differences between how literature was “put to work” in nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century groups also show the ways this process is shaped by its historical context. 29. It should be noted that this breadth of taste might also have been the result of compromises within the group between people who wanted to read more “high” literature and others who preferred more popular forms. This certainly happens in contemporary reading groups, and the minutes are not informative enough to fully support this interpretation or the argument I make in the text, or indeed whether both processes were at work in the group. 30. Minutes, 17 January 1952; 19 February 1953. 31. Minutes, 16 February 1950; 20 January 1955; 19 February 1953; 2 June 1949; 19 February 1959; 2 December 1954; 5 March 1959. 32. 4 March 1954. 33. Minutes, 20 January 1955; 19 February 1959; 17 February 1955; and 24 April 1958. 34. Minutes, 26 October 1956. 35. Minutes, 24 January 1957. 36. Minutes, 5 March 1959. 37. The Mizpah appears to have been part of a closing blessing for many women’s sororities and other associations. For example, a Google search on the topic revealed, as part of the November 2002 Meeting Minutes of the On-Line Sigma Chapter of Beta Sigma Phi, the recitation of the following closing ritual and Mizpah: “ ‘Eternal Father, Shepherd of the N OT E S TO PAGE S 465 – 70
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Stars, guide us that we may follow only the Good, only the True, only the Beautiful. Hold aloft to us thy guiding torch of wisdom and help us to push on, undaunted, toward its light. Illume our souls with thy wisdom that we in turn may light the way for those who follow us. If the road we take seems obscured in dust, give us the skill and grace to pave it with stars, to transmute the dust into stardust. Grant us such clearness of vision, such sweetness of spirit, such earnestness of purpose that we may follow the torch to our goal.” Then, listed after a space: “May the Lord watch between me & thee, while we are absent, one from the other” (〈http://bsp.ncf.ca/ols/minutes/min1102.htm〉). The Mizpah appears in other contexts to signify bonds maintained despite absence. 38. Minutes, 3 February 1955. 39. Minutes, 16 April 1959. 40. Minutes, October 1969 (no specific date in October mentioned). 41. Indeed, this is characteristic of reading groups that do not always conform to elite standards. See my work in Long, Book Clubs, and that of Anne Ruggles Gere, such as her book Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), as well as that of Gere and Sara Robbins, “Gendered Literacy in Black and White: Turn-of-the-Century African-American and European-American Club Women’s Printed Texts,” Signs 21 (1996): 643–678. Also relevant is the work by Elizabeth McHenry mentioned previously.
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CHAPTER 27 Book Collecting and the Book as Object 1. Bennet Gilbert, 〈http://www.gilbooks.com/25propositions.htm〉. 2. Ruth Shepard Granniss, in The Book in America: A History of the Making, the Selling, and Collecting of Books in the United States, by Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt in collaboration with Ruth Shepard Granniss and Lawrence C. Wroth (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1939); Carl L. Cannon, American Book Collectors and Collecting from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1941); Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: H. Holt, 1995). 3. The Scheide collection, though still privately owned, is now housed within the Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. 4. William S. Reese, “The First Hundred Years of Printing in British North America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 99 (October 1989): 337–73. 5. There are exceptions: many libraries sell duplicates or books deemed inappropriate to their collections. Such acts of “de-accession” are often very controversial. 6. The story of the rise of institutional collecting is told by Ruth Granniss in The Book in America. 7. Bill Gates’s attempt to collect the digital rights to many of the great art collections in the world is perhaps a counterexample, a throwback to the age of imperial collecting. Other such throwbacks may exist, and competition is, of course, still part of the game. 8. Only four private collectors and one institution have completed the list. 9. Jack Matthews, Booking in the Heartland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 31. 594
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10. The exception is the first item, which is so rare that it is known to exist in only one other location (Charterhouse School). 11. Gazette of the Grolier Club, no. 44 (1992): 35–51; 37. 12. Stephan Salisbury, “Library Company Gets Rare Early Documents,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 March 2000. This is the source of all quotations from Zinman in this paragraph. 13. My information on Burden comes from an interview with Charles E. Pierce Jr., former director of the Morgan Library (22 September 2000) and from Mel Gussow, “$8 Million Literary Trove Given to Morgan Library,” New York Times, 23 February 1998. 14. I rely here on Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. 20–27. 15. Private correspondence, 22 August 2000. 16. The Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book Market; An Analysis and Overview of the Used Book Market in the United States from 1992–1999. This report, its updates, and the latest survey appear on the Web at 〈http://www.bookhunterpress.com/index.cgi/ survey.html〉. 17. For a discussion of the ways in which collecting in general is gendered, see Pearce, On Collecting, 197–222. 18. Ruth Granniss traces the origins of American book collectors clubs in The Book in America. 19. The Quiet Revolution, table 1, “Growth in Number of Used Book Dealers.” 20. For a survey of the most important online book finding services, see Karen Raugust, “A Wired World for Old Books: Used Book Dealers, Listing Services and E-commerce Sites Deal with a Changing Online Marketplace,” Chaners Business Information, 23 April 2001. For an assessment of the effect of the Internet on sales of rare and used books, see William S. Reese, “The Rare Book Market Today,” Yale University Library Gazette 74 (April 2000): 146– 65. 21. Information on the Hyde Collection is available in Four Oaks Farm, ed. Gabriel C. Austin, 2 vols. (Somerville, N.J.: privately printed, 1967). 22. Information about printed works by Johnson in the Hyde Collection and elsewhere is available in J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). The Johnsonian part of the Hyde Collection now belongs to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
CHAPTER 28 Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-Typographic World 1. Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 2. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodríguez, and Robert M. Wharton, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 155–57; Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 289–90. See also John Maxwell Hamilton, Casanova Was a Book Lover and N OT E S TO PAGE S 47 5 – 85
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Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling and Reading of Books (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 3. Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4. Anthony Grafton, “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents,” New Yorker, 5 November 2007, 50–54; Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books,” New Yorker, 24 December 2007, 134–39. 5. I am using here Thomas Kuhn’s notions of paradigmatic crises in his analysis of the history of science. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 6. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 7. David Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meaning: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). However, see also a caveat in the introduction to A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 9. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982). See also Khosrow Jahandarie, Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1999). 10. Landow, Hypertext 2.0, 209. 11. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994). 12. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); Allan C. Purves, The Web of Text and the Web of God: An Essay on the Third Information Transformation (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). 13. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2000). 14. Carla Hesse, “Books in Time,” in Nunberg, The Future of the Book, 21–36. 15. David S. Kaufer and Kathleen M. Carley, Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993). 16. Bolter, Writing Space. 17. Gavriel Salomon, Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Symbol Systems (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979). 18. I am extending here ideas outlined in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000). 19. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 20. Arthur Ellis, The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). 21. Lanham, The Electronic Word, 99. 22. Jason Epstein, “The Rattle of Pebbles,” New York Times Book Review, 26 April 2000. See also Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Hamilton, Casanova, 23. Hamilton estimates that in the 1990s one of every 388 Americans had published at least one book. 596
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23. Ibid., 135. 24. Kaufer and Carley, Communication at a Distance, 353–359. 25. John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), chap. 4. See also Gary Stix, “The Speed of Write,” Scientific American, December 1994, 106–11. 26. Brown and Duguid, Social Life of Information. See also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 27. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, Research Report no. 47 (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, November 2007). 28. Alberto Manguel, The History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996). 29. Bolter, Writing Space, 85–106. 30. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Hollodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997). 31. Frank Smith, To Think (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991). 32. Bolter, Writing Space, 227–29. 33. Lanham, Electronic Word, 13. 34. David Reinking, “Me and My Hypertext:) A Multiple Digression (sic) Analysis of Technology and Literacy,” Reading Teacher 50 (1997): 626–43. 35. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 36. James Flood and Diane D. Lapp, “Broadening the Lens: Toward an Expanded Conceptualization of Literacy,” in Perspectives on Literacy Research and Practice: The 44th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, ed. Kathleen A. Hinchman, Donald J. Leu, and Charles K. Kinzer (Chicago: National Reading Conference, 1995), 1–16. “Visual literacy” has also been referred to as “representational literacy” or “media literacy” in relation to the school curriculum.
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Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables. Abbott, Robert S., 302 Academic publishing, 40–42, 183, 363, 361–75, 373, 374; in digital age, 361–62, 368, 374–75; future of, 373–74; research funding and, 40–41; scholarly corpus model of, 371–73; subsidy to, 183; sustainability of, 41, 374–75; virtual library model of, 368–71, 369. See also University presses Active readers, 86 Adamson, Joy, 358 Adler, Mortimer, 409, 410, 411 Adobe Acrobat, 62 Adobe Photoshop, 61 Adorno, Theodor, 236 Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), 259 Advertising: in black press, 291; book industry using, 77; confessional style in, 442; in gay press, 282; in general-interest magazines, 108, 109–10; on Internet, 116; multimedia companies offering packages of, 117; for National Library Week, 205; in newspapers, 119, 128–29; promotional articles as, 118, 537 (n. 29); in special-interest magazines, 107, 110–11, 112, 114; targeted, 537 (n. 18); on television, 109, 128 Advocate (magazine), 281 African American literature, 230–32. See also Black press African Americans: children’s books for, 36; GI Bill benefits denied to, 520 (n. 25); as journalists, 125, 286; magazines for, 114; newspapers ignoring, 120–21; religious literature for, 384; textbooks on, 38, 314–16. See also Black press; Civil rights movement African American women: book club for, 410, 423, 459–71; feminists, 279 Age, reading habits and, 86, 87, 130–31, 418, 430 Agency for International Development, 200, 202 Agricultural industry, 450 AIDS crisis, 282 Akashic Books, 218, 218 Alcoholics Anonymous: foundation of, 435, 437; image of, 432; meetings of, 434; oral culture of,
432; origins of, 435–37; as publishing house, 432, 588 (n. 2); reading culture of, 432–34; as textual community, 435, 445; women in, 589 (n. 11). See also “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous Aldus PageMaker, 60, 61 Alfau, Felipe, 392–93 Aliteracy, 2, 418 Allende, Isabel, 404 Alternative newspapers, 182, 269, 271–75, 272, 274, 276, 420–21 Alternative Press Syndicate Directory, 274 Amazon.com, 26, 40, 85, 103–4, 106, 219, 364, 427, 487 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 350 American Association of University Presses, 196 American Bible Society, 184, 379, 380, 581 (n. 19) American Bibliography (Evans), 247 American Book Publishers Council, 31, 81–82, 195–209 American Book Publishing Record, 506 American Council of Education, 315 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 371–73 American Educational Publishers Institute, 207 American Government (Magruder), 313 American Indians. See Native American Literature; Native Americans, textbooks on American Library Association (ALA): American Book Publishers Council cooperating with, 197, 198, 204, 205, 206; against censorship, 138, 144, 346; on children’s books, 36, 82; on computerized libraries, 333–34; on informationbased libraries, 335–36; on PATRIOT Act, 149; study on libraries by, 326, 328 American Publishers Association, 195 American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), 537 (nn. 28, 29) American Textbook Publishers Institute, 195–96, 206–8 American Tract Society, 184
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Amsterdam News, 287, 290, 295, 301, 302 Analog prepress workflow, 58–59 Analytical bibliography, 245, 247–52, 253 Anderson, Benedict, 287 Antipornography ordinance, 148 Antiquarian Booksellers of America Association (ABAA), 478 Anti-Semitic publications, 284 Apple computers, 60 Arendt, Hannah, 259 Armed Services Editions, 188, 190, 192 Armies of the Night (Mailer), 259 Arte Público Press, 396, 403 “Article as Art, The” (Podhoretz), 256–57 Ascent of Man (television series), 356 Association of American Publishers (AAP), 195, 207–8, 377, 504, 507–8 Auction houses, 480, 480–81 Audience, 72–90; book-buying habits of, 72–77; booksellers and, 91; characteristics of, 85–90; influences on, 73–77; reading habits of, 1–2, 73, 86–89, 418–19; of Spanish-language books, 403–4; of special-interest magazines, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114; of university presses, 50–51 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) (1992), 163–64 Augie March (Bellow), 228 Authors, 223-25, 237-40; credibility of, 452–53, 496-97; in digital age, 486; Foucault (Michel) on, 253; insulated from market pressure, 450–51; Latino, 399–402, 404; on magazine staff, 265. See also Book authors Autonomous reading, 414, 426 B. Dalton, 94, 95–96, 97, 98 Baby boom generation: book-buying habits of, 3–4, 8, 75–77, 86, 87; bookstores and, 93; newspaper reading habits of, 129–30 “Bad tendency” test, 135 Bagdikian, Ben, 271 Bailar, John C., Jr., 354 Bailey, Beth, 274 Baker, Nicholson, 343 Baker, Russell, 121, 124 Baldwin, James, 257, 258–59, 260, 263 Bantam Books, 347 Baraka, Amiri, 232 Barnes & Noble, 85, 96, 101, 102, 218–19, 364, 383, 401 Barry, Dave, 126 Barzun, Jacques, 238–39
600
Beerbohm, Max, 475–76 Beers, Robert, 200 “Beginner Books” series, 82 Beidler, Philip, 420 Bell, David, 3 Bellow, Saul, 228 Benjamin, Curtis G., 203 Berholz, Susan, 400 Bernal, J. D., 329, 332 Berne Convention: content of, 154; lack of enforcement mechanisms of, 162; U.S. entry to, 154, 160–61; U.S. nonparticipation in, 154, 155, 159–60; Universal Copyright Convention as alternative to, 154, 159–60 Berne Implementation Act (1988), 160 Bershtel, Sara, 221–22 Bertelsmann, 19, 27, 34, 50, 555 (n. 4) Bezos, Jeff, 26, 106, 427 Bibles: critical reading of, 436; distributed free of charge, 184, 379; Oxford Group reading, 436–37; press runs of, 184; sales of, 16, 383–84, 513; in Spanish, 391–92, 401; translations of, 383–84; women’s study, 378 Bibliofilm Service, 330 Bibliographical Society of America, 246 Bibliography, 245–55; analytical, 245, 247–52, 253; book collectors and rare-book dealers and, 245–46, 247, 473, 475; computerized, 333, 340; and New Bibliography, 223, 245, 246–47, 251, 252; technological changes and, 253–54 Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (McKenzie), 251, 252 “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, 410, 432–46, 433, 444; content of, 438–39; editor of, 441, 442–43, 589 (n. 21); emulative reading of, 445; first edition of, 432, 437–45; handmade covers for, 434, 434; new edition of, 432; personal stories in, 440–45 Bilingual books, 396, 397, 398, 403 Bilingual education, 394–95, 395, 402 Bilingual Press, 396–97, 402 Bindery techniques, 66–67 Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), 311 Biology textbooks, 304, 308, 311, 321–22, 351–55 Birkerts, Sven, 2, 429, 430, 488–89 Black Arts movement, 232, 292 Blackmur, R. P., 225, 234 Black nationalism, 287, 292–301 Black Panther (newspaper), 292, 297–301, 299 Black Panther Party, 272, 292, 297–301
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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Black press, 182, 286–303; advertising in, 291; in black nationalism, 287, 292–301; in civil rights movement, 290–92; contemporary, 301–3; decline of, 126, 291–92; goal of, 121, 289; political role of, 287–89. See also African American literature; Civil rights movement Block, Herb, 199 Bloom, Allan, 419 Bloom, Harold, 409, 410, 411 Blume, Judy, 14, 147 Bobbs-Merrill, 38 Bollingen Prize, 415 Bollingen series, 212–13 Bolte, Charles, 197 Bolter, Jay David, 489 Book authors: as public figures, 243–45, 258–59, 450, 458; writing for magazines, 256–68, 449–51. See also Authors Bookbinding techniques, 66–67 Book blocks, 67 Book Business (Epstein), 27–28 Book clubs: for African American women, 410, 423, 459–71; book industry and, 82; for children, 36; decline of, 16; niche, 16; Oprah’s, 18, 78, 219, 427–29, 492; school-based, 82; Spanishlanguage, 404; for women, 378, 423–24 Book collecting, 472–84; bibliographic purpose of, 245–46, 247, 473, 475; communication of knowledge and, 475–76; economics of, 479; expense of, 473; styles of, 472–74, 480; thematic change in, 472–73 Book collectors: communities of, 479–84, 482; middle-class, 478, 479; motives of, 410, 472–73; notable, 472, 474–78; population of, 478–79; social scientists on, 478; women as, 475, 479, Booker, Simeon, 120–21 Book Hunter Press, 479 Book industry: advertising used by, 77; book clubs and, 82; computerization of, 26, 57–62, 98; consolidation in, 3, 4, 7, 17, 25–26, 34, 37–38, 47–52, 510; domestic market of, 35–47; education and, 8–9; exports in, 30–32, 34, 40, 187–95, 199–203; growth of, 1, 2, 18, 19, 25; imports in, 30, 34; infinite variance in, 42; institutions promoting literacy and, 81–82, 203–7; internationalization of, 30–34, 32, 52–53, 53; marketing practice of, 77–85, 81, 105, 105–6; number of publishers in, 506, 509; organization of, 29–54, 195–97; overproduction in, 83–85; publicity used by, 77–78, 449, 450; rights sales in, 30, 31, 32, 33, 201–2; scandals in, 219; specialization
in, 7; statistics on, 25, 26, 503–18; superstores and, 102; during World War II, 186–95. See also Independent publishers; Publishing Book Industry Study Group (BISG): limitations of studies by, 506, 507, 508; on paperback publishing, 47; on publishers, 25, 26, 50, 184–85, 504–5; on religious publishing, 377, 378, 379, 384; on university presses, 41 Book Industry Trends, 504–5, 507 BookMachine, 70 Book Manufacturers Institute, 207 Book-of-the-Month Club, 16, 82, 404, 424, 426 Book production technology: bibliography and, 253–54; digital platform for, 67, 67; early, 55, 56; new technologies in, 26, 53; in postpress, 66–67; in prepress, 56–62; in presswork, 63, 63–66, 64, 65; in women’s publishing, 277–78 Book reviews, 78, 86, 243, 267, 427, 453 Books: abstract arguments in, 496–98; advice on, 409–10, 412–13, 426, 427; aesthetic qualities of, 478, 494–96; authority of, 455; classification of, 507, 512; community-building function of, 272, 277–78, 280, 283, 289, 296, 298, 488–89; as cultural icons, 1; fixity and fluidity of, 490; future of, 485–501; growth in consumption of, 72–77, 90, 509, 514, 517, 531 (n. 1); growth in production of, 1, 2, 25, 35, 509–13; ideal of, 491; intellectual function of, 451, 488–89; mass production of, 55–56; mode of temporality and, 489; number of new, 506–7, 511; portability of, 489; prices of, 508, 511–12; printed on demand, 28, 69–71; role of, in public libraries, 325, 328, 330, 336; sales figures for, 506, 507–8, 509–14; social movements inspired by, 5–6, 450, 457; tactile dimension of, 343, 431. See also Audience; Children’s books; Paperbacks; Reading; Religious books; Science books; Textbooks; Trade books Booksellers, 91–106; acquisitions by, 95, 96; audience and, 91; consolidation of, 102; critics of, 92, 93; influences on, 91; new types of, 102–5; role of, 91–92 Books in Print database, 506–7 Bookstop, 101 Bookstores: Christian, 382, 382–83, 385; marketing in, 83, 97–98, 106; merchandise returned from, 84; niche, 99–100; number of, 506, 514; paperbacks sold by, 46–47, 97; printing in, 70; in rural areas, 76; in suburban areas, 18, 95–97; in urban areas, 18, 76; women’s, 99–100, 100, 278, 278, 279, 563 (n. 26). See also Chain-operated
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bookstores; Independent bookstores; Internet; Superstores Boorstin, Daniel, 413–14, 424, 430 Booth, Wayne, 446 Borders, 85, 101, 102, 219, 383, 401 Born Free (Adamson), 358 Boston Women’s Health Collective, 13–14 Bowers, Fredson, 247, 247–48, 251 Bowker Annual, 46, 504, 506 Boyd, Julian P., 249, 250 Boyle, James, 157 Brainwashing in the High Schools (Root), 313 Brandenberg incitement test, 144 Brandt, Deborah, 181 Braschi, Giannina, 402 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 223–24 Brentano’s, 94, 95 Brereton, Virginia, 441 Bridwell, Norman, 82 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 347, 358 Broadway Hale Stores, 95 Brockman, John, 358 “Broken [television] set” survey, 542 (n. 65) Bronowski, Jacob, 356 Brooks, Cleanth, 225, 557 (n. 15) Brooks, Paul, 449, 450, 452–53 Brown v. Board of Education, 138–39 Bruner, Jerome, 311–12 Buchman, Frank, 436, 437 Buckley, William F., Jr., 283 Buckley, William F., Sr., 313 Building America series, 312–13, 314 Burden, Carter, 474, 477–78 Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), 504 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 504, 506 Burstyn v. Wilson, 139–40 Bush, George W., 147, 177 Business of Books, The (Schiffrin), 211 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez, 391 Cable television: First Amendment protection of, 146; special-interest magazines and, 114 Cadden, Wendy, 277 California, textbooks in, 308, 313, 315, 316, 317–18, 320 California Library Association, 138 Cambridge University Press, 33 Campfires of the Resistance (Gitlin), 421 Canfield, Cass, 52, 196, 204 Capote, Truman, 263
602
Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (1983), 162 Carlsen, G. Robert, 205 Carlson, Chester, 67 Carlson, Walter, 332 Carnavsky, Leon, 332 Carr, David, 116–17 Carr, Michael T., 115 Carratello, Mattia, 211–12 Carson, Rachel, 6, 263, 355, 360, 410, 447–58, 448, 455 Case binding, 66 Catholic literature, 378–79 Cat in the Hat, The (Dr. Seuss), 15, 82 CD-ROMs, 171, 172 Cell phones, text-messaging on, 2, 22 Censorship: at local level, 141, 142, 144; moral, 139, 143, 147, 197, 198; progressive, 136, 146, 147–48; in school libraries, 144, 147, 148; self, 10, 44, 121, 137, 139. See also Government censorship; Public libraries Census Bureau, 25, 503–4, 505–6 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 144 Cerf, Bennett, 52, 186 Chain-operated bookstores, 92–98; growth of, 18, 83, 92–96; independent bookstores and, 18, 98–99; style of, 94, 96–98; in suburban areas, 18, 95–97; superstores and, 102 Chall, Jeanne, 415–16 Chaos (Gleick), 358 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 13, 135, 141, 143 Chapman, Gilbert, 204 Chartier, Roger, 254, 343 Chat-An-Hour Social and Cultural Club, 410, 459–71; foundation of, 459, 462; lectures for, 468–69; location of meetings of, 465; members of, 462–63; minutes of meetings of, 463, 465, 466, 467, 469–70; mission of, 464; reading practices of, 466–68; sisterly solidarity of, 470 Chemical Abstracts (database), 349 Chemical industry, 449, 450, 451–52 Chemical Rubber Company, 577 (n. 13) Chemistry textbooks, 351, 352, 354, 577 (n. 13) Chesman, Andrea, 275 Chicago Defender, 121, 126, 182, 287, 288, 289–92, 302, 302, 303 Chicago Tribune, 124, 131 Childhood and Society (Erikson), 9 Child pornography, 145, 147 Children’s Book Council, 35
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Children’s books: civil rights movement and, 36; increase in, 35–36, 75, 75, 512; paperback, 36; promotion of, 81–82; reading and, 36, 205; series, 36; in Spanish, 403; translation of, 33 Children’s Interracial Book Council, 36 Christian Book Distributors, 382 Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), 382, 383, 580 (n. 1) Christian bookstores, 382, 382–83, 385 Ciardi, John, 415 Cieciorka, Frank, 272 Cisneros, Sandra, 399–400, 404 Citizen journalism, 133–34 Citizen pressure groups, on textbooks, 304, 305, 312–22 City Lights Books, 139 Civics textbooks, 313 Civil rights movement: alternative newspapers in, 273; Baldwin ( James) in, 259; black press in, 288, 290–92, 293; children’s books and, 36; Hispanic Americans in, 394; reading and, 419–21; White (Lulu) in, 459–62. See also African Americans; Black press Clark, Kenneth B., 316 Clark, Ruth, 130, 131 Clarke, Arthur C., 21 Clarke, William Newton, 436 Cleaver, Eldridge, 298, 299, 301 Cleaver, Kathleen, 299 Clifford: The Big Red Dog (Bridwell), 82 Clinton, Bill, 146, 164, 173, 177 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 419 Cobb, Ron, 273 Cohen v. California, 143 Cold-type typesetting machines, 57, 57 Cold War: anxiety over literacy during, 14–15, 75; censorship during, 9–11, 10, 136–40, 145, 197–98; children’s books during, 35, 75; communist publications during, 270–71; government publishing during, 168; interest in Russian literature during, 32–33; publishing during, 9–13, 75, 75–76; reading during, 73 “Collecting Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning” (Lasner), 476 Collective reading, 421–22, 422 College Physics (Sears and Zemansky), 352 College students: federal aid to, 38–39; increasing number of, 8, 38–39, 39; paperbacks for, 8, 76, 79 College textbooks, 38–40; digital, 40, 366–67;
growth of market for, 8–9; online retailers of, 40, 104; science, 352–54; used, 40 Collins, Billy, 236 Color electronic prepress systems (CEPS), 59–60 Color separation, 59 Comic books: censorship of, 14, 139, 521 (n. 46); on copyright law, 157 Commercial Alert, 537 (n. 29) Committee on Public Library Inquiry, 326, 327, 571 (n. 4) Committee on Reading Development, 204 Communications Decency Act (1996), 147 Communist publications, 269–71 Community, textual, 435, 445 Community information model of public libraries, 336–38, 344–46, 345 Compugraphic CompuWriter II, 57 Computerization: of inventory control, 98; in magazine industry, 111; in newspaper industry, 125; of public libraries, 330–33, 334, 341, 344; of publishing, 26; of research libraries, 331, 339–40, 341, 346; of typesetting, 57–58. See also Digitization Computers. See Personal computers Computer Software Copyright Act (1980), 158 Computer-to-plate (CTP) technology, 65, 65–66 Conference on Rural Reading in America, 204, 206 Conference on the Development of Lifetime Reading Habits, 204 Confessional narrative, 441–42 Congressional Information Service (CIS), 174 Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), 5 Conservatives: censorship and, 147; homophobia of, 282; on phonics, 310, 417; on textbooks, 304, 305, 310, 311, 313–14, 318–22 Consolidation: in book industry, 3, 4, 7, 17, 25–26, 34, 37–38, 47–52, 510; of booksellers, 102; in magazine industry, 26, 117; in newspaper industry, 26, 122–24; in textbook industry, 37, 305–6, 307 Contact (Sagan), 357, 358 CONTEXT (periodical), 215–16 Copyleft, 161 Copyright Act (1909), 153–57, 199 Copyright Act (1976), 156–58, 160 Copyright industries, 152 Copyright law (international): importance of, 152; on software, 162. See also Berne Convention Copyright law (U.S.), 151–66; American Book Publishers Council on, 198–99; common-law
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interpretations of, 153, 156; in digital age, 151–53, 158–59, 163–65, 486; dual system of, 156; fair use doctrine in, 157, 157–58, 164, 199; harmonization of, 153, 159–63; revision of, 152–59; roots of, 151; sanctions against piracy in, 162, 164–65; and semiconductor chips, 158–59; and software, 158; subject matter categories in, 156–57; term of copyright in, 154, 157, 163 Cornish, Samuel, 287 Cosmos (television series), 356–57, 357, 360 Council on Books in Wartime, 187–88, 189, 190, 196 Cousteau, Jacques, 358 Crain, Lucille, 314 Creationism, 308, 321–22, 355, 578 (n. 31) Creative graphic software, 61 Crisis (newspaper), 289 Crown Books, 98 Crusader (newspaper), 289 Cruse, Harold, 290 “Cult of Experience in American Writing, The” (Rahv), 227 Culture scientifique, 347, 349, 355–59 Customer reviews, 427 Daily Worker, 270 Dalkey Archive Press, 211, 214–16, 215, 393 Dara, Bob, 142 Darnton, Robert, 254–55 Databases, 339–40, 341, 349–50, 372–75 Dayton Company, 95, 96 Deep reading, 2, 3 Denby, David, 426 Dennis v. United States, 138 Denominational publishing, 379–80, 385, 582 (n. 20) Department stores, as booksellers, 93, 93–94 Depository libraries, 169, 171, 172 Depository Library Act (1962), 169 Derrida, Jacques, 233 Desktop publishing, 59–62; development of, 60; in government publishing, 171; software in, 60–61, 62; typesetting in, 57–58 Developmental editing, 51 Development of Lifetime Reading Habits, The (Grambs), 81 Dewey, John, 237 Dick and Jane books, 306 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (1998), 164–65, 166 Digital prepress, 57–58, 59–62 Digital printing, 67–71; advantages of, 69, 70–71;
604
electrophotography in, 67–68; ink jet printing in, 68; platform for, 67, 67; print-on-demand in, 28, 69–71; short runs in, 69 Digital reading device, 28, 487, 487 Digital Research Initiative, 574 (n. 49) Digital signatures, 169, 175 Digital textbooks, 40 Digital texts: fixity and fluidity of, 490, 491; lack of authority in, 498; nonlinear narrative in, 495; unreliable information in, 493, 494; visual rhetoric in, 498 Digitization, 485–501; academic publishing and, 361–62, 368, 374–75; content delivery and, 364–65; content management and, 364; copyright law and, 151–53, 158–59, 163–65, 486; marketing and, 364; operating systems and information flows and, 363–64, 374–75; paradigmatic crisis caused by, 486–88; power of, 485; reading and, 429–30, 488–99; value added by, 365–68. See also Digital printing Direct lithography, 63 Dissent (magazine), 259, 270 Dissident press. See Alternative newspapers; Oppositional publications Distribution: of alternative newspapers, 271–72; American Book Publishers Council improving, 203; cost of, 78; in department stores, 93, 93–94; on Internet, 26, 40, 85, 103–6, 364; of paperbacks, 42, 46–47, 79; of religious books, 381–83; in supermarkets, 103. See also Bookstores; Superstores Dix, William, 332 Dr. Seuss books, 15, 35, 82 Domestic market, of book industry, 35–47 Donoghue, Denis, 236 Doubleday, 17, 31, 35, 48, 34, 94, 205 Doubleday Anchor series, 8 Double Helix, The (Watson), 352 Douglass, Emory, 299 Dowell, Denzil, 297–98 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 399 Dworkin, Andrea, 148 Eagleton, Terry, 427 Eastland, James, 10–11 Ebony, 114, 126, 182, 301, 467 E-books, 21, 26, 361–63, 368–74, 430, 486 EBSCO, 366 Eccles, Mary Hyde, 474, 475, 481–83 Economics (Samuelson), 8–9 Eddy, Donald, 483
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Edge of the Sea, The (Carson), 448 Ediciones del Norte, 397 Ediciones Huracán, 398 Ediciones Plaza Mayor, 398 Ediciones Universal, 397 Editing: of books, 213, 220–21; historical-critical, 252; of magazines, 262, 253; textual, 247–52 Editor & Publisher, 505 Education: bilingual, 394–95, 395, 402; federal subsidies to, 9, 11–12, 35, 37, 75–76, 310; and growth in school enrollment, 8, 37–38, 73; local control in, 305; of postwar journalists, 121; reading habits and, 73, 86–87, 89. See also Public school textbooks Educational publications, by government, 170–71 Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), 171 E-government, 173, 174, 178 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 221, 266 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 11, 138, 145, 189, 283 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 254, 490 Eldred v. Ashcroft, 163 Electronic Freedom of Information Amendments (1996), 176, 177 Electrophotography, 67–68, 171 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), 35, 75–76, 206, 310 Elementary textbooks. See Public school textbooks Eliot, T. S., 224, 225, 226, 228, 230 Ellis, Arthur, 490 Ellison, Ralph, 230, 466 Ellsberg, Daniel, 12–13 Emotional Intelligence (Goleman), 357 Emulative reading, 445 Engelhardt, Tom, 221 Environmentalism, 450 Epstein, Jason, 3, 8, 17, 27–28, 49, 70 Erikson, Erik, 9 Espresso Book Machine, 28, 70 Esquire, 111, 258, 259–62, 264, 265 Essence, 114 Ethical criticism, 446 Ethridge, Mark, 120 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, 382 Evangelical Christian publishing, 380–81 Evans, Charles, 247, 476 Evans, Luther, 198 Evolution, 304, 305, 308, 311, 321–22, 353–55 Ex Libris (Fadiman), 430–31 Exports, in book industry, 30–32, 34, 40, 187–95, 199–203
Fadiman, Anne, 430–31 Fadiman, Clifton, 413, 430 Fairchild, Euretta K., 463, 592 (n. 13) Faire Free Press, 271 Fair use doctrine, 157, 157–58, 164, 199 Fard, W. D., 292 Farr, Konchar, 428, 429 Farrar, Straus, 32, 35 Farrell, James T., 3 Faulkner, William, 227, 228, 229 Favorite Poem Project, 425–26 Febvre, Lucien, 254 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 145 Federal Reports Act (1942), 177 Feidelson, Charles, 227 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 275–77, 423 Feminist bookstores, 278, 278, 279, 563 (n. 26). See also Women’s bookstores Feminist criticism, 230 Feminist movement, 100, 277, 336, 421–23. See also Women’s movement Feminist press, 275–79, 422–23, 563 (n. 18) Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 139 Festschrifts, 350–51 Feynman, Richard, 357 Fiction: in magazines, 256–64; Protestant, 385–88, 584 (n. 52); sexual expression in, 13; for young adults, 14, 36 Films: book buying and, 76; censorship of, 135, 139–40, 197–98; changes in technology of, 240; pornographic, 141; self-censorship of, 135, 137 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 258–59, 263 FirstGov, 174 First-person narratives, 440–45 Fish, Stanley, 427 Fisher, Arthur, 155 Fisher, Florence, 21 Fiske, Marjorie, 138 Fixity of writing, 490, 491 Flesch, Rudolph, 14, 415, 416, 417, 521 (n. 47) Florence Agreement, 202–3 Fluidity of writing, 490, 491 Folger, Henry Clay, 472, 473 Forcade, Tom, 274 Ford Foundation, 331 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978), 149 Forever (Blume), 14 Forgotten Readers (McHenry), 463 Foucault, Michel, 253 Fountain chemistry, 65
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Franklin, John Hope, 315 Franklin Book Programs, 201, 201–2, 202, 208 Franzen, Jonathan, 428, 429 Frase, Robert W., 195–209 Frazier, E. Franklin, 290 Freedom (newspaper), 290 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (1966), 11, 177 Freedom’s Journal (newspaper), 287 Free speech, 136, 141–50 Free-speech advocates, on copyright law, 161, 163 French structuralism, 229–30 Frey, James, 219 Fried, Richard M., 137 Friedan, Betty, 275–77, 281, 423 Fundamentalist Christians, on textbooks, 304, 305, 310, 311, 318–22, 355, 578 (n. 31) Furet, François, 254 Gabler, Mel, 320, 320–21 Gabler, Norma, 320, 320–21 “Gag orders,” 149–50 Galassi, Jonathan, 2–3 Galleys, 58 Gannett, 123, 133 Gardening books, 74 Gardiner, Eileen, 371–72 Garfield, Eugene, 349–50 Garvey, William, 348 Gates, Bill, 594 (n. 7) Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 232 Gay press, 280–83 Gay rights movement, 5, 280–82 Geisel, Theodore (Dr. Seuss), 15, 35 Gell, Marilyn, 336 Gellhorn, Walter, 198 Gender, reading habits and, 88–89, 418, 423–24 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 160, 162 General Chemistry (Pauling), 352 General-interest magazines: advertising in, 108, 109–10; for African Americans, 114; decline of, 107, 108–10 Generalized System of Preferences (1974), 162 GI Bill (1944), 8, 38–39, 39, 196, 351, 520 (n. 25) Gideons, 184, 379, 380 Gioia, Dana, 430 Gitlin, Todd, 420, 421 Gittings, Barbara, 280–81 Gleick, James, 358 Goldberg, Gerald, 483 Golden Books, 35–36
606
Goldwater, Barry, 5 Goleman, Daniel, 357 Good Reading (pamphlet), 412, 414, 419, 424, 426, 430 Google Library Project, 579 (n. 5) Gordimer, Nadine, 263 Government Advisory Commission on International Book Programs, 203, 208 Government censorship, 6, 27, 135–50, 199; American Book Publishers Council fighting, 197–99; “bad tendency” test for, 135; of child pornography, 145, 147; during Cold War, 9–11, 10, 136–40, 145, 197–98; of comic books, 14, 139, 521 (n. 46); decrease in, 136, 141–45; of films, 135, 139–40; in libraries, 10, 138, 144, 147, 148, 329, 346; McCarthyism and, 9–11, 10, 137–38, 197–98, 270; of obscenity, 140, 141, 142–43; of paperbacks, 43–44, 198; PATRIOT Act and, 149–50; protest against, 139, 142; rationale for, 135–36; of sexual expression, 13, 139, 140, 198 Government Printing Office (GPO): bookstores of, 168; centralized status of, 168, 169, 171, 172; competitors of, 171; depository library program of, 169; digital signatures by, 169, 175; establishment of, 167; preservation of publications by, 175; publications by, 168; Web service of, 172–73, 175, 176; during World War II, 167 Government publications: authentication of, 169, 173, 175; definition of, 172; in depository libraries, 169, 171, 172; online catalog of, 169, 174; preservation of, 173, 174–75; public access to, 168, 173–74 Government publishing, 6, 27, 167–78; changing content of, 168, 170–71; changing media of, 168, 171–73; during Cold War, 168; executive control of, 169–70; on Internet, 171, 172–73; technological changes in, 171; during World War II, 167 Grafton, Anthony, 21 Grahn, Judy, 277 Grambs, Jean, 81 Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), 57–58, 60 Graphic software, 61 Gray, Henry Clay, 469 Great Books (Denby), 426 “Great Books” curriculum, 412–13 Great Britain, publishing during World War II in, 186–87, 190–93 Great Society program, 331, 335 Greco, Albert, 42, 51, 509 Greenwood Publishing, 400 Greg, Walter, 246
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Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Griffin, Marjorie, 332 Griffiths, Paul J., 437 Grolier Club, 480, 482, 482 Grove Press, 142–43, 217, 224 Guide to Women’s Publishing ( Joan and Chesman), 275 Guiliano, Vincent, 340 Guinzburg, Harold K., 189, 190, 191–92 Gutenberg, Johannes, 55, 56 Gutenberg Elegies (Birkerts), 2, 429 Halliday, David, 352 Hamilton, John Maxwell, 492 Harambee Book Club, 36 Harcourt Brace, 37, 48, 213, 306, 307 Hardcover books: case binding for, 66; profitability of, 42. See also Books Harlequin, 45–46 HarperCollins, 32, 401 Harper’s, 35, 37, 82 Harper’s (magazine), 259 Harry Potter series, 36 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 249, 249 Hawking, Stephen, 347, 357, 358, 359 Hawley, Nancy, 13–14 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 248 Hayes, Harold, 258, 259, 260, 264, 265 Heath, Shirley Brice, 424 Heidbreder, Ann, 203 Heidelberg platen press, 56 Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 105, 63 Heins, Marjorie, 521 (n. 46) Hersh, Seymour, 12 Hess, Stephen, 124 Hicks, James, 295 Higher Education Act (1965), 331 High school textbooks. See Public school textbooks “High spots” book collecting, 473–74 Hijuelos, Oscar, 399 Hills, Rust, 261–62, 264 Hirsch, Paul, 84 Hispanic Americans. See Latinos Hispanic Literary Heritage project, 396 Historical-critical editing, 252 History E-book project, 371–73 History textbooks, 313, 315–16, 317–18, 322 Holbrow, Charles, 352 Holt, Albert Edwards, 207 Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 37, 38, 48 Homophobia, 282
Homosexual Citizen (magazine), 281 Homosexual rights movement, 5, 280–82 Hoopes, Townsend, 208 Horkheimer, Max, 235–36 Hotlinks, 366 “Hot” metal typesetting machines, 57 Houghton Mifflin, 15, 35, 48, 317–18, 449, 450, 452, 453, 458 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 399, 400, 404 House Un-American Activities Committee, 9–11, 10, 137 Housing, book buying and, 73–74, 74 How-to books, 74 How to Read a Book (Adler), 409 How to Read and Why (Bloom), 409 Hoyt, Lawrence, 94–95 Hubbard, L. Ron, 379 Hughes, Robert, 240 Humanist textbooks, 321 Huntington, Henry, 472, 473 Hyde, Donald, 474, 481–83 Hyperlocalism, in newspapers, 133–34 “I Can Read” series, 82 Illiteracy, adult, 418 Illustration software, 61 Image-editing software, 61 Immigration: book industry and, 30, 212; during Cold War, 138; Spanish-language publishing and, 184, 393–94 Imports, in book industry, 30, 34 Impressions (textbook), 320 Inactive readers, 86 In Cold Blood (Capote), 263 Income: book collecting and, 478; reading habits and, 86–87, 89, 418 Independent bookstores: chain bookstores and, 18, 98–99; return of, 99–100; superstores and, 101, 102 Independent publishers, 210–22; background of, 210–11; collaboration among, 218; corporate houses and, 217–18, 220–21; examples of, 211–16, 221–22; growth as danger to, 217; increase in number of, 50; influence of, 182; literary standard of, 219–20; role of, 216–17; superstores and, 218–19 Informational Media Guarantee Program (IMG), 200 Information-based public libraries, 325–27, 330, 333, 335–38
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Information ecology, 21 Information science, 340–41 Ink-jet printing, 68 In-line finishing, 66–67 InstaBook, 70 Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), 349–50 Institute for the Future of the Book, 486 INS v. Chadha, 169–70 Integrity right, 160, 161 Intellectual property. See Copyright law Intelligent design, 322, 578 (n. 31). See also Creationism Interaction series, 320, 321 International Information Agency, 137–38 Internationalization: of book industry, 30–34, 52–53; of magazine industry, 118 International Publishers Association (IPA), 203 International Thomson Organisation, 34 International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Property. See Berne Convention Internet: advertising on, 116; black press on, 302–3; book collecting and, 480; book distribution on, 26, 40, 85, 103–6, 105, 364; content delivery on, 364–68; First Amendment protection of, 146, 147; government publishing on, 171, 172–73; information exchange on, 493; magazines and, 27; newspapers and, 27, 133; pornography on, 146, 147, 149; reliability of, 493, 494; specialinterest magazines and, 115–16 Inventory control: computerization of, 98; insufficient, 83–85 Investigative journalism, 125 Invisible Man (Ellison), 230, 466 Iser, Wolfgang, 427
Jones-Shafroth Act (1917), 398 Journal for Multimedia History, 429–30 Journalistic criticism, 242–43 JSTOR, 366
Jackson, William A., 248 Jackson Eagle Eye, 291 James, Henry, 227 Janney, Frank, 397 Jarrell, Randall, 223, 229 Jenkins, Jennifer, 157 Jenkins, Jerry B., 386, 386–88 Jet (magazine), 291 Jim Crow segregation, 289, 291 Joan, Polly, 275 Johnson, Alvin, 327 Johnson, Lyndon, 11, 203, 206, 227, 286, 331, 416 Johnson, Malcolm, 201 Johnson, Samuel, 481–83 Johnsonians, 481–83 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri
Lacy, Dan, 195–209 Lacy, Steve, 115 Ladder (magazine), 280 LaHaye, Tim, 386, 386–88 Lancaster, Wilfred, 340 Land of the Free (textbook), 315–16, 317 Lanham, Richard, 2, 485, 487, 491, 499 La Prensa, 394 Larrick, Nancy, 82, 205 Lasner, Mark Samuels, 474, 475–76 Late Great Planet Earth, The (Lindsey), 376 Latin American Literary Review, 397–98 Latin American Writer’s Institute (LAWI), 397 Latino Experience, The (database), 400 Latinos: as authors, 399–402, 404; in civil rights movement, 394; common traits of, 390;
608
Kahn, Herman, 360 Kakutani, Michiko, 244 Kameny, Franklin, 280, 281 Kammen, Michael, 238, 241 Kanellos, Nicolás, 396, 400 Katz, Alfred, 445 Keane, John, 2 Keller, Gary, 396 Kennedy, John F., 450 Kenyon Review, 224, 225, 557 (n. 15) Kerr, Chester, 188–89, 190 Kindle, 487, 487 King, Stephen, 21, 486 Kingdom and the Power, The (Talese), 261 Kinsey, Alfred, 5 Kirkpatrick, David, 16 Kirtas 2400 book scanner, 369 Klopfer, Donald S., 52, 186 Knight Ridder, 123–24, 131 Knopf, 30, 32, 46, 48 KNOW, Inc., 278 Kolb, Gwin, 483 Korda, Michael, 4, 13 Korry, Edward M., 207 Kroch, Adolph, 3 Kuhn, Thomas, 355 Kunhardt, Dorothy, 36 Kunkin, Art, 273, 275 Kurtz, Ernest, 441
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demographic growth of, 390; diversity of, 390; and literary criticism, 230. See also Spanishlanguage publishing Laughlin, James, 224, 229 Learning to Read (Chall), 416 Leavis, F. R., 236 LeClerc, Paul, 344 Lectorum Publications, 400 Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins), 386, 386–88 Leigh, Robert, 327 Leroy, Erma, 460, 592 (n. 18) Leroy, Moses, 592 (n. 18) Lesbian press, 280–83 Leslie, Frank, 108 Letterpress printing, 56, 57, 63 Letters, culture of, 223–26 Lewis, Michael, 2 LEXIS, 174, 340 Libel, 143–44 Liberalism, censorship and, 141–45 Liberation News Service, 274 Libraries: “bookless,” 330, 332; depository, 169, 171, 172; “paperless,” 340; virtual, 368–71, 369. See also Public libraries; Research libraries Library Journal, 327, 332 Library of Congress, 331, 333, 506 Library Service and Construction Act (1964), 206, 331 Library Services Act (1956), 330 Lies My Teacher Told Me (Loewen), 323 Life (magazine), 107, 108, 110 Life Studies (Lowell), 227 Lifetime Reading Plan (Fadiman), 413 Lightning Source, 69 Lilienthal, Philip, 30 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 415 Linden Lane Press, 397 Lindsey, Hal, 376 Linear narrative, 495, 496, 497 Linotype line-casting machine, 56–57, 254 Lipton, Lawrence, 273 Lish, Gordon, 264 Literacy: acquisition of, 181, 415–17; in adults, 1–3, 417–18; anxiety over, 14–15, 75; institutions promoting, 81–82; intellectual functioning and, 488; text-messaging as, 2. See also Reading development Literary criticism, 223–55, 231; academic, 229, 233–38; ahistorical, 253; contemporary, 241–45; as culture of letters, 226; feminist, 230; French
structuralism and, 229–30; journalistic, 242–43; language of, 235; New Criticism, 224–30, 225, 235, 253; by New York Intellectuals, 228–29, 233, 234, 235; nonacademic, 235; reevaluation of American literature in, 227–28, 248; in Review of Contemporary Fiction, 214; by Yale critics, 230 Literary Guild, 82 Literary reading, 2, 89, 419 Literature textbooks, 306, 318–20, 319, 321, 322 Little, Brown, 35, 37 Little Bear (Minarik), 82 Little Golden Books, 33 Locos: A Comedy of Gestures (Alfau), 393 Loewen, James W., 323 Lomborg, Bjørn, 360 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 414 Long, Elizabeth, 91, 423–24 Look (magazine), 107, 108, 110 Look-say approach to reading. See Sight-reading method Lord, Sterling, 264 Lord Weary’s Castle (Lowell), 227 Los Angeles Advocate, 281 Los Angeles Free Press, 271, 273, 275 Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, 294 Los Angeles Times, 132 Love, Charles Norton, 462–63 Love, Mrs. C. N., 462, 470 Lowell, Robert, 226, 226–27 Macdonald, Dwight, 234, 257–58 MacKinnon, Catharine, 148 Macmillan, 31, 307 MACOS project, 312 Madison, Lulu B. See White, Lulu B. Madziuk, Roseann, 442 Magazine industry: consolidation in, 26, 117; internationalization of, 118; management strategy of, 109–10; statistics on, 503, 505, 516, 518; technological changes in, 111 Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), 537 (n. 28) Magazines, 107–18; advantages of paper, 117–18; book authors writing for, 256–68; book promotion in, 266–67; decline in consumption of, 90; distinctive voice of, 265, 267; fiction in, 256–64; gay and lesbian, 280–83; Internet and, 27; Midcult, 258; nonfiction in, 264–65; political, 266; promotional articles in, 118, 537 (n. 29); school, 82; service, 264–66; Spanish-language, 396; spin-off, 114–15; study on, 537 (n. 28); television and, 26–27, 107, 108–9, 114; total
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readership of, 109. See also General-interest magazines; Oppositional publications; Specialinterest magazines Magruder, Frank, 313 Mailer, Norman, 259 Malcolm X, 294–95, 297 Malone, Adrian, 356, 357 Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos), 399 Man: A Course of Study (teaching program), 312 Manges, Horace S., 198 Manguel, Alberto, 495 MAN Roland Rotoman S web press, 64 Manufacturing clause of Copyright Act (1909), 154 Marchand, Roland, 442 Marcus, Edwin, 145 Marcuse, Herbert, 147–48 Marketing: in book industry, 77–85, 105–6; in bookstores, 83, 97–98, 106; in magazine industry, 107, 112; in newspaper industry, 131–32; by online retailers, 104, 105, 106 Marsden, George, 380 Martin, Henri-Jean, 254 Martin, Judith, 130–31 Marty, Martin E., 376 Mass culture, 238–41, 257–58 Mass production, of books, 55–56 Mattachine Review, 280 Matthiessen, F. O., 227–28, 230 Maus (Spiegelman), 214, 221 Max, D. T., 428 Max Beerbohm (Lasner), 475 McCarran Act (1950), 138 McCarran-Walter Act (1952), 138 McCarthy, Joseph, 9, 137–38, 197, 270 McCarthy, Mary, 234, 257 McCarthyism, 9–11, 10, 137–38, 197–98, 270 McClure’s (magazine), 108 McFadden, Bernarr, 441, 442, 443 McGann, Jerome, 252 McGraw-Hill, 31, 37, 50 McHenry, Elizabeth, 463–64, 468 McKenzie, Donald F., 251–52, 255 McKeon, Richard, 198 McKerrow, Ronald, 246 McNamara, Robert, 12 Mechanical (art board): creation of, 58; electronic, 60–61; photographing of, 58–59 Mechanical binding, 66 Mediamark Research and Intelligence, 88–89
610
Medical publications: export of, 32, 40; by government, 170–71; increase in, 75 Mehta, Ved, 262–63 Mellon Foundation, 371, 372, 373 Menand, Louis, 237 Men’s magazines, 110–11, 111 Meredith Corporation, 115 Merton, Robert, 198 Messenger (newspaper), 289, 290 Metropolitan Books, 221–22 Meyer, Doris, 585 (n. 4) Meyer, Edith Patterson, 331, 333 Microfilm, 171, 172, 175, 253, 330 Micromarketing, 537 (n. 18) Microprocessor-controlled photocomposition system, 57 Midcult magazines, 258 Miller v. California, 143 Millett, Kate, 423 Minarik, Elsa, 82 Miracle, The (film), 139–40 Mitchell, Margaret, 155 Modernist writing: college courses on, 229; New Criticism on, 225; New York Intellectuals on, 228, 229; recognition of, 228; skepticism toward, 239 Modern Library series, 186, 229 Molecular Biology of the Gene (Watson), 352, 358 Molz, Kathleen, 335 Mondale Act (1974), 145 Monographs, 342, 346, 361–62, 367 Moral censorship, 139, 143, 147 Moral rights, 160–61 Morehouse Trinity Press, 380 Morgan, Frederick, 243 Morgan, J. P., 472, 473 Morgan, Robin, 277, 422–23 Morrison, Theodore, 223 Morrison, Toni, 429 Moss, John, 11 Movement, the, 272, 272–73, 275 Movies. See Films Ms. (magazine), 422 Muhammad, Elijah, 292–94, 295, 296, 301 Muhammad Speaks (newspaper), 292, 293, 294–97, 298, 300–301 Multiculturalism, 16, 38, 399 Multicultural religious books, 384, 385 Multicultural textbooks, 38, 305, 309, 310, 314–18 Munsey’s (magazine), 108
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Murray, Janet, 495 Museum exhibits, 241 Musto, Ronald, 371–72 N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 505 Nader, Ralph, 335–36 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 259 Narrative, 367–68; confessional, 441–42; firstperson, 440–45; linear, 495, 496, 497; nonlinear, 495, 497 Narrative Technique (Uzzell), 443 Nash, Gary B., 317–18, 318 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 286 National Advisory Commission on Libraries, 205, 206 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 174–75, 249 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 289, 315, 459–61, 463–65, 592 (n. 7) National Association of Book Publishers, 195 National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 205 National Book Awards, 205, 208 National Book Committee, 81–82, 203, 204–5, 208 National Council of Teachers of English, 412 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) (1958), 9, 310, 416 National Education Association, 312, 314 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 214, 418, 419, 430 National Historical Publications Commission, 174 National Lampoon, 113 National Latino Writers Conference, 405 National Library Week, 205, 206, 206, 208 National Organization of Women (NOW), 278 National Review, 283–84 National Science Foundation (NSF), 310–12, 331, 332, 341 National security, seditious libel and, 144 National Technical Information Service (NTIS), 170–71 National Vanguard (periodical), 284 Nation of Islam (NOI), 292–97 Native American literature, 230 Native Americans, textbooks on, 38, 317 Nazi propaganda, 187, 189, 555 (n. 4) Negro World (newspaper), 289
NetLibrary, 369–71 New American Library series, 229 New Bibliography, 223, 245, 246–47, 251, 252 New Criticism, 224–30, 225, 235, 253 New Directions, 224, 229 New Journalism, 261 New Left publications, 271, 420, 421 New Press, 221 News management, 11 Newspaper industry: competition in, 122, 128–29; consolidation in, 26, 122–24; decline of, 123–34; offset lithography in, 64–65; statistics on, 503, 505, 516–17, 518; technological changes in, 122, 133 Newspapers: advertising in, 119, 128–29; African Americans ignored by, 120–21; circulation, of, 125–30, 516, 517; cooperation with government, 11; decline of, 27, 90, 111, 119–34; diminished content of, 123, 124; home delivery of, 122, 129; hyperlocalism in, 133–34; Internet and, 27, 133; investigative journalism in, 125; local news in, 119–20, 131–32; McCarthyism and, 10–11; niche, 26; radio and, 119, 122; and reading habits, 119, 120, 125–26, 129–31, 132–33, 342, 543 (n. 82); self-censorship in, 121; Spanish-language, 394, 395, 404; special sections in, 131; television and, 26–27, 122, 126–28; writing style of, 119, 125, 132. See also Alternative newspapers; Black press; Oppositional publications Newsroom, 121, 124–25, 286 Newton, Huey, 297–301 New Yorker, 108, 262–64, 449, 451–52, 453, 454 New York Intellectuals, 228–29, 233, 234, 235, 257 New York Times, 11, 13, 124, 128–29, 131, 132, 198, 291, 449, 454 New York Times v. Sullivan, 143 NEXIS, 174, 340 Niche book clubs, 16 Niche bookstores, 99–100 Niche magazines. See Special-interest magazines Niche newspapers. See Alternative newspapers; Black press Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich), 221 Nielsen, Jakob, 430 Nielsen BookScan, 505, 508 Nixon, Richard, 143, 206–7, 335, 338 Nobody Knows My Name (Baldwin), 258 Nonlinear narrative, 495, 497 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 162
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Norton, W. Warder, 188, 189 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), 258 O’Brien, John, 214, 215, 216 Obscenity, censorship of, 140, 141, 142–43 Océ VarioStream 7000, 67 O’Connor, John, 197 Office of the Superintendent of Documents, 167–73, 175, 178 Office of War Information (OWI), 187–94 Off-line finishing, 66 Offset lithography, 63–66; alternative press using, 272; computer-to-plate technology in, 65, 65–66; development of, 63; limitations of, 68, 69; method of, 63–64; sheetfed, 63, 64; web, 64, 64; wet, 65 Old Glory (Lowell), 227 Old Left publications, 269–71 On Demand Books, 28 Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), 370 Oppositional publications, 269–85; alternative newspapers, 182, 269, 271–75, 272, 274, 276; characteristics of, 269; distribution of, 271–72; feminist, 275–79; gay and lesbian, 280–83; rightwing, 283–85; socialist and communist, 269–71. See also Black press Oprah’s Book Club, 18, 78, 219, 427–29, 492 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 259 Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Collective), 14 Out-of-print books: digital printing of, 70; university presses acquiring rights to, 51 Overproduction, in book industry, 83–85 Overseas Editions, Inc., 190–95, 191 Oxford Book of American Verse, The (Matthiessen), 227–28, 230 Oxford Group, 436–37 Oxford University Press, 33 Page creation: analog workflow of, 58–59; digital workflow of, 59–62 Page description language (PDL), 62 Page layout applications, 60–61 PageMaker, 60, 61 Pantheon, 211–14, 221 Paperbacks, 42–47; censorship of, 43–44, 198; for children, 36; classics reprinted as, 44, 46; for college students, 8, 76, 79; distribution of, 42, 46–47, 79, 97; early, 42; increase in sales of, 45, 47, 79–80, 514; nonfiction, 44, 46; original titles in, 44, 46; perfect binding for, 66; profitability
612
of, 44; religious, 384, 387–88; rights for, 44, 45; romance novels, 45–46; trade, 46–47, 76, 79 Paper consumption, 25, 27, 167, 515 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The (Boyd), 249 “Paracopyright” legislation, 165 Paradise (Morrison), 429 Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading, A (Larrick), 82, 205 Paris Review, 262 Partisan Review, 230, 238, 257–58, 557 (n. 15) Paternity right, 160, 161 PATRIOT Act (2001), 149–50 Pat the Bunny (Kunhardt), 36 Pauling, Linus, 352 Peabody, Richard, 445 Pearson, 34, 307 Penguin Books, 42 Peretti, Frank, 386 Perfect binding, 66 Personal computers (PCs): in prepress, 59–62; reading and, 418, 494–95; typesetting on, 57 Peterson, Theodore, 108 Phillips, William, 241 Phonetic approach to reading, 308, 310, 415, 416–17 Photocopy. See Electrophotography Photolithography, 63–64 Photomechanical composition systems, 57 Phototypesetters, 57, 57 Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC), 310, 311 Physics for Students of Science and Engineering (Halliday and Resnick), 352 Physics textbooks, 310, 311, 352 Pickwick Book Shops, 96 Pierce, William, 284–85 Piñata Books, 403 Pinsky, Robert, 425–26 Piracy, 152, 162 Pittsburgh Courier, 287, 289, 293–94 Playboy, 139 PM (newspaper), 269–70 Pocket Books, 42, 205 Podhoretz, Norman, 228–29, 256–57 Poetry: choice of, 425–26; religious uses of, 425–26; in Spanish, 397–98 Pollar, A. W., 246 Popular culture, 238–41, 257–58 Pornographic films, 141 Pornography: child, 145, 147; definition of, 148; on Internet, 146, 147, 149 Portable Document Format (PDF), 62
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Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Post, Susan, 100 Postpress technology, 66–67 PostScript-compatible systems, 60, 62 Post-typographic world, 25, 28, 411, 485–501 Pound, Ezra, 224, 415 Prepress, 56–62; analog workflow in, 58–59; digital, 57–58, 59–62; typesetting in, 56–58 Presswork technology, 56, 63, 63–66, 64, 65 Price, Jacob, 204 Printing: in bookstores, 70; letterpress, 56, 57, 63; stages of, 56; variable-data, 68. See also Digital printing; Offset lithography Printing Act (1895), 167, 172 Print-on-demand, 28, 51, 69–71 Professional publishing, 40–42. See also Academic publishing Progressive (magazine), 116, 144, 266 Progressive censorship, 136, 146, 147–48 Proofing, 59 Propaganda: Nazi, 187, 189, 555 (n. 4); postwar American, 187–95 Protestant book publishing, 376–88; case study on, 386–88; denominational, 379–80, 385, 582 (n. 20); distribution in, 381–83; Evangelical, 380–81; fiction, 385–88, 584 (n. 52); for-profit, 380; growth of, 379, 513; multicultural, 384, 385; not-for-profit, 380–81; paperback, 384, 387–88; by trade houses, 381; trends and challenges in, 383–86; by university presses, 381. See also Religious publishing Protestant fiction, 385–88, 584 (n. 52) PSik 1Book printing system, 70 Public-domain advocates, on copyright law, 161, 163 Publicity, book industry using, 77–78, 449, 450 Public libraries, 325–46, 328, 342; book-buying habits of, 333; campaign for, 205, 206, 206; censorship in, 10, 138, 144, 147, 148, 329, 346; community information model of, 336–38, 344–46, 345; computerization of, 330–33, 334, 341, 344; federal subsidies to, 9, 11–12, 35, 75–76, 206, 330–31; information-based, 325–27, 328, 330, 333, 335–38; progressive, 328; reform of, 326–30; role of, 183; role of books in, 325, 328, 330, 336; studies on, 326; in urban areas, 335–36 Public schools, bilingual education in, 394–95, 395, 402 Public school textbooks, 37–38, 304–24; citizen pressure groups on, 304, 305, 312–22; complexity of, 307; consolidation in industry of, 37, 305–6, 307; decline of, 307; fundamentalist Christians on, 304, 305, 310, 311, 318–22, 355, 578 (n. 31);
growth of, 37, 306, 307, 351; multicultural content in, 38, 305, 309, 310, 314–18; political pressure on, 38, 182; selection of, 182; vocabulary of, 307–8 Publishers Weekly, 504 Publishing. See Academic publishing; Book industry; Government publishing; Magazine industry; Newspaper industry; Religious publishing; Spanish-language publishing; Women’s publishing Puerto Rico, 398 Punk Planet magazine, 218 Purpose Driven Life, The (Warren), 381 Purves, Allan C., 489 R. R. Bowker, 25, 45, 377–78, 412, 426, 504, 506, 507 Racial discrimination, GI Bill and, 520 (n. 25) Racial minorities, textbooks on, 38, 305, 309, 310, 314–18 Racism, fight against, 12. See also Black press Racist publications, 284 Radio, newspapers and, 119, 122 Radway, Janice, 424, 427 Rahv, Philip, 227 Randall, Richard S., 135, 136 Random House, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27–28, 34, 35, 38, 48, 82, 211, 213–14, 400 Ransom, Harry H., 249, 249 Ransom, John Crowe, 224, 225, 557 (n. 15) Rare-book dealers, bibliography and, 245–46, 247 Ravitch, Diane, 148 Rayo, 401 Reader-response theory, 426–27 Reading, 1–3, 20–21, 409–31; active, 86; advice on, 409–10, 412–14, 426, 427; age and, 86, 87; autonomous, 414, 421, 424, 426; children’s books and, 36, 205; during Cold War, 73, 74; collective, 421–22, 422; deep, 2, 3; in digital age, 411, 429– 30, 485–99, 585–601; digital device for, 487, 487; education and, 73, 86–87, 89; emulative, 445; expenditures per consumer for, 518; extensive, 488; feminism and, 421–23; habits of, 1–2, 73, 86–89, 418–19, 423–24, 430; inactive, 86; income and, 73, 86–87, 89; for information, 409, 418, 419, 491–94; for inspiration, 424–25; intensive, 488; literary, 2, 89, 419; optimism about, 2, 3, 20, 411–12; personal computer and, 418, 494–96; pessimism about, 2, 14, 418–19; for pleasure, 409, 418, 419, 424, 494–96; and race, 418; for raising political consciousness, 410, 419–21, 420;
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Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
for self-improvement, 412–13, 414, 419, 424, 425; social aspects of, 378, 409–11, 425, 428, 429, 431, 488–89; as solitary practice, 409, 424, 431; studies on, 418, 424–25, 430; task-centered, 338; television and, 17–18, 418; during World War II, 73, 80, 188. See also Audience; Books; Literacy Reading development: American Book Publishers Council and, 203–7; phonetic approach to, 308, 310, 415, 416–17; sight-reading method in, 308, 415, 416, 417; whole-language approach to, 308, 310, 417 Reading textbooks, 308, 309–10 Reagan, Ronald, 146 Reception theory, 426–27 Record Rental Act (1984), 159 Reed Elsevier, 34, 50, 174, 504 Reese, William, 473 Reference books, 349, 350, 366, 367, 491, 500 Reich, Wilhelm, 139 Religious books: audience for, 89; definition of, 377; distribution of, 381–83; fiction, 385–88, 584 (n. 52); growing market for, 15–16, 377–79; multicultural, 384, 385; paperbacks, 384, 387–88; poetry, 425–26; press runs of, 184, 377, 379; in Spanish, 385, 391–92, 401; by university presses, 381 Religious publishing: lack of scholarly interest in, 376; statistics on, 377–78, 513. See also Protestant book publishing Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker (Mehta), 262–63 Research libraries: book-buying habits of, 339; computerization of, 331, 339–40, 341, 346; critics of, 342–43, 346; economic crisis at, 338–39, 362; federal subsidies to, 330–31; as information service, 329, 474; objective of, 329; space at, 329–30, 373 Research Libraries Information Network, 339 Resnick, Robert, 352 Resourceful Earth, The (Simon and Kahn), 360 Reston, James, 11 Review of Contemporary Fiction, 214 Rider, Fremont, 330 Riesman, David, 414 Riggio, Leonard, 106 Rights sales, in book industry, 30, 31, 32 Right-wing publications, 283–85 Rinehardt, Stanley M., Jr., 188 Robertson, Nan, 432 Robinson, Charles, 337 Robinson, John P., 129–30
614
Rodríguez, Clara, 42, 51, 509 Roman Catholic literature, 378–79 Romance novels, 45–46, 88, 424, 427 Romano, Octavio Ignacio, 397 Roof, Wade Clark, 15 Roosevelt, Theodore, 153 Root, E. Merrill, 313 Rosenblatt, Maurice, 207 Rosset, Barnet, 224 Roth, Philip, 53 Rothrock, Mary, 327 Rothschild, Loren, 483 Roth v. United States, 140 Rotskoff, Lori, 442 Rowan, Carl, 121 Royko, Mike, 125 Rozan, SJ, 218 Rulon-Miller, Robert, 478, 479 Rural areas, booksellers in, 76 Russworm, John, 287 Ruxin, Paul, 483 Sagan, Carl, 356–57, 357, 358, 359–60 Salon.com, 115–16 Samuelson, Paul, 8–9 San Francisco Oracle, 275, 276 Saturday Evening Post, 107, 108, 223, 229 Saturday Review of Literature, 224, 415 Scanners, 61–62, 372 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 248 Scheide, William, 472 Schiffrin, André, 51, 211, 212, 213–14, 221 Schiffrin, Jacques, 212 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 238 Schmidt, Richard, 207 Scholarly corpus model, 371–73 Scholarly monographs, 342, 346, 361–62, 367 School-based book clubs, 82 School libraries, censorship in, 144, 147, 148 School magazines, 82 Schrecker, Ellen W., 137 Schuyler, George, 294 Science books, 347–60, 351; culture scientifique and, 347, 349, 355–59; decline of, 348–49, 350; export of, 32, 40; Festschrifts, 350–51; functions of, 349; increase in, 75; lack of writing manuals on, 348; spiritual message in, 359–60 Science Citation Index, 349, 350 Science textbooks, 310–12, 351–55 Scientific journals, 41, 183, 329, 338–39, 342, 348, 362, 366, 493
INDEX
A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Scientific publications, by government, 170–71 Scott, Foresman, 37 Screening, 59 Screw (newspaper), 274 Scribner, 35, 48, 49 Scribner, Charles, 80–81 Sea Around Us, The (Carson), 448 Seajay, Carol, 278 Seale, Bobby, 297, 300, 301 Search for Anna Fisher, The (Fisher), 21 Sears, Francis, 352 Seditious libel, 143–44 Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham), 521 (n. 46) Self-censorship, 10, 44, 121, 137, 139 Self-publishing, 184–85 Semiconductor Chip Act (1984), 158–59 Senefelder, Alois, 63 Sengstacke, John H. H., 302, 302 Sensory books, 36 September 11 terrorist attacks, 149–50, 177 Service magazines, 264–66 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944). See GI Bill Sevareid, Eric, 450 Seven Stories Press, 222 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey), 5 Sexual discrimination, GI Bill and, 520 (n. 25) Sexual expression: censorship of, 139, 140, 198; in fiction, 13; women’s movement and, 13–14 Sexual Politics (Millett), 423 SFN Corporation, 37 Shameless Hussy Press, 277 Shanks, David, 47 Shape, 115 Shawn, William, 263, 449, 451 Sheetfed offset lithography, 63, 64 Shopping malls, bookstores in, 83 Short runs, 69 Sifton, Elizabeth, 419 Sight-reading method, 308, 415, 416, 417 Signatures, 59 Silent Spring (Carson), 6, 263, 355, 360, 410, 447–58, 455 Silent World, The (Cousteau), 358 Silhouette Books, 45–46 Simon, Julian, 360 Simon & Schuster, 4, 39, 43, 45, 48, 49, 52, 307 Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan), 277, 422–23 Skeptical Environmentalist, The (Lomborg), 360 Smith, Datus, 201 Smith, Maceo, 461, 592 (n. 7) Smith, Robert, 435, 437, 438–39, 440
Smith Act (1940), 138 Snow, C. P., 332–33 Socialist publications, 269–71 Social movements, books inspiring, 5–6 Social sciences textbooks, 311–14 Society for Textual Scholarship, 250 Software: copyright law on, 158, 162; in desktop publishing, 60–61, 62 Solotaroff, Ted, 216 Soto, Gary, 403 Space City (newspaper), 274 Spanglish, 402–3 Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (Stavans), 402, 585 (n. 8) Spanish language: history of, in U.S., 389; variants of, 389–90 Spanish-language book clubs, 404 Spanish-language books: anthologies, 398, 585 (n. 4); audience of, 403–4; in bilingual format, 396, 397, 398, 403; for children, 403; English translations of, 391, 397, 398, 401–2; increased interest in, 184, 399–401; of poetry and literature, 397–98; religious, 385, 391–92, 401; in Spanglish, 402–3; in superstores, 401; written by refugees, 392, 393 Spanish-language magazines, 396 Spanish-language newspapers, 394, 395, 404 Spanish-language publishing, 389–406; growth of, 184, 403; history of, 390–93; immigration and, 184, 393–94; institutions of, 396–98; limitations of, 404–5; need for, 395–96; in Puerto Rico, 398 Spaulding, William, 14–15 Special-interest magazines, 265; advertising in, 107, 110–11, 112, 114; audience of, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114; cable television and, 114; editorial formula of, 112–13; editorial structure of, 113; emergence of, 107–8; Internet and, 115–16; manufacturing costs of, 111; spin-off magazines of, 114–15; success of, 26, 110–12, 131. See also Oppositional publications Spiegelman, Art, 214, 221 Spiller, Robert, 227 Spiritual literature. See Religious books Springer Verlag, 33 Standard of living, book buying and, 74–75 Staples, Brent, 126 State Department, 200, 202 Stebbins, Ledyard, 353 Stephenson, Neal, 489 Stephenson, William, 192 Stepp, Carl Sessions, 132
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
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Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Stock, Brian, 435 Straus, Roger, 45 Strauss, Harold, 30 Streitmatter, Rodger, 281 Stripping, 59 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 355 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 232 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 5–6, 420, 421, 422 Studies in Bibliography ( journal), 247, 254 Suburban areas, booksellers in, 18, 95–97 Subvention, 181 Sun-Reporter, 302 Superintendent of Documents, 167–73, 175, 178 Supermarkets, as booksellers, 103 Superstores, 100–102; growth of, 83, 101–2; independent bookstores and, 101, 102; independent publishers and, 218–19; models for, 101; popularity of, 101–2; promotional costs at, 83; religious literature in, 383; Spanish-language books in, 401. See also Bookstores Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (Feynman), 357 Susman, Warren, 445 Sweatt v. Painter, 461, 462, 592 (n. 7) Symbolism and American Literature (Feidelson), 227 Talese, Gay, 261, 261 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 250 Targeted advertising, 537 (n. 18) Task-centered reading, 338 Tate, Allen, 225, 225, 226 Taylor, Edward, 228 Teachers, textbooks and, 323 Technical publications: export of, 32, 40; by government, 170–71; increase in, 75 Teletypewriter, 334 Television: advertising on, 109, 128; alterations in cultural climate and, 240; average amount of viewing time, 240; book buying and, 76, 81, 81; “broken set” survey on, 542 (n. 65); comic books compared to, 14, 521 (n. 46); in libraries, 328; magazines and, 26–27, 107, 108–9, 114; newspapers and, 26–27, 122, 126–28; programs on reading, 205; reading and, 17–18, 418; science shows on, 356–57, 357. See also Cable television Temple, Johnny, 218 Texas, textbooks in, 304, 305, 308–11, 320, 320–21, 355, 578 (n. 31) TEXT ( journal), 250
616
Textbooks: dull, 322–23; export of, 32; pedagogical knowledge in, 367; teachers and, 323. See also College textbooks; Public school textbooks Text-messaging, 2, 22 Textual community, 435, 445 Textual editing, 247–52 “Theory,” 253 Think and Do workbooks, 304 Third World countries, export of American books to, 30–31, 199–203 Thomas, Piri, 399 Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 50, 529 (n. 98) Thy Neighbor’s Wife (Talese), 261 Till, Emmett, 290–91 Tonatiuh-Quinito Sol (TQS), 397 Total readership, 109 Tracts, press runs of, 184 Tract Society. See American Tract Society Trade Act (1974), 162 Trade bindery, 66 Trade books, 42–47, 400, 492, 511, 512, 514 Trade houses: children’s divisions of, 35; paperback rights sold by, 44, 45; religious departments of, 381; Spanish-language books published by, 399–401 Trade paperbacks, 46–47, 76, 79 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 162 Transatlantic Editions, 190–93, 192 Translation, 32–33; of Bibles, 383–84; of children’s books, 33; of Spanish-language books, 391, 397, 398, 401–2; by university presses, 32 Travel books, 89 Trillin, Calvin, 492 Trilling, Lionel, 5, 228, 235, 257 True Story (tabloid), 441, 442 True-to-life testimonies, 440–45 Truman, Harry, 137, 269 Turner Diaries, The (Pierce), 284–85 Tyndale House Publishers, 387 Typesetting, technologies for, 56–58, 57 Underground newspapers. See Alternative newspapers Underground Press Guide, 273 Underground Press Syndicate, 274 Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren), 225 Under the Radar (BISG), 508 Unicorn and Other Poems, The (Lindbergh), 415 United Nations, 313–14
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
United States government publications. See Government publications United States Information Agency, 30–31, 200, 202 United States Information Service, 193. See also Office of War Information Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), 154, 159–60, 200 University ethnic studies programs, 395 University presses: audience of, 50–51; developmental editing by, 51; exports by, 31; future of, 373–74; growth of, 41, 361; output of, 41; in Puerto Rico, 398; religious books by, 381; rights to out-of-print books acquired by, 51; role of, 183; trade paperbacks issued by, 46, 47; translations by, 32. See also Academic publishing University research libraries. See Research libraries Updike, John, 16 Urban areas, booksellers in, 18, 76 USA PATRIOT Act (2001), 149–50 Uzzell, Thomas, 441, 442–43, 589 (n. 21) Vacuum frame, 59 Variable-data printing, 68 Variation and Evolution in Plants (Stebbins), 353 Vasconcelos, José, 396, 398 Veronis Suhler Stevenson, 505 Vice Versa (magazine), 280 Vietnam era, publishing in, 12–13 Viking, 31, 34 Virtual library model, 368–71, 369 Viswanathan, Kaavya, 219 Vitale, Alberto, 211, 214 Volatilized print, 2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 222, 420 W. W. Norton, 9, 39–40, 50 Waldenbooks, 94–95, 97, 98 Waller, Theodore, 195, 196–97, 200, 204 Warehouse clubs, 103, 219 Warren, Rick, 381 Warren, Robert Penn, 225, 225 Washington Post, 11, 13, 125 Wasserman, David, 337 Waterless lithography, 65 Watson, James, 352, 353, 358 Web offset lithography, 64, 64. See also Offset lithography Webzines, 115–16 Wechsler, James, 270 Welch, Robert, 283 Wertham, Fredric, 14, 521 (n. 46)
Wesley, Carter, 462 West, Rebecca, 188 Westerns, audience for, 89 West Publishing Company, 174 West Virginia, textbooks in, 318–20, 319 Wet offset lithography, 65 Wharton, Robert, 42, 51, 509 White, Julius, 460 White, Lulu B., 459–62, 465, 466, 469, 592 (nn. 7, 18) “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 259 Whitfield, Stephen, 10 Whitman, Walt, 248 Whole-language approach to reading, 308, 310, 417 Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch), 14, 415, 416, 417, 521 (n. 47) Wilcock, John, 273 Wiley, 31, 39, 50 Wilson, Bill, 435, 437–43, 445 Winfrey, Oprah. See Oprah’s Book Club Wired, 498 Wolfe, Tom, 130, 260 Wolff, Helen, 30, 48, 212, 213 Wolff, Kurt, 30, 48, 212–13, 216 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros), 400 Woman’s Educational Equity Act (1974), 310 Woman to Woman (Grahn and Cadden), 277 Women: in Alcoholics Anonymous, 589 (n. 11); book clubs for, 423–24; as book collectors, 479; GI Bill benefits denied to, 520 (n. 25); as journalists, 121, 125; reading habits of, 88–89, 418, 423–24; as romance readers, 424; textbooks on, 38, 305, 309, 310, 316–17. See also African American women; Feminist press Women’s bookstores, 99–100, 100, 278, 278, 279, 563 (n. 26) Women’s magazines, 110, 114, 422. See also Feminist press Women’s movement: anthology of, 277; factions of, 423; libraries providing information about, 336; publishing and, 13–14; reading and, 421–23. See also Feminist movement Women’s publishing, 13–14, 275–79; community building by, 277, 278; diversity of, 279; early, 275–77; technology of, 277–78. See also Feminist press Woodford, John, 300 Works Publishing, Inc., 438 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 164 World War II: government publishing during, 167;
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Nazi propaganda during, 187, 189, 555 (n. 4); publishing during, 186–95; reading during, 73, 80, 188 Wright, Richard, 230 Writing: fixity and fluidity of, 490, 491; functions of, 488–91; invention of, 488. See also Authors Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (Hills), 264
Zacharias, Jerrold R., 310 Zemansky, Mark, 352 Zinman, Michael, 474, 476–77 Zondervan, 376, 380, 381, 383 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm), 475–76
Copyright © 2009. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Xerography. See Electrophotography Xerox, 37, 67
Yale critics, 230 Yates v. United States, 138, 139, 144 Young adult fiction, 14, 36 Yo-Yo Boing (Braschi), 402
618
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A History of the Book in America : Volume 5: the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, edited by David