Peeved Look at Publishing

Despite the supposed intellectual languor of a nation devoted to TV and tailfins. U.S. publishers are turning out books as fast as they can be printed (a near record 11,881 titles so far this year), and customers are buying at a rate that will probably surpass the 1956 high of some $750 million. But to Veteran Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, 65, the state of the publishing business is parlous. In the current Atlantic Monthly, Knopf lines up his culprits for a scattergun blast.

First of all, Knopf hits the booksellers. Most of them, he grumbles, are content merely to display books, make no effort to sell them. While the big book clubs peddle and pass out books by the hundreds of thousands, bookstore owners lazily rake in 40% commissions on books that leave the counters under their own power, pack the rest back to the publishers. The result is that "much of the time our inventory is gone today and here tomorrow."

Cows Are Not Vain. Next, Knopf berates reviewers, longs for the good old days of H. L. Mencken ("who could even sell a book by denouncing it, so arresting was his invective"), Heywood Broun and Yale's William Lyon Phelps, "at whom the intellectuals used to laugh but whose enthusiasms were really contagious." The only present-day reviewer contagious enough for Knopf is the New York Times's notoriously Phelpsian Orville Prescott. Says Knopf: Prescott can "make them buy the book he praises. We would all benefit enormously were there a dozen like him. Whether they were sound critics wouldn't matter so much to the book trade--not to start with, at any rate."

Writers, too, earn an onion. There was a time, Knopf recalls mournfully, when editors were not compelled to "conduct elaborate correspondence courses" for "would-be and indeed practicing novelists." The fellows are unreliable, snorts Knopf: "We pay substantial advances for books that never get written." Worst of all, they are self-important: "You can offer a grade A milk and a grade B if you are in the dairy business, but authors are vain in a way that cows are not."

Back to Buying. Knopf admits that the grievous inadequacy of authors, booksellers and critics does not excuse publishers for "producing the large volume of trivial, unimportant, inferior and downright unworthy stuff we do." He roasts his colleagues for handing out contracts to hopefuls who have never written novels and, worse still, for printing the results. Standards are so low, he complains, that no one "can say to any author, 'Your book is so bad that it can't be published,' because the author is just as likely as not to go down the street and sell it to the first publisher whose office he passes." Knopf scoffs at overstimulated advertising ("Never has a book offered so much") and fraudulent announcements of "12 superb new novels" in a single season An offender not mentioned: Publisher Knopf, who decorated the book jacket of Come with Me to Macedonia (TIME, Aug. 26), one of the most forlorn comic novels of the season, with this endorsement: "I cannot remember when I have laughed so much over a novel."

Finally, what about the readers? Citing Walt Whitman's remark that "To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too," Knopf suggests that a really great audience would pay its own way. He grumbles that "People who wouldn't dream of borrowing any other purchasable object feel no compunction about borrowing a book." But successful Businessman Knopf really is not much displeased with his customers' buying or reading habits: "By and large," he concludes, "the taste of the reading public is better than that of us who cater to it."

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