PrintDecember 2, 2006
Money and Morals in Book Publishing
In 1948, one year after the death of legendary Charles Scribner's Sons editor Maxwell Perkins - editor of Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and Wolfe - the annual Books in Print index listed 85,000 titles from only 357 book publishers. The small scale of the book trade at that time meant that book publishers continued their tradition of being gatekeepers of our culture and knowledge; publishing, it was thought, was a calling for those for whom commerce was a secondary consideration. Distilling and developing insight, literature, philosophy, social commentary, what we now like to call ‘intellectual capital,' was the chief role of publishers. The profession was refined, gentile, a self-imposed meritocracy which, in serving primarily the literate upper classes, had as its unspoken mandate to identify works of quality and enable them to be enshrined and preserved in book form.But those days, despite their sentimental appeal, are clearly gone: in 2005, for instance, R.R. Bowker, who compiles...(Read Full Article)
