A Vision for Books That Exults in Happenstance

January 13, 2001 - It is sometimes said of Jason Epstein, the longtime
editorial director of Random House now in retirement, that he has had four
great ideas in his life.

One: At 22 he invented the high-quality paperback in the form of Anchor Books.

Two: In 1963, during the New York newspaper strike, he had the idea for The
New York Review of Books.

Three: In 1982 he created the Library of America with its definitive
editions of American classics, conceived earlier with Edmund Wilson at the
Princeton Club while Wilson drank a half-dozen martinis.

Four: In 1986 Mr. Epstein invented the Reader's Catalog to market books
directly to readers, a precursor of Amazon.com.

And now, perhaps, Mr. Epstein has a fifth: that the World Wide Web,
contrary to gloomy predictions, may be the best thing to happen to
literature and book publishing since Gutenberg. While publishers tear their
hair out over slender profit margins and worry that the Internet will be
the end of books as people know them, Mr. Epstein says he believes that the
Web will save the book business, enable books to be published more cheaply,
and bring bigger royalties for corporations and authors.

This idea and others are presented in Mr. Epstein's "Book Business:
Publishing, Past, Present and Future," a book due out this month from W. W.
Norton & Company. It is also an intellectual memoir of his life in
publishing and a look back at the trends and people he has encountered in
his 50 years in the business.

Looking ahead, he posits an utopian universe in which books will be ordered
from the Internet and printed on demand by A.T.M.-like machines, doing away
with middlemen and resulting in lower costs for readers.

At the same time, writers will have greater freedom to publish what they
want and will no longer be at the mercy of timid and puritanical
publishers, as Nabokov and Dreiser, were during their careers.

"There will be a vast multilingual directory or catalog which will include
everything," Mr. Epstein said in a recent interview.

"There will be no shelf space problem," he said. "The publisher doesn't buy
paper, order a printing, ship books to retail stores. He doesn't need a
sales force." In this view Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, unprofitable
because their businesses still require middlemen, will become brokers of
books.

Sometimes Mr. Epstein delivers these thoughts in a mumble, which compels
his listener, leaning forward and asking him to repeat himself, to pay even
more attention. He is 72 now and has a contract with Random House to edit
some of his old authors, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Jane Jacobs, Elaine
Pagels, Helen Prejean and others, including Richard Holbrooke and David
Remnick. He also spends time conjuring up ideas in his elaborately
decorated apartment.

The apartment, in the old Police Building in Little Italy, is decorated
with photographs of Mr. Epstein with his famous friends. "That's William
Styron's birthday," he said, "George Plimpton, Vonnegut, me, Gloria Jones,
Willie Morris and Bob Loomis, Styron's editor." Another photo shows him
with his friend Mort Zuckerman. There is one of him with Mr. Doctorow, and
one of him with Mr. Mailer and Muhammad Ali. Another taken by Richard
Avedon captured Mr. Epstein with Jules Feiffer and William Kunstler at the
trial of the Chicago Seven, the subject of his book "The Great Conspiracy
Trial" (Random House, 1970).

The apartment is a study in yellows, orange and celadon, columns, Oriental
rugs and pink silk lamps with fringes. Designed by Robert Denning of
Denning & Fourcade, it was inspired by a book about St. Petersburg in the
1880's. "Bob tends to get overelaborate," said Mr. Epstein, but he managed
to keep him within bounds.

For most of his time in publishing, Mr. Epstein has been part of the
intellectual elite that defined the city's cultural horizons. He has edited
Wilson, Stephen Spender, V. S. Pritchett and W. H. Auden.

He can seem aloof to those who are not part of this circle but denies that
he is a snob. His aloofness is a kind of shyness, he has said. He once
attributed it to his not liking strangers. "But I do now," he said, though
he conceded: "I don't like to go out too much. I like to see the same
people over and over again."

His new book is a small vessel, 188 pages long, that began as a series of
lectures at the New York Public Library. Part of it was published in The
New York Review of Books, which is edited with Mr. Silvers and with his
former wife, Barbara Epstein.

In many ways the book is a nostalgic recollection of the 1920's, when a new
generation of publishers, many of them Jewish, achieved prominence. They
included Alfred Knopf, and the founders of Random House — Bennett Cerf and
Donald Klopfer — who, he said, would have had no future in traditional
houses and were more open than most to modernist writers like Faulkner,
Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Mr. Epstein, the son of a textile merchant from Milton, Mass., entered
Columbia University in 1945 in an era that has been called its golden age.
Lionel Trilling was on the faculty. Norman Podhoretz was a student and he
and Mr. Epstein became close, though the two later parted ways over a
negative review of Mr. Podhoretz's book "Making It" in The New York Review
of Books. The poets Richard Howard, Allen Ginsberg, and John Hollander were
there, as was the editor Robert Gottlieb.

The book describes how, fresh out of Columbia, Mr. Epstein continued his
education in the old Eighth Street Bookstore, which he regarded as a
cathedral of knowledge. After receiving his M.A. in 1950, he got his first
publishing job, at Doubleday.

Publishing was a different world then, he writes. Editors were gentlemen
and publishers' offices were like second homes to authors. An editor could
go to work in the morning and discover that a stray author had spent the
night there, not always alone. Nowadays the security guards hired by the
conglomerates that own publishing houses would never let an author go
upstairs unannounced, Mr. Epstein writes.

People like Cerf were in publishing for love, not money, Mr. Epstein said,
and often paid themselves less than those working for them. Once Cerf had
to fire a editor and lent him money to buy a house, Mr. Epstein said.

The 1950's were a time of great excitement in publishing, he said, with the
flowering of a generation of postwar writers like Mr. Mailer, Mr. Styron
and Gore Vidal.

While he was at Doubleday, Mr. Epstein came up with the idea for Anchor
Books. Then Wilson gave him a copy of a novel called "Lolita," by Nabokov.
Executives at Doubleday refused to publish it, he said, because of its
sexual content. Mr. Epstein departed in frustration and tried to start his
own business, which failed.

He met a young woman, Barbara Zimmerman, whose father had known his. She
had urged Doubleday to publish "The Diary of Anne Frank" and became the
book's editor. The two were married and had two children, Jacob and Helen.
Ms. Epstein, along with Robert Silvers, Robert Lowell Elizabeth Hardwick,
were founders of The New York Review of Books with Mr. Epstein.

The Epsteins were divorced in the early 1980's, and he is now married to
Judith Miller, a correspondent for The New York Times.

In his book the author calls the publishing companies of today "the ghostly
imprints of bygone firms." It is nearly impossible to make a profit, he
says, because of the huge advances paid to a handful of brand- name authors
and the high cost of real estate, which limits the stock for booksellers.

Corporations have bought publishers expecting them to make a profit like
other industries, Mr. Epstein writes, but publishing "more closely
resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the
activity itself rather than its financial outcome."

With the innovations Mr. Epstein foresees on the Web, publishing will
become a cottage industry once again. In his vision books will not
disappear and neither will bookstores, which will become local shrines,
still redolent with the smell of paper and glue.

"I've never been wrong about the future of the business," Mr. Epstein said.
"It sounds boastful. But it's not boastful to tell the truth."

By DINITIA SMITH
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/technology/13EPST.html?pagewanted=all


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