 |
 |
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 janet paterson, an akinetic rigid subtype parkie 53 now / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd TEL: 613 256 8340 SMAIL: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada EMAIL: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/