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STEVE WASSERMAN
In January, I wrote for the Winter 2026 issue of LIBERTIES quarterly journal a lengthy consideration of the state of American publishing. LIBERTIES was founded five years ago by Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor of The New Republic, and my essay is reprinted by ScheerPost with permission. You can access LIBERTIES website at: https://libertiesjournal.com
I’ve been invited by Robert Scheer to write a monthly column. This inaugural essay will give you a sense of my commitment to the world of books and publishing and, more broadly, to the notion that ideas matter. I’m a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and have headed up several publishing companies, both in New York at Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Times Books, a onetime imprint of Random House, and in California where I am currently and for the past ten years the publisher of Heyday, a nonprofit independent press founded more than fifty years ago in Berkeley. I’m the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.
As for this essay, I can sum up its essence in a sentence: I think we’ve entered a golden age of independent book publishing, more diverse and robust against all expectation that the Goliaths of mainstream publishing would snuff out the small fry.
I knew the jig was up when one day, in the fall of 1995, my boss and publisher Peter Osnos asked me to lunch. I was then editorial director of Times Books, an imprint of Random House. Previously, I had been publisher of Hill & Wang, a nonfiction division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I’d had some success during my years there in the late 1980s, publishing Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, Hill & Wang’s first bestseller since Elie Wiesel’s Night in 1960. Wiesel’s slim and scorching account of his torment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald had been rejected by more than fifteen American publishers before Arthur Wang took it on. It was not an immediate success despite glowing reviews. Over time, however, it would sell more than ten million copies and become a central text in the world’s moral education, such as it is. Paulos’ polemic pressing the case for mathematical literacy was unlikely to find similar favor, especially given the one-hand-clapping review buried in the middle of the New York Times Book Review. Yet to my surprise it vaulted to the upper echelons of bestseller lists all over the country, including the Times, largely, I came to believe, because of its brevity — it was more essay than full-length jeremiad — written with engaging wit, and so it didn’t feel like homework. It did a lot to help many people overcome their allergy to numbers.
My phone was soon ringing with offers from other publishers, who perhaps felt I had some mojo, some secret sauce, that might help them out. They offered to double my salary and to give me the keys to their respective bank vaults so that I might dangle larger and more substantial advances to authors whose books might similarly sell well. Plus giving me a larger playing field to run around on, with all the presumed market clout that a larger, more corporate concern might provide. I took the bait. What could go wrong?
There I was, on the eve of publishing a revisionist history of the American Revolution by Theodore Draper, one of the most independent and formidable historians in the country, a public intellectual avant la lettre, a man I had long admired and whose defenestration of the Iran-Contra scandal I had published at Hill & Wang. His new book was the work of a lifetime of study, just over five hundred pages of brilliantly argued scholarship, an original account of the causes and nature of the revolutionary process that resulted in the final rupture with England and, as Draper put it, in a struggle for power, whatever its ideological conceits. I rounded up praise — read: blurbs — from a clutch of worthies, including R. R. Palmer, Esmond Wright, Edward Countryman, and even Gore Vidal, who had long ago anointed himself an expert on American history. He called it a book written “with an acuity and balance worthy of the late (and until now unequaled) Richard Hofstadter.” I arranged a paperback edition with the head of Vintage Books at Random House, to follow our hardcover. Our first printing was ten thousand. The pump was primed. I was excited.
Osnos waited until dessert to deliver the bad news. He said that, going forward, we could no longer publish the Drapers of this world. First printings of ten thousand copies were killing us. It was our obligation to find books that could command first printings of forty, fifty, even sixty thousand copies. Only then could profits be had that were large enough to feed the behemoth — or more precisely, the more refined and compelling tastes — that modern mainstream publishing demanded.
It was a dark moment, but still I was game, except for the sad fact that only rarely had I acquired books that warranted such large printings. To be sure, Osnos and I had published books that had “done well,” going back to press, some in numbers that ultimately far exceeded sixty thousand copies sold. But, I pointed out, if such a principle were raised to the level of dogma, none of the several books that were then keeping Random House fiscally afloat — Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (eventually spending a record two hundred and sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, and adapted into a film by Clint Eastwood), and Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors” (published anonymously and made into a movie by Mike Nichols in 1998) — would ever have been acquired. None had been expected to be a bestseller, and each had started out with a ten-thousand copy first printing.
Osnos would soon decamp to start an independent press called PublicAffairs. Decades later, he would recount in startling and revelatory detail in his self-published and lively memoir, “An Especially Good View,” the corporate pressures to which he and Times Books were subjected, as well as its many successes. For my part, I accepted an offer in late 1996 to edit the Los Angeles Times Book Review, one of only three separate Sunday sections devoted to books left at the country’s major metropolitan dailies. Four years later, I organized and published in the Book Review a symposium on the state of American publishing. More than thirty distinguished editors (Robert Gottlieb, Robert Loomis, Jason Epstein, Robert Weil, Marian Wood), publishers (Alberto Vitale, André Schiffrin, Richard Seaver, Roger W. Straus Jr.), literary agents (David Black, Sandra Dijkstra, Morton L. Janklow, Gloria Loomis, Betsy Lerner), and booksellers (Andy Ross, Barbara Meade, Douglas Dutton) participated. They represented both mainstream trade publishers (Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Simon & Schuster) and independent houses and university presses (W. W. Norton, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Seven Stories, Harvard, Oxford, Walker & Co., The Overlook Press, Verso). Today a third of the respondents are no longer with us. The important, and stinging, question remains: Is their publishing world still with us? Or has the business — which, like all cultural enterprises, has effects beyond its own profits or losses — evolved beyond recognition, for better or for worse?
When, in that Pleistocene era, I invited a broad spectrum of industry veterans to share their individual and collective wisdom, the twenty-first century had just begun. It was plain that for some time several issues had been plaguing those of us fortunate to work as midwives to the birthing of books. None of us were naïve. We had always known that working at the intersection of art and commerce was inherently fraught. Publishing had always required an admixture of idealism and cynicism. Many were temperamentally Chicken Littles, fearing that however difficult the old ways of acquiring and editing and selling books were, the new ways were worse. The Golden Age, as usual, was in the past — a time synonymous with our youth — and of course we were convinced that it had been much better. (And there were, we soon discovered, some good reasons for thinking so.) The future was now fast upon us, and whatever else might be said about it, we knew one thing: it would not include us.
We had entered a new world of painful — even, for many, unimaginable — challenges. Among the more acutely distressing trends were the conglomeration of nearly everything, a sovereign obsession with the bottom-line and the pressure to reap short-term profits, and the near-universal enrollment in the junk cults of celebrity, sensationalism, and gossip, which made it harder for publishers to successfully maintain a commitment to literature and the public discourse — to be a serious publisher. Complicating the picture even more was the advent of electronic technologies that threatened to significantly transform old ways of both producing and distributing books. The swift rise of Amazon was a critical factor, transforming the landscape of bookselling, putting to the sword hundreds if not thousands of independent bookstores even as Jeff Bezos built with a single-minded determination both admirable and appalling a digital juggernaut that made it possible for millions to gain access at remarkably cheap prices to a more diverse array of books than ever before. Bezos got big fast and was soon able to dictate the terms of the entire trade. Publishers reeled. And so did the noble bookshop owners. By 2010, the number of bookstores in the country fell from a high of about four thousand in 1990 to fifteen hundred. (Thirteen years later, against all expectation, it had rebounded by about 1,000 bookstores.)
The rise of digital communication and book-buying caught Hollywood’s imagination and swiftly became the basis for a hit movie, Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail,” a glamorous tale of the unglamorous reality of the independent American bookstore. Worry deepened that these trends would alter even how people read. The growing proliferation of screens raised the specter that the habits of attention necessary to absorb extended narrative — the new term “long form” was itself an expression of the jitters — would fall victim to the seductions of a culture hostage to velocity and instant gratification. The patience necessary for the lasting pleasures of a more contemplative, slower approach to both knowledge and entertainment was at risk.
Perhaps it was delusional on our part, but optimism dies last. We felt ourselves to be a species defined by our opposable thumbs and an inherent need to tell each other stories. For this was the principal way in which we extracted meaning in an otherwise inchoate world. Surely technology could not destroy or replace this essential human quality. We might debate the many ways the industry had resisted opening itself up to the stories of others and what should be done about it. We could argue about how a world of ostensible privilege and presumed entitlement had too often shaped who got to be the “gatekeepers” — another shibboleth of digital culture, though of course it applied most precisely to Bezos and Zuckerberg and the other tech mandarins — of our literary culture. We might decry the dismal fact that American publishers, with notable exceptions, had long been allergic to translating works from other languages. We might blame the manifold failure of our experiment in public education to advance literacy so that we now have an electorate in which fully half are unable to read at a level higher than fourth grade, thus enfeebling the very idea of an informed citizenry that is so essential for a healthy democracy.
Book people are nevertheless temperamentally given to a persistent idealism even while constantly complaining that everything is doomed. Almost uniformly they will insist that any glass filled halfway with water is half empty, but they will behave almost without exception as if it were half-full. They live to hear a new story by a new writer, or a fresh gloss on an old truth. The main worry, as the late Marian Wood, a veteran of many years in New York publishing, insisted to me in early 2001, wasn’t “the conglomerate or a celebrity-hungry culture or the technology, or the idiocies of the last thirty years. The biggest problem is keeping reading alive as a passion — and finding ways to reach those passionate readers with the news of a great new writer.” The renowned Robert Gottlieb, who died at the age of ninety-two in 2023, told me: “Every few years since I’ve been in publishing — that’s since 1955 — we’ve been told that it’s all over. There’s always a new reason: remember ‘The medium is the message’? Meanwhile books go rolling along. The very golden age that young and middle-aged people are looking back at so romantically was forcefully (and frequently) described to me by Alfred Knopf as ‘the age of the slobs’ — for him, everything after 1939 represented the death of publishing. I thought he was mistaken then, and I think today’s doom-criers are mistaken, too.”
The venerable literary agent Georges Borchardt is still working at age ninety-seven. When I met with him a year ago in his Manhattan office, he saw no reason to revise his sober assessment rendered a quarter of a century earlier, reminding me that good and daring writers had almost always had a hard time getting published by big established houses, long before the mergers and the conglomerates came into being: “William Faulkner was turned down by the legendary Maxwell Perkins (Scribners); Elie Wiesel was turned down by the original Knopf (Mrs. K herself); Samuel Beckett was turned down by just about every publisher in New York. Both Wiesel and Beckett were then picked up by small publishers with little capital, but good instincts, Hill & Wang and Grove Press respectively.” (Borchardt represented both writers.) “So put me in the camp of the guardedly optimistic.” It was inspiring to have pessimism dispelled by someone who has seen so much. (Alas, Georges died a little over a year later just weeks after this essay went to press.)
Still, twenty-five years into the new century, something has changed; an ill wind is blowing through publishers’ suites. One wonders if those rosy sentiments are more a treasured conceit — editors and publishers have always mythologized themselves — than an unsentimental acknowledgment of a more disturbing reality. The big surprise is less the manifold ways in which Brobdingnagian publishing has come to dominate the ecosystem of publishing generally, but — this is the good news of our day — the consequent and unexpected resilience of an entire galaxy of small independent publishers. You would have thought that as big publishers battened on economies of scale, merging back-office bureaucracies, outsourcing entire departments of copyeditors, shedding aging (and expensive) staff, and kicking an entire generational cohort to the curb, the result would be leaner, more efficient, more profitable publishing machines ever more deft at discovering the quirky writers whose daring imaginations would be well served by publishers skilled in the alchemy of promotion and marketing. More: that as the big companies merge and consolidate the small fry would be snuffed out, deprived of oxygen, unable to compete. But you would be wrong.
With conglomeration came cowardice. Turns out, mass wasn’t synonymous with class. A culture of timidity soon set in among the corporate overseers, and invertebrate behavior quickly became a striking hallmark of the merger mania that characterized much of mainstream publishing dealmaking and practice. (Beyond the economic realm, one must not forget the shabby fear with which mainstream publishing greeted the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.) Most publishers began in the first half of the twentieth century as the black sheep of their rich families: Horace Liveright, Roger W. Straus, Jr., Barney Rosset, to name only a few. One example tells the larger story: Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer founded Random House in 1927 and bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960 and Pantheon the following year. Four years later, in 1965, they sold it to RCA and then RCA, in turn, sold it in 1980 to Si Newhouse’s privately owned Advance Publications for between $65 million and $70 million in cash. Newhouse ruled the roost for eighteen years and then sold in 1998 to the private German multinational conglomerate Bertelsmann, which paid a reported $1 billion, making Bertelsmann a publishing Goliath. Fifteen years later, in 2013, Random House and the Penguin Group combined because of a deal between Bertelsmann and Pearson, the parent companies of their respective publishing houses, a response to the threat posed by Amazon. Other publishers followed suit, the French company Hachette buying Little, Brown, the German firm of Holtzbrinck absorbing Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation swallowing HarperCollins, and the global private equity and investment firm of KKR gobbling up Simon & Schuster, leaving today just five corporate empires dominating the American publishing landscape. Corporate raiders made out like bandits; authors and editors not so much.
To be sure, opportunism and market agility are among the requirements of a successful business. But fear hollows out the good kind of opportunism, and mainstream publishers grew wary of alienating readers and found themselves cleaving to the familiar, the safe bet, the tried-and-true. A certain predictability set in; and, as ever, smaller publishers — independents who had almost no money — were less encumbered and therefore nimbler and more willing to take on risk. Kris Kristoferson was right: freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Big publishing blew itself up, and much of its current predicament is the result of self-inflicted wounds, prompting the emergence of an arcadia of small publishing houses, many of which display all the qualities of imagination and taste and pluck which largely elude the established firms.
Today, thanks to a concerted campaign to discover and publish a wider array of voices, more representative of America’s changing racial and ethnic demography than had been permitted in the past by a publishing elite hostage to its own class and racial and ethnic origins, more writers from every corner of the country and the world, ostensibly reflecting a greater range of human experience, are being published than ever before. But this politically inspired expansion has also prompted a politically inspired contraction. The politicization of American publishing — from both the left and the right — has become more pronounced in recent years. All the self-congratulation and the virtue-signaling that often accompanies the appearance of this or that new novelist cannot disguise the fact that the stories that are told in many of these new books, especially those peddled by the mainstream houses, no matter the ethnic or racial origin of their respective authors, seem mainly to be chapters in a single tale of trauma, survival, and resilience, testimonies intended to keep open the wound of victimhood whose suppurating nature is seen as a sign of moral authenticity.
A new orthodoxy has arisen. As David Rieff points out in his incisive and important book “Desire and Fate” (recently published by a small courageous house in London called Eris and distributed by Columbia University Press), we live today in a therapeutic culture in which the idea of trauma has become central. Rieff worries that “we are entering a Woke version of the Victorian Age, or post-Hays Code Hollywood, in which censorship will be the norm, not the exception” and suspects “that the increasing consensus that a writer or an artist’s moral character, and political and increasingly racial and gender bona fides, should determine whether they are published or exhibited, celebrated or ignored, will grow stronger, not weaker in the decades to come.” Rieff denounces the “ecstatic philistinism of identity politics” and locates its origins in the “old axiom of small-town White Protestant America — ‘If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ — a trope that has now been “redeployed in the service of supposed emancipation and reparation.” The use of “sensitivity readers” by publishers to assure them that nothing heretical or insensitive (heretics are always insensitive!) appears in their books, that characters and language that might offend are expunged from publication, is common, as is the proliferation of “trigger warnings.” There is, Rieff concludes, “a new kind of politicized moral prudery sailing under the flag of anti-racism and inclusivity (not to mention under medicalized fetishization of trauma) to impose the claim that only morally defensible art is acceptable art.”
Rieff’s book is likely the most intellectually sophisticated and rigorous critique of “wokeness” that we will have, but by now the anxiety is hardly his alone. (Adam Szetela’s “That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing” (MIT Press) also dares to investigate illiberal censoriousness.) One hears it also in the book trade. “We all know the elephant in the room,” the literary agent Andy Ross and former owner of the great Cody’s Books in Berkeley told me. “It goes by the name of ‘cultural appropriation.’ It supposes that authentic fiction demands the writer can only write in the point of view of characters of the same sex, race, or ethnicity as the writer. It’s become a tyranny. It’s dangerous to speak out against it. When you do, you get accused of things like ‘literary colonialism’ or something like that. Everybody in publishing agrees, but nobody will do anything about it or even talk about it out loud. I’m glad I don’t represent Arthur Golden, a Jewish guy who wrote a wonderful novel in 1997, a bestseller, “Memoirs of a Geisha.” It would never be published today.” In our culture now, like seeks only like, and only like can speak with any authority about like. We know only what we ourselves are. We have permission to write only about ourselves and people like us. Fiction has been inundated with “auto-fiction.” Authenticity is the supreme literary value, when in fact it is not an aesthetic value at all. Can there be a prescription more discouraging to the imagination than this?
This is not an entirely unprecedented debate in American letters. It is useful to recall, for example, the controversy that erupted in 1983 over “Famous All Over Town,” a novel of Chicano life, by one Danny Santiago. Hailed by the New York Times as “a classic of the Chicano urban experience” and by the Dallas Times Herald as the work of an author with “a voice rich with barrio talk and a comic touch” and by the street-wise Richard Price as “utterly seductive. . . funky, cocky, innocent, cagey and at times screamingly funny,” the book’s author turned out not to be who he said he was. He was unmasked by John Gregory Dunne as his former landlord and friend Daniel James, not Chicano at all, a Yale graduate and past member of the American Communist Party and middling Hollywood screenwriter whose career had tanked and who had been so frightened by being blacklisted that he resorted to using a pseudonym to get over his writer’s block. “The idea of an Anglo presenting himself as a Chicano, I found troubling,” Dunne confessed. He felt that “this particular kind of literary deception could, if discovered . . . have unpleasant extraliterary ramifications.” James, however, insisted that as Danny Santiago he was “so much freer” to write and it was under that guise that he was able to publish the stories that would become his novel in Redbook and Playboy in 1971, including one called “The Somebody” that was chosen in Martha Foley’s annual collection, “Best American Short Stories.”
The identity police were aroused. Philip Hererra, the editor of Nuestro, a champion of Latino writers who had published one of Santiago’s stories, was outraged: “We were deceived. We were led to believe that Danny Santiago was a Mexican American. Clearly, he was not.” Alvin Poussaint, Harvard’s resident progressive psychiatrist, joined the chorus of denunciations, saying that “by implying it was written by a Mexican, it gave the book an authenticity it simply did not have.” Others rose to James’ defense, including many Latino writers. Thomas Sanchez, for one, author of both the bestselling “Zoot-Suit Murders” and the acclaimed “Rabbit Boss,” a novel that through an act of gifted literary ventriloquism gives voice to four generations of Washo Indians in the California Sierras, declared that “I don’t care who writes a book — a man, a woman, a cat or a dog. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Well, you shouldn’t judge it by the author’s ethnic or cultural background.”
Dunne, Herrera, and the others got it backwards. Surely it is a tribute to the scope of a writer’s imagination if he can create a world not his own, if he can persuasively write not within difference but across difference. Madame Bovary, c’est moi, Flaubert thrillingly proclaimed, in defiance of the writer’s confinement to his inherited circumstances. There is an old and honorable literary tradition of writing in somebody else’s lane. Besides, are we not all traveling in humanity’s lane?
More recently, in 2020, the publishing world was roiled by the controversy over Jeanine Cummins’ novel “American Dirt,” a story about the calamity that befalls a Mexican mother and son who slip the noose of a drug cartel and seek refuge in the United States. Cummins, a white woman of Irish and Puerto Rican extraction, sold the book to Flatiron, a division of Macmillan, for a reported advance of seven figures, received early praise from Stephen King and John Grisham, and saw her book become an Oprah Book Club smash hit, selling more than four million copies in nearly forty languages. But Oprah, the supreme voice of conventionality, spoke too soon. To the author’s astonishment and the distress of her publisher, “American Dirt” was excoriated by more than one hundred and forty writers who signed an open letter calling the book “exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed, too often erring on the side of trauma fetishization.” These were not literary objections. Condemned for its alleged caricatures of Mexico, and despite Cummins’ wistful and not altogether savory admission that she wished that someone “slightly browner than me” had been the author, she was unable to avoid becoming, as she put it, an “example of the white supremacy problem in publishing, as a part Puerto Rican woman from a working-class background.” In reality, of course, it was she who had sought to tackle “the white supremacy” problem by writing a book that tried to transcend all such extra-literary considerations.
Among the commissars of publishing, Cummins took a beating. The battle over “American Dirt” was so bruising that she was unable to write for a year. (Her new novel, “Speak to Me of Home,” appeared last spring.) Ordinary readers didn’t care about the disputations; they bought the book by the millions. Yet her public shaming had a chilling effect on many agents and authors. A curtain of fear descended, and you could feel the dread especially in the corridors of corporate publishers who dared not admit what had become common knowledge: that they were operating according to certain ideological and sociological constraints. Despite their market clout, they worried about provoking the wrath of the Red Guards of Woke. For all the chest-thumping triumphalism of the new dispensation, ballyhooing the enfranchisement of voices previously excluded from mainstream publishing, what was striking was the unacknowledged conformism of the stories now being championed.
Less noticed was the long retreat among mainstream publishers, with, as ever, notable exceptions, from the highwater mark of an earlier period to publish works of serious history and daring, even offensive fiction. Following the Second World War and the subsequent expansion of American colleges and universities as the Baby Boom generation reflected the country’s growing middle class, publishers were quick to seize the opportunity to expand their publishing programs. The growing archipelago of institutions of higher education and public libraries helped underwrite this growth. In 1953, Jason Epstein founded Anchor quality paperbacks at Doubleday, while three years later Harper & Row started Harper Torchbooks, both imprints making classic works of history, literature, philosophy, and criticism popularly available to ordinary readers. Other publishers (Beacon, Meridian, Norton Library) followed. A taste for the serious was encouraged. In 1953, for example, Random House was happy to publish the recondite journals of the sixteenth-century Jesuit Matteo Ricci, one of the first Westerners to visit Japan. Today doing so would be considered commercial suicide and never mind the intellectual glory. Such a book would be consigned to the ghetto of the university presses, deemed (not altogether wrongly) to be of interest only to scholars and specialists. And so we must award plaudits to the university presses — many of them beleaguered by parent institutions that have increasingly lost faith in the intrinsic significance of core humanities curricula — who have taken up the slack of the trade houses’ reluctance and have been publishing many important works of history with all the editorial scrupulousness and marketing zeal that such books require.
History as a category has suffered especially, and those publishers still committed to bringing out serious works of history complain bitterly. A case in point is the Penguin Press’ recent publication of Ian Buruma’s fine book “The Collaborators,” a forensic exhumation of three morally complicated lives in imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and occupied Netherlands. The book was acclaimed in America’s few remaining review publications — but the book bombed, selling only slightly more than 1,000 hardcover copies. The number was so disappointingly small that the publisher decided against bringing the book out in paperback. And this is not an exceptional circumstance in today’s unforgiving market. A recent visit with a former longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf with decades of experience editing many of the nation’s most distinguished historians confirms the disobliging sales reality: readers are neither reading nor buying history in the numbers needed to make such publishing profitable. Buruma, of course, is a well-known writer, and at least his book made it into hardcover. What about all the gifted but less celebrated historians whom the trade houses ignore and can no longer imagine publishing in hard cover or soft?
Perhaps this was to be expected. Americans have long suffered from a collective historical amnesia. Our politics are hobbled by our refusal to understand the manifold ways in which history, as was once famously said, weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Americans have long cleaved to the conceit that history, insofar as it was deemed important at all, was more hindrance than help in our presumed unstoppable march to the munificent future. Optimistic, pragmatic, impatient, inventive, generous (when they are not other things), Americans have refused to be held hostage to the past, or even to be interested in it, believing America to have burst its bounds. The cost of such myopia is large. It enfeebles understanding, promotes false and ugly nostrums of all kinds, and licenses the infantilization of public debate. But the interest in facts has always taken a backseat in our culture to the easier and more seductive approach whose pleasures have tended to arouse a lasting echo of enthusiasm among a broad public, an approach best articulated by the reporter Maxwell Scott in that great mythmaker John Ford’s film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It is one of the more sinister American slogans.
The death of publishing, like the death of the novel, is an evergreen prediction. But the obituary is always premature. Neither the specter of AI nor the widespread and growing illiteracy of an alarming chunk of the public, nor the cowardice of all too many mainstream publishers, is enough to dim the passions of the word-addicted and the book-besotted. The current proliferation of small and independent publishers (I work at one of them) is remarkable proof of a thriving commitment to the written word, the serious written word, and even to the tactile pleasures to be had from the book as object. Kate Gale, the founder and intrepid head of Red Hen Press in Pasadena observes that “books run on thin margins; it’s not the oil business. Yet writers like Percival Everett cup their hands over their keyboards to deliver stories and poems, and we who work in the independent press world, we press on. It was never about money, it was about story, the long game of reading a manuscript and saying as I did just yesterday this story about a creek and a girl has me. I am with this girl by the creek beaten down, getting back up again. As we do in this industry.”
The list of these blessed and stalwart publishers continues to lengthen. The roll call includes Grove Atlantic, New Directions, City Lights, The New Press, Tilted Axis, Beacon, Europa, Other Press, Faber and Faber, O/R, Two Lines Press, Melville House, Akashic, Verso, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf, Transit Books, Archipelago, PM Press, Ren Hen Press, Taschen, Copper Canyon, Zone, and, not least, Wiley & Sons, family-owned since 1807, an unrivalled record of independence in the American publishing industry, and W. W. Norton, not exactly a small press but the country’s only employee-owned press. Many are regional in nature, devoted to this or that interest, to one literary, political, or cultural tendency or another. Some have owed their survival, in part, to the largess of federal institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, now under ruthless assault by the Trump administration; others, to private philanthropy. Many would find it hard to thrive without continued reliance on their nonprofit status. But these fragilities notwithstanding, they exist. There is a feistiness that refuses to fold. One is tempted to say that, despite all the challenges, we may be entering a renaissance of independent publishing, remarkably nimble and business savvy, intellectually curious and culturally indispensable; and the corporations be damned. This may well be enough to keep despair at bay.
Steve Wasserman, raised in Berkeley and a graduate of Cal, is Heyday’s publisher. He is a former editor-at-large for Yale University Press and editorial director of Times Books/Random House and publisher of Hill & Wang and The Noonday Press at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He has worked with many authors and published numerous books, including, most recently, Greil Marcus’s The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, Martha Hodes’s Mourning Lincoln, David Thomson’s Why Acting Matters, and two posthumous volumes of the late critic Ralph J. Gleason’s musical and political writings. A founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California, Wasserman was a principal architect of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books during the nine years he served as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (1996–2005). He began his career as an assistant editor to Warren Hinckle at Francis Ford Coppola’s City Magazine of San Franciscoand went on to become deputy editor of the Sunday Opinion section and Op-Ed Page of the Los Angeles Times (1978–1983) before becoming editor in chief of New Republic Books, based in Washington, D.C., and New York. He was also a partner in Kneerim & Williams, a Boston-based literary agency, and represented, among others, Robert Scheer, Christopher Hitchens, David Thomson, Linda Ronstadt, and Placido Domingo. He has written for many publications, including The Village Voice, Threepenny Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Conservative, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Times, and the (London) Times Literary Supplement.
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