The Last Days of Publishing?

When his publisher asked him to answer a series of questions about his new novel, The Last Days of Publishing, for the benefit of radio interviewers, Mr. Engelhardt was stumped. It seemed too weird and contrived. But then, as he told us, he decided he should"deal with 'the interview' as a form in itself and have some fun. So I threw out all their questions and wrote an interview with myself, the way you might write fiction (though nothing in it is fictional except the form), full of interruptions and with the feel of two people talking." And then the words flowed. ...

Q: You've called your novel The Last Days of Publishing. Do you really think publishing is in its last days?

A: Well, questions of extinction do interest me, but I meant the title to convey a certain irony. After all, I begin the book by invoking the extinct city of Pompeii, and implicitly the nineteenth- century potboiler (from which I stole my title), The Last Days of Pompeii, a style of popular fiction filled with purple prose, sex, and morality that's now extinct. But, as in most cases of extinction (even in Pompeii, where many escaped), it's only the last days of publishing for some, not for everybody. Not yet anyway.

Q: Do you count yourself among those "some"?

A: Every now and then, when I wake up in the morning, I touch my arm just to make sure I'm still here. But after thirty years in publishing doing only books that I loved (how's that for old-fashioned?), I still seem to be hanging on by my fingernails. Like Rick Koppes, the editor I made up for my book, I arrived in publishing in the mid-1970s -- at Pantheon Books actually -- at a moment when the business, for better or worse, still had some of the feel of a cottage industry. Publishing was smaller and slower and less pressured and in many ways freer. In the not quite three decades since, I've watched every mainstream independent publishing house except W. W. Norton get gobbled up by the entertainment conglomerates -- Viacom, AOL TimeWarner, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann, and the like -- and then watched many of those houses get spit out again and . . . well, you know the story. It's ongoing. It's been a feast of sorts and I was there, more or less at tableside along with the rest of the servants, to watch the high-spirited eating. Anyway, I thought it was a cultural scene worth commemorating and that a novel might be the best way of capturing it.

Q: When did you notice that the feasting had begun?

A: It was already under way by the time I arrived. Random House was in the forefront of the first wave of takeovers. It had been bought by RCA, which was dreaming of finding a "content provider" for a future classroom in which its computers would be "teaching." Those dreams, which never came to be, were just the first of a number of dreams about publishing that disappointed, and RCA never quite knew what to do with us. We used to get an "RCA family" magazine which would always detail the impressive profits of its various units in figures and then add something like "and Random House did well too." Finally, RCA gave up and spit us out. But, you know, you can't go home again. So Si Newhouse bought us.

Q: How did you ever become an editor in the first place?

A: Not by a route anybody would recognize today. I didn't even know what an editor was. I was in graduate school and an activist. It was the sixties. The Last Days of Publishing, by the way, is filled with characters for whom the sixties were a defining experience, and the fallout from and failures of that moment are one focus of the book. Anyway, I was living among a roiling mass of activists and -- because I was studying to be a China scholar then -- proto-scholars as well. My friends just started handing me pieces they'd written to edit. Why me? They must have sensed the editor in me, the fellow I didn't even know was there. I was just helping friends and, lo and behold, some of them began to get published and I was an "editor." More formal acts followed.

Q: So when you arrived in publishing in . . .

A: 1976.

Q: . . . you brought some well-known authors with you?

A: Hardly. At the time, the only thing that interested me was finding authors as unknown as I was - those whom I came to call "voices from elsewhere" (even when the elsewhere was here) - and I saw my job, my real job, as somehow helping those voices make their way a little closer to the mainstream of our society, which badly needed to hear them. Thirty years later, a number of those voices are well known, but I had no idea that would happen.

Q: Give me a few examples.

A: John Dower, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book Embracing Defeat, or Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus I published after it had been rejected everywhere else -- it also won the Pulitzer -- or the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who recently won the Lannan Foundation's first Lannan Cultural Freedom Award. But I should add that I have no less love a quarter century later for the Finnish cartoonist Tikkanen, whose autobiography I published and of which we sold maybe twelve copies, seven of which undoubtedly fell into the cracks in library walls and were lost to the world forever.

You know, back in those days I used to joke - but I wasn't truly joking - that I was publishing's "editor of last resort." I was proud of it. I wanted to rescue books and authors. It was like a boast. If you said that now, while trying to exist as an editor in one of the publishing giants, it would be like firing yourself. Similarly, I just about never found authors through literary agents, but any author without an agent today would immediately be devalued in mainstream publishing.

Q: At one point, your characters -- they're at a meal --

A: If you don't mind an interruption, that's one of my little jokes in the book. Every chapter centers around, or at least includes, one scene, sometimes more, in a restaurant. For instance, the Vietnam War is revisited - refought, you might say - by two editors, one about to be axed by his publishing house, in a Chinese restaurant with a Vietnamese chef. It was my way of tipping my hat to the fabled publishing lunch.

Q: Of which you've had many?

A: No. I swim at lunchtime. It's a different way to drown your sorrows than downing those martinis that were par for the course in the years just before I made it into publishing.

Q: Anyway your editor, his ex-wife, also a publishing executive, and their two assistants are at a meal in a fancy restaurant and one of them pulls out some kind of electronic book prototype . . .

A: Yes, it's my own invention. The Q, or Q-Print. Q stands for Quasar. I don't know why. Maybe to associate the new form of the book with the primordial power of the universe.

Q: Exactly, and your editor and his ex-wife begin to argue about whether this is the future of the book. Do you think the print book is essentially a dead form?

A: Well, you can't claim a technology -- the printed book - that has delivered the goods for half a millennium with unparalleled efficiency, and still does it better than anything that's been created to replace it, is dead. Despite the craze in the business for the e-book - and for a couple of years if you read the trade journal Publishers Weekly you would have thought e-books were sweeping the world - they've at best got a tiny toehold. At worst, readers don't like the screen much for books and that's understandable right now. But yes, I do think that sooner or later the book will be replaced by some kind of machine. My own best guess is that, whatever it is, it will look and feel like a book, not a screen. You'll be able to open it, "leaf" through it. But that machine will also do what all screens do now - deliver all sorts of things to you, not just books - and so it will, by its nature, which will not be bookish, dissolve the deepest magic of the book, that mysterious sense of unity, of wholeness, that feeling you get (once you expend the effort and find yourself inside) that you've entered a world. That sense is bound to diminish when, inside your "book" you can also listen to the interview with the author, buy the t-shirt, check out the latest news headlines, and plan your next vacation. But even when that new form, whatever it turns out to be, really arrives, let's remember that the book won't simply vanish. After all, the form the printed book replaced, the illuminated manuscript, hung on as a high-end collectible for maybe another century and a quarter after Gutenberg.

Q: Can you tell me why you wrote this book?

A: As an editor and a sometimes reviewer - I've worn a number of hats in this business over the years - my feeling is that the writer's often the last to know the why. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even the writer's job to know what he or she has done. Otherwise why would we need reviewers and literary critics? But I guess what I could say is that I began writing at a moment when I felt I was losing faith in the power of the book, of the word itself, in a gridlock entertainment universe where the chatter of selling is now deafening. The book is really such a modest object, though its purpose is to break you into immodest spaces. Every modest book now has to make its way, in terms of profitability, more or less on its own into a generally noisy, deeply immodest, and hostile environment. These days everyone wants to pretend that publishing's a mass entertainment business, which it's not. Reading's too labor intensive for that.

I suppose there's a certain irony in deciding to write a book because you feel you're losing faith in the book and in the world that produces it, not to speak of the world it's forced to inhabit. But the experience of writing itself was remarkably enjoyable. My various characters emerged miraculously. They continually surprised me -- even my editor Rick Koppes, who shares a number of thoughts about editing with me but whose life and books bear little relation to my own. I think the fun of the process for me was to try to imagine an editor who worked and existed in ways truly at odds with my own editing style. As any of my authors will tell you, I'm an interventionist. I leap into your manuscript and possibly your life with both feet, or maybe I mean one hand, the scrawling hand (since I still edit on paper, not on screen). Rick Koppes is a listener. If you want him to edit your life as well as your book, you're likely to be most disappointed. While writing this novel, I was struck by another oddness, if not irony. Isn't it strange that the business that's brought you the book all these years is so seldom written about?

Q: Yes, it is strange - not a lot of books about publishing come to mind. Why is that? The newspaper business has been fictionalized and filmed endlessly. So, of course, has Hollywood. Even comics now have their best-seller - the wonderful The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. People always seem interested in the media/entertainment universe but books on the book business . . .?

A: It's a distinctly underwritten subject. I felt a little like those Latin American magical realists of a previous generation who suddenly found, in literary terms, that they had the opportunity to name a whole continent for the first time. I suppose I was naming something closer to an atoll than a continent. But at least it was an atoll that no one had visited for a long while. In fact, there are only two great novels on publishing -- or rather on the owned space in which words appear -- Balzac's Lost Illusions and George Gissing's New Grub Street and both of them were written in the nineteenth century. As for why this is so, I can think of two explanations. One is the old-fashioned modesty of publishing in its former life. The thought was that the editor and house should be subsumed in the book and not call attention to themselves. They weren't the story - and I admire that. The other is more modern. I think it's a kind of secret embarrassment with the business. If you want to be in the entertainment business in the first place, then why aren't you in TV or the movies, something mass and jazzy? Publishing's so small-scale, so disappointing from that point of view. It occupies the sub-basement of the entertainment conglomerate. I don't think most people in the business of publishing necessarily want to take a clear-eyed look - but for everyone else, why not?