It is probably the one thing I did that exceeds any other thing I was able to do in conservation, to put the conservation message in print in a forceful and attractive way. . . . I still have this book addiction.
DAVID BROWER, “ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST, PUBLICIST, AND PROPHET”
The importance of America’s wilderness can be stressed and protected in various ways, and in the late 1950s David Brower and Ansel Adams stumbled onto a tool that significantly defined Brower’s career. It began when Yosemite Park officials wanted to make the LeConte Memorial Lodge into a geology museum, and Adams had an alternative proposal. Completed in 1904 by the Sierra Club in the heart of Yosemite Valley, the small, Tudor-style cottage now under the management of the Park Service had become a dry, dusty, dull library.
1 Adams suggested using LeConte as a forum that would feature a photography exhibit promoting the Sierra Club’s point of view about the importance of conservation.
That was the birth in 1955 of
This Is the American Earth, an exhibit produced by Adams and Nancy Newhall, a museum designer. Adams shot about half of the black-and-white prints, including his great portrait of Mount McKinley at sunrise and a winter storm over Yosemite. Other renowned photographers were also represented, including Margaret Bourke-White, Jacob Riis, and Edward Weston. Adams made all the prints to ensure uniformity in presentation.
2 Newhall supplied the text. One reviewer said the message was “terrifying and beautiful.” It was frightening because much of it deplored the human tendency to exploit or conquer nature and the results of that propensity. Yet the exhibit attracted attention because the photographs and the scenes that they depicted were so striking. In 1956, David and Anne went to the exhibit at the LeConte. Anne told David that she thought Adams was the greatest of all photographers. David told Adams that Anne virtually never offered such praise.
3 The exhibit eventually was shown in museums and universities around the country.
By 1957, Brower wanted to convert the exhibit into a book. He also believed that the quality of the book should match the exhibit, which would be costly. Adams had connections with the McGraw Foundation, which agreed to supply a $15,000 grant for the book. Brower and the Sierra Club board still hesitated. Although the club had been in the book-publishing business for years, it had never attempted anything of this scale. In November 1958, Brower tried to persuade Paul Brooks, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, to publish the book. Brooks wanted full control and was willing to sacrifice the printing quality to keep the price down and sales high. Brooks also told Brower if he insisted on using the best reproduction techniques, the book would be too expensive. It was an art book, and art books were not sold in bookstores, Brooks said. Brower, paraphrasing Brooks, reported, “Your art book would only convert the converted. We would much rather see 50,000 or 100,000 copies sold to spread the conservation message more broadly, where it’s needed.” Customers also would be unable to differentiate between Brower’s “lavish” format and Brooks’s more modest result, anyway.
4The Sierra Club had been publishing books for decades. Most were modest guide books or mountain adventure books, and none was of the scale that Brower now wanted. Nevertheless, after a debate the Sierra Club board approved publishing the book. Brower, Adams, and Newhall toiled in Adams’s San Francisco home, in Newhall’s residence in Rochester, New York, and in New York City, where the book was published in 1960. The 112 pages of
This Is the American Earth were an oversize 10.5 inches by 13.5 inches. Because of an error in preparing the printing plates, the photos came out so sharp that they had a three-dimensional quality. An additional $10,000 had to be borrowed to meet expenses; ten thousand copies were ordered and would be sold at $15 each. Sierra Club members got a discount, but at the time there were only fifteen thousand members.
5The response went far beyond expectations. William O. Douglas called
This Is the American Earth “one of the greatest statements in the history of conservation.” The
New York Times published two reviews and one story, exclaiming that the book featured “magnificent photographs and eloquent words.” NBC’s
Today Show aired the photos while host Dave Garroway read the text. Newhall won a prestigious publishing award, and Wallace Stegner and Stewart Udall considered converting the book into a film. The first press run of ten thousand sold out, so a second was launched.
6Thus was born the Exhibit Format book series. The Exhibit Format books were artistically beautiful while also promoting the Sierra Club’s environmental agenda. Membership and revenues for the club increased dramatically, and much of the increase was attributed to these books. The books were one of Brower’s great achievements, demonstrating how media and art can not only inspire an appreciation of nature but also be used as an effective tool in garnering political support for environmental and conservation causes. Yet for all the brilliance of the book series, Brower became so caught up in their production that it would lead to a fissure between him and the club leadership. He was a poor financial manager, and the costs of producing such high-quality books eventually threatened the club’s finances.
Following the success of
This Is the American Earth, Brower wrote to the board in September 1960 suggesting a significant increase in the club’s publishing. He pointed out that the club was already printing a monthly newsletter, publishing books, and producing films on conservation messages. He acknowledged that there were risks, but there were also opportunities.
7 In response, the board created a five-member Publications Committee and asked August Fruge of the University of California Press to be its chairman.
Fruge was an interesting choice. He may have been Brower’s former boss, but in this relationship they had often clashed, not least when Fruge was pressured to fire Brower from the press after the incident in which a student claimed Brower had made sexual advances to him at the University of California in 1952. As Brower saw their relationship, Fruge became a jealous competitor who worried that the Sierra Club publishing program would be more successful than the University of California Press.
8 Fruge maintained that his academic press and its objectives were far different than those for the Sierra Club books and that he was always fair in his role on the Publications Committee. “I don’t remember anybody having any problem with it,” he said. “I never found any competition.”
9Fruge was a librarian and editor who never avoided a fight. Over the thirty-five years that he would lead the University of California Press beginning in 1944, he transformed it from a small publishing house where local professors published their monographs to a professional operation producing nearly two hundred titles a year. To make changes, Fruge often had to fight, and he never backed down, either with the printers who resisted changing technology or the writers who quelled at having their work edited. His opinion of Brower the editor evolved from respect to mixtures of deference, skepticism, and hostility. Although Fruge acknowledged Brower’s commitment to quality in publishing, he questioned Brower’s financial and management acumen.
10 Brower took risks that Fruge did not always admire, yet Brower credited Fruge with encouraging him to take chances. He once recalled an exchange that he had with Fruge at a bar. They were discussing human affairs. Fruge “ran his finger along the edge of the table and said, ‘You’ve got to be out here at the edge. You may fall off, but if you’re back towards the middle, it’s too safe. Nothing happens.’ ”
11Adams was Fruge’s major counterpoint on the Publications Committee and Brower’s biggest booster. Adams’s name was attached to three of the early Exhibit Format books, including his biography written by Newhall,
Ansel Adams, volume 1,
The Eloquent Light. Brower’s name is sometimes difficult to find in these books, but Brower was the creative force behind all of them. He chose the author and photographer (unless someone approached him first), and he was responsible for the typeface, the photos, the layout, and the final production and printing. “He liked layout,” recalled Mike McCloskey, “he loved getting the aesthetic balance the way he liked it.”
12The photographer who would raise the stakes for Brower and the Sierra Club, however, was not Adams but Eliot Porter. Adams was a master of black and white; Porter made color photographs. A high-quality book in full color was significantly more complicated and expensive to publish at a time when color reproduction was still developing. Brower took risks that commercial publishers refused to take, and the combination of Porter’s photographic genius and mastery of color literally made the books irresistible to buyers despite their hefty price tag.
The pivotal book for Brower and the Sierra Club had begun many years earlier, in 1950, when Porter’s wife suggested that Porter do a book that combined text from Henry David Thoreau and photographs from Porter. “Your pictures remind me so much of him,” she told Porter. “They show his Walden as it is.”
13 No one was more qualified than Porter, who ten years earlier had given up a career in medicine and research at Harvard to take photographs of nature. As a child growing up in Illinois shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, Porter would spend hours in a bird blind waiting for just that moment to snap his camera shutter. He went on to get a degree in chemical engineering and a medical degree and finally taught at Harvard. This career was not fulfilling. Yearning for more, he picked up a camera again. The great photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz encouraged him. He toiled in the field and the darkroom. Finally, in 1939, Stieglitz was offering more praise than criticism. Porter quit the cloistered halls of academia for the uncertainty of freelance nature photography. He moved his family to New Mexico and began to gain recognition.
What catapulted Porter’s reputation, bringing Brower and the Sierra Club books along for the ride, was the color that Porter could achieve. His chemistry background enabled him in his own darkroom to experiment with Eastman Kodak Company’s new Kodachrome film at a time when other photographers shunned it. Porter spent years experimenting, but the result was clear, crisp color transparencies that dazzled. They pushed Porter to the forefront of photography as the popularity of color surged and that of black and white waned. It was only years later, when technology and other photographers caught up with Porter, that some reviewers began to reassess Porter and to suggest that his work was only pedestrian.
14It took Porter ten years to finish the Thoreau book,
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, and the expense of printing it scared publishers until it got to Brower. The beauty of the proposed book overwhelmed Brower, and he told Porter in a letter in February 1961 that he would be willing to begin a life of crime to pay for its publication.
15 Although he need not rob a bank, he knew he would need lots of cash to undertake the book. He assiduously courted Kenneth Bechtel, whose family-owned engineering and construction company based in San Francisco was best known for building oil refineries, power plants, and facilities that in later years Brower would rail against. Bechtel, through the Belvedere Scientific Fund, gave the Sierra Club a $20,000 grant and a $30,000 loan to subsidize the production of the book.
A second problem was finding a printer capable of reproducing Porter’s superb color photographs. It took months before Barnes Press of New York passed muster on the samples it showed to Brower and Porter. Barnes needed to produce ten thousand copies of Porter’s seventy-two color prints and to get the four colors to balance and register on the presses. The firm used a sixteen-plate form, with four rows of four, each of a different photographic image. The yellows, reds, blues, and blacks had to be matched perfectly in trial runs, with paper spewing off the presses. These experimental runs took an inordinate amount of time and often forced another trial. Brower recalled one evening when he stayed to supervise, while Porter and the owner of the press, Hugh Barnes, went to dinner around 7:00
P.M. Barnes returned at 9:00. Brower stayed until 11:00
P.M. and then returned to his hotel. Porter, who had slept after dinner, returned at 1:00
A.M. and stayed until dawn.
16 This kind of pattern was not unusual at Barnes, and Brower’s journal for years in the 1960s is filled with entries of his returning to the printing company at odd hours of the day or night.
17Finally, on a day in August 1962, Brower, Porter, Barnes, and others gathered around press number 3 and watched the first 2,500 sheets roar off the presses. The men examined them at a table, using lenses carefully.
They were excellent, recalled Brower, but they were not perfect.
Hugh Barnes agreed. “How about it, Dave, shall we throw out the first 2,500 sheets, and will you go fifty-fifty with me on the cost of the paper?”
How much would that cost? Barnes said $200 for each of them. For Brower, that was equal to the amount of dues the club got in a year from twenty-five members, but he agreed.
Barnes returned a few minutes later. “You did the right thing,” he said. “Now they [the Barnes workers] really know that this is a fussy job.”
18Even though
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World would be sold at an incredibly expensive $25 (the equivalent of nearly $200 fifty years later), the first five thousand copies quickly sold out, as did the next nine reprints. Critics praised the book. “Only a bold photographer could try to capture Thoreau’s vision again and again. But Mr. Porter succeeds triumphantly,” declared the
Christian Science Monitor. Added
Natural History, “If there was ever any doubt that Eliot Porter ranks among the world’s great artists with a camera, it is dispelled by this volume.”
19Brower was now the darling of publishing, the upstart who had proved Brooks and other commercial publishers were wrong. He had created a new genre, an expensive, sprawling book that openly touted an environmental message. As
Newsweek was to comment, “Each book is a graphic reminder to Americans that their land is slowly being turned into shopping centers, superhighways and crowded recreation areas.”
20 The glossy books with their bold, beautiful photographs could have a hypnotic effect. John Mitchell, who would one day become editor of Sierra Club Books, recalled a friend who came to his office and waited while Mitchell finished an annoyingly long telephone call. Bored, the friend began to thumb through Porter’s
Wildness book. Mitchell’s call finally ended. He remembered slamming down the phone to get his friend’s attention. No response. “It seemed nothing less than a cannon shot could have shaken his concentration,” said Mitchell.
21 This was not an unusual response. Time after time, people described how they joined the environmental movement and the Sierra Club by first browsing through an Exhibit Format book in a bookstore or at a friend’s house.
The Sierra Club was becoming the most recognized environmental and conservation organization in the nation. Membership doubled from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand between 1960, when the first Exhibit Format book was published, and 1965 and then doubled again in less than three years.
22 But there was no way to prove that those increases were tied to the books, even though Brower tried.
The greatest skepticism regarding this connection between the books and the increased membership came from the Publications Committee, whose relationship with Brower only continued to fester. Brower believed that the Publications Committee had been created not to help advise him but to control him.
23 Perhaps that is why from the committee’s inception its members complained with some justification that they were receiving scant information about finances, inventory, and other details relating to the book publications. Brower had friends on the committee, but he also had enemies besides Fruge, old-timers who were not interested in seeing the transformations Brower was making within the club and the conservation movement. Even winning approval for
The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado did not come easily. In 1962, Brower still hoped he could stop the dam, and he wanted to get the book into the hands of Congress and the Kennedy administration as quickly as possible. Some on the board believed that Glen Canyon was “a dead issue” and that the proposed book was too expensive. Brower had to work to win committee authorization.
24If ever there was a time when Brower’s book program nearly died, it was the summer of 1963, when Fruge wrote a memo that firmly recorded his reservations. The Sierra Club had to decide, said Fruge, whether publishing was a tool for conservation or the club would become a large general publisher of conservation books. Fruge said he feared that the club was headed in the latter direction, which he opposed. He conceded that the “nature propaganda” that Porter was producing educated the public and potentially could produce additional revenue for the club. But it could also drain off resources that were needed for conservation battles, so he questioned whether the books were the club’s best tool and commented that the club already worried too much about sales figures and book issues. Too many books were being considered solely on the basis that they could produce big sales during the Christmas season. If that trend continued and making money to sustain publishing became paramount, then Fruge worried that the Sierra Club would lose its purpose and character. The organization that he had joined would be gone.
25Brower was shocked by Fruge’s memo, and his defense was basic: publishing was the Sierra Club’s most effective conservation tool. There was no need to choose between conservation and publishing. He argued that one promoted conservation through words, voice, and picture and that books, pamphlets, journals, and films were integral media to transmit those messages. The books had made the Sierra Club a national leader, and funds had increased tremendously to hire more staff and spread the word. Attacking the book program would not only harm the club but also deprive it of money and recognition. Critics, he said, had the power not only to destroy the book program but also to harm the club’s conservation program.
26The debate raised other concerns. One was how Brower, the club’s executive director, could run what was becoming a bigger organization, with more employees, members, and responsibilities, while also devoting so much time to editing books. Brower responded that he was spending about 50 percent of his time with the books, which he thought was about right. Brower’s personal journals, however, show that by 1963 he had begun spending significant amounts of time in New York. For instance, in the twelve months leading up to Fruge’s August 1963 memo, Brower spent at least two months off and on in New York. There are numerous notations for the time he spent working at Barnes Press or conferring with Porter or others about a book issue. Even when Brower was back in San Francisco or elsewhere, it appears that he was devoting more than 50 percent of his time to books.
27It was also clear, though, that the books were changing the club. In 1959, the year before the first Exhibit Format book was published, the club’s budget was $120,000. In 1962, after the first black-and-white books were published but before Porter’s color book on Thoreau was launched, the budget had doubled. By 1964, the annual budget had ballooned to more than $1 million, and the publication budget alone was half of that amount. One other figure in the ledger demonstrated the risks being taken in the book program: that year, the Sierra Club spent $17,000 more in the program than the program brought in. Those deficits on the publications side of the budget would only increase over time. A side issue was that it took time to sell books. In June 1963, the club had $193,000 invested in inventory that was still sitting in bookstores and warehouses.
28For Brower, that inventory merely meant that the club’s endowment was being converted from stocks to books. He did not have a problem with that, but some board members did. Richard Leonard commented later, “Dave told the board that the money had always come in and always would and that he didn’t see what we were worried about.” Edgar Wayburn recalled that an analysis completed in 1965 showed that on average each book publication was losing $50,000. Brower strongly disagreed with those numbers, in part because the club assessed an overhead charge for its administrative expenses and he thought that amount was too high. “The specter in my mind,” said Wayburn, “and I think in the minds of other members of the Publications Committee, and reflected to the board, was that if ever Dave published a turkey, we would indeed be in trouble.”
29Brower could be creative when it came to financing a book. He found the money for
The Place No One Knew—which was going to be even more expensive than
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World—by convincing Barnes Press to delay payment, having Porter agree to limit his royalty payments, and tapping into some leftover funds from the Belvedere grant (
figure 11). These maneuvers helped, but he needed yet more money. He had received loans and grants for earlier books, so he decided to put out a wider solicitation to Sierra Club members. He received more than forty responses. Some objected not only to the solicitation but to the way their dues were being spent on such appeals. But the money did come in through advance purchases of the book, contributions, and interest-free loans. In July 1963, Brower reported that the combination of these fund-raising activities had produced $60,000. The downside was that promotion and production costs were now up to $80,000.
30
Eliot Porter and Brower choosing what photos should go into Porter’s next book from the many laid out on the floor. Porter first approached Brower in early 1961 about publishing a book based on his photos and the writings of Henry David Thoreau. They forged a partnership that created beautiful books and greater exposure for the Sierra Club, but they also increased the organization’s financial risk. (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Both the Publications Committee and the Executive Committee for the board seriously considered the publication and financing issues. After several months, they told Brower that he could continue publishing, but with some limitations. To control the club’s financial exposure, limits were placed on how big the book inventory could be and the level of borrowing.
31No Exhibit Format book was more controversial than
The Last Redwoods by Philip Hyde and François Leydet.
32 Although Brower’s name is almost nonexistent in the book, he oversaw and managed its production. Forestry and lumber representatives resented the title because they felt it suggested that the California coastal redwoods were disappearing. At the time, more than 60,000 acres had been preserved. A review in the
Journal of Forestry complained that the book “resorts to half-truths, distortions, exaggeration and quoting out of context.” But the book drew wide praise elsewhere, ranging from the
Salt Lake Tribune, which called it a “masterpiece of photographs and poetry,” to the
Atlantic Monthly, which said it was “a poignant, infuriating record of American impatience” in destroying priceless natural resources.
33 The book’s first chapters were typical of an Exhibit Format book, depicting soaring redwoods, breakers crashing on the coast, clear blue rivers, and verdant glens of moist moss and fern. But by
chapter 5 the book’s tone changed as it showed clear-cut fields, polluted streams, and wide freeways that slashed through the forest.
When books went well and Brower was praised, he glowed. When he was blamed for the problems, he glowered. He had never taken criticism well, and criticism was an integral part of the book business. He did not like it from the Publications Committee, the Sierra Club board, the authors and photographers, or even the occasional book critic who published a negative review. He told George Dusheck at the
San Francisco News-Call Bulletin that his negative review about Porter’s Thoreau book “financially impaired and caused anguish” to everyone connected with the book, from Porter to individual book sellers.
34 After an unusually emotional argument with Adams, he apologized and said Anne had told him that lately he had been “pitiful, petulant and pompous.”
35He did not react well even when he received what were meant to be constructive comments from such friends as Adams and Porter. The degree of his reaction was telling. The morning after a Publications Committee meeting in February 1964, Adams wrote a detailed, single-spaced, four-page letter addressing concerns about the book program. Although he closed with the comment that the books had been “an astonishing event in the publishing world” and “the most effective aspect” of the club’s efforts, Brower responded with a bitter defense, concluding that Adams’s letter was more discouraging than any previous comment about the Sierra Club publishing program. Adams was astonished by this response; he had only been suggesting ways to improve an already great book program. But he should not have been surprised. A year earlier, he had scolded Brower after another outburst—Brower’s paranoia that outsiders were intent on getting him fired seemed to be on the rise at the time—and assured him that no one was out to get him. Everyone truly did appreciate him.
36In September 1964, in response to complaints from Brower, Porter was just as blunt. If the situation were truly as serious as Brower made it out to be—Brower had been complaining that his life was so hectic and disorganized that he could not get anything done—there would be nothing left to do but to offer Brower a loaded gun.
37By 1967, Brower had produced seventeen Exhibit Format books, and he was continuing to work on several others that the Publications Committee was not as willing to authorize. His staff now included a publications department that took care of the monthly Sierra Club Bulletin, Sierra Club films, and various non–Exhibit Format books that the club also continued to produce. The number of books that were published is a testament to Brower’s talent, energy, and ability to persuade others, including the members of an often divided Publications Committee, to do as he wished. He did not always win, however.
Brower believed in working on projects despite widespread opposition. He was used to finding ways to overcome such resistance. In an especially revealing comment in his oral history, recorded from 1974 to 1978, Brower talked about the issues he had with the Publications Committee and exclaimed, “I led them on a merry chase. I felt that I had to, that there were a lot of things that needed to be done, and if I took the risk, I would rather do it than not.”
38As time went on, there was no secret about what Brower was doing. “Dave bragged to the board of directors that the books would never have been published if he had not gone ahead without authorization,” said Leonard, who increasingly worried about Brower’s independent streak.
39 Such independence worked as long as the successes continued.
From 1964 to 1967, they did. There were books on the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Nevada, California’s Big Sur, an American climbing expedition to Mount Everest, Summer Island on the Maine coast, the Southwest’s Navajo country, Hawaii, Alaska, and Baja California. The best of them may have been the Grand Canyon book,
Time and the River Flowing, which drew strong support even from the Publications Committee.
40 It was a campaign book, a direct response to Udall’s call for two dams within the Grand Canyon. The book was controversial, depending on how one defined the Grand Canyon. The national park boundaries at the time included only a portion of what geologically constituted the Grand Canyon. Critics were unhappy that the photos in the book displayed areas of the canyon that would be affected by the dams but were not within the park.
Controversy sells books, and the Grand Canyon book was picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and was selling well. In April 1965, Brower learned that both
The Last Redwoods and
Time and the River Flowing had won a prestigious book award. The Carey–Thomas Award honored what it called a “distinguished project of creating publishing.” A surprised Brower said in response to the news, “This is good for us, but more important it is good for the Grand Canyon.” Book publishing was helping the conservation movement, “and this award is the greatest boost of all.”
41Yet, to paraphrase an old maxim, one is only as good as one’s next book. The Everest book threatened to become the financial failure that Wayburn and others most feared. The old mountain climber Brower really wanted this book, and he sought out the leaders of an expedition in 1963 that challenged the world’s highest peak. The author, Thomas Hornbein, conceded in the preface that he had doubts about his writing ability, and some critics said he should have heeded those fears. As had happened with other Sierra Club books, the photographs of the expedition helped save this book.
42More controversial within the Sierra Club was Brower’s proposed book featuring the California coast of Big Sur and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Brower and Adams, who had by now moved to Carmel on the coast, had been discussing how to protect the Big Sur shoreline of California. The concept of recognizing an area that included developments would later become part of the national park system, but it was premature in the 1960s, and so the book’s conservation message was muted. Jeffers himself was also controversial. He was not a conservationist, said Fruge, but more of a misanthrope. Adams thought that his poetry was second rate. Wallace Stegner believed the solution was to not emphasize Jeffers poetry because it would overwhelm the book. Instead of a Sierra Club volume, it would be a Nietzsche–Jeffers book with Sierra Clubbish photography.
43By a narrow vote, the board grudgingly allowed Brower to continue with the Jeffers–Big Sur project, which would eventually be titled
Not Man Apart, but Brower had trouble finding time for it. He eventually turned it over to his twenty-one-year-old son Kenneth. Like his father, Ken had struggled at college, which made him available. Although Brower was listed as editor, he noted in the preface that in reality Ken should have taken that title. Ken’s inclusion in the project only complicated things, however, because several members of the Publications Committee were unhappy with the younger Brower’s selections. Too many of them, complained Stegner, displayed his immaturity.
44Adams had doubts until he finally received his published copy. After spending several hours examining every element of the book, he wrote that it was the most moving, unified, logical, and beautiful book that the Sierra Club had done to this point. He was especially pleased with the editing of Jeffers’s prose, a task that must have been truly challenging.
45Stegner said Brower seemed to be more intent in publishing
Not Man Apart to get more cash flowing into the club and less worried about the book’s quality. The financial picture was getting more complicated and at times dire. In 1966, the publications program was $119,000 in the red, but the club’s overall budget of slightly more than $1.5 million ended with a surplus.
46If ever there was a time not to expand the book program, this would seem to be it. So of course Brower expanded it. Ian Ballantine, a paperback publisher, was intrigued by Exhibit Format books and wanted to publish them as small, high-quality paperbacks. At the time, paperbacks were rarely priced at more than 95 cents, but Ballantine agreed to pay more to attain the high quality of the hard covers and charge $3.95. That move was risky, but so was the idea of undercutting the more expensive hard covers with cheap paperbacks.
47 Ballantine paid Brower $22,000 as the first advance for the paperbacks, a deal Brower made and then presented to the Publications Committee. The committee’s members and even Brower worried how the paperbacks would affect the hard covers. They worried needlessly. The first paperback was Porter’s
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World in an abridged version with slightly fewer color plates. Its sales would eventually top 1 million. Brower decided that the paperback not only did not cut into the sales of the hard covers but also created a market for the bigger books.
48Ballantine also rescued Brower from the Publications Committee when it balked at publishing a highly unorthodox work,
On the Loose, by Terry and Renny Russell. It was not an Exhibit Format book, but it would become important to the Sierra Club. The two young men, inspired by the Exhibit Format books, found snapshots of trips they had taken through the American West. The photos were taken by low-end cameras and were processed at drug stores, so they had low fidelity. They were matched to Terry Russell’s paeans to the immaturity of youth and quotations from the Bible, actor Steve McQueen, H. G. Wells, and others. It took the Russells about three months to produce a draft of the book, which was bound in green Moroccan leather with gold lettering. They were living in the Bay Area when they knocked on Brower’s door one evening, and he let them in. The family’s pet monkey snapped at them, and Brower poured a drink and began reviewing their manuscript. Renny Russell had misgivings as he studied Brower’s face, which remained impassive. “Then, without finishing, he flashed his sky-blue eyes at us and simply said, ‘We have to publish them,’ ” recalled Russell. “I melted.”
49The Publications Committee was adamant that this book, which was far more about youth than about conservation, was not for the Sierra Club. Brower took the book to Ballantine, who immediately recognized it as a potential best seller. Ballantine agreed to pay $20,000 for the paperback rights to the book. Faced with the potential arrival of a large cash flow, the Publications Committee relented. The plates in the book would incorporate the Russells’ photos as well as Terry Russell’s handwritten text. Brower ordered fifty thousand copies, which reduced the cost per unit, but he had only fifteen thousand bound. The first copies sold out rapidly, and Brower was able to get the remaining copies bound quickly to keep up with demand. Over the years, the book would remain in print and sell more than 1 million copies.
50Brower had done the seemingly impossible. His books were now on best-seller lists, included in the Book-of-the-Month Club, winning awards, and selling in the millions. And yet Fruge’s warning in 1963 now seemed more germane than ever. Was publishing still the servant of conservation, or had Brower turned the Sierra Club into a publishing house? And was such a transformation good or bad?
