WHEN MARCUS WILHELM was moved to the United States to take over the American Doubleday book clubs, he was replaced by a numbers man from Bertelsmann’s head office in Gütersloh with no interest in the clubs’ Canadian selections. Commitments that had been made in the United States were to be honoured in Canada, even when the books seemed quite unsuitable to our audiences. Every Canadian selection was a battle, and the bundles of Canadian classics that Susan Renouf had introduced into the program no longer fit the systems Bertelsmann had developed.
I remember meeting for breakfast in Frankfurt with international book club boss Dr. Walter Gerstgrasser, who informed me that, while deviations for each country were acceptable, overall direction had to come from the men (yes, they were all men) who had developed the clubs and had grown them to more than 25 million members worldwide. It was Gerstgrasser who introduced me to Karsten Dietrich, in charge of France Loisirs, the French club, Bertelsmann’s most successful book club enterprise at the time. Karsten was sympathetic to what I had been trying to do in Canada, but he told me the kinds of changes would be viewed more favourably by the bosses if I was working for the book clubs full-time. It turned out that there was no love lost between the clubs and the publishing divisions.I
I used to visit Alberto in New York: he rarely came to Canada. Our discussions about Doubleday Canada were cordial but infrequent. The 1980s recession had been tough on the booktrade both sides of the border. He reminded me that the real value of Doubleday Canada was in its right to sell books produced in the United States, and as long as those sales continued to be at least ten per cent of the American market, there would be few problems. Canadian books were a negligible part of their overall income, but as long as they didn’t lose much money, there was no harm in them. He said he thought it had been wise that I had hung on to Key Porter. At least it was something I could have real influence over. That could never be the case with Doubleday. As for the Canadian government’s protectionist policies, he believed that phase would pass. Canada needed American investment and increased trade with the United States. He saw no sense in nationalism—not even of the benign Canadian variety.
Alberto had little interest in individual authors. He was a businessman. His job—and it was a big job—was to steer the company right in troubled waters and make sure everyone did their work for the benefit of the corporation.
I am not sure how the partnership lasted five years. I was constantly exhausted, worried, beleaguered by too many demands and looking for a way out of my multiple roles. My usually laid-back staff was complaining. No one understood why certain books would be published by Key Porter and others by Doubleday. I had lost track of where Seal fit into the overall plan. Or whether there was even an overall plan. My original idea of Doubleday’s performing sales and warehousing functions for Key Porter had gone down the drain and I now realized that there was never going to be an independent Doubleday Canada. As far as Bertelsmann was concerned, all parts of the puzzle had always been intended to fit into the large Bertelsmann group—publishing on one side, book clubs on the other. I knew I had to get out of the partnership.
Bantam Doubleday Dell and I parted ways reasonably amicably when I invoked the “buy-sell” clause in our original agreement. I am not sure which one of us was more relieved, Alberto or me. We managed to remain cordial, though mutually suspicious. From time to time I visited him in his swish New York offices. Occasionally he still invited me to lunch. As did Marcus Wilhelm, who had taken over all of Bertelsmann’s US book clubs but complained that the fun had gone out of the mail-order business as well as his own life. The pressure was unrelenting and the top honchos were unwilling to admit that there were crucial differences between the Bertelsmann model for book clubs and how American buyers operate.
After the end of my Doubleday adventure, we also sold Key Porter’s shares in Seal Books to Bantam Doubleday Dell. When I was asked why, I answered that I gave up on it for the same reason I had given up skiing. It wasn’t going to get any better.II “It hadn’t worked for Jack and it wasn’t going to work for me.” Bantam’s administrative overhead charges, their destruction of all returns and unsold books, their approach to write-downs was never going to work for a small, nominally independent company such as Seal. “Nominally” is, indeed, how it felt when Bertelsmann decided to exercise their option to buy our shares. There was no chance that we could bid competitively in the terms of the buy-sell agreement we had signed when Key Porter bought the majority of Seal shares.
After all that struggle, it was a relief to return to Key Porter full-time. Even the dusty overhead beams looked good.
Alberto Vitale had been appointed president of Random House in 1989. He was given a much larger office with a much better view and an expense account that had no difficulty stretching to expensive lunches at the Four Seasons Restaurant’s inner sanctum, where waiters were eager to usher him to what I assumed was now his usual table.
The last time I saw Alun Davies, he had retired, but he still knew all the gossip about everyone important in the book business. He let me take his small white dog for a walk in a nearby park.
I. It was only in Canada, and only because of the government’s policies on takeovers, that the clubs and the publishing division produced combined year-end financial statements. The whole exercise drove the Bertelsmen crazy.
II. Roy MacSkimming quotes this in The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (McClelland & Stewart, 2003).