THE OBLITERATION OF PUBLISHER IDENTITY

Anyone who tries writing a history of publishing in the twentieth century will encounter a fascinating, eventful, and complex story. Much more than what is to be found in publishing in the nineteenth century. And it was the very first decade of the twentieth century that produced the essential novelty: the idea of the publishing house as a form, as a highly singular place that would bring together works that were mutually congenial—even if at first sight they seemed divergent or even contrasting—and would publish them following a clearly defined style that was distinct from any other. This was the idea—never clearly expressed because it didn’t seem necessary—around which several friends met up to establish two journals, Die Insel in Germany and La Nouvelle Revue Française in France. Later, alongside each journal, thanks to the efforts of Anton Kippenberg and Gaston Gallimard respectively, a new publishing house was established following the same lines. But the same idea, over the same period, would guide publishers as different as Kurt Wolff, Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, Bruno Cassirer, and later on in other countries, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Alfred Knopf, and James Laughlin, each in their own particular way and not necessarily linked to a journal. And finally Giulio Einaudi, Jérôme Lindon, Peter Suhrkamp, and Siegfried Unseld.

The first examples I mentioned were publishers who came from the wealthy educated bourgeoisie, who shared a certain taste and attitude of mind, who launched their enterprise out of sheer passion, with no illusion about making it financially lucrative. Making money producing books was, then as now, a dicey venture. With books, as everyone knows, it’s very easy to lose money but difficult to make it—and even then they are modest sums, useful above all for continued investment. The industrial destinies of those firms varied greatly: some publishing houses, such as Kurt Wolff, closed after a few glorious years; others, such as Gallimard, are still prospering and firmly anchored in their origins. These publishing houses had each developed an unmistakably clear identity, defined not only in terms of the authors published and the style of their publications, but by the many occasions when those same publishing houses had been able to say no in terms of authors and style. And this is the point that brings us to today and to a contrary phenomenon that we are witnessing: I would call it the obliteration of publisher identity. If we compare the first decade of the 1900s with the one that has just passed, we immediately see two entirely opposite trends. In the first decade of the twentieth century the idea of the publishing house as a form was developed, an idea that then dominated the whole century, sometimes leaving a crucial mark on the culture of certain countries at certain times (as happened with the “Suhrkamp culture,” as George Steiner described it when referring to Siegfried Unseld’s Suhrkamp Verlag in 1960s and ’70s Germany, or with Giulio Einaudi’s Einaudi in Italy during the 1950s and ’60s).

In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, however, we have witnessed a progressive blurring of differences among publishers. Today, as shrewder agents well know, everyone competes for the same books and those who win distinguish themselves only because, by winning, they have bought a title that will prove in the end to be a moneymaker or a disaster. Then, after a few months, whether it has been a success or a failure, the book in question is lost in the twilight of the backlist: a meager twilight that occupies an ever smaller and irrelevant space, much the same as the past itself occupies in the mind of the hypothetical book buyer whom the publisher is seeking to win over. All of this can be seen in the acquisitions lists and above all in the catalogs, those very significant bulletins through which books are presented to the booksellers—and which have now become so highly interchangeable in terms of their language, images (including photos of authors), and suggested selling points, and lastly in the physical appearance of the books. At this point it becomes seriously difficult for anyone to identify what a certain publishing house cannot do because it simply isn’t cut out for it. It is noticeable that in the United States the name and logo of the publisher have become an increasingly discreet and at times almost imperceptible presence on book covers, as if the publisher didn’t wish to seem too presumptuous. It will be argued that this is due to enormous structural changes that have taken place and are still going on in the book trade. An incontrovertible observation, to which it can be answered that such changes would not in themselves be incompatible with the continuation of that line of publishing as form, in the way I described earlier. In fact, one of the notions venerated today in whatever branch of industrial activity is that of the brand. But there can be no brand unless it is based on a clear, firm selectivity and idiosyncrasy of choice. Otherwise the power of the brand can never be elaborated and developed.

My fear is another: the drastic change in production conditions may have led many people to believe, wrongly, that a certain idea of publishing which was a characteristic of the twentieth century is now obsolete in the enlightened new millennium. A hasty and baseless judgment, even though it must be recognized that some time has elapsed since any publishing house inspired by those old and evergreen ideas has successfully emerged. Another distressing symptom is a certain failure to understand the quality and extent of a publisher’s job. The summer of 2011 saw the death of two great figures of publishing: Vladimir Dimitrijević, publisher of L’Âge d’Homme, and Daniel Keel, publisher of Diogenes Verlag. Testimony to their work can be found in catalogs with thousands of titles that could happily keep an avid young reader going for years. But very little of this appeared in the newspapers reporting their deaths. It was said, for example, that Daniel Keel was a “friend to his authors,” as if this characteristic were not an obvious requirement for any publisher—and inevitable, moreover, in the obituaries of certain editors who are well known for their devotion to their authors. But there’s quite a difference between a publisher and an editor. A publisher is the person who shapes the profile of the publishing house. And he is judged and remembered, above all, by the virtues and defects of that profile. An even more embarrassing instance: the Frankfurter Allgemeine observed that Daniel Keel had created a third possibility between “serious literature” and “literature for entertainment.” But for Keel the polestar of his literary taste was Anton Chekhov. Should we also include Chekhov in that no-man’s-land that is not quite “serious literature” and yet goes beyond “literature for entertainment” (and in the case of Diogenes Verlag, it would have had to include writers such as Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georges Simenon, and Carson McCullers)? The sad suspicion is that these judgments are an unwitting posthumous revenge for a successful slogan that Daniel Keel had one day invented: “Diogenes books are less boring.” The unexceptionable assumption of that phrase is that, in the long run, only quality trumps boredom. But, if the perception of quality in everything that defines an object—whether it’s a book or a publishing house—is ignored, since quality itself seems increasingly irrelevant, the road toward relentless monotony opens up, where the only thrill is provided by the electric shocks of high advances, large print runs, great publicity launches, and mega-sales—and just as often by large numbers of returned books, destined to fuel the flourishing pulping industry.

In the end, it seems clearer every day that, for information technology, the publisher is a hindrance, an intermediary who could happily be dispensed with. But the more serious suspicion is that publishers, at the moment, are collaborating with technology in such a way as to make themselves superfluous. If the publisher relinquishes his function as first reader and first interpreter of a work, it’s hard to see why that work should accept a place in the framework of a publishing house. It’s much better relying on an agent or distributor. The agent would then give a first judgment on the work, deciding whether or not to accept it. And the agent’s judgment can obviously be more acute than what had, at one time, been the judgment of the publisher. But the agent neither has nor creates a form. An agent has only a list of clients. Otherwise one can also imagine an even simpler and more radical solution in which there is just the author and the (gigantic) bookseller who has brought together the functions of publisher, agent, distributor, and perhaps even commissioner.

The question arises whether this would mean a triumph for the democratic process or produce a general stultification. For my part, I tend toward the latter view. When Kurt Wolff, a century ago, published young prose writers and poets such as Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Georg Trakl, and Gottfried Benn in his Der Jüngste Tag (“Judgment Day”) series, those writers immediately found their first few readers because there was already something attractive about the appearance of those books, which looked like slim black exercise books with labels and came with no program announcements or publicity launches. But they suggested something that could already be sensed in the name of the series: they suggested a judgment, which is the real acid test for any publisher. In the absence of that test, the publisher might just as well withdraw from the scene without it hardly being noticed, and without causing too much regret. But then he’d have to find another job, since his brand value would be next to nothing.