Five hundred years after its beginnings, the task of publishing has not yet managed to achieve a solid reputation. Part merchant, part circus impresario, the publisher has always been considered with a certain mistrust, like a clever huckster. And yet the past century may one day be considered the golden age of publishing. It would be futile to reconstruct French culture during the twentieth century without following the various events in the evolution of Éditions Gallimard; or if we examine a more restricted period, delving into the intellectual climate of the 1970s without referring to the hypnotic awe that emanated from Éditions du Seuil; in the same way that we would understand little about the German scene from the 1960s onward without considering the effects of the Frankfurt School, all of which was brought together in the publications of Suhrkamp; or we would know even less about Italian postwar culture if we ignored the highly educational role of Einaudi; or lastly, it would be strange to retrace the acrobatic transformation in Spain from the years of Franco to today without having at hand the chronological catalog of three publishers in Barcelona: Carlos Barral, Jorge Herralde, and Beatriz de Moura. In order to draw an outline of a culture, there is good reason to assess its publishing landscape well before its academic landscape, where the great scholars now live in a sort of enforced isolation, more or less content to do so according to the country, and the resources of individual universities.
But can we expect the golden age of the twentieth century to continue into the twenty-first century? Here the doubts are many and varied. The first of these relates to a certain way in which publishers now generally consider their work. In fact, the publishing trade shouldn’t just be guarding against Google, but against itself, against its increasingly fainthearted conviction about its own necessity. Above all in Anglo-Saxon countries, which are the spearhead of publishing, given the predominance of the English language. For anyone entering a London or New York bookshop, it’s increasingly difficult to recognize individual publishers on the New Books display. The name of the publisher is often discreetly reduced to one or two initials on the spine of the book. As for the book covers themselves, each are different—and in a certain sense too much the same. On each occasion they make a more or less successful attempt at packaging a text. And each has its own value, in obedience to the one shot principle. As for the authors, their books are brought together under the logo of one particular publishing house rather than another, primarily as a result of the negotiations between the author’s agent and that particular publisher as well as personal contact between the author and a particular editor. The publishing house meanwhile tends to become an unnecessary link in the chain. There are, of course, notable differences of quality among publishing houses, but all within a spectrum in which there is the highly commercial (of the vulgar kind) at one extreme and the highly literary (of the soporific kind) at the other. Various names are to be found in a series of categories in the middle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be closer to the “literary” end and St. Martin’s toward the “commercial” end, but without this implying any ulterior consideration, and above all without ruling out certain invasions of the pitch—the literary publisher may occasionally be tempted by the commercial title in the hope of replenishing his bank balance and the commercial publisher may always be tempted by a literary title, since aspiring to prestige is a weed that grows everywhere.
Most distressing about this distinction—which then corresponds to a certain mind-set—is the fact that it is false. It is clear that, in the spectrum I have just described, Simenon or his hypothetical modern reincarnation ought to be included in the highly commercial zone, and thus not eligible for any literary evaluation; and it is clear that many belonging to the pitiful category of “writers’ writers” ought to be assigned automatically to the literary extreme. This works against the interests of both pleasure and literature. The true publisher—since such strange beings still exist—never reasons in terms of “literary” or “commercial” but, if anything, in the old terms of “good” and “bad” (and it is well known that the “good” can often be neglected or remain unrecognized). Above all, the true publisher is one who has the arrogance to claim that, in principle, none of his books will fall from the hands of any reader through tedium or an unassailable feeling of extraneousness.
About a century ago, some of the most important publishing houses of the twentieth century—Insel, Gallimard, and Mercure de France—were born or were taking their first steps. They had two features in common: they had been founded by a group of friends who were more or less affluent and marked by certain literary ambitions; and, before becoming publishing houses, they had been literary journals: Die Insel, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and Mercure de France. Then the figures who were to become the publishers—Anton Kippenberg, Gaston Gallimard, and Alfred Vallette—found their way with books. A similar experience would be unthinkable today since conditions have changed. Among other things, the category of literary journal no longer exists, or at least it has lost the subtle and discreet relevance it used to have. The only periodical to have retained its preeminence, its authority, and its relevance is The New York Review of Books, which, however, is first of all a journal of reviews and therefore doesn’t match the form that perhaps reached its peak of perfection around the 1930s with the twenty-nine issues of Commerce, under the invisible and protective wing of Marguerite Caetani.
If we ask what bound those small groups of friends together in the early 1900s, the answer is found not in what they wanted (often fairly vague and confused) but in what they rejected. And it was a form of taste in the sense in which Nietzsche used the word, as “instinct of self-defense” (“Not to see, not to hear so many things, not to let them near—first clear indication, first proof that we are not chance, but a necessity”). This passage to book publishing must indeed have been a clever move if it proved so effective. Today, a hundred years later and two generations on from its founder, Gallimard is the leading publishing house in France and is still recognizable for a certain “Gallimard taste” which makes it possible to detect more or less whether a book may or may not be a Gallimard title. Though everything around has changed, the physiology of taste that bound those small groups of friends together would be an excellent antidote today in certain publishing houses caught up in periodic concerns about their fading image or lack of identity. But at that point it would also become apparent that taste is no longer, for the most part, wrapped in that fabric of sensibility, which has become a cloth rent with holes larger than the fabric itself.
But this should not be dispiriting. It would certainly be harder and less practicable to set up a publishing house based on the enthusiasm of a small club of friends. But at the same time publishing—if it only wanted to, if it only had the courage—now has opportunities that at one time didn’t exist. Over the last hundred years the area of what is publishable has vastly expanded, if we think only of the enormous quantity of anthropological, scientific, historical, and literary material that has accumulated over the twentieth century, just waiting to find a new form in publishing. Not just the Biblioteca series, but all Adelphi books from the very beginning, were based on this notion. It was an attempt to bring the most disparate texts and materials together in that broad, swirling current that carries with it all that a lively and agile mind can wish to read. Today, in fact, more than ever before, one of the prime objectives of publishing could be to shift the line determining what is publishable and include as feasible a lot of what currently lies outside that line. It would be an enormous challenge, not so different from the very beginning, when Manutius was working in Venice. This is perhaps the moment to recall what was the publisher’s founding charter. It was a loose sheet of paper, printed by Manutius himself, that has survived by chance, glued into the binding of a copy of a Greek dictionary in the Vatican Library. Printed around 1502, that sheet of paper contained the text of a pact between scholars who were preparing editions of classical Greek texts for Aldus’s publishing house. In the words of Anthony Grafton, “they agreed to speak only Greek in one another’s company, to pay fines when they slipped, and to use the money (once enough had accumulated) to hold a symposium: a lavish common meal that was required to be better than the food usually distributed to Aldus’s workers. Other ‘philhellenes’ would be admitted to the circle over time.” We do not know today whether the rules of that New Academy of Aldus Manutius were ever applied. But it will be recalled that Luther’s ninety-five theses and the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of August 26, 1789, were originally printed in the same way. Having said this, it is obvious that the tendency in the world and in publishing until now has been, and still is, to move in the opposite direction. And so the field of what is felt possible to do continues to shrink. “That would be very nice, but it’s not possible” is a phrase frequently heard throughout the publishing world.
But if we go back to the early 1900s and to those publishers who had developed on the basis of an affinity among a small group of friends, it can easily be seen how many times those same publishers, with commendable recklessness, must have said at that time: “That would be very nice, let’s try it.” Otherwise it would be difficult to explain how for years Insel had published certain French editions in perfectly neat print (for example, Stendhal’s De l’amour) in French for a German readership, or how in 1914, just as war was breaking out, the publisher Eugen Diederichs had dared to publish a monumental edition (first of all in terms of size) of the main Upaniṣads translated by Paul Deussen, a great Indologist and friend of Nietzsche. And those bold enterprises certainly reduced neither Insel nor Diederichs to ruin, since a century later they remain two important names in German publishing.
Projects of this kind would never succeed today. Because publishers wouldn’t have the imagination to create them? Or because—some would argue—those projects would be stopped immediately by sharp-eyed publishing managers? Certainly, a century ago, the publishers I’m talking about didn’t have managers but bookkeepers or accountants. And this probably made them more ready and inclined toward risk. But there’s something else. Over the course of the past hundred years, the very physiognomy of the publisher has changed, at least when we define him as someone who knows the books he publishes and decides the form they must have. If we accept this definition, there are very few people today who can be given the title of publisher. They could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. Editors, on the other hand, are many and increasing, if editors are those who discover, follow, develop, and launch a certain number of books within the catalog of a publishing house. All editors are associated with a list of authors and books as though they are theirs. This, however, doesn’t include the form itself—the catalog, the program of the publishing house for which they work. If a publishing house is not conceived as a form, as a self-sufficient composition held together by a high physiological compatibility between all of its constituent parts, it easily turns into a casual association, incapable of triggering that magical element—brand power—that even marketing experts consider essential for achieving some degree of success.
And here is the paradox faced by the publishing manager, who is a recent figure and now widespread throughout the book world: on the one hand he has been taught to extol the importance and the value of the brand, while on the other his approach can only weaken, and ultimately compromise, the special quality of the brand itself.
In his platonic form, the publishing manager feels he is the representative of a universal doctrine applicable to everything, without exception, and whose results are to be assessed, like every other branch of his doctrine, on the basis of figures that appear at the bottom of certain columns of figures. Those figures are the bottom line—and can be just as thrilling, depressing, mediocre, acceptable, in publishing as in button manufacturing or cosmetics, or with any other product or service for sale. Except that the publishing of books—those books that are not textbooks, that have no practical purpose, that appear in Italy under the unintentionally comic name of various—constitute one of the most frustrating and treacherous branches to which the manager’s doctrine can apply. This seems to excite the representatives of this category even further, rather than deter them, almost as if they were horse breakers who want to show they can tame even the most high-spirited mounts. We are continually told of managers who moved into publishing from major industry. But there appear to be no cases of managers brought up in publishing who have gone into major industry. In publishing the manager arrives on the scene to be engulfed by it and disappear, or otherwise to remain there to the very end, producing more or less commendable results. But no manager has so far been associated with any memorable event in publishing. Nor is there ever any alternation of roles, any movement between one and the other, as happens in the rapport between politics and the academic and financial worlds, so that the academic temporarily loaned to politics returns to academic life, or the financier returns to Wall Street with a more substantial remuneration. The case of a manager who has made a fortune in publishing simply doesn’t exist—or it must have been a modest fortune that hasn’t been recorded in the annals. Whereas there have been several cases of managers from major industry who, after a swift dive into publishing, have made a hasty return to their own familiar territory just before causing irreparable damage (or else, more frequently, immediately after). How do we explain this reluctance of publishing to comply with a universal and hitherto unscathed doctrine such as that of management—or at least to provide it with satisfactory results? Here at last we must examine the peculiarities of this sector.
The size of the book trade is, above all, fairly modest, so that good results, obtained through hard work, will not produce sensational profits. It’s much easier, however, to make large losses. Let’s assume, for example, that the top manager of a publishing group orders his editors to snatch a group of bestselling authors from their rivals, attracting them through a large increase in their respective advances. And let’s assume (as often happens) that all the new books by these authors are failures—or at least they produce revenues lower than the advances. At that point, all that remains is to pulp the hundreds of thousands of copies returned over the next few months, with a negative impact on next year’s results. Nothing else. The bestselling author whose book doesn’t reach the target at the first shot has almost no prospect of a second chance, as happens with certain books that can be gradually discovered or rediscovered or have unexpected luck in a discounted edition. As for books on current affairs, published in great haste because they deal with topics that everyone is talking about, they will soon be left behind by current affairs themselves, which soon require that everyone talks about something else. And what about publicity and commercial promotion? The costs of publicity and commercial promotion for an individual book become easily and manifestly disproportionate. A book is one of a hundred or two hundred or three hundred objects produced by the same firm and each is waiting (or, at least, their authors are each waiting) to get publicity, whereas a new perfume is a single object on which the whole promotional energy of a brand is concentrated. And the videos or photographs that go with a perfume are inevitably more captivating and memorable than press advertising for a novel. Kate Moss or Charlize Theron have never publicized a novel. For good reason. And a perfume can, in theory, be advertised in hundreds of airports throughout Asia, Europe, or the United States, whereas an Italian book is unlikely to be seen in more than a dozen medium-sized Italian airports. Among the great international successes of the last twenty years, there is no book whose success can be said to have been forced by publicity, whereas for many other kinds of products it can be said that the nature of the object was less important in its success than the publicity campaign that had launched it.
A new scenario seems, in all probability, to be appearing behind all this: a new publishing landscape populated by many editors, by even more publishing managers and marketing experts, but fewer and fewer publishers. I fear that many people wouldn’t even be aware of such a radical change. Certain things disappear almost unnoticed. And sometimes they are things of fundamental importance. The question “Who has published this book?” could become less frequent because the answer would be irrelevant. Everything would move imperceptibly in the direction of the anonymous reader who once told me she never took any notice of who a book’s publisher and author were. And what would happen in the end? There would still be good and bad books. But those good books would appear as sporadic, isolated events, with no congenial context into which to fit them. Otherwise, not much would change in the bookstalls. Apart from this: one figure would have vanished—namely, the publishing house, the concept of the publishing house and its form—whose vital role would be recognized by some people too late. The only comfort would then be in the thought that what seems most likely doesn’t always happen. In other words, virtue isn’t always punished.
I have spoken so far about two dangers faced by publishing today: first, publishers self-censoring their own ideas, and second, the ill-considered initiatives of managers who know too little about the objects they are dealing with (the books themselves). But there’s a further danger, which is there for everyone to see: the campaign against copyright.
In this campaign, now in full swing, there are hidden motives that go well beyond the sphere of authors’ rights. The secret motivation behind this movement is a disdain for what Italian law describes as “creative work.” The refusal to remunerate it, in a civilization that makes it illegal not to pay cleaning staff, implies that creative work is not to be regarded as actual work. But, if it isn’t this, then how should it be considered? As publicity by the author for himself, where payment for the publicity is made in kind—and this would be the labor itself carried out by the author in giving form to his work. If we accept this point of view, the author wouldn’t live on the profits derived from the sale of his work, but on the fact that his work has produced invitations to public events, commissions, consultancies, summer schools, which will have to be adequately remunerated. And this would reestablish a tolerable balance.
For such an idea to filter into public opinion and eventually establish itself, as in fact it has, every type of work has to be regarded as communication: a formless concept, with neither beginning nor end, involving people who count much the same as subjects in a statistical sample. This shameful and depressing situation corresponds with the forced esotericism that is an ever more apparent characteristic of the unnameable present. In the same way that in the sattras—the boldest, ultimate, and interminable Vedic rites—the distinction between the sacrificer and the officiants disappeared, and with it the obligation to pay ritual fees (dakṣiṇā, without which the rite itself could not be regarded as effective), so too in the Internet world there is a tendency to reduce the distinction between work and communication, between author and generic keyboard user. Consequently there will also be no obligation to remunerate the work of the author, since everyone is an author. Some of the most vociferous opinion makers of today regard this state of affairs as a victory for democracy, a global democracy that will be a prelude to other victories to be achieved not just on the Web. And this is a more subtle and up-to-date form of the bêtise that scourged the world in the times of Baudelaire and Flaubert. But equipped obviously with much greater means—as well as a ubiquitous potential.
Having said this, I wouldn’t wish to give the impression that publishing today, in the sense I have attempted to describe—namely publishing where the publisher is happy only if he succeeds in publishing good books—is a lost cause. It is, instead, simply a very tough cause. But no tougher than it was in 1499, when Aldus Manutius of Venice published a novel by an unknown author, written in a composite language consisting of Italian, Latin, and Greek. Its format was also unusual, as were the many woodcuts that studded the text. And yet it is the most beautiful book printed up to now: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Someone could still attempt sometime to equal it.