On the final evening of the conference, August 5th, the conversation continues in Sanders Theater from the afternoon session discussion. On this recording, Hilda Livingston gives her talk “Paperback Books and the Writer” and William Sloane delivers the first part of his talk “The Editor and The Author.” The next recording, Part Two, includes the evening’s panel discussion and the conference’s conclusion.
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| 0:02 | Tonight we are, as far as the audience is concerned, few and very select, and we might have a very good discussion this evening of the problem of the novel as the publisher and publishing and economics make a difference to it. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:24 | This evening, we will have two talks by publishers followed by a discussion by the members of the panel, which I think will be a very free one since by two afternoon sessions and two evening sessions, the members of the panel have come to know each other's opinions, powers, and prejudices very well. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:51 | In general, despite the length of that discussion, since we have no commentator this evening, I think we'll perhaps have a considerably earlier evening than last evening. | Carvel Collins |
| 1:04 | Our first speaker tonight, whose title is Paperback Books and the Writer, is the assistant to the president of New American Library, which is responsible for a large portion of the books of all types and qualities which you see in markets ranging from the bookstores and drugstore to the Stop and Shop. Ms. Hilda Livingston. | Carvel Collins |
| 27:37 | Thank you, Ms. Livingston. Our next speaker has, as his subject, The Editor and The Author. He is the Editorial Vice President of Funk and Wagnalls, Mr. William Sloane. | Carvel Collins |
| 29:05 | Bill, this is a very bad hall. It's a fine hall except acoustically, and I think you'll speak a little louder. We've had trouble with this. | Carvel Collins |
| 29:14 | You don't need to overdo it. | Carvel Collins |
| 54:23 | I think now we can have a-- | Carvel Collins |
| 1:43 | Thank you, Mr. Collins. I'm going to sound a rather low commercial note in the discussion tonight because I'm going to talk about money, and I'm going to talk about readers. And I'm going to talk about who reads books and why they read them. And now that I've defined my terms, I will start. | Hilda Livingston |
| 2:02 | What I want to talk about is a kind of revolution in merchandising that has induced a cultural revolution in reading in this country. And if you think this sounds pretentious, I hope I can convince you by the time I'm finished that it is, in effect, something that we're all experiencing and something of the utmost importance to everyone who wants to write or to everyone who reads. | Hilda Livingston |
| 2:24 | The mass audience for books, for paper bound books, is an enormous one. But the mass audience itself is no new phenomenon in this country. Paper bound books have existed as early as 1800 in one form or another. Dime novels were paper bound books of their own that had tremendous vogue. | Hilda Livingston |
| 2:44 | National magazines in the late 19th century and early 20th century brought the works of a great many very, very talented writers to a very wide audience, and newspaper syndication and book clubs have also brought books to a very wide audience. But the new and important aspects of paper bound distribution is that it has immensely multiplied the size of this audience and enormously varied the kinds of books available. | Hilda Livingston |
| 3:15 | Paper bound book publishing as a kind of marriage of book publishing and magazine distribution, and I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how it works so that we can follow one another. Paper bound books are distributed like magazines. They are sold at 100,000 retail outlets throughout the country. | Hilda Livingston |
| 3:32 | And as Mr. Collins said, this includes newsstands, drugstores, railroad terminals, supermarkets, and we even have a couple of funeral parlors on our list. Everywhere you find magazines and practically everywhere you find people, you'll find paper bound books. In 1952, 250 million copies of paper bound books were sold, and this represented about 1,000 titles-- 1,000 new titles. | Hilda Livingston |
| 4:02 | Because of our discussion this morning, which painted a rather bleak view for new writers, particularly writers who were unfortunate enough to be aspiring novelists, I thought I would tell you that from where we sit in the paper bound book industry the news is very cheering indeed because as an industry, we published and sold last year almost 200 million copies of new novels. | Hilda Livingston |
| 4:27 | And by new, I may be stretching a point. They were reprints, but they were contemporary novels that had been published within the past two or three years so that certainly a vast new audience has been built up for fiction in book form, and it's an audience of the most varied and catholic taste. | Hilda Livingston |
| 4:46 | To describe the kinds of books that are available in paper bound editions would be a directory of the leading writers of the 20th century, as well as a great many of the older writers of our time. Fiction ranges from Louis Bromfield to Tennessee Williams. European writers include George Simenon, Moravia, Flaubert. | Hilda Livingston |
| 5:11 | The nonfiction title in the paper bond industry is steadily increasing in importance. Nonfiction and paper bound books includes history, science, anthropology, philosophy, Shakespeare, the classics, et cetera. I don't want to sound too commercial, but the New American Library, which publishes mentor books which are entirely nonfiction of a rather high order, has sold 10 million copies of nonfiction in the past six years. | Hilda Livingston |
| 5:41 | These were 35 cent books that people walked up to newsstands to buy, and the two most popular titles in this series are Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict, which has sold a half a million copies, and the W.H.D. Rouse translation of Homer's Odyssey. | Hilda Livingston |
| 5:56 | But what does this all mean? These figures are impressive and substantial, but what does it mean to the writer particularly and to the reader? The thing that it means to me most precisely is a refutation that I long to make this afternoon when I listened to Mr. Little who talked about the aristocracy of art. | Hilda Livingston |
| 6:19 | I'm perfectly willing to admit the aristocracy of art in the minds of the creators because talent is confined to a very elect few, but our whole publishing experience has proved quite conclusively that there is no limitation on the aristocracy who responds to good books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 6:38 | We have had the most-- and all reprint published shows have had the most-- extraordinary success with truly good books at low prices. William Faulkner has sold over 6 million copies in 25 cent editions in the past five years. And this can be reflected in a whole stream of other authors of absolutely first rate-- James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and George Simenon, and a great many others. | Hilda Livingston |
| 7:06 | The fact is that although you hear a good deal about the so-called mass audience and the so-called class audience, I don't believe there is any such animal. The mass audience in this country, the audience that's serviced by paper bound books, are people who have the same curiosities, the same aspirations, and the same interests in their world as the people who can afford to spend $3 for books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 7:29 | But there are two things that separate them. First, they only have a quarter to spend instead of $3. And secondly, they live in places where there are no bookstores and where most of the books available are available only through paper bound editions. | Hilda Livingston |
| 7:43 | This brings me, again, to the housekeeping of book publishing, but it's something you have to understand to realize the significance of this revolution in reading. There are something like 2,000 honest to God bookstores in this whole country, and there are many, many substantial cities where you could hunt very, very hard and couldn't find a bookstore. | Hilda Livingston |
| 8:03 | I had an experience like this in Youngstown, Ohio, about two years ago. I was kept waiting for two hours by a gentleman. This never happens, but it did that night. And so I decided I would case the bookstore situation. And there were two department stores in Youngstown that sold books. There is no bookstore. | Hilda Livingston |
| 8:21 | And I went to the department store whose slogan was, "The Greatest department Store in Youngstown," because I thought I'd start at the top. And I asked for the book department, and it was in the third floor. So I went to the third floor, and I couldn't find it. | Hilda Livingston |
| 8:33 | And they said, oh, it's in the gift shop. So I went to the gift shop, and they had six tables of books. Five of them were children's books. They had the best assortment of the Honey Bunch series that I've ever seen under one roof, and they had a wonderful collection of paper books, linen books, that infants can eat without serious after effects. | Hilda Livingston |
| 8:53 | They had one table of illustrated books that could be easily given to anyone who couldn't read. They were art books, cookbooks, and the sort of book you might give a hostess whose tastes you weren't very sure of. So I said to the clerk, well, where's the current fiction and nonfiction? She said, oh, we don't get much call for that sort of thing. | Hilda Livingston |
| 9:12 | So I said, well, what happens if someone in Youngstown wants to read a new novel? She said, well, they go to Cleveland. It's only 20 miles away. | Hilda Livingston |
| 9:20 | Well, this is a very sad story if you're a writer, incidentally, and the only happy note in the whole thing is that the independent magazine wholesaler in Youngstown who distributes about 70% of the paper bond books available sold 700,000 paper bound books that year. So the people in Youngstown are reading books. They're just reading them at a quarter and not at $3, but they never read them at $3. | Hilda Livingston |
| 9:46 | Mr. Sloane was absolutely right this morning when he said that the market for fiction has increased enormously in the past 25 years. It may have increased in different ways. The big emphasis may be now in paper bound books, but it's a very, very broadening category of people who are reading books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 10:07 | Well, what does this vast mass audience have to offer a writer-- a writer of fiction, especially? First, an audience. It's my hunch that most writers write to be read. And in the mass audience, he finds this happy condition most immediately. | Hilda Livingston |
| 10:24 | As you know, the average first printing of a novel, especially a new novel by an unknown author, may be as low as 5,000 copies. Well, the average first printing of a paper bound novel is at least 200,000 copies and sometimes goes as high as 500,000, so the immediate distribution of a book is far more penetrating in a paper bound edition than it is in a trade edition. | Hilda Livingston |
| 10:50 | Secondly, it offers him an audience with a highly spontaneous response to what the writer has to say. It's an audience that's completely or almost completely uncluttered by literary cliches, conversational fads, bestseller lists, or what looks good on a coffee table. | Hilda Livingston |
| 11:09 | Paper bound books really don't lend much social prestige to the people who has them in his hand. If you get a paper bound book the chances are you read it because there's really very little other aclad to be achieved by parting with a quarter. | Hilda Livingston |
| 11:24 | And the third thing that it offers the writer is a burgeoning audience for the writer's future books. Many people have been seduced into reading books as a result of paper bound editions. | Hilda Livingston |
| 11:36 | There are not only a great lack of bookstores in this country, but the whole convention of selling books-- and I do hope there are no booksellers in the audience, because if there are, this doesn't apply to Cambridge-- is one that is hedged around with restrictions. | Hilda Livingston |
| 11:51 | Many bookstores resembles cathedrals of higher education. And for a person of little literary sophistication to enter such a place is frequently a rather trying experience. Well, this doesn't happen on a newsstand. You go to a newsstand for a pack of cigarettes, and you buy it. And something attracts you on the book rack, and maybe you pick it up. | Hilda Livingston |
| 12:12 | You go down to get your favorite magazine, and it's all sold out. And you want very much to read something because it's raining, so you pick up a book instead. And once you have read a book and find out that it doesn't bite back, the chances are you're much more fair game for future books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 12:28 | I promised not to tell this story because it wasn't very intellectual, but I think I'll tell it anyway because it demonstrates this point. We got a letter from a man in Tennessee, which has been used extensively and will sound like a handout. But it really happened and I read it. And I have a copy at home. | Hilda Livingston |
| 12:44 | It said, "Just read the Odyssey. Boy, that guy Homer sure can write. Do you have any other books by him?" So I sat down and wrote him a long note about the Iliad. But this is a very, very interesting example of people who stumble on to reading in paper bound editions and are captivated and go on reading other books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 13:03 | I have another example that's more significant, and that is Patterns of Culture had been out of print in the Houghton Mifflin edition for several years when we released it as a mentor edition. And a year after it had been available at $0.35, Houghton Mifflin went back to press with the second printing. | Hilda Livingston |
| 13:20 | And they took a large ad in the Publishers Weekly to say that the only thing new added to this book's history in this year had been the paper bound edition, which apparently had attracted enough people to the book so that they were willing, after sort of sampling it at $0.35, to go out and buy it at $3. | Hilda Livingston |
| 13:36 | Because I'd be deceiving you if I told you that the paper bound edition is as durable as a 35 cent edition or as easy to read or as attractive in many cases. So the paper bound edition has had in a large variety of instances a very salubrious effect on the same title at a higher price and more immediately on the author's future sales on future books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 14:00 | Well, who reads paper bound books? I think I know, but I wanted to make sure, so I did a little research today. I went to Jordan Marsh to see Mr. Brame who's a very knowledgeable bookseller. And I said, who reads paper bound books? Can you pick a paper bound book customer when they come to the Jordan Marsh book department? | Hilda Livingston |
| 14:18 | He said, well, maybe you could have eight years ago, but you can't today. So either books are getting better or people are getting worse. But anyway, everybody is reading paper bound books today. College students read them in great numbers. About 180 of our 450 titles a year is required reading in schools and colleges. | Hilda Livingston |
| 14:36 | They're enormously used by the Army, the Navy, the State Department, housewives, college professors, businessmen-- there's as diverse an audience for paper bound books as there is for trade books. And what's the special appeal of the paper bound book to the so-called new reader of books? | Hilda Livingston |
| 14:57 | First, I think the availability is probably the most important aspect. You can get a paper bound book as easily as you can a pack of cigarettes or a magazine. Secondly, it's a low price, which puts it in the reach of many people who have never been able to afford to buy all the books they wanted to. | Hilda Livingston |
| 15:16 | And then, as I mentioned before, the extremely high attraction of the self-service operation, which makes it very easy for a person to look at a book get some idea of what's in it, and if he doesn't like it, reject it with the least loss of face. I heard something very interesting in this connection from a librarian in Washington just yesterday before I came down. | Hilda Livingston |
| 15:37 | Libraries are using increasingly more paper bound books because it gives them a good deal more money to spend for reference books and nonfiction. But I meant they're using a great many more paper bound editions in fiction, particularly light fiction entertainment and that sort of thing. | Hilda Livingston |
| 15:55 | Well, this librarian told me they have two copies of Daisy Miller in their circulating shelves, and that just for the fun of it, she thought she'd check the circulations on the two editions. They have a trade edition, and they have a paper bound edition. | Hilda Livingston |
| 16:08 | In the past year, the trade edition, which is the cloth bound big book, went out twice. It was borrowed twice, and the paper bound edition was borrowed 19 times, so that, in a sense, the appeal and the kind cozy familiarity of a paper bound edition is almost as potent in a library as it is on a newsstand. | Hilda Livingston |
| 16:29 | I would be doing you all an injustice if I pretended that the format which has helped spur the sales of paper bound books has not also been a hindrance. Paper bound books, because they sell themselves, have to contain their own selling story. | Hilda Livingston |
| 16:50 | As you all know, paper bound books have pictures on their covers, and they usually have descriptions of what's in the book on the front cover and on the back cover. And we all know of the ghastly abuses of the artwork and copy which has appeared on paper bound books. | Hilda Livingston |
| 17:08 | I think this has been brought out by sales figures, that not only are publishers taking a much more stringent attitude for these lapses in good taste, but in the long run, the reader who reads solely for the promise of sensation on a cover and fails to find it within the book doesn't respond quite so visibly to this misleading bait in the future. | Hilda Livingston |
| 17:30 | As I said, one of the big excitements of the paper bound field is that it has proved in publishing something that has not yet been demonstrated as widely in other mass media, such as movies, radio, and television, and that is there is no such thing as a six-year-old audience. | Hilda Livingston |
| 17:50 | The most extraordinarily profound books sell well, and the most trivial books sell well. But there is no kind of formula for success in fiction in paper editions. And if you think so, you are misguiding yourselves. | Hilda Livingston |
| 18:10 | The amount and variety of offerings in the paper bound book field is infinite. It ranges from Mickey Spillane to William Faulkner. And Spillane sells well, and so does Faulkner. And sometimes, the same people read them both. And one is art and one is not. But this is not-- | Hilda Livingston |
| 18:35 | I haven't used a big word, and I've been here two days, so I thought I'd get art in, too. But this doesn't matter. The fact is they're both available, and people respond to both of them in vast quantities. And in the long run, the substantial endures, and the freakish expires. It makes a lot of noise, but when it ends, it's very dead. | Hilda Livingston |
| 18:57 | This brings us to the problem of a reprint editor and his function and how he does it. Reprint editors select about 1,000 titles annually from the 10,000 that are published. They read titles and manuscripts. They read titles in galleys. They read advance copies. They read out of print copies. They frequently read books in foreign languages, which have to be translated. | Hilda Livingston |
| 19:18 | And then based on their own publishing policies, they select the books that we will publish. The average reprint publishes between 80 and 100 books a year, so it's a very, very selective process to winnow down from the 10,000 books available the 80 or 100 you choose to distribute to this mass audience. | Hilda Livingston |
| 19:38 | And what does the reprint editor look for? Again, I repeat there's no formula. There's no way of picking a book that will do well. | Hilda Livingston |
| 19:45 | And I suspect it's very close to what Mr. Sloane may tell you about the trade editors' problem in what to publish because the big search in the reprint editor's mind when he reads all of these books is for the book that communicates to a reader-- not so much in terms of style, not in terms of format, not in terms of allegory or novel, but a book that has something pertinent to say that a reader will understand. | Hilda Livingston |
| 20:17 | And it has been this true communication that has established the most substantial successes in the paper bound field. And that's why I think that it's so important for new writers or writers of novels to realize that art is good, but other things will also suffice a conviction, the genuineness of experience which Mr. Ellison has mentioned so eloquently. | Hilda Livingston |
| 20:44 | And something to say that people reciprocate and respond to is what, in our experience, determines success in a very wide audience. There has been a good deal of experimentation in paper bound editions. I'm sure you've all seen New World Writing, Discovery, New Voices, The Partisan Review Reader, and there are probably many more. | Hilda Livingston |
| 21:04 | These are books which tend to do what the little magazine does, but on a much larger scale. They offer literary hospitality to the new writer of talent, the novelist, the short story, writer, and the poet. And they use the vehicle of mass distribution to bring these people to a very wide audience because one of the enchanting things about this audience is that it doesn't matter whether the writer is well known or unknown or whether the book is new or old. | Hilda Livingston |
| 21:32 | If they haven't read it before, it's new, and they're much more concerned about the author has to say than what is said about him. You'll hear a lot-- and if you are a writer, you may have even said a lot-- about the influence of the success of reprint fiction, on the kind of fiction that is published in trade editions. | Hilda Livingston |
| 21:50 | Mr. Sloane could tell you much more about this than I can because he's a trade editor. But we have found this to be a much more minor note than is generally suspected. Certainly, there are prefabricated novels. The pulp writer has always existed in one form or another. Many of these formula novels may have a temporary one shot success. | Hilda Livingston |
| 22:15 | But as I said before and the big thing that I would like to leave with you is that the enduring success is the Faulkner. It's the Caldwell. It's the Farrell. It's the Simenon and the Ellison and the writers of genuine conviction who write from experience who succeed in the long haul. | Hilda Livingston |
| 22:41 | In the long run, magazine distribution, colorful covers, exciting blurbs, and low prices are all devices that bring many books to many readers. But what makes these books stay with the readers and what makes them win millions of other readers is what's in the book itself. | Hilda Livingston |
| 23:03 | There's a phrase in publishing I can't stand because publishers always use it to describe something they can't analyze. It's called word of mouth. When a very peculiar book suddenly runs away and sells a million copies, they say, well, word of mouth did it. And when a very good book that gets a good deal of advertising promotion lays a big egg, they say, well, we didn't get the word of mouth started. | Hilda Livingston |
| 23:24 | Well, I'm afraid I have to use it again in paper bound books because it's true-- it exists-- that all of the techniques that I've described rather briefly this evening that tend to package a book and bring it to the attention of the potential reader are just techniques. What makes the book a success and a real success is what's in the book itself. | Hilda Livingston |
| 23:49 | And what's in the book itself can be an infinite variety of messages and experiences that can range from voice operas to tall stories. It can range from anthropology and philosophy to Alberto Moravia. | Hilda Livingston |
| 24:06 | But it is essentially what is in the book that has developed-- wins friends for the book and that wins the friends for the author. And this, I think, is the important thing to remember about writers and paper bound books because it's perfectly true. | Hilda Livingston |
| 24:26 | You can't sort of fool people, and the vast audiences that have been won for paper bound books in the past 13 years-- and this is a rather adolescent industry with lots of goosebumps still on it-- have been won because of the genuine merit of the majority of titles offered in this field. | Hilda Livingston |
| 24:48 | When paper bound books first appeared on the American scene in 1939, they were a lot different than they are today. The early lists, if you look back on them, were largely mysteries and Westerns and popular bestsellers. There was very little experimentation done with new writers. There were almost none of the foreign writers, and there was entirely no nonfiction, except for the imported Penguin editions. | Hilda Livingston |
| 25:13 | The character of the industry has changed enormously in the past 13 years because as of last year, 20% of the titles offered in paper bound editions were nonfiction-- serious nonfiction-- and they are substantial categories of plays, poems, short stories, humor, et cetera. | Hilda Livingston |
| 25:33 | I'm sorry to belabor Mr. Liddell because I think he's so charming, but I do want to say that the aristocracy in art in the mass audience rests in the communion between the writer and the reader, and this is a communion in which we have the utmost faith for the future. | Hilda Livingston |
| 25:54 | Now I finished my talk, and I want to tell you a newsflash that I should have started off with. We, as a company and as an industry and writers as a whole, won a great victory today. Six months ago, the chief of police in Youngstown, Ohio, banned 335 books from the newsstands because he said they were obscene. | Hilda Livingston |
| 26:14 | I don't have the complete list with me, but they were a very representative selection of the best contemporary writing-- Faulkner, Steinbeck, Farrell, Moravia, Dos Passos, Simenon, and many, many others. | Hilda Livingston |
| 26:34 | And just a few minutes ago before I got here, my office called me. The New American Library brought suit against the police chief. There were 11 of our titles on this list. We objected to a police officer taking this power of censorship into his own hands. | Hilda Livingston |
| 26:54 | Our position was that the courts are the place to try the obscenity of books, and we don't think that police chiefs or ladies clubs or other well-intended people should take this rather important function to their own bosoms, so we brought suit. And it's been going on for six months. | Hilda Livingston |
| 27:09 | And it was a great hazard because, as many people pointed out, we could lose. But I'm delighted to say that we won. And I think this is a great blow for freedom. Thank you. | Hilda Livingston |
| 0:00 - 0:51 | August 5 Panel Dicussion Introduction | Program |
| 1:04 - 27:19 | "Paperback Books and the Writer", Hilda Livingston | Program |
| 27:36 - 54:23 | "The Editor and The Author" | Program |
| 28:00 | I'm not going to read all of this formal documentation, just a piece of it. I got to this assembly only a little over 24 hours ago, and I must say that they have been a fruitful 24 hours for me. | William Sloane |
| 28:17 | I think I've been compelled to re-examine, in one fashion or another, almost all of the operating precepts by which I think I live and work and also a picture of myself, which every man forms as he goes through this world. | William Sloane |
| 28:38 | What follows is a somewhat modified version of what I was going to say when I came up here. I believe myself to be a publishing editor as well as a publisher-- more important to be an editor perhaps in certain ways than to be a publisher. | William Sloane |
| 28:57 | But I have heard a view of the patterns of modern writing expressed-- | William Sloane |
| 29:13 | All right. Can you hear this? | William Sloane |
| 29:18 | OK. I've heard a lot of opinions expressed about the structure and nature of the modern novel in the last 24 hours, and this is merely a report from somebody who has been a midwife to a few of them, sometimes under rather grueling circumstances, including snowstorms and bankruptcy. | William Sloane |
| 29:47 | Modern novels have to be published. Otherwise, they don't get read. Somebody has to publish them. The publisher, at least in publishing a novel, does not intend it as an act of introspection on the part of the author. | William Sloane |
| 30:04 | He is not concerned, basically, with how the author feels when he reads his own printed pages silently over to himself after the printer has delivered the finished copy. He is indeed interested in how everybody else feels, including the critics, but most of all, the people with a certain sum of money in their pockets who intend to part with the money in exchange for the novel. | William Sloane |
| 30:36 | Now, it's no secret that very large numbers of people in this country write. I mean, surely there must be quite a few people in this audience who are even now writing something. I am, and I'm sure that many of you must be. | William Sloane |
| 30:51 | And a process is required by which to select from all that is written that which is to be said. In terms of a word which I've heard often here in the last 24 hours, in terms of society, somebody has to make this decision. | William Sloane |
| 31:08 | Basically, the editor of the initial publishing house makes this decision, and it's a little bit about him and how he makes this decision and why he makes this decision that I want to talk tonight. It is, to give you, really, the theme of this, at the editor's desk that the future reader and the writer first meet each other. | William Sloane |
| 31:40 | Unfortunately for the best principles of business management, nobody in the book industry has been able to invent a way of rearranging and reorganizing it so that the editor is not the central factor in the process of publishing. There is every inducement to reorganize our industry so that editors would not be the central fact in it. I will come to the reasons why this is economically desirable later. | William Sloane |
| 32:13 | The editor is generally considered by writers to be everything from adult to the authentic mouthpiece of God. And his words are either treasured or excoriated, and every shade of opinion in between. A man doesn't have to be an editor very long to be nervously aware of the fact that he is going to play as many roles in the course of his life as there are writers who submit material to him. | William Sloane |
| 32:46 | However, back in the 19th century, which to a certain extent-- at least I think Mr. O'Connor correctly perceives to have been one of the golden ages of fiction publishing as well as fiction writing, the situation is rather different from the way it is now. Publishing was a much smaller operation. | William Sloane |
| 33:07 | And in general, the central editor of a publishing house was also its owner, or at least he controlled it. He could set the tone of voice. He could set the quality, caliber, and character of the operation in which he was interested. He was, in a sense, a very cultivated and civilized member of society to begin with, but he was also very powerful. | William Sloane |
| 33:35 | The book itself in those days enjoyed a relatively more central status than it does now-- again, using a word I've heard here over and over again-- than it does now in our society, the analysis of which I believe could perhaps better be left to sociologists. | William Sloane |
| 33:54 | In any event, the book editor enjoyed an enormous prestige, and he was almost always the president of the company. People like Mr. Henry Holt-- later, contemporary perhaps, George H. Doran many, many, many others. These men were their houses. What they thought about writing, publishing was what the house thought about it, and authors were not compelled to go there or not to go there but at least their houses were themselves. | William Sloane |
| 34:27 | Nowadays, in all but very small houses the editor, even the central editor, is essentially an employee. And thus, you have a situation in which the decisions about what is to be said and not said in our time is divided between a man who advises another man that this or that ought to be said, and the other man who says, I will or won't find the money to do this depending on how persuasive you are about the necessity for this matter. Now, this is a complex matter but except as I say for small houses almost all large publishers are headed by businessmen, and almost all important editors are employees. | William Sloane |
| 35:22 | During the period in which this transition was taking place, a certain group of very distinguished editors lived and worked in the United States, and I intend to quote from one of them both favorably and adversely in a minute, who occupied in a sense a very dominant position. They could really force their houses to follow their publishing bent even if they didn't own them, and even if they weren't on the board of directors or a corporate officer. | William Sloane |
| 35:58 | However, this situation is increasingly less common in American publishing today. To this reason, I still feel and believe deeply that it is important that as many small publishers as possible should survive the fortunes of our time because in them reposes a certain freedom and integrity of action which is impossible in a large corporate structure. | William Sloane |
| 36:27 | Now, I thought before I came up here how to explain what it is that distinguishes an editor from, let us say, the head of the bookkeeping department of a publishing house or the head of the sales department perhaps even. And finally, I hit upon a word. If I don't make this plain, I hope you'll all ask questions later. This word is interest. The one distinguishing common characteristic of every effective editor that I have ever known or of which there is any written record is his capacity to be interested. | William Sloane |
| 37:09 | Now, almost 10 years ago I was associated in another publishing house with a friend of mine, a woman named Helen Taylor. And the two of us became quite enamored of what you might call the folklore of our craft, and we wrote a series of advertisements about what we thought publishing was all about. And Miss Taylor wrote an advertisement for the Saturday Review of Literature on what an editor is. And in a decade with one exception, which I will also present to you, I haven't heard anything any better than this. | William Sloane |
| 37:56 | "We have been reflecting on the work of some important people on our staff. One of them just went by the door with a bulging briefcase, probably going home to get two days' work done in one night. We'll tell you the whole truth if we can about what an editor in a publishing house is and what he does. | William Sloane |
| 38:16 | An editor is a man with a finger to the wind. He reads all important periodicals and newspapers, and when he thinks a book on a certain subject is needed, he tries to find the best person to write it. This might entail anything from a telephone call to a series of investigations resembling the work of the FBI. An editor is a man who likes to read and a good thing too. He must be on speaking terms with all notable and all best-selling books currently published. He can read only a few hundred of these books a year. Therefore, he scans all book review sections carefully. | William Sloane |
| 38:55 | An editor is a man of hope he reads from 10 to 50 manuscripts in a week. Less than 1% of them is ever published by his house. He is also courageous and tactful, for he must reject the rest of those manuscripts often face-to-face with the author, and try to give the honest reasons. | William Sloane |
| 39:14 | An editor is a man with a gregarious mind and a tender regard for human nature. He works sympathetically with any number of his firm's authors. No two alike, writers being more individualistic than most people. | William Sloane |
| 39:28 | An editor is a friend to all literary talent and thereby leads a hunted life, for his friend's friends, and all their merest acquaintances besiege him with mistaken ideas of their own creative powers. But that doesn't stop him, let him get his hands on a manuscript with promise or a great manuscript--" see this is the day before I got the word great out of everything-- "and he is a humble and happy man. He will wrack his brain to help a writer out of a dilemma with a character or a situation. He will style it for the printer with great care or he will throw all style to the winds if the situation demands it. | William Sloane |
| 40:08 | An editor is a plastic surgeon to books by unprofessional writers. Book writing these days, unlike a century ago, isn't limited to people trained in literary matters. Let someone devise a new way of erecting chicken houses or let him live six months in a Persian village and the result is a book, full of facts, true but not always too well written. | William Sloane |
| 40:30 | That's where the editor comes in. It is he who cuts thousands of words of dead wood, organizes, tightens, reshapes sentences, puts in grammar and punctuation, and still retains the author's style. It's still the author's book too, though the author often doubts it while the process is going on. | William Sloane |
| 40:49 | An editor is a businessman, he arranges contracts with authors and authors' agents. He has a sharp eye for second serial and reprint possibilities for his firm's books. He wrestles with Hollywood for a good price. He has to predict sales of books too. And when he is off by the thousands as he often is, people accuse him of being a visionary or a liar and not a good businessman. | William Sloane |
| 41:11 | An editor is a gambling man, he will recommend that his firm publish the first, the second, and even the third book by an author, knowing full well that they will lose money. The editor is putting his chips on the books his author will write a decade or more hence, and you couldn't get any side bets in Wall Street on a proposition like that. The editor must also steel himself for the author's disappointment, whatever form of reviling or despair it may take, he must comfort and encourage him." | William Sloane |
| 41:43 | And she goes on to say that "the editor is also a denizen of the reference room, he has got to be a legal man, he has got to be a man of detail." | William Sloane |
| 41:53 | ? Andrew Tisement ? wound up with these words, "Editors have their compensations, when our friend, the manufacturing man, comes upstairs with the first copy of a book that is just off the press, he always goes to the editor whose baby it is and says, how do you like it? The editor reaches for it with a glint in his eye and says, let's see it. And they stand there both of them admiring it like a couple of fools." | William Sloane |
| 42:31 | Yeah. There is another statement about the business of the editor in the world of books, and this is written by a man whom I admire very much, John Hall Wheelock, who is the senior editor at Scribner's, and who contributed the preface to a book which I imagine some of you have read, which is The Collected Letters of Max Perkins. And I intend to do a slightly unfair thing in order to make a point, I want to quote a little bit from Mr. Wheelock, a little bit for Mr. Perkins, the former with approbation, the latter in spite of the fact that he was a friendly acquaintance of mine, with the opposite. | William Sloane |
| 43:14 | Mr. Wheelock says, "The job of editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating, and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world. Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time, they need perpetual reassurance. When a writer has written his masterpiece he will often be certain that the whole thing is worthless." Incidentally, this happens less and less frequently as time passes. | William Sloane |
| 43:43 | "The perpetrator of the dimmest literary effort, on the other hand, is apt to be invincibly cocksure and combative about it. No book gets enough advertising, the old superstition regarding its magic power still persists, or it is the wrong kind. | William Sloane |
| 43:59 | And obviously, almost every writer needs money and needs it before not after delivery of the goods. There is the writer whose manuscript proves that Shakespeare's plays are merely an elaborate system of political code. Another has written a book to demonstrate that the Earth is round but that we are living on the inside of it. Still, another has completed the novel in five volumes entitled God. Probably if not vocally expressed, the most consistent ejaculation in the editor's mind that I know of." | William Sloane |
| 44:38 | He then goes on to comment on Mr. Perkins' grasp of the editorial function which is beyond dispute. And says, that "Mr. Perkins had a very fine conception of the function of a publisher, he frequently stresses the fact that fiction is not mere entertainment but at its best a serious interpretation of reality." These are very nice, clean, clear words, perhaps they should have been read earlier. | William Sloane |
| 45:10 | "Comprehending within its scope the evil and the ugly side of things as well as the good and the beautiful, and subject to such limitations only as are imposed by the conscience of art. Where ideas are concerned, a publisher as such must not be partisan but should offer to any honest and fresh viewpoint worthily presented a chance to take its place in the free commonwealth of thought. | William Sloane |
| 45:36 | Is it of interest to the public? If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. The public, not the publisher is the judge." | William Sloane |
| 45:57 | Now, even a man who is perhaps the greatest editor of my time is capable like Homer of nodding, and I wouldn't want any author in the audience here to think that I'm not very well aware of the fact that the editorial function frequently results in something a little short of perfection. So unless you are all overcome by a good side of the editorial operation, I have selected from Mr. Perkins' letters to a contemporary writer something which I regard as balderdash. And in reading it I must tell you that unfortunately, this kind of horse liniment is altogether too viable. And I myself writing similar passages have never been called once for doing this. | William Sloane |
| 46:51 | This is a letter by Mr. Perkins, who certainly was as good as any editor of our time, to a writer named Nancy Hale, whose work I'm sure some of you at least have read. "Dear, Nancy. You cannot worry me about your novel. I remember so well the quality of all that I saw of it and I know that you have a rich and sensitive mind and memory. In fact, I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety, and dissatisfaction. It is true that a good many novelists do not but I think the best ones truly do. And I don't see how it could be otherwise. It is awfully hard work, writing of the kind you do. | William Sloane |
| 47:41 | I myself feel certain that it will end very well indeed if you can endure the struggle. The struggle is part of the process. There is no sign that Jane Austen had any trouble at all but I am sure Charlotte Bronte must have had, and almost all of the really good ones except Jane, who is good as gold of course." | William Sloane |
| 48:06 | As I say even Homer nods, and if I had received a letter like that from an editor I wouldn't have known what to do with the work in question at all except possibly to reread Jane Austen and reflect that it didn't cause her any trouble at all to write what she wrote. | William Sloane |
| 48:25 | Now, I'm not contending in these quotations, and in the course of this talk that I think that any editor is capable of being universally interested but only being catholically interested with a small c. Naturally, anybody is more interested in some things than others. The better the editor, the more things he's interested in, and the more things a man is interested in the better foothold he has on the problem of becoming a good editor. | William Sloane |
| 48:55 | By the same token, no one editor could suffice a whole society. Mark Twain said that it was a difference of opinion that made horse races possible. And it's a difference of opinion on the part of editors that makes modern publishing possible. Otherwise, we'd have one single vertical trust the way they do in Russia. I've watched my contemporaries make a lot of money off books in which I could see but little virtue and turned down, and I have myself from time to time scored some astonishing successes off things which were rejected by better men than I. | William Sloane |
| 49:29 | But from the point of view of management of a publishing house the trouble with editors is twofold. The first trouble is very serious, they spend money. Publishing is not a very profitable process and editors are apt to be quite lavish with money in different ways. They have a bad habit of handing it out to authors and worse than that, they sometimes allow authors to write books in a manner which makes them more expensive to produce many other things. This makes editors unreliable from the management point of view. | William Sloane |
| 50:04 | Equally bad, the editors aren't infallible. In fact, very few of them bat over .300. When they do they seldom if ever get the same salary that Monte Irvin gets for doing the same thing for the New York Giants. | William Sloane |
| 50:28 | I'd like to leave plenty of time for questions. So I'm going to skip over the rest of my points rather rapidly. The modern book editor is required to be a creative type guy. He's supposed to have a lot of book ideas and know who could write them and go out and get them, and all the rest of it, and woe betide if it doesn't sell. Management has a memory longer than an elephant, it never forgets. And the next project he brings up has got two strikes on it. | William Sloane |
| 50:56 | The next place the editor is being subjected to a cruel and unusual form of punishment, if he's as old as I am, he began by planning to be a book editor and finds himself in his middle age being compelled to edit something which no longer is a book but is a property. It is we'll say 2/3 of a ghost or a novel and at this point, the writer has sold it to him and having made the book contract sale, the writer's mind immediately switches to a consideration of what he could do with it in television, radio, first serial, 101 other places all of which pay very much better than the royalty on the book itself. And all he wants from his editor is advice as to how now that I've got you nailed to the cross I can really get the big dough. | William Sloane |
| 51:45 | And this is becoming an increasing matter. It's not only directly with the authors themselves that this tendency is taking place but also interminable meetings, which I myself hold, and I'm sure all other editors do with the author's agents, who are no longer interested in what the Germans used to call a NON-ENGLISH the book is a book, but in the property. | William Sloane |
| 52:08 | And the editor is compelled to be a universal genius, he doesn't produce a good book, he produces a good property, or rather he supervises the production of a good property. And this is very attractive in the rare cases where it works out, everybody makes a lot of money off it but there still are the old fables about the two stools and you know who is between the two bundles of hay. | William Sloane |
| 52:36 | A book is a book, is a book, and my advice as an editor, to any writers in the audience is to write a book. And don't try to become booksellers or TV experts or scenario writers or literary agents or anything of the sort. Just write books. Leave it to the people who have to make their living in these secondary areas to exploit your property for you. If they could they'd probably write themselves. In any event, they're good at what they're good at, stick with what you're good at. | William Sloane |
| 53:15 | I make it sound as if it was pretty rough to be an editor. It isn't but the roughest thing of all is a hard thing to explain to all of you. And here I'm departing from my outline, it's an emotional thing. Nowadays, if you win you don't make any money off it, you don't win except prestige or acclaim, a lot of things. There's practically nothing in it for you. If you lose, boy you really lose. Those are real dollars that you lose. And there aren't very many publishers' yachts, and what yachts there are belong to people who decided to become publishers because they could afford both activities at one and the same time. | William Sloane |