overview revolutions publishing retailing reading technologies illustration going digital journals bodies

publishing This page looks at publishing as an industry and a culture, highlighting general studies and profiling particular publishing houses.       business or culture A useful starting point for thinking about publishing (business? culture? the business of culture?) is Books: The Culture & Commerce of Publishing (New York, Basic Books 82) by Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin & Walker Powell. Albert Greco's The Book Publishing Industry (Boston, Allyn & Bacon 97) is a crisp study, complemented by The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s (New Brunswick, Transaction 92) edited by Fred Kobrak & Beth Luey. John Feather's A History of British Publishing (London, Croom Helm 88) is more academic. Andre Schiffrin's The Business Of Books: How The International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing & Changed The Way We Read (New York, Verso 00) is an outstanding memoir by the publisher of Pantheon Books and The New Press. Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past Present & Future (New York, Norton 00) is characteristically curmudgeonly. There's a similar, although less elegant, lament in Leo Bogart's Commercial Culture: The Media System & the Public Interest (New Brunswick, Transaction, 00). In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 98) by economist Tyler Cowan offers a more convincing analysis of the market.   Clarkson Potter's Who Does What & Why In Book Publishing (New York, Birch Lane 90) is a slim guide for the perplexed. Siegfried Unseld's The Author & His Publisher (Chicago, Chicago Uni Press 80) is less mechanistic.  John Tebbel's four volume A History of Book Publishing In America (New York, Oxford Uni Press 72-81) is heavy going but comprehensive. We enjoyed Thomas Whiteside's entertaining The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business & Book Publishing (Middletown, Wesleyan Uni Press 81). William Charvat's Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 by  (Amherst, Uni of Massachusetts Press 93) is a modern classic.    Little Presses Roderick Cave's The Private Press (London, Faber 71) provides an introduction to the 'little presses'.  Hugh Ford's Published in Paris: American & British Writers, Printers & Publishers in Paris 1920-1939 (London, Garnstone 75) is an outstanding sketch of the little presses run by Harry Crosby, Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Robert McAlmon and Edward Titus among others.  There's a genial although thin description of the milieu in Humphrey Carpenter's Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920's (London, Unwin Hyman 87) and Noel Riley Fitch's less engaging Sylvia Beach & the Lost Generation (New York, Norton 83). Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company (Lincoln, Uni of Nebraska Press 91) is a modest and elegant history, by its owner, of the famous Paris bookshop. It is complemented by The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier (London, Millington 76), Richard McDougall's translation of the memoirs and essays of Beach's rival Adrienne Monnier. The bad, mad and decidedly dangerous to know playboy Harry Crosby is the subject of Black Sun: The Brief Transit & Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (Hamish Hamilton, London 1976) by Geoffrey Wolff. We're just not wild about Harry, who blew his brains out (and those of his mistress) after getting a black sun tattooed on his feet and running the modernist Black Sun press.  Closer to home, Jack Lindsay's Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiography in Three Volumes (Ringwood, Penguin 82) includes an account of his time as publisher of the Fanfrolico Press. His partner P R 'Inky' Stephenson is described in Wild Man of Letters (Melbourne, Melbourne Uni Press, 84) by Craig Munro and in two articles by Richard Fotheringham in the March and June 1972 issues of Meanjin.  Both feature in the festschrift Culture & History: Essays presented to Jack Lindsay (Sydney, Hale & Iremonger 84) edited by Bernard Smith; it includes a checklist of Fanfrolico Press books. We note the celebration of the work of Canberra publisher Alec Bolton in A Licence to Print: Alec Bolton & the Brindabella Press (Canberra, Friends of the National Library of Australia 93) and the Preserving the Ephemeral: Katharine Brisbane & Currency Press (Canberra, Friends of the National Library of Australia 95) compiled by John Golder. Richard Kennedy's A Boy At The Hogarth Press (Penguin, London 78) is a slight but charming memoir by Virginia & Leonard Woolf's printers devil. John Lehman's I Am My Brother (London, Longmans 60) is weightier but more acidulous. There's another perspective in Beauty & the Book: Fine Editions & Cultural Distinction in America (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 00) by Megan Benton.    US giants Scoundrel Horace Liveright, co-founder of the Modern Library, was described by Tom Dardis in the so-so Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright, the Man Who Changed American Publishing (Random, New York 95). Changing American publishing is an exaggeration but Liveright deserves thanks for the creation of Hollywood gothic. Importing Dracula onto the sound stage in a "censorproof way to present outrageous themes of oral sexuality, insanity and borderline necrophilia (What after all was the kiss of Dracula if not sex with a walking corpse?)" makes publisher and gameshow star Bennett Cerf - author of At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (Random, New York 77) look quite tame. Ellen Ballou's The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 70) is a standard history. Charles Scribner's In the Company of Writers (Scribners, New York 91) and In the Web of Ideas (Scribners, New York 93) are thoughtful memoirs by the last of that publishing dynasty. Michael Winship's American Literary Publishing In the Mid-19th Century: The Business of Ticknor & Fields (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 95) is exemplary. Wiley has an online corporate history.    and UK Allen Lane, King Penguin (Hutchinson, London 80) is the standard biography by John Morpurgo of the founder of the Penguin empire, now owned by the theme parks to merchant banking conglomerate Pearson. He was influenced by having Lane as his father-in-law and employer. Differing views on the effect and basis of the second paperback revolution - the first having occurred in Germany seventy years prior to Penguin - are given in successive issues of online journal The Culture of Publishing. Steve Hare edited Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane & the Penguin Editors 1935-70 (Penguin, London 95), a collection of letters and reports by the penguins. It's entertaining but perhaps too self-indulgent and anecdotal. Lane's predecessor is the subject of Elkin Matthews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison, Uni of Wisconsin Press 89) by James Nelson. First With the News: The Story of WH Smith 1792-1972 (Garden City, Doubleday 85) by Charles Wilson profiles the distributor and retailer whose founder was the model for Gilbert & Sullivan's Sir Joseph Porter KCB. Peter McDonald's British Literary Culture & Publishing Practice 1880-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 97) is less striking than Pegasus In Harness: Victorian Publishing & W M Thackeray (Charlottesville, Uni Press of Virginia 91) by leading US editor Peter Shillingsburg. James Nelson's The Early Nineties: The View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 71) deals with the publisher of Henry James and the Yellow Book.  Kurt Wolff founded leading publishers in both Weimar Germany and the USA - Kurt Wolff Verlag and Pantheon Books. Michael Ermarth's Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays & Letters (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 91) covers his relations with Hesse, Mann, Grass, Kafka, Kraus, Rilke and Pasternak among others through a selection of Wolff's writings.    Academic Among studies of academic publishing we recommend MH Black's Cambridge University Press, 1584-1984 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 84), Peter Sutcliffe's The Oxford University Press (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 78) and Heinz Sarkowski's Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing House (Berlin, Springer 97). Wilmarth Lewis - Yale Skull-&-Bones member, Standard Oil heir, spook, editor and publisher of the 48 volume collected correspondence of Horace Walpole - features in the perceptive Cloak & Gown: Scholars in America's Secret War (London, Collins 87) by Robin Winks and in his own more reticent One Man's Education (New York, Knopf 67). While there is much truth in the jingle that "those who can't write, teach; those who can't teach, edit" we should be grateful for the example of Lewis and his mate Ralph Isham, memorably described in David Buchanan's The Treasure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers (London, Heinemann 75), one of those tales that combines scholarship with the excitement of the treasure hunt in describing the rediscovery and publication of James Boswell's papers by more of the Skull-&-Bones crowd. William McGuire supplies an excessively reverential account of the Bollingen Press (Gulf Oil money publishing Jung and other proto-New Agers who found flying saucers - and the occasional Nazi - at the bottom of their gardens) in Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton, Bollingen/Princeton Uni Press 82). Australian expatriate Louise Hanson-Dyer, founder of L'Oiseau-Lyre records and the Lyrebird Press is the subject of Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of L'Oiseau-Lyre 1884-1962 (Melbourne, Melbourne  Uni Press 94) by Jim Davidson.    Naughtiness Dewey Ganzel's Fortune & Mens Eyes (Oxford Uni Press, London 86) is a dry but fascinating account of the life and misdemeanours of master forger and bibliomaniac Thomas Wise. 'Dirty Book' publisher Maurice Girodias stars in Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press & Its Writers (Random House, New York 94) by journalist John De St Jorre. Girodias's The Frog Prince: An Autobiography (New York, Crown 80) is less trustworthy but more entertaining. For a scholarly study we recommend Patrick Kearney's The Paris Olympia Press (London, Black Spring 87).      next part  (revolutions)