Context

In May of this year I participated in a publishing conference in Warsaw co-sponsored by the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University and the Polish Chamber of Books, one of half-dozen Americans present to address Polish publishers on the book business. The conference was organized to inform publishers about survival tactics in Poland’s emerging market economy. For historical reasons, market economics in Poland has come more slowly to publishing than to other industries. Under communism, state-sponsored publishing meant mandatory print runs and distribution, censorship, and possible arrest for those who defied curbs on freedoms. Is it surprising publishers now struggle to gauge real demand for their books? The woes of the industry are further complicated by more recent developments. With the fall of communism and lifting of restrictions, many small independent presses have sprung into existence. Thousands of them. Most are severely underfinanced, lacking professional management, and without adequate distribution channels. For the purveyors of culture, this transition time, representing new freedoms and opportunities, is at once exhilarating and frustrating.

An editor with backgrounds in book retail management and financial planning, I was asked to talk about distribution, new cost-saving technologies, and relationships between publishers and large book chains in the United States. The text of that speech is of less interest to readers of CONTEXT than issues, fears, and hopes voiced by Polish publishers and general observations gleaned from the Warsaw conference. My real aim here is to look at American publishing through the lens of what is now happening in Poland and to show how issues there shed new light on the nature of commercial publishing and the printed word as commodity. This is a brief lesson in perspectivism, an Emersonian jaunt, by which I intend to unsettle things. To paraphrase Emerson: Put your head between your legs and even the most familiar objects will look strange and different.

The general mood of the conference was optimistic and forward-looking. Publishers are happy to exchange old challenges under communism for new ones. No one wants to resurrect old orthodoxies, and certainly no one I met wants to return to the days of furtively printing Samizdat literature in Warsaw’s basements. These observations serve as context for all subsequent remarks about the situation in Poland.

Unlike Americans, Poles do not enjoy the luxury of taking liberties for granted. I am reminded of something the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslow Milosz said in his 1952 classic The Captive Mind, penned during the darkest years of Stalinist rule: "The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are." The historical situation that gave rise to Milosz’s observation has changed but the point remains. Americans can no more imagine a day when liberties suddenly disappear than they can a war waged on American soil. (God help us, a truly terrifying lesson in perspectivism.)

At the conference, concerns voiced by publishers took two forms. First, those related to nuts-and-bolts problems of running a business; and, second, concerns of a more philosophical nature, often voiced privately, about art and commerce. The first I have already touched on briefly; if easily described, they are less easily solved. Publishers are stymied as much by distribution problems as by their inability to gauge print runs (the two things are obviously related). Getting books into stores has proven difficult. Because there is no national wholesaler in Poland, distribution is handled by numerous (about three hundred) inefficient regional wholesalers. An individual shop must depend on dozens of wholesalers to stock shelves. Books are sold on a commission basis, and so booksellers seem to spend most of their time counting inventory. (No, bookstores are not computerized.) Because few books carry suggested retail prices, books get marked up, allowing bookseller and wholesaler to hide inefficiencies. As might be guessed, inefficiencies are passed on to the consumer. It is possible to find the same book for sale at thirty, thirty-five, or forty zloties in different stores. I wondered what ABA CEO Avin Domnitz would make of remarks by Andrej Chrzanowski, President of the Polish Chamber of Books, as he expressed very warmly to conference attendees the hope that a national wholesaler as well as a large bookstore chain would soon emerge to galvanize the industry.

Some attendees expressed anxieties about these western corporate models. These anxieties, confessed with some hesitation, have their origin in communist doctrine. That Poles still harbor fears about what used to be called the "stupidity" of capitalist culture is not surprising, even if Marxism is effectively dead in former Eastern bloc countries. That these fears should resurface at this time, as Poles embrace democracy and market economics, is to be expected. One publisher from Gdansk expressed concern about growing public apathy for the printed word. It was explained to me that most Poles are not focused on political and cultural issues but on doing better for themselves because they now can do better. An example of what Poles fear, he said, can be found in the former Soviet Union’s waning public interest in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn returned from exile in 1991, he received a hero’s welcome home, greeted by cheering crowds. The most famous of twentieth century dissident writers was single-handedly reclaiming Russian cultural heritage. Granted a television forum, Solzhenitsyn attracted initial curiosity, but his ratings plummeted. Solzhenitsyn’s talk show was eventually canceled for lack of viewership.

I could not help reading on the face of the man who spoke to me a certain amount of emotional deflation, deflation which, real or imagined, I thought I saw on the faces of all those who had been active in underground activities. For pure adrenaline rush, the closet drama of commercial publishing cannot match the urgency and sense of purpose of underground publishing days. Philip Roth once observed that in the West everything is allowed and nothing matters, and in the East everything matters and nothing is allowed. Growing public apathy is one component of the Poles’ fear. Another is the tyranny of the marketplace, i.e., pressures brought to bear on the printed word by consumer appetites and the almighty bottom line. One publisher expressed to a small group of listeners during a coffee break his belief that many of his colleagues were now engaged in the business of publishing garbage. The problem (or perhaps solution), as Hollywood and New York well know, is that garbage sells.

Having more experience with capitalism than anyone else, Americans tend to be less alarmist about pressures of the marketplace on the arts. We understand that the dangers are real but often exaggerated. Our own fears nonetheless find repeated expression in public debate. They find clear articulation, for example, in debates about "mass culture" that raged in literary quarterlies in the 1950s, notably in the Partisan Review. Philip Rahv, Dwight McDonald et al appealed to writers to rise above the favors of mass culture. Fences between high and low culture, they argued, needed to be maintained to avoid compromise.

We find their concerns distantly echoed in the rhetorical stances of the ABA and Writers’ Guild in recent campaigns against the chains—whether petitioning the FTC to oppose Barnes & Nobles’s attempted acquisition of Ingram or grousing to the press about the big bad retailers. There is always talk about the dangers the chains represent to "cultural diversity." The argument goes like this: once the chains gain dominance, they will yank from shelves all the books that don’t sell (or don’t sell well), hence leaving us with nothing but John Grisham and Danielle Steele. In effect, it is the consumer the ABA fears, since the chains will only allow the consumer to get his way. The so-called "furniture" may sell better than the ABA supposes. At any rate, what makes shopping in superstores a frustrating experience for me is not lack of diversity, but lack of discrimination. There are enormous pressures on the people who buy for these stores to represent everything.

Our own attitudes toward the "printed word as commodity" are complicated. On the one hand we share many of the Poles’ fears about the marketplace. On the other hand, as a democracy that places high value on free expression, we are wary of any governmental intervention in the arts or printed word. (But let’s be clear: publishers are not themselves in the business of free speech but quite the opposite—first in discriminating against numerous manuscripts; and second in exercising editorial control over an author’s work.) Our Government remains stubbornly indifferent to the arts. Interestingly, the Pew Charitable Trusts, a giant 4.7 billion foundation, has recently announced it will devote 50 million dollars toward getting policy makers to focus on issues of cultural policy and finance for the arts. Stewardship and protection of the arts in the country has traditionally fallen to private institutions, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations. In an important sense the history of these organizations can be read as a fundamental lack of faith in capitalism. With university presses and other not-for-profit publishers, charitable organizations dedicated to the arts share a single overriding goal: to create an environment more nurturing and patient than the marketplace and an environment where laws of supply and demand are held at least temporarily at arms length.

How Poles will resolve to protect the arts cannot yet be known. It is not yet clear what the emerging marketplace will and will not support. Privatization continues at a rapid pace. No doubt debates about funding for the arts are occurring right now behind closed doors within the Ministry of Culture, debates which, given recent history, must be highly politically charged. Publishers’ expectations about what the market will bear might be unrealistically high. Expectations are generally high. Polish publishers were shocked to learn from a colleague, for example, that the vast majority of writers and scholars in America do not earn a living through writing. In a somewhat ironic twist, this same colleague informed the Poles that many writers in America do not write for money but for other reasons—for personal fulfillment or because publications advance a professional career. While Poles’ worst fears may be misplaced, high hopes will inevitably be dashed.

Toward the close of the conference there occurred an awkward moment. One of the Poles, a medical publisher, suddenly realized that four of the six American speakers were employed by not-for-profit publishers, and, furthermore, that two of these presses received funding from state universities. "But this," he said, sawing at the air, "is the old system!" Admitting important differences, my Polish colleague was right. In our efforts to sing the praises of market economics, we had lost track of this basic fact. We were often speaking as if there were just a single paradigm for publishing. In response, I suggested that the business tactics outlined would apply for these presses as well. A colleague from Harvard University Press emphasized that the not-for-profit sector represented only a small percentage of books sales in the US and that within that percentage university presses were an even smaller fraction. Both responses were accurate but misleading. Misleading because not-for-profit publishing plays a far greater role than can be measured by sales.

Imagine for a moment how impoverished our cultural and intellectual lives might be without university presses, to take one component of not-for-profit publishing. For over a hundred years these presses have advanced important research and scholarship in the arts and sciences, serving an admittedly small but important community of scholars whose ideas eventually filter down to popular culture. Such a loss could not be quantified. It would not be a matter of subtraction but rather wholesale diminishment. Every serious work of nonfiction published by a commercial trade house draws directly or indirectly on scholarship and original source material published by university presses. An author of a general history of the Civil War stands on the shoulders of generations of scholars. This is something trade house editors do not always understand. And why should they? Most do not have academic backgrounds. They are students of the market, not the university, wielding ax to remove difficult chapters, footnotes, bibliographies, and acknowledgments. (By the way, not always are the market’s effects pernicious ones. I have known many a scholar whose writing and arguments improved by being asked to address a general reader.)

Polish publishers will solve their numerous problems related to distribution, print runs, pricing, access to information—competition will ensure that—but they will need to understand the limitations of commercial publishing. American publishing is only partly based on a for-profit model; commercial and not-for-profit publishing have enriched one another in this country in ways which, as I have suggested, may not always be readily evident. It is a time of change in American publishing, however, and many university presses are now being asked to tighten purse strings at the same time funding for the arts has in general become more competitive. It’s true university presses and other not-for-profit publishers have a greater visibility in bookstores now than they have ever had before due largely to superstore growth—something to be celebrated—but such exposure brings with it large risk. It is not just a matter of often-heard complaints about shop-worn inventory and high book returns to publishers. As not-for-profit publishers and university presses fight for shelf space with the commercial houses, they will more and more come to resemble their competitors. Now that is frightening. Hello NEA, hello Rockefeller Foundation, hello university presidents and treasurers. Is anyone listening?

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.