Getting the words out

The best chapter of this very good book is the first one. It is titled “Good Reading for the Few and and for the Millions”, and it is about the fine books America used to publish and read, sometimes in astonishingly large numbers, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

One reason was the arrival of the paperback. This kind of cheap book not only drew a more democratic readership, it also changed how books could be marketed.

Another reason was the small flood of European intellectuals, among them a few publishers, who escaped to America. In their new home these publishers tried to keep alive the tradition within which they had worked. At first these publishers had little impact, but over time, they came to have an immeasurable impact on the world of ideas.

Among them was Jacques Schiffrin, a French Jew who founded Pantheon Books in New York in 1942. It is, or was, a hallowed imprint. Among its early authors were André Gide and Albert Camus, in French. It also published the first complete translation of Grimm’s fairy tales. In the 1960s it published the I Ching, a blockbuster (1 million-plus copies). Another bestseller was Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago (6 million copies).

The book in which all this is laid out is The Business of Words (Navayana, Rs 295), by Jacques’s son André. André Schiffrin has had a long career of his own in publishing. He too led Pantheon, for three decades — although the company had been bought by Random House in 1961. He was responsible for spectacular acquisitions, including oral historian Studs Terkel, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, linguist Noam Chomsky and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman.

In his book, Schiffrin describes the threat posed to independent publishing — which is supposed to focus on quality (the curation of good, new ideas) and not high profits — by the conglomerates that own most publishers today. Instead of steady returns and cutting-edge work, big publishers want bestsellers. But it is not possible to guarantee bestsellers.

Random House told Schiffrin to go in 1990. Many staff members and most of Pantheon’s authors went with him — to the New Press, a “non-profit” independent that Schiffrin co-founded. That is a happy ending.

Schiffrin was in India last week to launch his book. Among the events was a discussion on Indian independent publishers, which I attended. The most interesting interventions were on Indian-language publishing, nearly all of which is by independents though quality is generally low. Schiffrin recalled the early era of mass publishing in America to suggest ways of bringing cheap, important books to big audiences — bundling them with popular magazines, for example, or selling them at newsstands (the paanwala or train-station stall). Indian publishers have tried such things, but with limited success.

In India the line is not so clearly drawn between independents and conglomerates. The market is not big enough. If Indian independents do indeed publish important books and want them to be widely read, if big publishers want good returns, and (most of all) if Indian-language publishing is ever to develop its own infrastructure, the one thing they all ought to be thinking about is distribution.

Schiffrin’s first chapter tells how America got a mass readership (much larger than that of today, proportionately). That allowed even “ideas” publishing by independents to find its market. How will we know what Indians will read if we don’t offer them the choice?

(rrishi.raote@bsmail.in)