Publishing is a temperate profession, on the whole. The highs are not pinnacles, the lows are not chasms. Even so, I imagine the mass of commissioning editors in the larger houses - to borrow from Thoreau - lead lives of quiet desperation.
Why? Well, nowadays you have to show 'em the money first. You cannot commission a book merely because it is interesting and fills a gap in the library (or, a timelier metaphor, parliament) of ideas. More important than that, your book has to have a market niche, and you have to tell the numbers - how many copies it will sell. It is the first year's sales that count most, not sales in the dozen years after. Thus, there is a lot of pressure.
Commissioning, or finding and cultivating authors and helping them shape their best possible book, is the big work of publishing. It is the work, to which a young editorial trainee aspires, the work that, when the result is exceptional, gets what little glory there is in the business. But just look at the number and quality of books marching week after week onto bookshop and e-shelves, and consider the absurdly tiny ratio of commissioning editors-to-books approved at most large publishers, even in India. Plainly the attention is paid to the market niche, not to the book, the author or, ultimately, the reader.
I say all this to salute one of the great editors of the Post War period, a man who brought into print such authors as Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Günter Grass and Art Spiegelman, had translated into English such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and other left-wing stars like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm. Among many others. A man whose time and place stretched from pre-Nazi Paris to post-millennium New York, from the individual publisher with low margins to the multinational media conglomerate, and, not incidentally, from a generally high standard of publishing to a generally lowered one.
Andre Schiffrin died a few days ago in Paris, aged 78. For 28 years, until ejected in 1990, he headed Pantheon Books, a quality imprint of Random House USA. Then he co-founded and helped run The New Press, a non-profit independent publisher for books on issues of social and cultural significance.
You may have noticed the obituaries. Some of them need correcting, because what they get wrong is significant. The New York Times, for example, says Schiffrin was eased out of Pantheon by Random House's then new owner mainly because of "chronic losses". This ignores the creative accounting that was allegedly done to make Pantheon's finances look bad; in fact, the imprint never cost the parent any money and the trouble was probably Pantheon's left-leaning (albeit wide-ranging) publications list, which incidentally included several bestsellers of long standing. This ugly episode is one of the things Schiffrin writes about in his two superb books on publishing, available in India as The Business of Words (Navayana, Rs 295).
When Schiffrin exited Pantheon in 1990, his colleagues quit with him in protest - and so did every one of Pantheon's hundreds of authors but two. Schiffrin moved on to The New Press. His beloved Pantheon, in next to no time, was publishing supposedly quick-moving tat with no backlist value. Thus, the clash between quality in the public interest and profitability. Schiffrin is a hero to independent publishers.
Read his books, read the anecdotes in the flood of tributes, and wonder at a time that such freedom in publishing, such heady vistas, were not just possible, but possible within the embrace of a large company.