The Twelve Days of Thanksgiving: Day Nine
Day Nine, and I'm feeling fine. Thankful for thankfulness. Refocused on gratitude in the face of the Infinite Unknowable that is the publishing industry these days. But hasn't it always been that way?
I'm reading an interesting book called The Lousy Racket. it's about Hemingway, Scribner's and the business of literature in the first half of the 20th century. Turns out, back in the day, things were just as wacky/ed/o in the book business as they are now. They just didn't have Kindles.
I found out about this book from one of my authors. I called him up to tell him about a pretty exciting book deal we had for him, and he says, "I was just reading a book and thinking about you." I'm not sure he meant that exactly nice, but merely cohabitating on the same brain wave as Max Perkins was gratifying, so of course I had to hear all about the book.
Turns out, I had entered his thoughts not in comparison--positive or negative--to Max, but only because we tend to talk about Hemingway and Fitzgerald when we get tangential. I asked to borrow the book, but I couldn't--it came from the library, and I am not the most trust worthy when it comes to library books. They tend to fraternize with my own teetering stacks and run amok. And then away.
Before I had so many books that visiting volumes became endangered, I used to go to the library on my lunch hour. I practiced a highly non-scientific selection process, a kind of literary Brownian motion. I would just start walking down the stacks, sometimes looking at spines, sometimes running my fingers along them. If something caught my eye, I would take it out and do the spine, jacket, flap, 1st page, middle page once-over. If it grabbed me, I checked it out.
I read some awesome, random books that way. Some had been out of print for years, some were politically incorrect, some had information that even callow I could tell was outdated. At one point, these books had been new releases, dressed up in stylish jackets to go to market, but by the time I found them deep in the stacks, there was none of that curb appeal left. All that remained was just a title, spine out, that somehow had enough life force in it to reach out and grab me.
Publishing exerts a powerful force on words, sending them shooting out into the world with an energy that it would be difficult if not impossible for a writer alone to muster. When an author has the ability to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, or even words to voice recognition software and weave a spell that is strong enough to get a team of people to want to create a book, a synergy is created that is hard to extinguish. Even when it is concealed in a drab library binding, plastered with testaments to Mr. Dewey's thought process and hidden among generation after generation of its brethren.
Look at books by different authors published by the same house: they are like cousins, distant cousins, perhaps, but if you look carefully enough, you can see similarities. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and so many other great American talents came through Scribner's, with Max as their editor. And as my latest book reveals, even with that pantheon, publishing was subjective and somewhat contentious. It's hard to have so many talented people with different viewpoints, skill sets and needs pinning their hopes on the same project.
So, while it's a challenging, crazy game, it's important to remember that like another legendary racket sport, it begins at Love, All. And if you take the time to look carefully at any published book, you can see the hand prints of everyone who once believed in it enough to work to propel it out into the world--editors, designers, illustrators, and so many others.That's the energy that transcends binding and calls out to us from the shelves.
Publishing may still be a lousy racket, but I'm thankful for it.
Thanksgiving Tip #9 Birds of a feather flock together. So if you're a turkey, you're safer hanging out with peacocks this time of year. They won't think to look for you there.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
~Thomas Wolfe
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Twelve days of giving thanks: not near enough to capture all the cool, make me pause, make me tear up, make me smile moments that happen around 