I don’t want this response from Harold Augenbraum of the National Book Foundation – sponsor of the National Book Award ceremony I wrote about Monday – to get lost in the comments page so I’ve brought it up front here.

It’s a stirring defense of an evening I will always regard, I’m afraid, with “unrelentingly negative” thoughts, as he puts it, but there is information here we should all celebrate regarding the hard work the NBA has done (and that I didn’t mention in my column) to get these awards noticed outside New York. At the same time – well, my reply follows his letter below.

Dear Pat,

Your column is interesting, but missing many facts:

If you check YouTube, you will find all the 2007 National Book Awards acceptance speeches on line. If you check YouTube in the coming weeks, you will find all the 2008 acceptance speeches on line.

As for webstreaming, after careful consideration and research, we at the National Book Foundation have concluded that no one watches them. Instead, we will upload the National Book Awards speeches to the National Book Foundation web site and send notices to the National Book Foundation email list (currently about 10,000) to let subscribers know on a regular basis what is now up. You will note that the National Book Awards Finalist Announcement video, filmed in Chicago in October, is on the Foundation’s web site. You may also want to consult with your local independent bookstores and libraries. In October, after extensive phone calling to each and every independent bookstore in America listed with the American Booksellers Association and in response to selected polling of bookstore owners and booksellers, the National Book Foundation sent posters to 1,000 independent bookstores, along with 100 bookmarks each about the National Book Awards Finalists. We also sent 100 bookmarks each to 2,100 libraries–also after calling every one of them to find out the best person at each library to receive them. This month we will send an additional 300,000 bookmarks (the medium both librarians and booksellers requested: they do not have room for posters, according to them) focusing on the National Book Awards Young People’s Winner and Finalists. In January, the Foundation will send 300,000 bookmarks–again to libraries and independent booksellers–focused on the Foundation’s 5 Under 35 selections of younger fiction writers. As for sending the authors around the country to promote reading, unfortunately, after doing this for several years, we found that the numbers reached were too small to be meaningful for the costs incurred, so that other means, from very low-tech bookmarks to higher tech eNewsletters, webcasting (not webstreaming, which reaches very few people), and podcasts are more effective. You will also note that on the National Book Foundation’s web site are exclusive interviews with each of the Finalists, which can be downloaded and printed out and read at your leisure or to accompany bookstore or library displays, along with the posters and bookmarks. When we asked booksellers and librarians if they wanted DVDs, there was a resounding no: they don’t have DVD players in their stores in most cases, won’t install them just for the National Book Awards, and don’t have table space. If they did, wouldn’t they have running loops of the new-fangled author videos all the publishers are making?

You will also note that only 3 of the 20 judges this year live in New York City, and that last year 7 out of 20 Finalists lived in the three states on the west coast (see David Ulin’s column and blogs about the National Book Awards in the past two years in the LA Times), and that this year’s lifetime achievement Medal was given to Berkeley resident Maxine Hong Kingston, last year Sacramento native (but New York resident) Joan Didion, and the year before California resident Adrienne Rich. You may also want to note that five of this year’s Finalists were published by independent publishers, who attended the ceremony in force subsidized by the mainstream publishing houses. And Horace Engdahl did not say that the American publishing community was insular, he said American writing was insular: there is a big difference, and the defensiveness came not from a defense of the publishing community but from a defense of the variety of American writing.

Yes, we changed some things at the National Book Awards to try to make them more fun and “glitzy”. That resulted in more press than ever. Will it sell more books? I don’t know. But I do know that trying new things and evaluating them to see their good points and bad points and then either continuing or rejecting those changes depending on their effectiveness is not a bad thing.

You may also want to note that the money raised at the National Book Awards dinner, funded mainly by the large New York presses, has paid for all of the above, that writers are invited to the event free or at cost (if they can afford it), and that nonprofit presses also get a special rate, which is also subsidized by the mainstream houses. You might also like to know that moving the National Book Awards from the “modest hotel” you mention to a “posh” downtown location cost exactly the same as the hotel in midtown. And that Socialista is not exactly a “hotsy-totsy in-spot” and that the after-party was underwritten by two independent presses who do believe that a night of fun to celebrate the selections of some of the best writers in the United States is a good thing.

Last year’s National Book Awards Winner in Young People’s Literature, Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, has sold 250,000 copies, according to its publisher, not bad for a hardcover teen book. Could National Book Award Winners and Finalists sell more? Of course, which is why we’re trying new methods to see how to spread the word more widely. Some will work, some won’t. But to criticize the National Book Awards and the publishing community for one night of fun in which 13 wonderful authors get to dress up and celebrate their craft in front of the business people of their industry–not their sales, their craft–is something I consider one of the better parts of the business. If you want to criticize it, go ahead, but at least temper your comments with some of the good aspects of what goes on that evening and get all your information straight. How unrelentingly negative can you be.

Regards,

Harold Augenbraum
Executive Director
National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards

Holt replies:

Dear Harold,

I’m glad we agree that trying new ways to get word out about the National Book Awards, and making adjustments when the new ideas fail, is “a good thing.”

Let’s start with the difference in perception between the “modest” hotel and the “posh” hotel.

Here is the modest hotel, the New York Marriott Marquis, where the National Book Awards were held in 2007 (I’m assuming you used this ballroom):

And here is the posh hotel, Cipriani Wall Street, where the 2008 awards were held:

So it’s not the money you spent that makes the difference. It’s the decision to change the look of the NBAs from modest to posh so the event would be mentioned by the press as a glamorous shindig on the New York publishing scene. That was the goal, and apparently you’re still happy with its impact on the rest of the country. I needn’t remind you that many of the librarians and independent booksellerss you’ve been calling to get those NBA posters displayed are going broke in these perilous economic times and might feel, you know, unimpressed and maybe a little rankled by the choice of venue and the message it sends.

About those librarians and independent booksellers: I must say a wave of nostalgia* came over me when I thought of your dedicated NBA staff members making what must have been thousands of phone calls and sending thousands of packages to get NBA posters and bookmarks into libraries and bookstores all over the country. Just because I never saw the poster doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, and when it comes to the exhaustive effort it takes to get anything literary on anybody’s walls, kudos to the National Book Foundation.

Still, if last year’s poster is any indication, the problem is worse than I thought. Yes, the 2007 poster is on the National Book Foundation’s website and is downloadable for bookstores and libraries, all right, but frankly it’s so drab I wouldn’t put it up in my garage. It’s an all-type list of titles and authors (nary a photo) with floating illustrations of – well, hard to tell: either parts of tables or the letter M – that doesn’t garner much excitement.

The website does show us color photos of the book jackets (from 2005 on), but they’re not in the poster – in fact there aren’t any NBA posters that I could see until last year’s. So I think you have your work cut out for you, Harold. That dull, institutional look needs routing out, and I’m hoping that when the 2008 poster goes up, the NBA will think of the reader and liven it up a bit: Add a few lines describing each book, for example. Put the all-color jackets in the poster. Maybe provide thumbnail photos of the authors, or mini-photos from the awards showing authors and presenters doing something engaging and human. Why do a poster unless it catches and then holds the eye with things to discover? You could scatter small blocks of type with excerpts from the books, from author remarks or from book reviews. Otherwise, a list is a list is a list; it may be a poster, but the eye is just going to skip it.

Even the author interviews on the NBA website, which should be informative and fun to watch, are disappointingly provided in audio only (the screen goes black), so we miss much of the intimacy, the unexpected facial expressions, the spontaneity and tension that comes from a face-to-face conversation in front of a live audience. The audio is just a blah experience.

And yes, I did see the video announcing the 2008 NBA nominations on the NBF website but I didn’t mention because frankly it’s so unrelentingly off the mark and stuffy I can’t imagine anybody watching it for more than 30 seconds. For one thing the nominations were presented at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, which is famous for adapting literary works to the stage. That’s terrific, but we aren’t watching the video to hear the artistic director at Steppenwolf tell us about past productions. Save that for another video, which with time to explore the literary-stage relationship and the National Book Foundation as a bridge linking the two could be really sensational. Nor are we watching the video to wait while the artistic director introduces you, Harold, and wait again for you to spend more time talking about Steppenwolf, the NBF, Nelson Algren (a local reference but again do the Chicago angle in a different video), the upcoming NBA dinner, and then wait again for you to list the many books written by upcoming presenter Scott Turow, who finally, after five long minutes, reads the nominations. All this happens on a screen that is surrounded on the webpage (when I saw it) by the very list of nominations Turow is announcing, so the video feels irrelevant, lacking all the drama and weight that should come with this kind of announcement.

Simlarly the YouTube acceptance speeches (in 2007 - here’s Robert Haas) are preceded with interminable introductions by moderator Fran Leibowitz who I’m afraid stumbles through introductions she hasn’t rehearsed enough and tries to make on-the-spot jokes that are often pretty lame. Ditto some of the presenters who had trouble reading their own notes (others were polished and interesting). Finally after a suspenseful moment – when the winner is announced and we see members of the audience whooping it up – few authors offer the kind of memorable thoughts that would strike a nerve about books and reading with viewers at home. (Robert Haas’ mention of Emily Dickinson did, as did Sherman Alexie on growing up as a reader).

One presenter refers to the “wildly diverse (and) passionate” judges for this year’s NBA, and boy, does the viewer wish we could have some of that. Passion about books and reading should be the underlying message of awards, websites, posters and bookmarks, don’t you think? I mean it’s the job of all of us in publishing to somehow convey the essence of these books to readers, to uncover the authors’ excitement about writing and to relate our own exuberance in a way that infects readers’ consciousness big time.

So I wasn’t talking about covering the bases with not very interesting posters and videos. I was talking about breathing new life into a respected literary awards program that could and should inspire, making the originality and wonder of good writing so appealing that every challenge the comes in the reading of serious literature is worth the reader’s effort.

As to the comments of Horace Engdahl from the Nobel Prize, let’s get back to the exact quote: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” he said. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

It seems clear to me that “they don’t translate enough” means that U.S. publishers don’t publish enough translations. Surely he does not mean that individual authors should sit down and translate books from many different countries on their own. If Americans could only read more works in translation – and come on, U.S. publishers, you gotta put ‘em out in number – then writers wouldn’t be “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”

So when Engdahl says “the U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” it’s the whole publishing community, obviously including writers, that he’s criticizing. American houses actively avoid publishing works in translation (as mainstream houses told the New York Times), so of course American writers are going to suffer. The question is, who is responsible.

But Horace, tell me this: When you look at the fact that little more than 2% of books published in the United States are works in translation, don’t you agree the output is “a national crisis,” as a National Endowment for the Arts director said? Don’t you think we should pay attention to the reasons our publishers are actively turning away from these books and the pressures (they also told the New York Times) that their corporate owners have brought upon them to publish more commercial, easy-to-read Amurrican books instead?

And remember, Harold, I have no beef about the judges or the selections of nominees and winners, or their locations. The humorous incident regarding a publisher at an NBA dinner who exclaimed how happy he was about so many winners from the West, meaning the West Side of Manhattan, was a comment on the way a deep bias (i.e., mainstream publishers in New York not considering life West of the Hudson) can seep into the vernacular of an insular community.

I have, it turns out, written before about the money. Back in 2003 I received an invitation to the NBAs and speculated before looking at the RSVP card how much an individual ticket would cost. I know you know a common gripe among publishers is that they’re kind of roped into buying tickets for a whole table or two or six at the NBAs, but this is one of the perks of bigness, yes? If you’ve got to be owned by a corporation, at least Dad can give you a night out once a year, and be sure to take that nice nominated author with you. But you know, Harold, for an individual person coming from, say, California, the ticket price might be – well, at the time I thought, shoot, $100? Then I read about your fine education-outreach programs at the NBA which must be costly for sure, so I thought maybe $200, and, considering your other programs, $300. Well, you can see where this is going. I got up to $500 per head before looking at the RSVP card and, surprise, surprise. Even then a single ticket cost for this one event cost a thousand bucks, not counting airfare and hotel (granted, not a problem if you live in NY and isn’t that telling?) plus meals and cabs and aspirin.

You can read about this in an archived column because even then I wondered about the insularity of the New York publishing community. So let me ask you, Harold: Have you ever considered holding the National Book Awards in, say, Seattle or Denver or Oxford, Miss.? These are great book towns as you know with plenty of terrific media including national bureaus and correspondents with NPR and AP and USA Today and even the venerable New York Times, plus book bloggers galore, and boy! Talk about the reception you’d receive, not only from the very independent booksellers and librarians you’ve been courting but also from writers who are, after all, the bread and butter sources for all of us.

Oh, but wait. It is the money that’s holding you back, isn’t that right? If the NBA dinner moved out of New York, a lot of mainstream publishers wouldn’t buy those tables, and as you mentioned in your letter, “the large New York presses” are so instrumental to much of National Book Foundation funding. Well, since that’s the case, if I were you, I wouldn’t go beyond the pale either. It just makes it all the more important captivate (not just reach) a national audience with the finest moments of the National Book Awards.

Finally, you mention that Adrienne Rich was a recipient of the prestigious NBA lifetime achievement award. But do you remember that she refused a personal invitation by your predecessor, Neil Baldwin, to contribute to an anthology the NBA wanted to compile as a fundraiser with Borders as its partner?

This took place in 2000, when chain bookstores were driving independent bookstores out of business in the most visible and predatory way. Rich was furious. She wrote to Baldwin about her fears of “a particularly intricate and disingenuous connection between Borders’ harassment of the independent bookselling community and its self-promotion via the National Book Foundation.

“To put it bluntly,” she added, “the National Book Foundation is presently providing credibility and respectability to a corporate enemy of independent bookselling.”

Well, you may think she got a little too hot under the collar, Harold, but of course, I agreed with her and put much of her letter in my column. A non-profit institution like the National Book Foundation simply can’t take sides in an issue like this: The chains-vs-independents controversy had been the subject of several huge lawsuits; it had torn up the membership of bookstore associations national and local; it had caused many authors to cut their book tours and it convinced readers who understood what was at stake to never set foot inside a chain bookstore again.

So I think Rich wasn’t asking too much of the National Book Foundation to listen to the reasons she would not contribute to any book, even if it helped the NBF, that would be promoted and distributed by Borders.

As Rich said, “I should not need to detail to you, of all people, the vital importance of both independent presses and independent bookstores to any genuine freedom of diversity of expression, in a country where media are being swallowed by media, and fewer and fewer ideas are made available by the resulting conglomerates.”

Apparently there were a couple of letters exchanged, and they go even deeper into the issue. But the lesson here, it seems to me, is that Rich is talking about the same blinders, Harold! She’s saying to Neil Baldwin, a representative of the mainstream publishing community in New York, you don’t get it. You aren’t seeing what’s happening to the rest of the country. One look West at the devastation that is reducing the number of independent bookstores by half would have told him, whether he agreed with taking sides or not: Don’t use Borders. It’s a slap in the face to the independent bookstores that sell a lot more copies of serious literary works – the kind the National Book Awards are built upon – than any of the chains.

Now Harold, tell me if I’m wrong about the outcome. The anthology was published by Random House’s Modern Library as “The Book That Changed My Life” in 2002, and I can’t find any indication that Borders survived as a partner or principal in the venture. If it didn’t – if your predecessor finally listened to Rich’s remarks that using Borders would be a blotch on the NBF name – I’d love to know.

Meanwhile, I sense that you are listening to the world, Harold, and I admit that it’s easy for people like me to sit out here 3000 miles away and criticize things I don’t like. So if you move the National Book Awards back to the New York Marriott Marquis next year, let me know. Who knows, if you let me in I might be able to afford the ticket.

With respect and gratitude,

Pat

*I mention nostalgia because I remembered the first time my advertising colleague Bill Chleboun and I found a way to publish a special Christmas Books insert – half editorial, half advertsing – at the San Francisco Chronicle. We printed it out-of-house to keep the costs down and used slick stock to make the color photos really pop, as they say. The best part was an early print run so we could get multiple batches to independent booksellers in plenty of time so they could use the insert as a sales tool on the front counter.

Like you, Harold, Bill was aware of booksellers’ busy schedules, especially during the holiday season, so he telephoned over a hundred booksellers in the Bay Area to see if they wanted the insert and how many they could use. The response was terrific, and everybody wanted it right away. So on the morning the special Xmas insert was delivered to the Chronicle, Bill and I, along with my editorial colleagues Alix Madrigal and Bob Thompson, were waiting at the loading dock. Most of the inserts would be mailed from the printer, but since this was our first venture, we decided to count out and tie up bundles ourselves, throw them into the back of Bill’s pickup truck and deliver them personally to the San Francisco stores that very morning.

I’ll tellya Harold, I remember looking up at the skyscrapers in the financial district as Bill sped us toward the first bookstore and saying to Alix and Bob, “this is going to be great.” I imagined the excitement of carrying in our first special Xmas insert and exclaiming “Here it is!” to the store’s welcoming staff. (Bill had faxed titles of the books featured in the insert so that booksellers could order enough inventory to fill what we were sure would be a serious demand.)

So the truck pulled up to the first store and out we jumped, each of us carrying a couple of bundles as we trooped through the front door (not the delivery entrance in the back). “Here it is!” I called out to the assistant manager, and the last thing I remember in my euphoria was seeing every head at the counter turn toward us, a look of surprise – or was it dismay – crossing the faces of sales people and customers alike. They all realized an interruption in holiday business had just begun – not exactly a happy surprise. “What is that?” the assistant manager said, and even as I started to explained, she began shaking her head. “I’ve never heard of your special Xmas insert, and you can’t put it here,” she said, gesturing to all the impulse items next to the cash register. “And you can’t put them there” (under the counter with the Xmas wrap and supplies).

Well, you know how these things go, Harold. The manager whom Bill had talked to was not in the store, there were no cell phones at the time, customers had begun lining up behind us, so what could we do. Before he knew it, Bill, still parked in the bus stop outside, saw Alix, Bob and I carrying the same bundles out of the store that we had just carried in. It didn’t take long to figure out we weren’t going on to the next store. “Wait here,” Bill said as he tossed us the keys, and thank heaven he found a buyer who had been told about the special Xmas insert and who came out to the sales floor to straighten things out with the staff. I must say when we trooped back in and found a clear spot near the register, it was gratifying to see customers pick up the special Xmas insert with curiousity and interest. Keep looking! I thought – it’s really an invaluable guide.

As you might have guessed, though, Harold, not every store owner/manager/buyer remembered talking to Bill, not every front counter had the space, and not every customer took to the special Xmas insert, so we had to do a lot more ’splaining to do. This is why the experience came back to me when I read about your staff making all those phone calls about the NBA poster and bookmarks. One of the things I admire about bookstores (and libraries) is that their priorities are never in doubt. The first thing they do is serve the customer, who has questions about books that must be answered immediately. Posters like yours and special Xmas inserts like ours are fine, but they may not be taken care of right away, and sometimes not for a while, even when the right person has ordered them. But it’s worth the effort on our part, wouldn’t you say? Believing in the National Book Awards and in the Chronicle’s book section as contributions to the nation’s reading habits must be, to use your words, a good thing.

#2:  PUBLISHERS LEAVING NEW YORK

[Part Two]

What a piece of work is mainstream book publishing in New York! Yesterday’s column looked at how remote and exclusive it’s become, how isolated from the rest of the country. The National Book Awards fiasco was cited as a humorous example, but two other influences (see below) demonstrate how serious the stakes have become.

Philip Roth Makes a Demand

I admit another side of me is saying about the National Book Awards debacle, So they had a little party (all right, a big party) — you don’t have to make a federal case out of it. Life in book publishing is not easy, and these people work hard to survive, so give ‘em a break. It was just one night.

Right. It’s what that one night represents that we should look at – indeed what Philip Roth has been railing against with his Nathan Zuckerman novels for years. That same Page Six mentality that turns the arts into a gossip machine has moved the focus of publishing away from books that are literature and put the spotlight on the authors who create literature. Roth doesn’t mean we’re honoring authors more than books – quite the contrary. He means we’re exploiting famous authors by writing biographies that deliciously and salaciously accent their hidden pasts, their secret inspirations, their dark side. It’s more lucrative to do that, he says, than to publish serious literary works.

In Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost,” he especially indicts “cultural journalism” as presented and practiced by the New York Times.

“Cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in ‘the arts,’ ” a character protests in a letter to the Times, “and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet?”

If you don’t believe mainstream publishers would rather dish the author than sell the book, Zuckerman steps up to supply two examples. First there was “dubious scholarly speculation” about Nathaniel Hawthorne having an incestuous relationship with his sister. It’s nothing but a rumor, mind you, but it persists. And what if it were fact – would it inform or hinder our appreciation and understanding of Hawthorne’s books? Well, what would that matter if your intention is never to read Hawthorne but to sell the heck out of a biography that scandalizes. Why, you might even get a blurb from Anna Wintour. That great Hawthorne scholar.

Then, too, look at Ernest Hemingway, says Roth’s letter-writer. Hemingway’s memory was maligned when a modern-day “cultural journalist” interviewed people in Michigan and their descendants ”who are said to have been models for the characters” in Hemingway’s early stories. When they told the journalist they felt “badly served by Ernest Hemingway,” their feelings were “taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.”

The NBA organizers bought into that same gossip-mill approach. Did the world hear about the literary wonders of the NBA winners or about the names of the quasi-famous who attended? The organizers could not see the problem because they’re trapped inside the mainstream.

(And of course Philip Roth loves to have his fun with us, having spent his career constructing his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman and then taunting “cultural journalists” and publishers for asking, gosh, is Zuckerman really Philip Roth disguised? Just by pondering the question, we reveal ourselves to be more interested in gossipy facts about the author than in the fiction he creates. Too bad the colossal ego in all Roth books has its own obvious needs, but we won’t go into that now.)

What to do about this? Here are a few suggestions.

Rebuild from the Bottom Up

When the Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl said that American writers and publishers were too insular, a lot of literary folk accused Engdahl and the Nobel Committee of being anti-American, thus launching an embarrassing pissing match that got us nowhere.

One unassailable lesson got lost in the shuffle: American writers and the mainstream publishing community “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. When publishers refuse to enter the world’s literary conversation, their “ignorance is restraining.”

Whaaaa? (as the Latin lover in Astaire/Rogers movies and “The Drowsy Chaperone” says so noisily and comically when he pretends to be taken by surprise.) Americans don’t publish many works in translation?

Not by a long shot. The steady decrease of translated books coming out of mainstream publishing is “a national crisis,” the literature director of the National Endowment of the Arts told the New York Times. Salman Rushdie looked at the number in 2004 (874 translated books out of 185,000 total) and called it “shocking.”

Moreover, it’s been proven that the only way writers of other countries can become known in the world is to be translated into English. So when mainstream publishers in New York avoid publishing works in translation, “we are the clogged artery,” says the chair of PEN’s translation committee – “[we] prevent authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country.”

It’s true that translated books used to be harder to sell. But today, thanks to the Internet, English-reading book buyers who love translated works are easier to identify and target. One feels that mainstream publishers would like to stick their toe in international waters, but according to the New York Times, they simply have “no staff editors who read foreign languages,” so they have “hesitated to rely on the advice of outsiders.”

Well, surely that can be rectified.

Wouldn’t any publisher consider it a plus if a prospective assistant editor came to the job interview with a reading fluency in at least one foreign language? During college the candidate could have studied the classics in that language, traveled in that country and read all the promising modern authors. If hired, the new editorial assistant could comb through the foreign country’s publishing lists, acquire advance copies, investigate the U.S. market for prospective works in translation and write up Readers Reports that would be reviewed by a senior editor. This would be good training for the editorial assistant and it would sure breathe new life into an industry struggling to match the literary demands of the world.

Hire enough of these editors, nurture sales reps and marketing executives with similar expertise, and maybe the house will not only look worldwide for authors to translate but learn how to market them to Americans who are hungry for foreign writers. If you think these readers are too small in number to make publishing works in translation profitable, remember the audience for books by Middle East authors was zilch before 9/11 and has grown fantastically since. If that’s too tidy an example, I remember a lone paperback editor who started a reading craze in the 1970s by publishing Latin American authors aside from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And wouldn’t it be great if mainstream houses required prospective editorial and marketing assistants to have worked in bookstores outside (far outside) New York, maybe during summers and holidays while in college, and to have carved out an area of literary interest for which they can demonstrate real expertise?

Bringing in new influences from the ground up is not only a way to open the horizons of mainstream publishers. It’s a way to turn our attention back to the work we all want to do, and that is to attend the publication of books we believe in, from the most literary to the most commercial. It’s a way to fight captivity by corporate pressures and faraway owners. It’s a way to establish our own literary standards and strive to live up to them no matter where the house is located or who/what controls it.

Once again if I’m in the dark and this is already happening, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe Manhattan will freeze over before mainstream book publishers ever set foot off the island. But breaking out of literary prison can take many forms, some barely visible right now, and can only spread like the “good viruses” of our new Internet Age. Thoughts welcomed (you can send anonymously, too) at pat@holtuncensored.com.

#2: PUBLISHERS LEAVING NEW YORK

[Part One]

Right, they’ll never do it, but shouldn’t mainstream publishing houses want to explore a world beyond the Hudson River? Maybe talking about it will shed light on such fiascoes as the recent National Book Awards (see below) and the defensive reaction to a Nobel Prize judge’s accusations that the U.S. publishing community has become “too isolated, too insular.” (Honeys, it is.)

I’ve never understood why American publishers duplicated the British model of placing mainstream houses in one location so they would dictate to the tastes of the rest of the nation.

Why didn’t we load our printers and binders into the wagons as we went hacking and slashing across the Plains to the West? We certainly brought our newspaper presses. But for some reason – perhaps it was the independent wealth of publishing founders — we kept book publishing on the East Coast and eventually in New York City itself. We decided to depend on a “cottage industry” ideal in which literary ideas would foment within the social exchange of like-minded people.

By now, however, working in close proximity has made New York book publishers appear inbred and clannish. If you can’t get them on the phone, it’s because they’re calling/emailing/texting each other, lunching at publishing “in” spots, complaining about hotel rates at Frankfurt or BookExpo and working the room at author receptions as if a world outside publishing doesn’t exist.

And does it? Not long ago, Farrar Straus & Giroux was thought to be a serious rebel in publishing simply for having an address 30 blocks south of what was then called Publishers Row. St. Martin’s was sort of a maverick for operating out of the Flatiron Building seven blocks north of FSG. Publishers Weekly didn’t hire a correspondent west of the Hudson until the mid-‘70s. Around that time, one Los Angeles reviewer remembers this conversation with a book publisher after the National Book Awards:

Publisher: “Well, the West had some great victories tonight.”

L.A. Reviewer: “What do you mean? None of the winning authors live west of the Rockies.”

Publisher: “I meant the West Side of Manhattan.”

Today publishers’ offices are physically more spread out in New York, but by any standard, the industry is so remote and rumor-driven that it can’t help but appear exclusive and arrogant to the rest of the country.

Publishers know that, yes? Surely people in publishing are a bit embarrassed about shutting themselves off in a gated community of bigness where they appear so inaccessible, so removed, so jaded.

Or, is it rather that they are trapped. When my San Francisco Chronicle colleague Bill Chleboun (pronounced Clay-bone) and I used to visit mainstream houses in New York to talk about advertising, the publishing people we met always knew we had a tight schedule of about 60 meetings in five days. This meant we were racing through the gossip mill of NY publishing a lot faster than they could telephone each other, so around the second day of our trip, our hosts were asking us, “All right, so what have you heard?”

(I should mention that Bill and I rarely felt the arrogance or smugness coming from individuals [as opposed to the industry] that authors outside New York so often describe when dealing with the mainstream. Just about everybody we knew in New York publishing remained open and human, while the system they worked for seemed increasingly to ooze rudeness. The pressures of their jobs demanded insane results, whether in dollars or awards or publicity, for the “big” books, always to the exclusion of the “small” books. Under those pressures a thousand different agendas emerged, making the business of books arbitrary and competitive, very much like Hollywood. With this came a tone of stiff-arming condescension that kept New York publishing more distant and more arrogant than ever.)

The National Book Awards Fiasco

So let’s look at what happened with the National Book Awards recently and see how working in such a tight-knit community can limit one’s perspective.

First a few questions:

1) When it was agreed that the tired old NBA dinner needed “reinvigorating” to “make it fun again,” did the organizers hire a Broadway theater with famous actors and get PBS to cover the proceedings – or at least webcast it themselves — so a DVD of the best moments could be sent to booksellers/librarians all over the country who could run a loop for customers/patrons at the check-out counter and to book groups that could show it at the next meeting and to YouTube so that people outside New York could personally experience the timely and literary importance of the NBAs and buy lotsa copies of the winners’ titles?

No.

2) Or did the National Book Award organizers decide to cancel the ceremony because of the rotten economy and instead design a smashing four-color poster of finalists and winners to send out to bookstores/libraries/schools everywhere and with the money left over interview finalists and winners for a DVD to send around (as above) and maybe even dispatch the authors themselves on a strategic tour of, say, five cities where they would promote reading and literary adventure along with their own books?

No.

Instead the organizers decided to move the NBA from a modest hotel and hold it at a posh black-tie dinner in a “regally decorated,” very expensive restaurant called Cipriani’s Wall Street with “the gold columns and the arches and the elaborate floral arrangements hanging from the walls.”

This sent a message to underfinanced authors and hanging-by-a-thread booksellers (not to mention frugal readers) that dining on baked tagliolini and roast filet of beef is what you do in New York when the rest of the world is counting pennies.

Oh, but pardon, they weren’t through yet. So as not to exclude anybody in the New York publishing scene, the organizers continued the NBA ceremony at a big after-party in a hotsy totsy in-spot called Socialista. This way “the very young” assistant editors and marketing people who weren’t invited to the dinner could have their own wasteful and wasted evening.

Nor was that the end of it. To turn a dreary literary occasion into what the NBA board described as “a bigger experience,” the organizers decided to glam things up with New York celebrities from the magazine world - you know, Anna Wintour of Vogue and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone and zzzzzz. Throw in Candace Bushnell of “Sex and the City” and you couldn’t get a more provincial NY would-be celebrity setting that sat back on its self-congratulatory plush seats.

Granted, some publishers at the dinner looked around at the “lush opulence” and saw it as “totally inappropriate,” as Steve Ross of Collins told the NY Observer. “But, you know,” he added, “we get so few opportunities to have anything to celebrate.” Aw. Well, look at it this way, Steve: The amount of money tossed down the drain on food, booze, cash prizes, tuxedoes, cab fares and corporate tables for this one night could have kept several independent bookstores out of bankruptcy court for months.

Of course looking at it from inside the New York scene, who could blame the organizers? The new NBA’s were what is called a Page Six event, meaning the gossipy insider page of the New York Post might have mentioned the “boldfaced names” for two seconds. It was dished more than covered by the New York Observer’s book columnist Leon Neyfakh, who also lost the focus. Quoting “one of the fashionable youngsters” at Socialista as saying, “Why does this party suck?” (too crowded), Neyfakh wrote: “Ms Joffe seemed to be wrapped in a sleeping bag made from several snow leopard carcasses.” So much for making the NBAs about books.

Happily, other media like National Public Radio brought word of the NBAs to a larger audience, but that seemed to be peripheral, like a bonus. After all, the idea was to make the New York book publishing scene nearly aristocratic in its glitzy and self-adoring excesses, to tell everybody watching that you’re an outsider until you’re an insider, to build “it” and hope they will still come.

Well, they don’t any more. That was the air of desperation one could feel 3000 miles away. For one thing, there is a parallel world on the Internet where a revolution in publishing is shifting power from the bottom up (more columns to follow about this). Then there is the flat sale of books that began long before the economy tanked and requires solutions from outside traditional industry sources, not from digging further into rusty old celebrity baloney.

In any case, publishers fiddling while the book trade burns to the ground is not the image I want to take from this. Rather it’s what we can learn from the NBA fiasco that’s been staring us in the face for years.

The second part of this (windy even to me) post will be up tomorrow.