Somewhere in the midst of discovering tiny Bellevue Literary Press and its incredible launch of an original trade paperback called “Tinkers” (191 pages; $14.95),  I decided to take a look at the book to make sure it was worthy of a whole column (or, as it turns out, two). 

Paul Harding

Wouldn’t you know, this first novel by Paul Harding has so much originality and fresh writing that I could not believe — well, first, that the author is still in his 40s (see left; surely his mind’s age is about 142); and second, that the intricate and animated construction of the novel becomes a character in its own right.

My only regret is that as much as I admire Bellevue Press for its literary standards, I wish the cover copy for “Tinkers” weren’t so dreary. 

“An old man lies dying,” it begins. “As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is united with his father and relives the wonder and pain ….” Sounds like a dozen other books to me, and misses a certain playfulness on Harding’s part. In most deathbed scenes, the soul rises gracefully to heaven, but here the house (which the dying man once built himself)  — in fact everything in his universe — comes crashing down on him.

As walls crack and foundation gives way, George Crosby, a former teacher lying in his rented hospital bed, remembers teaching his grandkids how to staple insulation in place. “Now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues,” along with shattered windows, caved-in ceiling, and “electrical wires that looked like severed veins” to George.   

There is no respite. “The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing and racks of old coats and boxes.” Now he sees right through a crippled roof as “the clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head. The very blue of the sky followed…Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

A Seam to Slip Into

But we don’t have time to ponder this hallucination (or true experience?) because Harding suddenly skips back 70 years to introduce us to George’s father, Howard, the tinker of the title. 

Howard is first seen in the 1920s, driving his mule-drawn wagon with its “heavy chest of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.” 

His job is plodding and practical, but Howard is something of a dreamer. In the fall, as his mule, Prince Edward, pulls the cart along the back roads of rural Maine, Howard’s eye is affixed not on the tin buckets, boot strings, nails or child-sized coffins he’s sold but on the “blazing maple leaves” on which all things, for that moment, rest.

Maybe this is a story of how people live in nature, we think, and it is, but there’s much more to it than that. During the winter, Howard visits an aging hermit who lives so deep in the snowbound forests that he has to walk for miles to meet the tinker. Howard watches him emerge from the whiteness like an existential dot  (see cover illustration below) and ponders the blurring of wilderness and humanity.

“No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit’s existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers’ shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.”

The Opposite of Death

If Howard sees the hermit  woven almost literally into the landscape, it’s because his vision has been artfully occluded by nature. Suffering from a severe form of epilepsy, he has become acutely sensitive to the coming of a seizure — his “diet of lightning”: 

“The aura, the sparkle and tingle of an oncoming fit was not the lightning — it was the cooked air that the lightning pushed in front of itself.”

Howard doesn’t remember any of the seizures, but he knows that “his brain nearly fried in its skull pan” during it. It’s as though a door opened to “the star-gushing universe,” and sheer voltage “instantly burst the seams of his thin body.” 

Here, then, epilepsy becomes the lens by which Howard can see, more clearly than people who don’t have the disease, how the universe reclaims the body long before we die. For Howard, in the instant “when the bolt touched flesh…he became pure, unconscious energy. It was like the opposite of death, or a bit of the same thing death was, but from a different direction.”

The mention of death and its opposite provides an early clue to the novel’s huge design. “Tinkers” is  concerned with a meeting of humanity and matter that signals vast and (previously) unknowable change. Because they live in rural Maine, the characters already feel part of nature’s transformations. Time has little chronology until they notice it, and space is as infinite as emotion. 

The few Native Americans left, “as old as light and just as diffuse,” appear briefly as guides between natural and manmade worlds. An Indian emerges out of the forest to repair a birch bark and vanishes without sound or movement. Others are seen only “as silhouettes traced by the sun.” One legendary Native American, long gone, appears when fishermen see him “dart by the water deep beneath their boats, chasing salmon.” 

Reabsorbed Back

And so the young Howard wonders: Did the Indian leave quickly to return to the forest, or was he “reabsorbed back, not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself.” 

This idea — that death is not an end but a gradual integration of life from one state to another — becomes the novel’s central preoccupation. And it’s not just life – all things are changing, consumed by each other, all of the time, as when Howard finds an old book in an attic: “The dust in the air was made up of the book I found,” he writes in a journal. “I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.” 

So for inanimate objects, too, there is no such thing as beginning or end, only a constant remixing in which we humans are the lucky ones, Harding seems to say,  because we get to observe.

In the spring, for example, Howard, having stopped his wagon after a snowstorm, gives his mule Prince Edward a carrot and wades into a beautiful field of wildflowers:

“Howard closed his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cold water and cold, intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral smell of cold, raw green.” It’s as though we can inhale the very passage of time.

From Infinity to Controlled Time

 “Tinkers” speaks just as eloquently to the fact that we are human, after all, locked into perceived ideas of time and space, trying to control both.  

It’s no coincidence that George, when he retires, turns into an expert tinkerer and repairer of ancient clocks, through which he ponders the phenomenon of controlled time. 

Hundreds of clocks, their inner workings spilled everywhere in the house (the same house that’s ready to collapse on him when his time is over), represent an amazing truth to George – that the power of time can be “tamed by the successive gears, from savage energy to civilized servant, to perform the most rarefied of tasks: namely…to mark precisely each of the 86,400 seconds in our earthly day, and furthermore, to do so for eight days at a time…” 

It takes eight days for a typical hand-wound clock to run out of time, eight days for George to die, and eight days for the time in Harding’s story to run out. Time in this ingenious novel is both clocked and mixed up by vignettes, journals, instruction manuals, observations, meditations and diaries. Tense can change with the next paragraph, as can first- and third- person voices. For a while, it’s hard to know how all the little stories are related to the one big story. 

But that’s the joy of any exquisite mosaic. The placement of each precious gem is so compelling, sometimes so breathtaking, sometimes even life-changing, that we’re content to wait until the grand picture emerges, at last. 

Personal Note

Since reading “Tinkers” I find myself thinking of its images and messages all the time. 

I’ll never go out on a boat again without seeing that Indian chasing salmon under the water. 

When people my age (60+) refer to their bodies as “betraying” them by growing old, I’ll think of the endless reabsorption that’s given new life by our bodies and returns new life when our bodies are born. (This doesn’t help alleviate anxiety about death; it just makes the process more interesting.)

And when someone refers to death as the end, I’ll think of “the opposite of death,” that process in nature that is ongoing and infinite, allowing human beings “fleeting glances”  that “the mystery is ours to ponder.”

Gee, I am still not hearing much enthusiasm from mainstream houses in New York about my idea that book publishers should stop putting out expensive and wasteful hardcover editions at the start of a book’s life and begin with original trade paperbacks instead.

(Here’s how most of the response went: You idiot. Original trade paperbacks are an old and outdated idea. Everybody’s tried it and everybody fails because trade paperbacks don’t get reviewed, don’t make enough profit for booksellers, aren’t taken seriously by TV/radio shows, and are too easily damaged in shipment. Even when they get to bookstores and even when they’re displayed face-up [too rarely!], the covers curl up on the table, so you lose about one out of ten.)

Remember, I’m not talking about established best-sellers that have found an audience willing to pay $30 per copy. I’m talking about books by new authors of midrange or serious literary books who don’t have a marketing budget behind them and can no longer depend on affluent readers who’ll take a chance on unknowns.

A Sales Rep Speaks

So: Do original trade paperbacks ever succeed? Thanks to Lise Solomon, a sales representative for the book distributor Consortium, here is a case in point:

“Last season I sold a first novel (‘Tinkers’  by Paul Harding), which I loved and wanted to make happen in my territory of Northern California. ” ‘Tinkers’  had the help of a Marilynne Robinson blurb on the cover and a great package from the relatively unknown independent publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, which announced the book as a trade paperback original. I had ARCs for key buyers and sold it passionately everywhere I could.

“The buyer at Book Passage in Marin County loved ‘Tinkers’ so much that she asked if there was any way Bellevue could print a hardcover edition for the store’s First Edition Club. The publisher did a short run of 500 copies, which sold out quickly, and ended up printing another 500. Then Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (the Northwest rep loves the book, too) asked about selling its own proprietary hardcover edition, too, and Bellevue printed 750 copies that presold out quickly.

“But most stores responded to the trade paperback. They were willing to bring in 4-12 copies of an unknown author from an unknown press.”

A Classic Case

So here is a classic case of launching a trade paperback from the ground up. The elements are: Passionate sales reps, savvy independent booksellers, a first book that stood up to expectations; and big initial orders (4-12 copies) that, compared to the usual buy for first novels (0-2) involved a risk on everybody’s part.

And if we are to take this story as an omen, it appears  the hardcover audience has boiled down to a collectors’ market that bookstores like Powell’s and Book Passage know how to cultivate.

The chain bookstore reaction, I learned later, was typically haphazard, with Borders coming in for a strong order of 1500 copies and Barnes & Noble making almost no buy at all.

Word Began to Spread

Back to Lise’s story: “The publisher got a grant to bring the author (based in Boston) out for four bookstore signings because of  the initial enthusiasm and because Book Passage needed its hardcover copies signed.

“Word began to spread. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it several weeks ago, as did the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe reviewed it last weekend, and rumor has it that it will get a New York Times Book Review soon as well.

“The trade paperback has been selling well because of the reviews and because of some passionate booksellers who wrote shelf talkers well enough that Bellevue sold through the first edition of 5000 paperbacks and 500 hardcovers. Bellevue went back to press for BOTH. Those just landed, and we’ve been out of stock for a few weeks, every rep’s nightmare, but I Bellevue is planning for a third printing since over half of the second printing is already sold.”

Is “Tinkers” a fluke or are original trade paperbacks finding a newly receptive place in the world? Lise Solomon says, are you kidding? “This should be the model!”

Looking at The Numbers

I asked Bellevue Press’s editorial director, Erika Goldman (below right), how many copies of the trade paperback edition have been sold since its January publication. She said, “8,000, and we’re about to go back to press a third time for a total in print of 12,500.”

To put that number in perspective, I remember back in the Big Bubble ’80s when the marketing director of Knopf told my colleague Bill Chleboun and me how dispiriting it was to send out a first printing of 3000-3500 hardcovers for first novels and see most of the copies returned in three months.

Even Knopf with its elegant reputation for discovering gifted authors could not generate enough hardcover sales to keep those books from sinking through the slats.  So for Bellevue Press to reach 12,500 in three printings only two months after publication is pretty sensational.

Weaning Off Hardcovers

Could trade paperbacks like “Tinkers” become the norm? Could a publisher just stop publishing hardcovers first, and begin most books’ lives with trade paperback editions?

“I admit it’s taken a while to get the ‘hardcovers first’ notion beaten out of me,” said Erika on the phone from her tiny office at Bellevue Literary Press in New York.

A veteran editor from the mainstream (Simon & Schuster, Charles Scribner’s Sons), Erika added,  “I was raised with the idea that if you don’t publish a hardcover first, you’re not going to get review attention. But distributing with Consortium has taught me a lot. I asked them point blank if there were any books that should be published hardcover first, and they said, ‘Other than art books, not really.’

“So we had the strange experience at Bellevue Literary Press of doing our first fiction books in hardcover because I was trying to wean myself off an old need. From then on we’ve been focusing on publishing fiction in trade paperback exclusively.”

Erika didn’t have to convince an acqusitions committee or pub board to go along with her. With her assistant editor, she is one of two full-time staff members, having co-founded Bellevue Literary Press with Dr. Jerome Lowenstein (below left), a faculty member at New York University School of Medicine, about three years ago.

How Bellevue Started

If you’re wondering whether the “Bellevue” of the title refers to the nation’s first public hospital (the one where all the crazies and the killers allegedly used to go), you’re right: Bellevue Hospital, now 271 years old, is both a general hospital whose ER is filled with patients handcuffed to stretchers and a modern medical center affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine.

For many years, third-year medical students at NYU School of Medicine have been required to write essays about their experiences with patients – not clinical experience, mind you (“3 mg Percodan administered 0500 hours”) but personal experience, the kind that inspired philosophic and poetic meditations.

Over the years these writings have been so eloquent that in 2001, The Bellevue Literary Review was created, consisting of student writings and outside submissions. The BLR, which continues to publish poetry, fiction and nonfiction twice a year, in turn generated discussions about whether NYUSM could publish books, and voila, the Bellevue Literary Press was born in 2007.

Most of Bellevue’s 20+ titles are decidedly not about health advice or medical advancements. (“We don’t publish popular reference titles at all,” says Erika, “only narrative nonfiction and fiction.”) Like the BLR pieces, the titles are loosely related to medicine and other sciences. Manuscripts qualify for submission if they “tell us something about the human condition.”

“Tinkers,” for example, is ostensibly about epilepsy and the way it was treated in the 1920s. But the writing is so dense with ideas that epilepsy is only a lens by which Harding examines much larger issues –  humanity’s bent for harnessing chaos, for example,  and what we learn when order tends to, you know, blow up in our faces.  (See complete and better written review next time.)

Drawing the Reader In

With its look-closer illustration of a distant, lone man walking toward a forest in a vast blanket of snow on the front cover (see above) and praise not only from Marilynne Robinson but Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and a starred review from Publishers Weekly on the back, “the package draws people in,” Erika Goldman says, “and when they start reading, they can’t leave.”

Using a hardcover to reach those readers, adds Erika, would have been a mistake. “We think it’s more important to get as many readers as possible, and with the price point for the paperback,  we can still make the book beautiful.

“Bellevue Press titles don’t have to be hardcovers to be appealing objects as books, and we believe very much in the book as a beautiful object. That doesn’t mean we’re not responding to the whole electronic-download world, because we are. But we also want our physical books to be cherished, and you can do that with a beautiful trade paperback.

“So I don’t feel that we’re sacrificing any of our aesthetics by publishing in trade paperback first – I think we’re freeing ourselves up to respond to the market in a way that we can’t as easily when we do hardcover.”

A Loaded Question

I asked Erika this obviously loaded question: “After your many years with mainstream and corporate publishers, do you feel that working out of your tiny office for a tiny independent house has changed the way you think about the book industry?”

“I felt the difference immediately,” she said. “My first BookExpo after the founding of Bellevue Literary Press was like coming home to all the passion and all the quirkiness and all the originality that leads to a lot of unusual titles. For me it’s that counterintuitive energy that book publishing is all about. At BEA it was just so exciting to be in the [small press] aisle rather than running up and down the stodgy, stuffy, uptight, besuited corporate aisles.”

[How I love that word "besuited."]

Still, I said,  Consortium sells a huge number of titles coming from dozens of other presses to quite a number of bookstores. Don’t you worry about Bellevue’s books getting lost in the shuffle?

Erika: “You know what I used to worry about? A lot of jaded people in mainstream publishing who would say, every time you express enthusiasm about your titles, ‘Yeah, well, show me another one. It’s a very different attitude at Consortium, and much more rewarding from my perspective.  I’ve never worked with a sales group that’s more service oriented and responsive and impassioned.

“I’ve always been a mid-list editor so I tend to treat every one of my titles as an individual labor of love. Of course I’ve published books for commercial reasons, but for the most part I’ve worked on lists that I’ve crafted and that have been expressive of my sensibilities and vision. Trying to get attention for that part of the list is never easy, but at Consortium, that’s what they’re about. I don’t have to make excuses for it.”

Erika Goldman adds that she’s not a one-person show. “Our wonderful assistant editor, Leslie Hodgkins, manages much of the list, and we have a fabulous consultant, Janna Rademacher, doing publicity and marketing. I’ve felt it was essential to pursue all phases of the publishing process, especially when so much momentum can get word of this trade paperback out to an audience that will take a chance on it.”

Next column: A review of “Tinkers,” a book that will haunt me as long as I live.

I may end up posing quite a number of Things I’d Love to See in the publishing industry, but a recent email from an editor in New York points out what a tangled knot mainstream publishing has become — too tangled, it seems, to make any substantive changes. 

The editor’s message responds to a recent column about publishers ending the tradition of publishing a book in hardcover first, then waiting a year for the trade paperback (if any). I proposed that publishers start with the cheaper but still beautiful trade paperback edition first. Especially for books by unknown or midlist authors, the already wasteful practice of publishing hardcovers seems senseless.

And now that money is short, readers are far more likely to take a chance on trade paperbacks; book reviewers who used to require hardcovers (honestly! I haven’t heard that one in 20 years) have been overtaken by bloggers who LOVE paperbacks; and since even publishers dismiss hardcovers as “promotional copies for the trade paperback,” my thought is: Just reverse the process.

Here’s what the editor from mainstream house has to say about that: “If you want to push the idea of trade paper originals, perhaps you could examine how authors expectations’ for an advance would have to adjust, and perhaps how publishers might also try more dynamic royalty approaches rather than the industry standard royalty, which is 7.5% for tradepaper.”

Well, okay! I thought. A few adjustments on either side (author/publisher), and off we go. 

But no. It’s not that agents and authors I talked to don’t love the idea – they do. Rather the old suspicions that have been built into an adversarial relationship for centuries come crawling to the fore.

“I’d be fine with it [the idea of publishing trade paperback editions first],” said one agent. “If the publisher offers a bigger advance because after all, the author is taking the risk so the publisher can save money; and if the publisher supports a real marketing campaign that explains to reviewers and booksellers and interviewers why choosing a trade paperback format does not mean the book is substandard (because everybody thinks hardcovers are top of the line), and if the publisher sends the author out on both real and virtual book tours to make it clear the trade paperback form is better when it’s the first off the press, then we’d consider it.” 

Yikes. Well, let’s go back to the publishing side. When I asked the editor to give me an example of “more dynamic royalty approaches” the response was, “I don’t really  have any answers.” And then came the usual criticism:

“The argument for the trade-paperback-only is an old one, and it always starts from the consumers’ point a view. Which isn’t a bad place to start! It doesn’t overcome the structural problems: reviewers favor hardcovers, and some review organs have ruled out paperbacks altogether. Bookstores also tend to favor hardcover display space over paperbacks (note which format comes first as you walk into the store). And the financial model that authors and agents and publishers are used to argues against it: the royalties generate more slowly; the costs are amortized more slowly.”

Well, the booksellers I talked to agree only this far: Everybody makes more money from hardcovers, when they sell. If the books just sit there because nobody knows about them or about the author, no matter how hard the bookstore’s staff gets behind them, sales are hardly going to be brisk. 

“Of course we display hardcovers at the front of the store!” a bookseller said impatiently. “They’re the newest books from the publisher. Then you go to the reprints.”

So here is my problem. Until publishers make an orchestrated and committed (and hyped) effort to change, and appeal to colleagues (not adversaries) in the book trade to change, too, nothing is going to happen. 

(I know the old argument: Joining together to create industry-wide change could be called collusion and we’d all be sued! Okay, so don’t join together. Somebody make a decision. It would take only one of the big houses to start the ball rolling before the other houses would follow. We know this because the model is so familiar:  Whenever some new thing, like say, books with “YOU” in the title, or dogs in the text or vampires on the cover, hits a nerve, then they all do it. That’s the way things work in publishing.)

I’m hardly the first to say that resistance to change is going to be the doom of mainstream publishing. But I admit it’s just beginning to sink in that Internet publishing has taken off so fast that New York publishers may have only five or six years before the empire really starts to crumble. 

Of course they’re all making concessions to new ways of publishing on the Internet, but in terms of setting out those “dynamic new approaches” that are needed right  now – come on, it’s the Obama era, for crying out loud – I worry that a new kind of paralysis is setting in.

(I began the series with Three Things I’d Love to See, but in the midst of a failing economy I think there are probably going to be quite a few more – you know, about 16. This one I’ve thought about for years and could easily have made the top three.)

Here’s why I know a book industry era has come to an end: One publisher after another keeps referring to hardcover books as “promotional copies for the paperback edition.”

Yes, hardcover books are selling so poorly that their only use for publishers is to get reviews, book interviews for the author and pave the way for a trade paperback edition that the real audience can afford.

True, the few hardcover books that hit bestseller lists can pay off big time, but these are known commercial hits that are worth giant marketing budgets from the beginning. Or so publishers think.

It’s a much more dangerous risk to try making an unknown author’s book a bestseller, which is why “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” (before Oprah) was so thrilling: Ecco/Harper knew exactly how to manipulate the formula of big-sprawling-summer-novel+Hamlet gimmick+beautiful-writing+struggling author backstory+DOGS DOGS DOGS = Must Read.

A larger truth, however, is that mid-list and serious literary books by lesser-known authors rarely find their audience in hardcover. Those adventurous readers who watch and clip reviews, look for new voices and love heated book-group discussions most often wait for the paperback, and who can blame them? The cost of a hardcover book after sales tax is about $30. The cost of a trade paperback after sales tax is about $15.

Every few months or so I like to save up $100 and spend it on books that call out to me in an independent bookstore. I never ask myself: Would I like to purchase 3 books for that amount, or 6 books. (Okay, granted, I often end up spending $200 for hardcovers I can’t wait to read but that’s another story.) 

Reasons to Stop

What would it take to stop publishing hardcovers right off the bat and start with the trade paperback as the original first edition? 

First off, it would save a lot of money at the bindery. Publishers could print enough sheets to cover a small hardcover printing for the institutional (library, etc.) sale. They could release the trade paperback with pride as the first and most affordable horse out of the starting gate. The more copies it sold, the more it would become what we used to call permanent backlist (trade talk for a long-term spot in every reader’s heart). As people began to buy the hardcover edition – for gifts,  or for their personal libraries (yes, readers still have them) – the title would begin to earn its way into increased hardcover publication.  

Years ago in the 1980s a number of publishers established original fiction lines in trade paperback and tried to market their young, unproven authors to  young, adventurous readers. As I recall, the experiment was a disaster because the process became so labor intensive (just to build up sales from ones and twos) that publishers decided the whole procedure got too costly. What they missed was that too many houses went after too small an audience at the same time. 

This is the sour taste that’s still in their mouths when publishers look at me aghast and say, “Stop starting with hardcovers?” Why, you can’t reverse the system so abruptly; it would take millions to reeducate the audience, let alone the media; the few book reviewers/interviewers left wouldn’t take the book seriously; booksellers would kill us; Oprah would hate it; agents would leave us, and so on.

In other words, more defenses, but come on. Oprah would love to tell her viewers they can save money on the books she loves from now on. Booksellers I’ve talked to say that if the original trade paperback “turns” twice as fast as the hardcover, no problem. Agents want higher numbers than hardcover sales can produce. Book bloggers are readers and they love trade paperbacks, as much as their audience. And besides: What book reviewers? What media? 

How to Start

One way is for publishers to start cutting back on selected hardcovers – and I don’t mean the ones they pile up in stacks at the front door of chain bookstores (and pay through the nose to do it) in the deluded belief that people buy more copies when they see big mountains of the things on the sales floor. 

I mean the titles that independent bookstores still buy in twos and threes with little hope of getting them unloaded. I mean the books that publishers know are going to make it or break it in trade paper, not hardcover. I mean keep decreasing the first printing of hardcovers and put whatever promotion you can afford behind the trade paperback. We used to call these “simultaneous” print runs, and with today’s inventory and printing technology, a close watch on sales can cover all the bases.

I think one of the most painful experiences for any customer today is to walk around the New Release table and drool over unknown new hardcovers that just aren’t worth the risk. 

But one of the flat-out joys for that same customer is to walk around the New Releases in trade paperback and start picking them up with anticipation because for 15 bucks, at least one unknown title that looks promising and special is going home with a very excited reader.

P.S. I just want to add that I’m a big fan of hardcover books in the old way, which is to say that even when trade paperbacks caught on, hardcover books were cherished for their durability and permanence, gave the publisher some security with automatic library sales and made a statement about posterity just by being bound. 

That statement to prospective authors was this: You can write a very good piece in a newspaper or a very good article in a magazine. But when you write a full-length book with sewn signatures and (sometimes even leather) bindings, not to mention expensive jackets just to keep the dust off, you are writing for the ages, and you better be great.