Veterans of Publishing Campaigns Speak, and a Good Listener Records

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor with Grove Atlantic Publishers, has taken it upon himself to conduct, for Poets & Writers, a series of lengthy Q&A's with distinguished editors and literary agents whose careers exemplify values and virtues that are rapidly fading from the daily discourse of the publishing business. It is absolutely incumbent on every member of our community 40 years old or younger to listen to their voices and imbibe their experiences so that you can understand what publishing was like when men and women of charm, taste and integrity walked the earth.

Ferrari-Adler's most recent interview is with literary agent Georges Borchardt, who has represented and in some cases discovered such towering figures as Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, John Gardner, Charles Johnson, and even General de Gaulle.

A brief excerpt or two...

J F-A: Let's talk a little about the industry. You've been in it for several decades, over the course of which it's changed a lot, or at least that's what people seem to say. What's your take on that?

GB: It has changed. Mainly it's the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn't need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn't really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It's totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I'm saying doesn't apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can't hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he's in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they're better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

J F-A: What has that meant for writers?

GB: It's mainly meant that they've become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor's position is very precarious. You've already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there's no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what's on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn't know either. The whole climate has changed.

Ferrari-Adler has also interviewed literary agents Molly Friedrich, Nat Sobel and Lynn Nesbit, editors Janet Silver, Pat Strachan and Chuck Adams, plus a host of young editors and agents. Each Q&A is a gem, and their cumulative effect is to transport us to a culture that is every bit as worth preserving and revering as the our rapidly dwindling glaciers and forests.

Richard Curtis