Posts Tagged ‘books’
“No one’s gonna tell me how to write. I’m gonna write the way I wanna write!”*…
Gill Paul on two pioneering women who revolutionized the book world…
During the Sixties, book publishing, like the rest of the country, was undergoing an upheaval. That venerable industry was at the beginning of a dramatic changing of the guard that would affect the staff they hired, the authors they published, and the way books were marketed to the reading public. And at the heart of it there were two trailblazing women, Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins.
In previous decades, publishing had been a refined gentleman’s business, peopled by well-educated men of independent means—figures such as Bennett Cerf, Horace Liveright, and Alfred A. Knopf who cared about Literature with a capital L. Knopf famously declared that he intended to publish “the best literature, whether it sold or not.” They acted on hunches, made deals over long lunches, and worked with authors to develop their long-term careers, even if their earliest books flopped.
Then, in 1959, the money men of Wall Street, sniffing around for the next bonanza, alighted on books. When Alfred A. Knopf’s company was absorbed into Random House in 1960, it was only the first of a series of mergers and acquisitions that would transform publishing from a career for literary gentlemen into a corporate money-making machine.
As an immediate result of the M&As, publishers had more cash to wave around, so they could offer big advances to authors whom they guessed (and it was largely guesswork) would be capable of delivering big sales. To find them, they began to rely on agents, who pushed the prices even higher. The corporate honchos wanted fast returns on their big bucks, so the books had to be what became known as ‘blockbusters’—incidentally, a term that originated during the war for bombs capable of destroying entire blocks.
Enter Jacqueline Susann. She knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote Valley of the Dolls, a thick, gossipy novel, which contained scenes of drug abuse and ‘kinky’ sex, and had leading characters said to have been based on famous actresses of the day (Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, and Carole Landis). Her sex is pretty tame compared to later bestsellers like Fifty Shades, but it was radical for its time. Legal judgements on previously banned books Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959) and Tropic of Cancer (1964) had established that the courts did not have the right to suppress a book so long as it had literary merit.
Jacqueline Susann and, a couple of years later, Jackie Collins, were inspired by the sexy soap opera-style novels being produced by Harold Robbins, to great sales if not great reviews. “My only criticism of his books,” Collins said, “Was that his women were either in the kitchen or the bedroom.” Both Susann and Collins wrote about strong women with their own careers, who took control in the boardroom as in the bedroom, and demanded athletic performances from their men. Their subjects weren’t ladylike; they were raw and honest and sometimes the stories ended in tears, reflecting the way women’s real lives were being transformed but adding a splash of aspirational glamour…
…
… It was partly due to the two Jackies that publishers finally clocked there was a vast female audience for novels—and that they didn’t want challenging literary works from pompous white men. They wanted to be entertained by stories about women who faced similar life crises to them, and the best people to write those stories were other women.
Back in 1960, only 18 per cent of all books published in the US were written by women but, as publishers cottoned onto their female audience, strategies began to change: by 1970, a third of all books were by women and by 2021 that had risen to 50.45%. The divide is even starker in fiction: today, roughly three-quarters of published novels are written by women and roughly 80 per cent of fiction readers are women. There’s still a long way to go in terms of diversity, but novels by people of different social and ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientation are increasingly being championed by publishers.
While they were looking for female authors for a female readership, publishers were forced to reflect on the fact that their in-house decision-makers were almost exclusively male. If women were employed at all, it was in low-paid secretarial posts where they could use their home-maker skills to bring tea for the boys. Gradually, a few women managed to maneuver themselves from clerical to editorial positions but they were still excluded from the upper echelons of management, and equal pay was a distant pipe dream. The transformation took decades but now, women form the majority of the workforce in publishing: 78 per cent of editorial staff are female and 92% of publicists, according to a 2021 UK Publishers’ Association diversity study—though most of them are still white and cisgender. And on average they are paid less than employees in other communication industries.
Publishing is constantly evolving and seems likely to become more diverse in future; it’s unthinkable that it would ever revert to an exclusive gentleman’s club. And among the people responsible for this change were Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins….
Credit where credit is due: “How Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins Changed the Face of Publishing,” from @GillPaulAUTHOR in @lithub.
* Jacqueline Susann
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As we turn the page, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that a woman who had her own massive impact on publishing tied the knot: Margaret Mitchell– the author of Gone With the Wind, of which over 30 million copies have been sold– married Berrien (“Red”) Kinnard Upshaw… in a union that may have contributed to Mitchell’s portrayal of the Scarlett-Rhett union.
Upshaw was an Annapolis drop out who supported himself bootlegging out of the Georgia mountains. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw’s alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after the best man at their wedding, John Marsh, gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924. Then (in a Susann/Collins-worthy twist), Mitchell and Marsh were married the following year.
“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”*…
But how do books become timeless, how do books become classics? And what relationship do they have to the best sellers and award winners of their time? Author Lincoln Michel has some thoughts…
Recently after a literary event, I was hanging out with some other writers and a conversation about older books led to a parlor game. One of us would read the titles of bestselling novels from a few decades ago and everyone else would try to guess the authors’ names. It was hard. Even with hints. We switched to National Book Award finalists, thinking we’d be more likely to remember acclaimed books than merely popular ones. We did marginally better. A couple titles were easy—your Pale Fires and The Haunting of Hill Houses—but most were not remembered. What was more surprising than the fact we couldn’t match names to (once) famous books was that many of the authors themselves were completely obscure, especially to the younger people present. We were writers and professors. If we didn’t remember these authors, who did? The conversation moved on but I think everyone came away with a reminder: literary fame is fickle and fleeting.
(Here, try it yourself. I’ll list the 6 National Book Award finalists for 1967 followed by the top 6 bestsellers of that year. NBA: The Fixer, The Embezzler, All in the Family, The Last Gentleman, A Dream of Kings, Office Politics. Bestsellers: The Arrangement, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Chosen, Topaz, Christy, The Eighth Day. Many readers will probably know the authors of Nat Turner and perhaps The Fixer, but the others?)
I remembered this as I watched the debates about whether or not popular recent novels like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games will be read “in 100 years.” I don’t really care much about either series, but I am always a little surprised at how confident many are that what is popular now must necessarily be popular in the future. This is rarely the case. Few things endure, after all. And 100 years is quite a long time. 1924 is an almost unrecognizable world. The differences in technology, global politics, and culture are hard to grasp. This was a time period when vaudeville was still one of the most popular art forms and feature films barely even a thing. Those 100 years have seen the rise and fall of empires and much of culture move to entirely different technologies (video games, television, the internet, etc.) What will the world even look like in 100 years?
I’ll save the speculation for a science fiction novel, I suppose. But even limiting ourselves to literature, it’s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. Acclaim has a bit better track record—the names of early Pulitzer Prize winners are more familiar than the names of bestselling novels of the 1920s for example—but neither is a guarantee of anything…
… But it isn’t just some popular works that disappear. It is even the most popular ones. The Harry Potters and MCU films of yesteryear. Take Zane Grey, who was the most popular author of the most popular genre (Westerns) in his day. Grey was one of the first millionaire authors ever and his novels were adapted into over 100 films. He was so popular and prolific that even though he died in 1939 his publisher had a stockpile of manuscripts they published yearly until 1963! Almost no one reads him today.
Grey’s slip to obscurity points to one of the whims of literary fortune: genres rise and fall. Last month, I talked about how quickly the market moves in the near term—how writing toward the market often means you are writing for a market that will have moved on by the time your book comes out—and this is far more pronounced in the long run. The Western was once a dominant genre in American film, TV, and literature. Today? Not so much. There is the occasional work of course, but the Western’s prominence has been replaced by genres like superhero films and YA SFF. In 100 years, those genres may feel just as antiquated.
I could go on and on with examples of how art fades. Perhaps the most interesting question is what makes something endure. What makes a work speak through time to multiple eras and contexts? There are certainly works from 1924—100 years ago—that are read today: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, multiple books by Agatha Christie, etc. I would like to think that quality helps determine what lasts yet it is obviously more than that. Melville and Kafka, for example, both went through long periods of obscurity before being “rediscovered” decades after their deaths. They are two of my favorite writers, but I have to sadly admit it is possible they will lapse into obscurity again in the future (and perhaps be rediscovered yet again and then forgotten again and so on).
To offer a theory though, I think what lasts is almost always what has a dedicated following among one or more of the following: artists, geeks, academics, critics, and editors. “Gatekeepers” of various types, if you like. Artists play the most important role in what art endures because artists are the ones making new art. Indirectly, they popularize styles and genres and make new fans seek out older influences. Directly, artists tend to tout their influences and encourage their fans to explore them. In literature that takes the form of essays, introductions to reissues, and so forth. In music, it might be something like cover albums as in the way Nirvana’s Unplugged introduced a new generation to older bands and musicians. Academics is pretty obvious. The older books with the best sales are mostly ones that appear on syllabi. And geeks and critics are the ones who extensively explore a genre or category’s history and proselytize their favorites. Editors are the ones who actually chose the older books to republish and can champion obscure books back into the public eye…
[ Michel considers the case of H. P. Lovecraft and other horror writers, starting with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein…]
… if you want to predict what will last I think you should look to what has partisans among dedicated readers—scholars, critics, genre nerds, etc.—rather than what merely sells well with casual readers. Specialists not popularists. And then what work seems influential among younger artists, such as work that seems foundational in a certain style or subgenre. That’s might get you in the ballpark, even if you will strike out more with most swings.
Another way for a work to endure is through the randomness of popularity in another medium. Many books last simply because a film or TV adaptation is popular, although often the books are simply eclipsed. Many younger people probably don’t even realize that Jaws and The Godfather were originally popular novels. (Film/TV can also popularize things in amusingly random ways. Recently, an anime show with characters named after older Japanese writers led to a surprising revival in the sales of Osamu Dazai’s novels…. merely because he shares a name with a character.)
Lastly, I do have to acknowledge that we currently live in the “franchise era” in which the biggest works are not actually individual works by individual artists, but sprawling multimedia empires with video games, movies, TV shows, action figures, and even amusement parks attached. Perhaps this means that the rare super franchises—your James Bonds and Harry Potters and Star Warses—can never die. I’m not entirely convinced. Even this shall likely pass. Time is fleeting. The brief candles flicker, even for sprawling multibillion corporate franchises. All we can do is write what we like and read what we love, and hope others like it too either now or in the future…
On the books that are remembered, rejected, repudiated, and rediscovered: “What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn’t Last,” from @TheLincoln.
* Clifton Fadiman
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As we contemplate the classics, we might send eerie birthday greeting to one of Michel’s examples, Mary Shelley; she was born on this date in 1797. The daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, she spent much of her life editing and promoting the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In 1814, Shelley eloped with then-17-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin… despite the fact that Shelley was already married. Shelley, the heir to his wealthy grandfather’s estate, had been expelled from Oxford for refusing to acknowledge authorship of a controversial essay. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a tavern owner, in 1811. But three years later, Shelley fell in love with the young Mary. Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe, marrying after Shelley’s wife committed suicide in 1816. Shelley’s inheritance did not pay all the bills, and the couple spent much of their married life abroad, fleeing Shelley’s creditors.
While living in Geneva, the Shelleys and their dear friend Lord Byron challenged each other to write a compelling ghost story. Only Mary Shelley finished hers– which she later published as Frankenstein.
Indeed, today is celebrated as Frankenstein Day.
“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore”*…
From Greg Ross, a helpful vocabulary lesson for those of us who would talk about people’s relationships with books…
rarissima
n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or printsIn The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:
- “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
- “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
- “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
- “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
- “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”
These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:
- bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
- bibliologue, one who discourses about books
- bibliotacte, a classifier of books
- bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”…
For the bibliophiles among us: “In a Word,” from Futility Closet.
(Image above: source)
* Thea Dorn
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As we love our labels, we might send eerie birthday greetings to Howard Phillips Lovecraft; he was born on this date in 1890. The creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, he was a pioneer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. H.P. Lovecraft was almost unknown in his lifetime, but has become one of the most influential writers of the Twentieth Century– Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, among many other writers, comic artists, and filmmakers, have all proclaimed their indebtedness.
“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”*…
With this post (and all best wishes for the season), your correspondent begins his annual Holiday hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around the New Year… In the hope that it’s helpful to those still searching for last-minute gifts, this, from the marvelous Tom Gauld…
And as a bonus, this appreciation of Jean Shepherd, the man whose work inspired (and fueled) that yuletide staple, A Christmas Story— and so much more: “The Old Man at Christmas“…
… Most of Shepherd’s career, particularly his first three decades on the radio, relied on riffing and improvisation, which makes for a vast but fairly evanescent archive. People often rewatch classic movies, and sometimes rewatch beloved old TV shows, but they very rarely replay old radio shows. The real marker of twentieth-century success always lay in syndication, and it’s there, a little late in the game, and in a medium that had otherwise eluded him, that Shepherd secured his legacy. In the petty grievances and joys of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in NPR-style storytelling, in everything that straddles the line between countercultural and popular representative of the monoculture, from Calvin and Hobbes to Steely Dan, echoes of his work can be found, so abundant and diffuse they can be easy to miss—but they’re everywhere you care to look…
Daniel M. Lavery in The New York Review of Books
* Neil Gaiman
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As we read, we might recall that it was on this date in 1882 that an associate of Thomas Edison, Edward Hibberd Johnson (President of the Edison Electric Light Company, a predecessor of Con Edison) lit and displayed the first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree at his home in New York City.
He had Christmas tree bulbs especially made for him–80 red, white, and blue electric light bulbs the size of walnuts, hand-wired around the tree. From that point on, electrically-illuminated Christmas trees, indoors and outdoors, grew in popularity in the United States and elsewhere. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. And in 1901, the Edison General Electric Company advertised the first commercially-produced Christmas tree lamps (manufactured in strings of nine sockets).
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library”*…
Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame? The redoubtable Robert Darnton reviews the equally-estimable Peter Baldwin‘s important new book, Athena Unbound- Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All…
In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization…
Darnton, who shares Baldwin’s goals of preservation and open access, unpacks the history of digital sharing/lending and of the forces massed to oppose it, and reviews the risks that attach, concluding in the end on a less optimistic (or at least, more complicated) note than Baldwin– a “dialogue” that’s enormously informative.
“The Dream of a Universal Library” (possible paywall; archived link here), from @RobertDarnton.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we accelerate access, we might send exquisitely-curated birthday greetings to Belle da Costa Greene; she was born on this date in 1879. A librarian, she managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Her life was a sad comment on access of another sort. Born to Black parents (her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first black student and first black graduate of Harvard [class of 1870], who ultimately served as dean of the Howard University School of Law), Greene passed for white. After she took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again and listed him as deceased on passport applications throughout the 1910s, despite his being alive until 1922.
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