ArtsBeat

Last summer when Buffalo area based BlazeVox Books found itself in a bit of a cash squeeze, poet, editor and avant garde publisher Geoffrey Gatza, who also happens to be a Culinary Institute of America trained gourmet chef, retired a considerable portion of its debt with a "carbohydrate bailout," a toothsome book raffle and bake sale.

A few weeks later, when Buffalo novelist Ted Pelton (Malcolm & Jack) faced a similar predicament with his acclaimed Starcherone Books, a publisher of independent, innovative fiction, the remedy was a time-honored Buffalo blue-collar tradition, a donor sponsored garage sale.

I don't mean to make light of the dire financial circumstances facing many of our leading corporate publishers and booksellers--there are many talented people whose careers and very livelihoods are at stake--but amid the many gloom and doom stories circulating this week, it's important to remember that it's possible to publish serious poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on a shoestring budget.

This week, on what the publishing industry is already referring to as "Black Wednesday," Becky Saletan, the highly regarded publisher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's trade books division, resigned from her position effective Dec. 10th in a move widely believed to be related to the HMH's decision to suspend all book acquisitions indefinitely until its bottom line and retail market conditions improved.  Among the major authors currently under contract to Houghton Mifflin are Philip Roth, Gunter Grass, Jose' Saramago, and Jonathan Safran Foer. 

The announcement of Ms Saletan's departure coincided with announcements of layoffs by Simon & Schuster and corporate shake up at Random House that will reduce its number of its principal divisions from five to three: The Random House Publishing Group, the longtime home to E.L. Doctorow and Maya Angelou; the Knopf Publishing Group, the prestigious literary publisher of Toni Morrison and John Updike; and the Crown Publishing Group, known for nonfiction and political authors such as Ann Coulter and a certain best-selling memoirist turned politician named Barack Obama.  Among the high profile Random House executives whose jobs are being eliminated are Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of Bantam Dell, which published genre fiction and mass market paperbacks, and Steve Rubin, publisher of Doubleday Publishing Group, which represents best selling authors including John Grisham and Dan Brown.

Perhaps the single, most salient detail in all the reportage of publishing business woes in recent weeks was buried in the final paragraph of the New York Times story about Saletan's departure (Houghton Mifflin Publisher Resigns - NYTimes.com ).   In the piece Jeremy Dickens, President of Educational Media Inc., formerly known as the Riverdeep Group, the private equity firm based in Dublin, Ireland that purchased Houghton Mifflin in 2006, estimated that HMH was $7 billion in debt, which costs it over $500 million a year in interest payments to service.

$7 billion in debt?  What in the name of Johannes Gutenberg ever happened in the book business to create that kind of operating overhead?  I realize that in the world of arbitrage and venture capital such figures are tossed about routinely, but for my money the death of literacy in our consumer driven culture began when corporate media raiders began acquiring the traditional old line publishing houses in the 1980's.  When literature became a commodity, the losers, dear readers, were all of us.

--R.D. Pohl