BEA: Adventures in the Book Trade — Jun 12th 2007

By James Marcus

Outside the Jacob Javits Convention Center, it was another scorching day in Manhattan. Inside, where an estimated 36,000 editors, booksellers, authors, journalists, and publicists would be commingling throughout the weekend, it was more tolerable--like a mild afternoon in the tropics. Welcome to Book Expo America, the publishing industry's annual romp, where the written word (along with an ocean of ancillary products) is the most desirable commodity on earth.


I spent three days roving the cavernous aisles, harvesting galleys, trinkets, pencils, tote bags, and at least one glass of champagne. I dodged in and out of panels, and when I could, I collared various industry bigwigs for a few moments of diagnostic chat. The first of these was Steve Wasserman, who's worn a good many hats during a long career in the trade: he ran both Hill & Wang and Times Books, then became editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and is now a literary agent. What, I asked him, was the state of the industry? And where was the good news?

Wasserman, noted both for the fluency of his conversation and for his cream-colored suit (not present), did acknowledge some of the obstacles facing the business. Sales were flat, independent booksellers were struggling, and the slight bump in profits was probably due to inflationary pricing. Yet there was a silver or at least anodized aluminum lining. "I'm confident that storytelling will not soon disappear," he told me. "We're given to it as a species--it's how we make sense of ourselves. But I am concerned that the arts of reading are being very challenged in an increasingly clamorous world. The ability to attend to long-form narrative is under siege. We may end up with a republic of writers, but no readers."

This wasn't the good news I was seeking. Hoping to avert any more gloom and doom, I changed gears and asked Wasserman how his new role differed from his nearly nine-year tenure at the LATBR. "I had a very privileged, even spoiled, existence at the Book Review," he replied. "Among all the pressures that existed there, making a profit was never among them. And the Book Review lost a million dollars per year." This last statistic he seemed to pronounce with a kind of perverse satisfaction. "As an agent, well, I have to pay the rent. I have to go out and find the talent--and must appraise not only its editorial merit but its commercial worth."


Wasserman, who called his new career "a form of literary midwifery," didn't dwell on the fiscal pressures that continue to drive indies out of business. Karl Pohrt, who has run the Shaman Drum Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for nearly thirty years, dwelled on little else. "I'm an optimist by temperament," he said, mopping his brow in the ABA lounge. "But this is an extremely volatile sector of the economy. And my nightmare is that the book industry will go down the same road as the music industry."

Pohrt was referring not only to competition from online retailers, but to the challenges posed by digital technology. Obviously the music industry has been hit harder by the explosion of file sharing and infinite duplication. But what happens to your local bookstore when texts can be downloaded, printed, and elegantly bound by a sort of quivering Rube Goldberg apparatus? Pohrt and his fellow booksellers would cross that bridge when they came to it. Meanwhile, there were more immediate challenges, and a shifting competitive landscape.

"The remaining indies have learned to be better businesspeople," Pohrt conceded. "They've learned how to survive by specializing. I now specialize in scholarly and academic texts, but it could be almost anything." He has also learned to fight high-tech fire with fire, at least to a certain extent, transforming Shaman Drum into what he calls a "clicks-and-bricks store." With his inventory available via the Internet, Porht can do business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and remain competitive with the Online Retailer Who Must Not Be Named. And he too remained sanguine about the written word itself: "The book is still your best bang for the buck."

Was it? I wandered over to a panel on The Future of Book Culture, moderated by Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson, and listened to David Ulin (Wasserman's successor at the LATBR) grapple with the topic at hand. Book culture, he said, involved "people who define their experience on the planet through the filter of the word. It's a way of thinking. I don't believe it's at risk, but it has reached an evolutionary moment." Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic agreed, even as he lamented the way books have drifted away from the cultural sweet spot. There were times, he admitted, when he felt like a manufacturer of stained-glass windows. "But books will always be with us," he concluded. That was a dictum I could live with. More ominous was the one offered a few minutes later by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch: "Resisting change always ends badly."

I took another spin around the floor. I drifted by the C-SPAN bus, whose elaborate, nonfiction-friendly interior I've described before, and studied the green Eric Clapton guitar being raffled off by the folks at Broadway. (Did I enter the contest? Of course.) Then I bought a hot dog for lunch on the mezzanine. Looking out over the scurrying crowds below, it was hard to believe that books could truly be an endangered medium.


That was certainly the opinion of David Kipen, formerly book columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, now Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts. "Book culture is healthy and getting healthier," he insisted, without any of the apocalyptic ambivalence I had heard throughout the day. "But there are vast swathes of the country where people don't even know what they're missing by not reading. Their only option is to drive forty miles to a Wal-Mart, which will mostly be stocked with bestsellers."

Was this a geographical division? Were the red states and blue states about to be pried even further apart? Not at all, Kipen told me. We were dealing with smaller-than-average towns or cities in many different parts of the country. Enterprise, Oregon. Galesburg, Illinois. Norman, Oklahoma. All of these locales had participated in the NEA's Big Read initiative, and by now the agency was getting more applications than it could handle. "That gives us the luxury of picking those cities with untapped potential to create readers," Kipen noted. "We want to get the non-readers, the lapsed readers."

To do so, Kipen and his colleagues have resorted to some unusual tactics. "We're shameless hucksters," he noted, and described the antique car parade they staged in one Arkansas community to whip up interest in The Great Gatsby. (There were flapper parties as well.) In Oklahoma, the NEA printed excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath on placemats, and distributed them to every greasy spoon in the area. Farenheit 451, with its nightmarish imagery of burning books, has now been flogged in various fire stations around the country. And when that wasn't available, Kipen shifted his base of operations to the non-thematic Krispy Kreme franchise, or to local bars and laundromats.

Kipen sailed away, possibly to promote The Unbearable Lightness of Being at a trampoline store. I now felt the book would survive, at least until the next BEA in Los Angeles. But I found myself wondering where the growth sectors were. Wasserman had mentioned general fiction, and Karl Pohrt had been even more specific--neuroscience was evidently something of a hot ticket. Now, as I slipped into my final panel of the day, I realized that I had stumbled across the hottest ticket of all: atheism.


As I entered the packed room, Christopher Hitchens was mellifluously putting organized religion to the torch. "Clericalism is stultifying and ruining our culture," he told the audience, most of them chuckling atheists clutching their copies of God Is Not Great, at that moment the bestselling book in the United States."Who needs justice when you have piffle? Who needs evidence when you have tripe?" The panel included a couple of other non-believers, including scientist Victor Stenger and author Nica Lalli (Nothing: Something to Believe In), but Hitchens was the undeniable star, giving God such an eloquent thrashing that I actually began to feel sorry for Him. Even the spiritual comforts tendered to the dying were tucked briskly into the trash can: "Lying to the dying is, I think, even more disgusting than lying to the healthy."

And what, finally, of the publishers? I headed for the parking lot, whose humidity and fiery temperatures suggested the surface of Venus, and was lucky to cross paths with one Dick Anderson, who declared himself "the smallest publisher here--we have no staff at all." His list was limited to a single product, the Pig A Day: Icons of Barbecue desk calendar. When I asked him how the BEA had gone, he sounded a little mixed. "No sales. Plenty of contacts. But that's why we have a six-foot-tall, Gloria-Swanson-inspired cutout of a pig here." And where would he and his wares be going next? "I've been working the barbecue community," he replied. "It's kind of a smelly underground." I couldn't top that. So I shouldered my books and went home.

Tags: bea, books, christopher hitchens, david kipen, karl pohrt, steve wasserman

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