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By Root 879 0

THE greatest mistake a publisher can make is to think in categories in the first place. Categories are the hallmark of mass-market publishing, in which it is necessary to stock the shelves with so many mysteries or so many science-fiction novels every month and in which the important thing is that the books themselves (and their covers) fit into a given category—the twenty-first novel in a paperback science-fiction series had better be as much like the previous twenty as possible, or there will be trouble from readers, jobbers, and retailers. In hardcover publishing, almost the reverse holds true, which explains (with a few notable exceptions) why so few mass-market people become successful hardcover editors or publishers. What works in hardcover is generally what is different, unexpected, and new, and even when people seem to be writing the same kind of book over and over again—as many best-selling novelists do—they need to be reinvented from time to time, and they can’t be imitated or cloned. Danielle Steel and Mary Higgins Clark write books that sell in the millions, but anybody setting out to create a stable of writers to provide books in their styles or following their formats would likely fail.

Doubleday was perhaps the only major hardcover house that succumbed to the notion of cranking out hardcover books in ever larger quantity, as if they were paperbacks. This might have been because Nelson Doubleday was more interested in his baseball team than in books, or possibly because Doubleday owned the Literary Guild, an enormously successful book club, and category publishing is the lifeblood of book clubs, or even because Doubleday owned its own printing plant, which needed to be kept busy. Whatever the reason, Doubleday became an unwieldy giant and for a time collapsed, until revived in a smaller form by a new owner—an object lesson, one would have thought, to everyone in the business.

But by the eighties, the prevailing opinion had changed. Big became better. What had limited the size of publishing houses was the sheer difficulty of obtaining information about thousands of different “products” and the amount of time it took for numbers from the field to work their way up to the desks of the people who made the decisions. Beyond a certain size, there was simply no way to keep track of things, and the publishing process either got out of control or had to be bound by so many rigid rules that it was unable to function, except when it came to the most obvious best-sellers.

The computer put an end to that concern. Information, such as it was—for the next step was to rationalize what people needed to know—was now almost instantly available, no matter how big the company was. The gray-haired old ladies with pencils in their hair gave way to casually dressed youngsters who knew how to run computers and get the numbers out of it in a form that a busy man could read and understand in an instant. As if by a magic wand, the gray-haired old ladies in accounting were fired and went home to Queens or Brooklyn or the suburbs of New Jersey, occasionally surfacing to write pathetic letters when something “their” company had done made news.

The computer changed everything, and the race for size—this time with management controls, s’il vous plaît—was on.

BY THE early eighties, Dick Snyder had hit his stride, and begun to move from the day-to-day grind of publishing books to the big time of corporate acquisition. In 1984, he acquired Esquire Corporation, buying everything except the magazine. He ended up with Allyn and Bacon, an educational publisher; a nontheatrical film company; a lighting company; a company that made storage cabinets; and what one of those involved in the purchase called “a few other dogs and cats.” Within a year all Esquire’s executives were history, and not long afterward so was everything Esquire had consisted of except Allyn and Bacon itself, which was to become the nucleus of S&S’s educational and informational business, which fifteen years later was to be sold for over four billion dollars.

Dick was on a