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By Root 774 0

shopping carts, checkout counters, and hours that kept the stores open seven days a week until late at night, instead of being closed on just those days and at just those times when ordinary people might be free to buy a book, which had always been the traditional way of selling books. It was as if the American genius for merchandising, which had invented discounting and the supermarket in the first place, had at last been directed toward that most ancient piece of merchandise, the book, with startling results.

The immediate effect was not necessarily to enlarge the pool of readers (or to make the average American reader any more inclined than before to buy literary first novels or translations of European fiction) but to deal an almost fatal blow to the mass-market paperback business. Readers who had formerly been willing to wait a year to read major best-selling writers in paperback now “moved up” to hardcover books in droves, as discounting pushed the price of best-sellers down. In any case, it was not just the price of hardcover books that had kept many readers from buying them—previously, many bookstores had been hostile to the kind of people who bought big best-selling fiction in paperback. There was a certain snobbery to selling books, and many bookstores found it easy to make potential customers feel uncomfortable and out of place. The new bookstores solved this problem by emulating that most user-friendly of familiar (and classless) institutions, the supermarket. It worked so well that for a while it was hard to find mass-market books in any quantity except in major airports.

IN THE meantime, the computer—which in some publishers’ doomsday scenario had replaced motion pictures and television as the invention that would bring the printed word to the end of its long run—turned out instead to offer publishers significant advantages, and not just as a business tool. The computer brought about a long-awaited revolution in the way manuscripts were processed. The illegible, intractable, smudged, and grimy pages that made up most manuscripts had always defied rationalization. It was a fact recognized with a sigh of resignation that the better a writer was, the more sloppy his or her manuscript was likely to be. Since the age of Gutenberg, copy editors and printers had gone blind before their time in the struggle to decode page after page of manuscript and render it correctly in type.

The archetype of the writing genius who wrote all his books in a crabbed, illegible hand was Tolstoy, whose pages were typed on a primitive typewriter by the unfortunate Countess Tolstoy, who alone could decipher his handwriting. Much corrected by him, these pages were then sent to Tolstoy’s publisher in Moscow, where printers puzzled over each line and handwritten change, crossed themselves and hoped for the best, then set it all in type. Tolstoy then corrected and rewrote in galley proofs, not once but over and over again, his changes and additions circling tortuously round and round the margins of the galley sheets until they took on the appearance of the Dead Sea Scrolls or perhaps a black-and-white work by Jackson Pollock. When Tolstoy was completing War and Peace, he did this so many times that his exasperated publisher finally sent a telegram to him in Yasnaya Polyana that read simply: DEAR LEV NIKOLAYEVICH—IN THE NAME OF GOD, STOP!

Things had not changed much if at all in all the time since Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. The speed with which a manuscript could be turned into a book was still dependent on hand labor and good eyesight, and printers and copy editors alike were of necessity outrageously overeducated for their jobs. It was common enough for copy editors to be fluent in several languages and more knowledgeable about most things than the vast majority of the writers whose work they edited—indeed, most authors depended on the copy editor to make sure their dates were correct, their quotations in order, their notes properly done, and to save them in short from mistakes, ignorance, and carelessness. Given the amount of time