Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [294]
Dick had tried to do business with Maxwell before and nearly acquired Maxwell’s scientific-publishing assets at a price that would have been the coup of the century, but Martin Davis rejected the deal, to Dick’s anger and mortification. Fortunately for Dick, Captain Bob’s ship was destined to hit the rocks in a storm of scandal a few years later after Maxwell died suddenly—the rape of the employees’ pension funds was almost the least of the posthumous charges against him—and S&S acquired large parts of Macmillan at a bargain price, becoming the biggest educational publisher in the world and far and away the strongest publisher of computer books. (S&S also ended up with the Free Press, Scribner, and Atheneum, all of which Captain Bob had managed to pick up while people still thought he was solvent.) The publishing house that Shimkin had sold to G+W in 1975 for $11 million in stock was now a multibillion-dollar publishing colossus in which the educational, reference, and computer business dwarfed the trade end. From Dick’s perspective, the future was already here and about to pay off.
Nor was he alone. Out there beyond Rockefeller Center, vast changes were taking place throughout the publishing industry. Buying up distinguished English publishing houses one after the other, S. I. Newhouse had made Random House the biggest publisher of trade books in the English-speaking world, setting off a trend that made Random House Australia’s leading publisher and placed S&S offices in such cities as London, Moscow, and Singapore. The German Bertelsmann group had already bought Doubleday, which itself had acquired numerous other publishing houses, as well as the Literary Guild. A different German publishing company was soon to end up with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, despite the many years Roger Straus had fulminated at the way big companies were buying up the publishing industry, Dick being his special target. The Pearson group, a U.K. publishing conglomerate, eventually picked up Viking, merged it with Penguin, then added to it Putnam to form a formidable international publishing company. The purchase of Time Inc. by Warner merged all of Time’s book-publishing assets—including the formerly august Boston firm of Little, Brown, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Time-Life books—with Warner’s, creating yet another publishing giant.
Since the booksellers were following the same path—expanding at a furious rate while consolidating by purchasing the smaller or weaker chains—it seemed likely that there would soon be two major book chains plus a rapidly diminishing number of specialty and independent stores, the futures of which were, to put it mildly, uncertain. Typically, New York’s Fifth Avenue, along the plush midtown strip between Fifty-seventh Street and Forty-eighth Street, which had once boasted two Doubleday bookstores (which stayed open until midnight), Scribner’s landmark bookstore, the Rizzoli store that specialized in art books, as well as a B. Dalton and a Barnes and Noble store within a few blocks of each other, was quickly reduced to only one store. Across the country, famous stores and chains collapsed or were bought up—Pickwick, in Los Angeles, Kroch-Brentano and Stuart Brent, in Chicago, bookstores that had been part of the publishing scene for decades, simply vanished, replaced by superstores in the suburbs and by chain outlets in the shopping malls, themselves often swept out of business by the superstores and the price clubs.
Thus, the book-publishing industry seemed at last to have made the transformation from cottage industry to big business. True, it still rested on imponderables—little old ladies typing away at their novels on kitchen tables;