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the whims of writers; four-page outlines of books that were sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, on buzz alone—but most of the bigger publishers had covered themselves against these uncertainties by going into other, more predictable (and profitable) businesses, such as education. Besides, once you were beyond a certain size, you could absorb failures that might have sunk a publishing house in the old days, when a single best-seller could make the difference between wealth and bankruptcy. Insofar as any business whose foundations rest on such insubstantials as a writer’s imagination and insight might be thought of as solid, book publishing appeared more firmly planted than it had ever been before.

Of course, that was an illusion.

CHAPTER 34

When your government talks of peace, your draft card is already in the mail.

–BERTOLT BRECHT

The early 1990s may now be seen as the calm before the storm, but of course one could not have guessed that then. Looking back on it, there were warning signs of major changes to come, but I no more perceived them than I did the fact that I would be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994. I could not have felt healthier or in better shape and would have been astonished to learn that I was in for major surgery and the scare of a lifetime. I would have been just as astonished had some Gypsy soothsayer foretold many of the changes that were to sweep over book publishing before the end of the decade. It is just when we feel ourselves to be on solid ground that the ground opens before us.

The nineties were a time of success for almost everyone in book publishing—the proliferation of new stores drove sales up in almost every category of book except the literary novel, while discounting made the price of hardcover books—the best-sellers, at any rate—seem almost reasonable. Bookselling was no longer part of the carriage trade, and ordinary people were buying books in unprecedented numbers. Admittedly, a lot of them weren’t the kind of books that would have pleased Henry Robbins, had he still been alive to complain, but among all the “merch” and dreck that cluttered up the aisles and the counters of the new bookstores, a surprising number of real books managed to sell. Perhaps the greatest miracle of the book industry is the way in which the public will, given the opportunity, home in on a good book by an unknown writer and make it a surprise best-seller (often surprising the publisher more than anybody). The nineties were to be extraordinarily rich in such books and continue to be as I write. The successes of Longitude, The Perfect Storm, Angela’s Ashes, Into Thin Air, and Cold Mountain are each, in their own ways, perfect examples of the public’s ability to discern a remarkable book despite all the attention directed toward bad or mediocre ones. If nothing else, this serves to remind us that even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don’t want to read. Hugh Collins is still right.

THE PACE of change in the world of publishing continued relentlessly in the 1990s. The eyes of publishers were now trained on all those English-speaking countries that had once been rendered on the world map as part of the British Empire and which were now accessible at last to American publishers, if only because the Americans had bought up so many English houses, or, as in the case of S&S, founded their own.

The old distinctions that had separated the English-speaking world into the United States (plus the Philippines and sometimes Canada), the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, and the “open market” (i.e., the rest of the world), which English publishers had defended fiercely for decades, collapsed almost as fast as the Berlin Wall and at about the same time. The new world market had no divisions. Books were sold wherever there was a demand for them or a place in the local bookstores. The bigger a publisher was, the more fit it would be to take advantage of the world marketplace—another reason for growth.

Publishing was now a hot