Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [60]
It was clear that the book-publishing business was about to undergo a process of radical change at just the moment when unprecedented paperback sales such as those of The Caretakers and deals such as the one for The Carpetbaggers were raising the stakes dramatically for authors as well. Irving Wallace’s departure from Knopf over The Chapman Report was, in fact, a sign of the times. He came to S&S and Pocket Books in a deal that raised eyebrows throughout the publishing business. If the publishers thought they were going to get rich courtesy of Wall Street without the authors demanding their share, they were much mistaken.
BOOK PUBLISHING before the early 1960s was a remarkably stable industry. People often worked at the same company for years, often for a lifetime, while most authors tended to remain loyal to the house that published them. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were published by Scribner’s for decades, while their editor, the fabled Maxwell Perkins, spent his whole career at Scribner’s. Nobody in the book-publishing business in the 1940s or 1950s could have predicted that authors and editors would soon be switching from house to house with such rapidity that Publishers Weekly would find it hard to keep up with them, while the companies themselves changed hands almost as quickly.
Clearly, if book publishers were going to take their companies public for big bucks or merge with each other in pursuit of market share (a hitherto unknown concept in the book business), both their employees and their authors would soon be looking for better deals. Book publishers had always been inclined to tell young job-seekers, with a certain amount of pride, that this wasn’t the right business to be in if you wanted to get rich—publishing wasn’t about money, it was about books. You had to love doing it, and most people did.
One reason why publishing had remained a kind of upper-class WASP enclave for so long was that you really needed an independent income to live a decent life on the kind of salary most publishers were still paying in the 1950s. For years, secretaries had traditionally been hired from the ranks of well-off friends’ daughters, as if a few years as a publishing assistant after Wellesley or Radcliffe or Smith was a kind of finishing school. Editors did not fare much better.
The word exploitation would have shocked people like Dick Simon or Bennett Cerf, but in fact the wage patterns of the book business bore some resemblance to those of the sweatshop, with the difference that since the book business wasn’t supposed to be about money, the owners actually claimed that better salaries and benefits for employees or better advances for authors would destroy whatever it was that made producing books different from producing other, less exalted articles of trade. The subject of money was felt to be unseemly, the kind of thing that a gentleman ought not to think or talk about, let alone a lady. If publishers could be said to believe in anything, it was that book publishing was “an occupation for gentlemen,” so much so that one book publisher even used the phrase as the title of his memoirs.
If the “new,” mostly Jewish, publishing houses shared anything in common with their WASP predecessors and rivals it was the genial assumption that people who worked in the book business did it—or ought to do it—for the love of books. Since few white-collar workers in the book industry are unionized, there was no particular pressure on publishers to raise salaries or increase benefits. Furthermore, so long as most of the big firms were privately owned, nobody knew exactly what anybody else was making, let alone what the owners were taking home in profits.
The Random House decision to go public inadvertently put an end to this cozy tradition of silence. A company that is traded publicly has to list what it pays its directors and senior corporate officers, as well as its