My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [57]
Then one morning, an e-mail slides onto my computer screen at home with the following message, sent from the Review:
“We’re screwed! Get in here now!”
For the last six months we’ve been working on an anthology that is due out this spring, and according to a fax we’ve just received, one of the authors is denying a request I sent to reprint their interview, which is no big deal. Except the book is already at the printer. George is going to go ballistic—it’s exactly the sort of mistake he’d blame on my being distracted by the deli. He’s going to fire me, and then he’s going to make sure that no one in publishing ever hires me again, which he can do since he knows everyone, and who would hire someone who got on the bad side of George Plimpton, the most affable and lenient boss in New York?
I rush into the office.
“Does he know yet?” I ask.
Brigid, the Review’s managing editor, shakes her head. “He went out early this morning and won’t be back till tonight.”
Good, there’s still time. I get on the phone and start begging the author’s agent to reconsider, but they’re firm—it’s a piece the author has decided not to reprint.
“And if you go ahead, we’ll sue you,” says the agent curtly, before hanging up the phone.
Brigid is standing next to me as this happens, trying not to look panicked.
“So you’re saying we have a choice between getting sued and not publishing this book? We have to do something.” After hesitating for a few seconds, she picks up the phone and sends orders to shut down the printing machines, just like in the movies. You can practically hear the machinery come to a screeching, car crash–like halt.
“Now what?” I ask. “Is everything okay? George won’t have to find out, will he?”
Everything is not okay. Five thousand copies of the anthology have already been printed and are now going to be sent to a place called the “book crisis center,” where they will either be pulped or have the offending pages extracted. Either way, it’s going to cost at least ten thousand dollars. Which means George will have to find out—tonight, in a few hours, at a cocktail party at the New York Mercantile Library.
He’ll be pissed for two reasons. One, the ten thousand dollars. George may be old money, but the Review has a slim operating budget, and ten thousand dollars is one-half of what we pay our authors for an entire issue. It’s a part-time editor’s salary. It’s a couple of parties. It’s money that sooner or later George, being the Review‘s fund-raiser in chief, will have to go out and make up by tapping his network of benefactors.
Two, George didn’t want us sending permission requests in the first place. In general, George is rather irritated by the whole idea of permissions, contracts, paperwork, and so on, which is why he put me in charge of it and then instructed me to do as little work as possible.
“It’s a gentlemanly agreement when you publish with the Review,” he once told me. “It’s not like we’re some cutthroat business making obscene wads of cash. It’s for the greater good of literature!”
Most authors seem to agree. Rather than contracts, they gladly accept a handshake or a congratulatory phone call from George, and seem fine with an absurdly puny check and access to comely interns at George’s parties.
When George was young, it was easier to get away with a carefree attitude because publishing was filled with people who had, as the expression goes, known each other forever. To pick but one example, when George published his first book, in 1955, a children’s fable called The Rabbit’s Umbrella, his publisher, Viking Press, was owned by the Guinzburg family, and its soon-to-be head, Thomas Guinzburg, was one of George’s oldest friends. Now Viking is owned by Pearson PLC, a massive multinational media conglomerate specializing in educational software. It’s a different world, and if you don’t