Reflections on the Publishing Scene

The Twilight of Provincialism; or, The Revitalization of Book-Selling

in North America

Richard Abel

W hen I first entered the book profession in the mid-1940s as a young, naive book-seller, coming to the trade as a heavy-duty book reader

from a Montana cattle-ranch, I was almost entirely innocent of the practices, preoccupations, modes of perception, etc. of those whose ranks I had joined by a chain of inadvertence. In short, I possessed the barest understanding of the general ambience that surrounded the book-selling enterprise and the sense of place of those in the trade. The minimal insights I possessed were garnered from excursions into the local bookshop when I came to town with a few dollars that I had been able to allocate for the purchase of a book or two.

The store never had any books a curious mid-adolescent kid wanted. Noth- ing very esoteric as can be imagined; introductions to history and to philo- sophic thought, a few of the classics of literature, simple accounts of the present understanding of the social and physical worlds, etc.--the kind of thing kindly adults might occasionally suggest by way of encouraging such curiosity. So, I had to place special orders with one or the other of the two women who staffed the shop. I was usually asked to identify the publisher as well as the author/ti t le since, as was made amply clear, the kind of thing in which I was interested was well beneath the sophisticated, worldly-wise tastes and inter- ests they shared with their national network of professional confreres and a coterie of regular local customers and, as a consequence, out of the range of their bibliographic perview. (There was no Books in Print in those days, so bibliographic searching involved the tedious exploration through multiple vol- umes of Wilson's unwieldy Cumulative Book Index or the rare subject bibliogra- phy in the local public library. I quickly became adept at dealing with bibliog- raphies---and a lifelong admirer of those marvelous tools and their makers). With the requisite bibliographic information in hand, one or the other of the staff would divert her attention from the clearly more welcome business of endlessly exploring the latest fashionable topic or the recently received revela- tions of a voguish reviewer or the doings of the current ranks of best-selling authors with the gathered provincial cognescente to take my order - -and the

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requisite cash deposit demanded by such an atypical transaction, since only Lord knows who would buy the book if this kid didn't.

With the deed done I departed, uncertain if I should feel humbled by the "cultural" hot-house and the acclimatized denizens thereof in light of the plainer place in which I pursued the less refined and tariffed matter of satisfying homely intellectual curiosity. Or I wondered if I had encountered a particular variant of a set of attitudes, perception, values, etc.--in short a weltanschauung-- I had dimly come to comprehend in another setting. Notably, that variant was among those who were to be dependably found in the gathering around the potbelly stoves in the general stores of the two hamlets nearest the ranch. The world of the latter turned on a handful of received, well-worn axioms and a small but comfortable stock of ill-assorted information and misinformation, some of it useful. The principal topics of conversation other than the weather turned on the repeated criticism, based upon barely disguised envy, of their more successful countrymen: the deeply relished and nearly endless dissection of local scandals; the interminable recounts of horrific crimes and other villain- ies; the flaunting of the latest fashions in conversational subject matter and manners as perceived to be in the mode of the big guys in the county seat; and, of course, the inevitable and incalculable terrors of the never-ending string of apocalypses, variously at the hands of social or ethereal forces, about to be loosed upon at least their part of the world, devastating all that is worthwhile. In short, the narrow and local view of the provincial North American style. I yet had no way to sort the matter out as my acquaintance with the book trade was only in its infancy and my sense of the full dimensions of the provincial mind-set was inadequate to the chore of making meaningful comparisons.

Launched on my book-selling career I remained unacquainted with any oth- ers in the book-selling network from whom I could acquire the esoteric and privileged understandings and tastes which I vaguely understood to be a nec- essary possession of a book-seller but expecting that in time the requisite in- struction in these matters would come my way. As I became acquainted with other book-sellers and their inventories I was astonished to discover that most simply did not stock many of the categories of books I thought important and which characterized the better bookstores around the country. Books in the sciences broadly construed were terra incognita; books dealing with theology and serious religious questions were disdainfully consigned to "Christian Stores" and questing readers dismissed to those emporia; an atmosphere of other-worldliness was lent to these stores by the absence of any titles address- ing the practical arts employed in the working world, including compendia of knowledge about marketing, promotion, business, finance, etc. which might even have served the needs of the management and employees of the store itself; books of serious scholarship were utterly absent; one was hard-pressed to find a store that carried the full range of the Modern Library, Everyman Library, etc.~ the very existance of the Loeb Library was virtually a piece of gnostic lore; and books published abroad, even in the English language, were conspicuous in their absence. In short, the whole of the physical world, most

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of the spiritual world, the working world, the bulk of the world of the mind, and much of the world's cultural inheritance were, as reflected in most book- sellers' inventories then, simply beyond their horizon or that of any customer of whom they could conceive.

But to my greater shock and distress most of the book-sellers were not sim- ply willing to dismiss most, and the best, of the life of the mind as contained in books but indeed quite pleased to do so. The only matters of account seemed to be those of the cult fashion currently dominating the popular fiction scene; the questionable preoccupations of those beating the drum for the prevailing social, economical, personal, or political apocalyptic vision; or the fine-points of the scandalous doings of newsworthy figures of the political, sports, and entertainment worlds. In short, they reflected the constricted view and limita- tion of concern characterizing the book-sellers in a Montana town; not the geographic provincialism of the country store crowd but a provincialism of taste and mental horizon.

The most sophisticated arguments for stocking only a narrow sliver of the world's esthetic and intellectual product were propounded. In their least ar- cane form they came down to the "personal" book-store. This is a thing akin to a work of art reflecting the superior tastes and perceptions of its proprietor or buyer. Some become so captivated by the preeminence of their judgment that they publicly refused to handle currently popular books of authors with whom they differed--the bookstore as a social or political or esthetic statement.

And in this thoroughly Byzantine milieu many of the players who paid the way for not just the book-seller but the publishers, reviewers, and assorted associated literati--that vast body of book-buyers/readers were hardly a fac- tor. Not all book-buyers/readers were ignored to be sure, for any number of such made up the coteries which circled about the book-stores/sellers of the modish kind--as I began to understand as a boy. Rather I have in mind all those serious book-users/buyers/readers who turned to buying via direct mail or alternative outlets; all those people whose intellectual, esthetic, spiritual, and cultural needs had necessarily to be met only among the huge classes of books which the general book-selling community long ago gleefully, disdain- fully, cavalierly, or casually turned away from in the interest of pursuing the comfort of their provinicial ways.

For the book-buyers/readers of all those kinds and classes of books slighted by most book-sellers, the unhappy historic era dominated by the Walden/ Dalton mall-store is best left aside. It was simply a form of provincial book- selling initiated and fueled by unalloyed greed and price competition. It had nothing to do with responding to the wider needs of the book-buying/reading public. Happily the days of this disfigured creature seem to be drawing to a close.

There is, however, little doubt that the chain-stores of that kind greatly in- creased the dollar volume of books sold. All the trade statistics of the last couple of decades confirm the significant impact the chains had on the in- crease in quantities sold. But these increases have been virtually entirely con-

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fined to that limited range of books favored by the typical trade book-store/ seller mentality--and, of course, textbooks, reflecting the baby boom and echo baby-boomer generations. The sales of most other categories of books dropped-- the painful outcome, in significant measure, of the decline of library budgets but in part the sheer difficulty of buying them.

Despite the substantial increases in the number of books sold, the state of book-selling remained even a half decade ago the same empty space for the small army of book-buyers/readers whose interests fell outside the narrow provincialism of the bulk of the nation's bookstores. As recently as four years ago I had, for example, to special-order volumes in the Library of America series--and finally directly from the publisher when all else failed. Indeed, I received so many "This title not stocked by our wholesaler" reports I finally started ordering all books I wanted directly from their publishers.

I use my own case simply as an example of a widespread practice resorted to out of the necessity imposed upon book-buyers/readers by the provincialism of much of the book-selling fraternity. This failure to adequately serve the broad range of book-buyers/readers should be a matter of as much concern to publishers as to the responsible book-sellers out there. The number of books not sold and the profoundly beneficial effect these lost sales would at the margin have for serious book-sellers and publisher are both largely immeasur- able. What can be pointed to is the vastly larger per-capita sales in countries served by more cosmopolitan book-sellers--Germany, the Scandinavian coun- tries, etc. The North American book trade would be infinitely healthier with book consumption in the range of these countries.

Mercifully, there have always been a handful of book-sellers whose visions or ambitions were too large to fit within the confines of their professional confreres' comfortable provincialism. A few random examples: the University of Washington and Harvard Co-op stores, Powell's in Portland, Tattered-Cov- ers in Denver, Krochs in Chicago presently having fallen on hard times, Brentanos in earlier days, etc. While none of them fully met all the conceivable requirements of all book-buyers/readers, these stores and others of their kind did, and continue in some cases, to do so in substantial measure. Other excep- tions were to be found in the specialist stores usually owned and operated by a genuine expert in that specialty. And, of course, some general book-store owners/buyers did a quite remarkable job of broadly representing the world of the book unlimited circumstances---in terms of both financial resources and space.

And it was from the examples of this kind that the so-called "superstore" derived. The emergence and rapid growth of superstores backed by well- financed firms has led to an enormous outpouring of angry talk and behavior from the book-store provincials, lately dubbed "independent" book-sellers. It can presumably be argued that this adjective is meant to signify that such stores are not part of a chain but they are far from independent. They are, on the contrary, members of a thoroughly cliquish group as I have tried to illus- trate here. They are bound together by shared narrow and shallow views of the world of books and the life of the mind--and apparently thoroughly com-

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fortable within these small-minded confines which have successively satisfied them and the bulk of their confreres for a half a century to my certain knowl- edge.

Before some book-sellers discharge their angry fusillades at such a character- ization let me cite a telling and supportive piece of evidence taken from a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, a journal notable for its sympathy with and allegiance to the views and preoccupations of this confined, comfortable world. In the August 15, 1994 issue the editors devoted a great deal of space to the recent escalation in the output of religious books being published in response to the growing numbers of people returning to the Christian tradition. They also provided a handy list of some of the leading historic figures in the shap- ing of Roman Catholic doctrine. They provided only ten names, beginning with St. Augustine and ending with G.K. Chesterton. Clearly their kindly in- tention was to give the mass of book-sellers/buyers a convenient short-list to assist in fleshing out a religious section with a few of the intellectual heavy- weights of the Church--and not surprisingly of our cultural heritage. But in thinking they had to provide such a meager crib they, quite unwittingly I am sure, overtly acknowledged the limited cultural furnishings possessed by a substantial fraction of their readership.

Whatever the motivations of their owners, the superstores have come to the rescue of a wide body of readers who once had to depend upon 800 numbers, publishers' catalogs and mailing pieces, and credit cards to meet their intellec- tual, spiritual, vocational, and cultural needs. One could carp that they are not doing the job entirely nor all that skillfully. But that is arguing from counsels of perfection for in very substantial measure they have opened the field of readily accessible books enormously.

By way of doing a bit of testing for this piece I visited the four superstores in Portland. All four were stocking all titles in the Library of America, Modern America, etc. series. All carried a large number of titles in theology and reli- g ion- including all the historic shapers of Christianity and many of those important to Judaism and Islam. All made a stab at providing books in the sciences but only one tried to be inclusive. (It may well be that the scientific community has become so habituated to direct purchasing that the sale of books of these kinds can never be won back by the retail book-trade.) In short several rough and ready tests based on the historic short-comings of most general bookstores offer a good measure of hope that book-selling may be breaking out of its long, self-imposed provincialism. If so, and if the number of bookstores offering a broad and deep array of books continues to grow, not only book-buyers/readers and the book trade generally but even more impor- tantly the cultural heritage of which we are the fortunate heirs can only profit.

It is to be devoutly hoped that this broad opening out of the prevailing provincialism among the generality of book-sellers by those willing to supply wider, deeper offerings to the book-buying/reading public will not be strangled by the same kinds of desperate tactics employed by the farm provincials of France whose only concern is their comfortable received place--and whose interests they slight are those of their customers.