Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do by Gerald Gross Page B
Authors: Gerald Gross
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these days…. The heart of darkness at the center of today’s publishing world is not a jungle. Rather, it is a flashy, disorienting environment, a combination hall of mirrors, MTV video, commodities pit, cocktail party, soap opera, circus, fun house, and three-card monte game. The message one emerges with, stunned and shaken by what one has witnessed, is: ‘Mistah Perkins—he dead.’”
Mistah Perkins—He Dead
Publishing Today
Each year our institutions of higher learning churn out thousands of liberal arts graduates who would just about kill to have my job: book editor for an established trade publisher. I know just how they feel, for in the early seventies I was one of their yearning number, and as pathetically ill-formed and ill-informed as my aspirations were, I can’t say that in any essential respect the profession has let me and my dreams down. I am paid a good dollar to read manuscripts and proposals that represent a nice slice of the best that is currently being thought and said, to select and then often help shape some of them for publication, and to engage the various publishing mechanisms so that those manuscripts make their way successfully into book form, into the bookstores, and finally into the hands of readers. The authors and colleagues with whom I work are about as pleasant and cultured and sharp and dedicated a group of folks as this civilization produces, and it is a joy to be associated with them. As a commissioned officer in the forward march of culture, I have something like a universal passport to pursue my personal enthusiasms, be they literary or intellectual or pop cultural. My daily work puts me in possession of the sort of inside skinny on events of the day that makes for interesting conversation at cocktail parties. As for those editorial lunches, well—they’re everything you think they are.
So what’s the beef? Why do book editors often end the workday with the white-collar equivalent of the thousand-yard stare? Why do so many of us adopt the armor of cynicism as protection against … against
what?
Well, each editor will have his own set of gripes, but for me it’s a faster, huger, rougher,
dumber
publishing world than I could have anticipated.
The American publishing business today is in a tremendous state of confusion between its two classic functions: the higher-minded and more vocally trumpeted
mission civilisatrice
to instruct and edify and uplift the reading public and the less loudly advertised but, in the nature of things,more consistently compelling
mission commerciale
to separate the consumer from his cash. Happy the publisher (and happy the author) who can manage to make a single book fulfill both functions! The real art of publishing consists not in reconciling what are, in a capitalist system, quite simply irreconcilable imperatives but in orchestrating the built-in tensions in a harmonious fashion. However, the two-way road in publishing from the bottom line to Mount Olympus travels right across a fault line, and that is where the serious editor lives and plies his trade. To put it bluntly, the tectonic plates are shifting, there’s an earthquake going on, and all that moving and shaking you’ve read about is making it hard to attend to business—or even to be certain, from day to day, just what our business is. The delicate task of orchestrating tensions becomes more difficult still when the walls threaten to collapse about you.
I overstate the situation, of course, but not by much. It may be that since book editors stand at the very center of the publishing process and also mediate between what the culture is offering up and what the firm is putting out, they register crises earlier and more severely, like canaries in coal mines. They certainly operate in highly contested, tremendously tricky terrain. Lionel Trilling famously referred to the “bloody crossroads” where literature and politics meet; the intersection between culture and
these days…. The heart of darkness at the center of today’s publishing world is not a jungle. Rather, it is a flashy, disorienting environment, a combination hall of mirrors, MTV video, commodities pit, cocktail party, soap opera, circus, fun house, and three-card monte game. The message one emerges with, stunned and shaken by what one has witnessed, is: ‘Mistah Perkins—he dead.’”
Mistah Perkins—He Dead
Publishing Today
Each year our institutions of higher learning churn out thousands of liberal arts graduates who would just about kill to have my job: book editor for an established trade publisher. I know just how they feel, for in the early seventies I was one of their yearning number, and as pathetically ill-formed and ill-informed as my aspirations were, I can’t say that in any essential respect the profession has let me and my dreams down. I am paid a good dollar to read manuscripts and proposals that represent a nice slice of the best that is currently being thought and said, to select and then often help shape some of them for publication, and to engage the various publishing mechanisms so that those manuscripts make their way successfully into book form, into the bookstores, and finally into the hands of readers. The authors and colleagues with whom I work are about as pleasant and cultured and sharp and dedicated a group of folks as this civilization produces, and it is a joy to be associated with them. As a commissioned officer in the forward march of culture, I have something like a universal passport to pursue my personal enthusiasms, be they literary or intellectual or pop cultural. My daily work puts me in possession of the sort of inside skinny on events of the day that makes for interesting conversation at cocktail parties. As for those editorial lunches, well—they’re everything you think they are.
So what’s the beef? Why do book editors often end the workday with the white-collar equivalent of the thousand-yard stare? Why do so many of us adopt the armor of cynicism as protection against … against
what?
Well, each editor will have his own set of gripes, but for me it’s a faster, huger, rougher,
dumber
publishing world than I could have anticipated.
The American publishing business today is in a tremendous state of confusion between its two classic functions: the higher-minded and more vocally trumpeted
mission civilisatrice
to instruct and edify and uplift the reading public and the less loudly advertised but, in the nature of things,more consistently compelling
mission commerciale
to separate the consumer from his cash. Happy the publisher (and happy the author) who can manage to make a single book fulfill both functions! The real art of publishing consists not in reconciling what are, in a capitalist system, quite simply irreconcilable imperatives but in orchestrating the built-in tensions in a harmonious fashion. However, the two-way road in publishing from the bottom line to Mount Olympus travels right across a fault line, and that is where the serious editor lives and plies his trade. To put it bluntly, the tectonic plates are shifting, there’s an earthquake going on, and all that moving and shaking you’ve read about is making it hard to attend to business—or even to be certain, from day to day, just what our business is. The delicate task of orchestrating tensions becomes more difficult still when the walls threaten to collapse about you.
I overstate the situation, of course, but not by much. It may be that since book editors stand at the very center of the publishing process and also mediate between what the culture is offering up and what the firm is putting out, they register crises earlier and more severely, like canaries in coal mines. They certainly operate in highly contested, tremendously tricky terrain. Lionel Trilling famously referred to the “bloody crossroads” where literature and politics meet; the intersection between culture and
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