Jason Epstein accompanied the book to his death. He died at his home in Sag Harbor, New York, on February 4, 2022, at the age of 93. When the news was announced, his wife, Judith Miller, said his side was "piled high with his books." A generation of legendary publishers, who eventually returned from Dan Lead. How legendary is it? In a statement from Random House, where Epstein had worked for a long time, Epstein "pioneered the commercial paperback, and for decades his outstanding leadership and vision in editing and publishing helped form a unique pattern for Two Days Press, Anchor Books, Random House, Vintage Books, and the wider literary community." He combined a deep passion for literature with a keen business acumen, and in his 1974 book Intellectual Aerial Writing: Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books, The American journalist PhilipPe Nobiley quoted Epstein's former colleagues at Doubleday Press as saying of him: "Jason possesses the profound knowledge of a scholar and the intuition of a trolley peddler. "It can be said that it is a brilliant summary of Epstein's brilliant book career.
▲ Jason Epstein, a famous American publisher.
Three innovations that led the book industry
Epstein grew up loving to read. Knowledgeable, he graduated from high school at the age of 15 and entered Columbia University to study English literature, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1949, only a year later, and in 1950, he received a master's degree. "I've always thought that my publishing career was a continuation of my great undergraduate years at Columbia. I happened to get into the book industry and went on to be a 'college student' – those authors were my teachers, and their books were my classes. He said in an interview with C-SPAN in the United States.
Epstein's first job was as a trainee editor at Two Days Press. At that time, he often spent a lot of his spare time soaking himself in the Eighth Street Bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York. One day, an idea popped into his head: If the expensive hardcover classics on the market could be sold in cheap paperbacks, the exponential expansion of the post-World War II college student population would form a sizable book market—Epstein, who had just graduated from Columbia University, knew the financial situation of his current students.
He told the idea to Ken McCormick, the editor-in-chief of Two Days Press at the time, who greatly appreciated it. Approved by McCormick, in 1953, the first well-written but inexpensive paperbacks were born. You know, before that, most of the paperback books circulating in the US book market were low-level and shallow fantasy works. Epstein named the high-quality paperback series "Anchor Books," and he hired artist friends such as Edward Gorey to design the cover of the series, and the original collection of works included D. H. Lawrence's Studies in American Classic Literature, Edmund Wilson's To Finland Station, Stendhal's Parma Abbey, etc. Priced at 65 cents to $1.25, the first editions of each book were limited to 10,000 copies and sold out in four weeks. The "paperback revolution" set off by the Two Days Press soon spread to other publishers, and everyone followed Epstein's approach, and more classic literary works, and even high-quality new works were also published in the form of paperback books, which became the most profitable part of the entire publishing industry.
Despite planning a business miracle at a young age, Epstein did not work long at Two Days. One day in 1958, he brought the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov to a publishing house with the intention of promoting the first edition of his novel Lolita in the United States. However, DoubleDay Press rejected the controversial novel about a middle-aged man falling in love with an underage girl on the grounds of "ill taste". Epstein was furious and left Double Day. After briefly running Vintage, then a paperback brand owned by Alfred Nopf, Epstein joined Random House. There, he propelled a large number of writers his age to become the most prominent stars of contemporary American literature: Philip Rose, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, E. Miller, and E. Lee. L. Dockturo, W. H. Auden... He was Director of editorial board at Random House from 1976 to 1995. It is worth mentioning that when Epstein first entered Random House, he reached an agreement with One of the company's founders, Bennett Surf: without conflict, Epstein could introduce and edit books while starting a business. It was this agreement that provided the conditions for Epstein's second book innovation.
Jason Epstein's office at Random House in 1968.
It was the winter of 1962, and the newspaper union in New York City was on an unprecedented strike that led to the suspension of seven newspapers, including The New York Times. One night, Epstein and his then-wife, editor Barbara Epstein, invited the poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hadwick, to dinner in their Upper West Side apartment. Epstein pointed out to others that he had long noticed that the lack of newspapers and periodicals in the United States that could provide services to the book-loving public like the British Newspaper Times Literary Supplement was a huge potential market. When he mentioned the project before, he always said, "There is only one person in the whole of America who can do this, but I am busy." But that night, he changed his mind. Coinciding with the strikes of other mainstream newspapers, Epstein believes the time is ripe to start an independent weekly book review. "Kids, let's put on a show." He said. So early the next morning, Lowell applied for a $4,000 loan from the bank through his trust fund as start-up capital and lobbied some wealthy friends to invest in it. Barbara, along with Robert Hilvers, who had previously worked at Harpers Magazine, as editor, Hardwick as editorial adviser, and Epstein himself behind the scenes, gave birth to the New York Review of Books. The first issue of the New York Review of Books, published on February 1, 1963, was a star of poetry by Dwight McDonald on Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Philip Rahoff on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Susan Sontag on Simone Weil, and poetry by Lowell, Auden, John Berryman, Adriana Richie, and others.
The New York Review of Books was a success and, under Epstein's guidance, became one of the first anti-Vietnam War publications in the United States in the 1960s. In 1969, Epstein himself wrote about the sensational Chicago Seven Gentlemen Trial (a group of young radicals accused of inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention). These reports were included in his 1970 book The Great Conspiracy Trial. With its flaws, tirades, and sometimes vitriol and sometimes lyricism, the New York Review of Books remains one of the most important literary and political magazines in the United States.
Epstein's third publishing innovation stemmed from his friendship with Edmund Wilson, an American writer and literary critic who was 32 years older than him, when he was publishing at Doubleday. In The Book Business, he recalls having lunch with Wilson at the Princeton Club in New York in the 1960s. At the same time, Wilson mentioned that the United States has never had a national literary collection like the French Seven-Star Poetry Society Series, which standardizes the great literary works in American history. Wilson did not live to see this classic literary series project come to fruition, but thanks to Epstein's diligent efforts, in 1979, the non-profit publisher The Library of America finally launched and published the first books. Seed funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the project has published more than 300 volumes of authorial works, from Mark Twain, F. Kennedy, and others. S. Gerrard, to James Baldwin and Saul Bellow, all have a uniform black cover. "Big questions will ignite Jason's passion. And the answer he gives is extremely influential. Think about how many great ideas he's already realized. Needless to say, he has been the leading intellectual entrepreneur in the publishing world of our time. Robert Gottlieb, former editor-in-chief of Alfred Nopf Press, said in a 2001 interview with the Boston Globe.
Let the technical service have a wider readership
Looking back on Epstein's life, some note that he seems to have a stark contradiction: on the one hand, he showed a very clear left-leaning political tendency in literary writing and editing, especially in his New York Review of Books, and on the other hand, he had an undisguised love of luxury—he liked cigars, custom leather shoes, fine dining restaurants, and even his home in Lower Manhattan and Saag Harbor, and more hardcover books in his study. Epstein himself, however, does not seem to see the two as contradictory, stressing that his quest has always been to appeal to a wide audience with books that meet intellectual needs and are affordable for everyone, "which boils down to a populist vision of the best for everyone," The New York Times commented.
In 1974, Jason Epstein (left) and the writer Gore Vidal, whom he met while working at Random House.
Epstein believes that in order to achieve this pursuit, the digital market will be a strong potential ally of the publishing world. He is one of the few traditional publishers who showed an early enthusiasm for new technologies. In 1989, he launched the Reader's Catalogue, which contains about 40,000 kinds of book information, including titles, descriptions, and illustrations, and readers can order the corresponding books directly from the warehouse by telephone mail order. This is considered a pioneer of online book selling site Amazon. But unable to compete with the larger bookseller chains of the time, such as The Baudders Group and BarnesEller Books, the Reader's Directory eventually went bankrupt. In 2003, Epstein co-founded the "Print on Demand" book company, launching the "espresso book machine", a device that can print, organize, and bind a book in a matter of minutes. Compared with traditional printing plants, it is small enough to be put into bookstores, libraries, and even newspaper outlets at the airport, eliminating the need for transportation and warehousing, making the dissemination and circulation of books more convenient.
Arguably, What Epstein advocated in essence was a systemic change that allowed authors to bypass the booksellers who hired them and reach the readership masses. Epstein once said in an interview with PBS that in the past, publishers "threw a book into the retail market without knowing where it would go." After Barnes & Noble Books places a single work with Random House, we'll print 10,000 or 20,000 copies, but who knows where they're going to be on the shelves? Which bookstore employee opened the seal? Do they know what these books are about? For whom? We don't know anything... This explains why so many books are returned before they are sold, why it is sometimes so difficult to find books in bookstores, and why some authors are still unaware of their readership. But in a new system, you'll see a market for each author's target audience. Technology makes this possible. Maybe not now, but the day will finally come."
The day came quickly. Founded in 1994, Amazon has become a veritable "largest bookstore on earth" in the early 2000s. Although Epstein and Bezos's philosophy were not the same, he welcomed any way in which books could better get them into the hands of readers. On Amazon, people can quickly search, browse, and place orders, sit at home and wait for the books they want to arrive at their doors; they can also post their feelings on the website to communicate with other readers and even the authors themselves. It's a lot like the scenario Epstein imagined in The Book Business: "Writers and readers can meet on the greenery of the world," "On the Internet, future novelists and their readers can make small talk or talk deeply."
But Epstein also has hidden concerns about e-books in the age of the internet. He believes that the complete replacement of paper books by e-books would be terrible, making books a disposable medium that people can open or close at will, and because electronic files are easy to delete, books in electronic form will also obliterate their existence. "If you're a book lover, you might want what you love to be more tangible, durable, and more tested than an electronic file," and "the words on screen will never carry the same cultural resonance and associations as printed books, or provide that unique visual, smelly, and tactile experience," he said in a 2012 interview.
iWeekly+
The Book Business: The Past, Present and Future of Publishing
This book is an informative account of the book publishing industry. By recounting his own experience, Epstein paints a long history of the book industry full of passion and dreams, boldness and innovation, failure and lessons. The book includes the passionate founding of the New York Review of Books, the tortuous publication of the American Library, and the difficult times of the Reader's Directory. In addition, Epstein elaborated on his bold, radical vision of the book industry. He argues that new technologies have changed the trajectory of everything, especially the way books circulate, and that e-books will have the same profound impact on culture, business, and politics as jet aircraft. "No matter who wins in the digital market tomorrow, today's embattled and difficult group companies will face the fate of extinction."
The content is from the "Weekend Pictorial", please do not reprint without permission
Written by - Downgrade b minor
EDIT—North-North