Jason Epstein, Editor Extraordinaire, RIP

Among much else, he co-founded The New York Review of Books and instigated the quality paperback revolution

Jason Epstein in his home, Sag Harbor, New York, 1984. (Photo by Susan Wood/Getty Images)

One day in late 1963, while walking along Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, the Doubleday editor Barbara Epstein ran into her friend Elizabeth Hardwick, an essayist. Out of that chance encounter, the two women agreed on a spur of the moment dinner party, to be hosted by Epstein and her then husband Jason, an editor at Random House. The party was a small affair with only four attendees: the Epsteins, Hardwick and her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. During the meal, the conversation turned to the newspaper strike, then depriving New Yorkers of reading material, including book reviews. Hardwick had in 1959 written a piece for Harper’s decrying the sad state of American book reviewing. The conjunction of the strike and Hardwick’s complaint led Jason Epstein to put forward a longstanding plan of his: an American version of the Times Literary Supplement. They conjured up the publication that became The New York Review of Books.

Jason Epstein, the last survivor of that fabled dinner party, died on Friday at age 93. He was one of America’s most innovative and forward thinking cultural entrepreneurs. In the 1950s, he was the mastermind behind the quality paperback revolution, which allowed books by scholars and modernist writers find a mass audience in the burgeoning academic world. He was a key instigator of The Library of America. Less successfully, but still displaying his characteristic foresight, he pushed for online selling before Amazon and sponsored print on demand technology.

Much will be written about Epstein in the coming weeks and years. Not least, he was in cherished editor by writers like Jane Jacobs, E.L. Doctorow, Jean Strouse and W.H. Auden.

In 2001 I reviewed for the National Post two similarly titled books written by men who didn’t like each other: Epstein’s The Book Business and Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books. The review offers some insights into the legacies of both men.

Jason Epstein and Andre Schiffrin

Even among bookish people, editors are rarely heroes. Poets, novelists and even journalists can be inspirational figures who battle the world to get their truths out. Editors, by contrast, are about as exciting as chartered accountants: However necessary their work may be to the operation of the firm, they exude an air of banality.

Andre Schiffrin and Jason Epstein are therefore two rare figures: editors who inspire passionate love and hate. When Schiffrin was fired as chief editor of Pantheon Books in 1990, hundreds of writers, including Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Sacks, picketed the headquarters of Random House, the parent company that ordered his dismissal.

Random House itself was torn into two factions, those who believed that Schiffrin's firing marked the end of quality publishing at the firm and those who thought Schiffrin deserved to be sacked because his imprint wasn't making money. (Because Random House had only one owner, tycoon S.I. Newhouse, the exact nature of Pantheon's financial condition remains a mystery).

In the wake of Schiffrin's firing, almost the entire editorial staff of Pantheon quit in protest, and scores of best-selling writers (notably cartoonist Matt Groening and popular historian Studs Terkel) stopped publishing with Random House. "Everything I am as an author is because of Andre," Terkel noted bitterly. "The barbarians have taken over at Pantheon, and they might as well be producing detergent."

Jason Epstein, then editorial director of Random House, led the anti-Schiffrin faction, arguing that "we have to earn a profit in order to earn the right to publish the books we want. Why on earth Andre Schiffrin doesn't understand that is beyond me." (In point of fact, simply by antagonizing Groening, the phenomenally successful creator of The Simpsons, Random House lost a small fortune by firing Schiffrin).

Ironically, a decade later, Epstein and Schiffrin have written strikingly similar memoirs with almost identical titles, The Book Business and The Business of Books. Both books combine personal history with polemics to produce remarkably congruent accounts of the shifting fortunes of the publishing world. As so often in life, our bitterest feuds are with those with whom we have the most in common.

Throughout their careers, Epstein and Schiffrin both used commercial publishing strategies to market intellectually challenging books. It was this shared goal that made them rivals within Random House. As journalist Thomas Maier notes, well before Schiffrin was fired "these two talented editors seemed to resent each other deeply and jockeyed for the intellectual high ground."

Epstein and Schiffrin both entered publishing in the early 1950s. At that time, as Epstein notes, "book publishing was a small-scale, highly personal industry." Indeed, even the largest and best known firms were still family-run businesses. Pantheon Books, for example, was started in 1942 by Schiffrin's father, a Jewish refugee who fled Vichy France.

Being run by families, these "small, elegant, amiable firms" were content with meagre but steady profits. Knowing their families would own the firm for years to come, publishers balanced their lists by bringing out both best-sellers (which generated short-term cash) and more difficult books that took longer to find an audience. Random House, for example, published William Faulkner for decades at a loss. When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949, they suddenly possessed a valuable backlist of his titles. It was this balance between popular and prestigious books that allowed quality publishing to thrive in mid-century America.

As young Turks, Epstein and Schiffrin made their names with their shared insight that the post-war expansion of higher education opened up a valuable new market for quality books. Students, many of them from poorer households, flooded into universities throughout the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the 1950s, paperbacks were largely pulp sold at corner drugstores: Mickey Spillane's brutal detective novels were the quintessential softcovers of the era. Epstein and Schiffrin realized that there was a market for quality paperbacks -- cheap enough for students but durable enough for class- room use -- that reprinted intellectually challenging books.

Epstein created the Anchor Book line for Doubleday while Schiffrin followed suit by initiating Signet Books for the New American Library. It turned out T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner could both be sold in a format previously reserved for schlock. Both these imprints went on to make millions for their firms, inspiring the paperback revolution in American publishing.

But the success of the paperback revolution paved the way for changes in publishing that Epstein and Schiffrin were to regret. Large corporate interests suddenly became aware of publishing as a possible "profit centre." Random House, which had bought out Pantheon in 1961, was in turn bought out by a succession of large corporate firms, starting with RCA in 1965.

In the mid-1960s, when these buyouts were fresh news, corporate ownership did little to influence what got published. In retrospect, the 1960s were glory days for Epstein and Schiffrin. Working for different divisions of Random House, they were both able to publish serious, challenging books that found large audiences. In part they were helped by the fact that they were in tune with the times. Both men combined left-liberal politics with cultural sophistication in a way that became popular in the 1960s. In 1963 Epstein co-founded The New York Review of Books, a characteristically successful publication which fused stylish literary taste with strong left- liberal politics.

Moreover, both editors were blessed with a knack for discovering and nurturing talent. With Epstein's assistance, urban critic Jane Jacobs published her influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities while Schiffrin brought out important books by French social thinker Michel Foucault and historian E.P. Thompson.

Not all difficult books find an audience, and even those that do sometime take years to catch on. Foucault for example, was initially coldly received in North America, although he is now one of the world's most influential philosophers. Schiffrin's strategy at Pantheon was the classic publishing tactic of balancing bestsellers with prestigious works. Matt Groening's cartoon books brought in piles of cash, allowing the firm to subsidize more demanding authors, such as Foucault, until they also found their audience.

Unfortunately, the bottom-line managers of Random House had little sympathy with this strategy. By their lights, it made more sense to simply publish Groening, take the money and run. This short- term thinking derives from the fact that corporate owners hold on to publishing firms for much less time than founding families do. For corporate owners, bestsellers are the key to success and building up a backlist is a waste of time.

In retrospect, Schiffrin's firing resulted from the fact his traditional approach to publishing clashed with the new imperatives of corporate ownership. Pantheon was probably making money, and in the long run it promised to be even more successful, having both Groening and Foucault on its list. However, the long run didn't concern the owner (in this case, Newhouse) who simply wanted a profit centre he could sell to some other firm.

Although Epstein has little sympathy with Schiffrin's personal fate, he too believes that the corporate takeover of publishing has been a disaster. "Conglomerate budgets require efficiencies and create structures that are incompatible with the notorious vagaries of literary production, work whose outcome can only be intuited ... Meanwhile, the retail market for books is now dominated by a few large bookstore chains whose high operating costs demand high rates of turnover, and therefore a constant supply of bestsellers, an impossible goal but one to which publishers have become perforce committed." In this economic environment, the largest firms are much less likely to publish quality books.

Because Epstein and Schiffrin have strong track records in forseeing publishing trends, both their books are being marketed as exercises in prophecy, promising to tell the shape of the book- selling future. Rather naively, Epstein hopes that new computer technologies such as the Web will solve publishing's problems. In the electronic book future, Epstein predicts, big-name authors such as Stephen King will publish their own works. This will allow publishers to move away from marketing bestsellers and concentrate once again on their essential task of cultivating quality writers.

Also, because the Web will allow all books to stay in print forever, building a strong backlist will once again be a key concern. "Book publishing may therefore become once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative autonomous units."

Unfortunately, Epstein's own venture into online publishing (The Reader's Catalogue, a forerunner in many ways to Amazon.com) was unsuccessful. As Epstein admits, no one has yet figured out how to make money selling books on the Web. Moreover, as Schiffrin and others have noted, there is every reason to believe that large corporations will dominate on-line publishing. Epstein's vision of a return to old-fashioned craft values is charming but unconvincing.

Schiffrin, for his part, has tried to return to the older style of publishing by starting a non-profit firm, the New Press, which is supported by foundation grants. In the last decade, the New Press has in fact published hundreds of books, some of which have been highly successful. Epstein has also used foundation grants to start the wonderful Library of America series, which is keeping the classics of U.S. literature in print in sturdy editions. Yet it is unlikely that these models can be widely imitated, since there is only so much charitable money around.

In the end, it seems likely that quality publishing will be taken over by very small firms run by highly committed eccentrics who are willing to live cheap. "Good literature is produced by a few queer people in odd corners," T.S. Eliot once said. The same may be true of publishing.

Despite this dispiriting conclusion, neither Epstein nor Schiffrin seem unhappy. Looking over the course of their lives, they can see that they've been lucky to make money doing what they love. Their success as editors derived from their ability to work closely with creative writers, a quality that shines forth in these memoirs. Both books are rich in anecdote and literary lore.

Epstein, in particular, is at his best when he gives a loving account of Random House when it was still a small firm housed in a downtown New York mansion. "My office ... had been a bedroom, and from time to time I came to work and found a wayward author who had spent the night there, not always alone. These offices were a second home for authors as well as ourselves. Mrs. Debanzie, our Scottish receptionist, usually sent them upstairs to see us unannounced: W.H. Auden in torn overcoat and carpet slippers delivering the manuscript of The Dyer's Hand; Ted Geisel, know as Dr. Seuss, arriving with his storyboards to recite Green Eggs and Ham to us ... John O'Hara in a three-piece suit showing off his Rolls-Royce in the courtyard on a sunny day; Ralph Ellison in my office, smoking a cigar and explaining with his hands how Thelonious Monk developed his chords."

Because of moments like this, one hopes Epstein will stop gazing into the hazy future of publishing and write a full-length memoir.

Recent Cultural Talk

For more recent cultural coverage on this newsletter, you can listen to the podcasts on Norman Mailer, The New Yorker and The French Dispatch, Aaron Sorkin’s checkered oeuvre and the film Passing.

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