There was a time in my life when reading professional books
and journals was nearly a full time job onto itself, especially when I was
starting out in my career. The books
seemed to come first and then the journals, particularly Publishers Weekly and it's UK counterpart, The Bookseller. Added to the
mix were academic and library publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews,
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, and a number of related newsletters. Weekends and nights were reserved for
professional reading.
Now retired, I haven't read a professional book in years,
although I try keep my eye on the publishing industry via the Web. Nonetheless I've been remiss; it was only
recently that I came across a book published some four years ago, a very
important one to me and, I think, to the history of publishing, Immigrant Publishers: The Impact of
Expatriate Publishers in Britain and America in the 20th Century
(Transaction Publishers, 2009). One of
the co-editors, Richard Abel, was the founder of Richard Abel and Co., a major bookseller
to academic and research libraries during my career. Perhaps not too coincidentally, the book was
published by Transaction Publishers which was headed by the late Irving Louis
Horowitz, a sociologist who was a great publisher in his own right, publishing
important works that others would have deemed too unprofitable to tackle. I competed with Horowitz at times for authors
but we had a cordial relationship.
Naturally, I was able to access large chunks of the book on
Google Books but through one of Amazon's "partners" I was able to buy
a new copy, still shrink wrapped for half the price. Probably this was a review copy that had been
sold. Some things never change. I wanted the hard cover for my collection of
publishing books, particularly as it covers my own publishing roots.
Immigrant Publishers
portrays a number of individuals I knew, worked with, and/or competed
with. For me personally, the most
influential person was Walter J. Johnson, who was my first employer at the
Johnson Reprint Division of Academic Press.
He was my "accidental mentor" and I would like to think that
some of his better attributes, his intensely productive and entrepreneurial
nature, became part of my working demeanor and without that subliminal
tutelage, my career might have been very different.
Two chapters are devoted to Walter Johnson, one by Edwin
Beschler covering Johnson and his brother in law / partner Kurt Jacoby and
their flight from Nazi dominated Europe to New York (with various stops
between), establishing Academic Press (AP) in 1942. Johnson arrived with his
wife, Thekla, after he had spent some time in a concentration camp but won his
release. The other chapter is by Albert Henderson covering Johnson Reprint
Corporation (JRC), run exclusively by Johnson (as was Walter J. Johnson, Inc.,
his antiquarian firm) and JRC's trailblazing accomplishments in the world of
scholarly reprints. I vaguely knew
Beschler who was an AP editor but I worked closely with Henderson.
Walter Johnson was an enigma to me when I joined the firm in 1964, straight out of college, winding up in the Production Department of JRC. On the one hand he could be charming, even endearing, but he
also managed his businesses through fear and divisiveness, and constantly displayed
a high level of distrustfulness. But it
was "justified paranoia" given his path to the United States (along
with other publishers covered in the book) to escape (just barely) the encroaching
threat of Nazi ideology inspired genocide (a fate of many of the family members
of Johnson, nee' Jolowicz, changing his name and his religion "to never
again be victimized").
Henderson recounts a meeting in the conference room of JRC
which perfectly illustrates Johnson's suspicious personality, one that I also
attended. It was a meeting called by my immediate boss, Fred Rappaport (another
important influence on my career who is still a friend of ours after all these
years). Johnson was out of town but had placed
a call to Fred waiting impatiently on the phone while the switchboard operators
attempted to locate him. At first they
were unable to find him, until he was finally traced to the conference room.
Johnson was incredulous and furious -- "what do you mean having a meeting
without me?" -- you could hear Fred desperately trying to defend himself.
I also vividly remember another incident when Johnson
stormed into the accounting department which was opposite my production
department. He was again furious,
yelling at the accounting manager (whose name I've forgotten). He picked up a calculator from a nearby desk
(bear in mind, a 1960's calculator would weigh in at almost 40 pounds). raised
it over his head, and smashed it to the floor, storming out of the department,
leaving stunned silence in his wake.
Yet, I had a different relationship with him. He could never quite figure me out. If he needed someone to come in all day
Saturday to work on an "emergency" production project, normally no
one would volunteer, something he pretty much expected (I think some of those
projects were "tests", simply to demonstrate his willingness to be in
on a Saturday while no one else was).
Well, in each and every case I said OK, I'll come in. He eyed me suspiciously. You want to come in to work? Sure, I said.
(Actually, I needed the overtime -- my first wife was pregnant and about
to retire from her lowly paying job -- and as I was on the clock early in my
career, overtime was a gift.)
So I would see Walter in the office some Saturdays early in
my career, and he began to depend on me to handle the more difficult reprint projects. Which leads to one of my favorite Johnson
stories. One such "rush"
project (the rush was always to beat Kraus Reprint to the punch), was a large
serial set of some public domain title, involving scores of volumes. We needed to get 50 complete sets out of
Arnold's Book Bindery (in Reading PA ASAP) and towards that end (and for other
projects as well), I had to go to Arnolds from time to time on a small plane
from Newark Airport. I was also in
frequent contact with them via phone from the office (remember, this is thirty
years before emails and twenty before faxes).
Well, one of Johnson's favorite "management
techniques" was to monitor activities through the two Doberman Pinschers he had as
receptionists/telephone operators. (There was no direct dial long distance --
all such calls had to be placed through the operators.) One morning I had to
speak to Arnolds about that rush project and I asked one of the watch dogs to
place the call and she said no. I said,
no? What do you mean? And she said, Mr.
Johnson said no long distance phone calls without his personal approval because
our long distance bills were getting too high, goodbye. I saw red and I grabbed the entire file on
the project (everything was on paper of course so these files could be several
inches thick), and I levitated (at least it seemed to me) down the stairs (his
office was on the 10th floor, mine on the 11th) which meant passing the dogs at
the desk (who smilingly glared at me, relishing their brief moment of power)
and I approached Johnson's office, which had two doors, one from the hallway
which had a red light over it and if the light was lit it meant he was in a
meeting (the light was on that day) and could not be disturbed, and the other
door from the editorial department (where Al Henderson was sitting). I went through the editorial department and
threw open Johnson's door and indeed he was meeting with some people I didn't
know, and as I entered, he started to mutter, slightly outraged, Bob, what is this? I slammed the file on his desk and said, you
want the books, you call Arnold's Bookbindery!
I walked out to the refrains of Bob, Bob, Bob! following my back out the
door.
Of course by the time I returned to my office the thought occurred
to me that I better start packing up my personal stuff as probably I'd be losing
my job that very day. Indeed, ten minutes
later he called and demanded that I come back to the office, which I did. But there he was at the switchboard
castigating (mostly for my benefit) the Dobermans at the desk, saying over and
over again "I didn't mean Bob!"
Although it was a vivid illustration of his divisive management
techniques, I also think the incident was a lesson for him that his rough
tactics did not intimidate me. From then
on, I never had any difficulty with him and if anything, he treated me solicitously.
There was no question that Johnson was a brilliant
publisher, from a publishing family, and Academic Press and Johnson Reprint,
addressed a real need for scientific and academic information, producing new research
material and bringing back out of print works to fulfill the insatiable
appetite for such information, particularly by libraries who at that time
enjoyed very lucrative government funded budgets.
Although I learned a lot from my "accidental
mentor" my relationship with Johnson and his firm was doomed as I had
learned everything I could in production, moved on to head up the editorial
department, and even though he named me an "Assistant Vice President"
in November 1969, I could see the handwriting on the wall when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
entered the picture at the end of that decade.
I was solicited by a start-up competitor, Greenwood Press, headed by
Harold Mason, a librarian who had briefly worked for Johnson's antiquarian
division. Johnson offered me raises,
promotions, anything to keep me from the competition. What he could not offer me was any kind of
career path into original publishing, which is where I was trying to take some
new JRC programs, but Harcourt blocked the way and even Academic Press was
moving into the humanities and the social sciences where I was trying to go
with their new "Seminar Press" (which Harcourt squashed anyhow).
My soon-to-be new wife, Ann, headed up customer service for
JRC and Johnson's knee jerk reaction was to be suspicious of her -- she remaining
at JRC while I went to a competitor. He
called her into his office to be interrogated and in the end we both had to assure
him of the ethical standards we both adhered to and remarkably he accepted
it. As it turned out, it was only a
couple years later that JRC was closed in spite of Bill Jovanovich's reassurances
of continuing everything as before. My
decision was the right one and within a few years I was President of Greenwood
Press and as I said, I would like to think that the better aspects of Walter's
work ethic materialized in my own management techniques.
At first we had little contact, but later he begrudgingly
acknowledged my career progress and we used to chat regularly at Frankfurt,
long after he left Academic but remained the largest shareholder of Harcourt
which purchased Academic in 1969. I
think Ann and I were among the very few former employees at his funeral service
in 1996, his working until he died at the age of 88, on the day of my 54th
birthday.
Whereas Johnson had his redeeming virtues, another
"publishing expatriate" that I dealt with during my career, Robert
Maxwell, seemed to have none. In fact he
very much reminded me of Walter, but without the charm. He too ruled those who
let him by fear and intimidation. I had
the unpleasant and totally unscheduled task of "debating" him -- I
think it was 1972 or 1973 -- at one of the American Library Association's
annual meetings
His company, Pergamon Press and ours were both caught up in
heady days of microfiche reproduction of public domain government
documents. We had been filming all the
Congressional Hearings to 1969 and we had rolled out a similar program for
municipal documents. Both Pergamon and
Greenwood had started to tackle State Documents, so we were head to head
competitors although both programs were still in their formative stages. Each company had produced promotional
literature describing its forthcoming program and the American Library
Association had asked us to speak about them at one of their government
documents sessions. The editor of our
program, however, was also the editor of our municipal project and he
discovered, sort of at the last minute, that he had a conflicting speaking engagement
about the municipal documents program and as that was much further along (and perhaps
he didn't relish the thought of taking on Robert Maxwell who was to speak on
behalf of Pergamon), I was thrown to the sharks with only a couple hours
notice. I had written the promotion
piece myself so I was familiar with many of the details, but not all. In any event, there I was, a thirty year old utterly
inexperienced public speaker, having to face someone whose public speaking
ability was legendary, a former Member
of Parliament with a booming voice, whose reputation preceded him.
The dreaded time finally arrived and I was shocked at the
sea of faces attending this meeting, maybe a couple of hundred, a far larger
crowd than I imagined. Perhaps Maxwell
was the draw and he was invited to speak first.
OK I said to myself, that will give me time to prepare any rejoinders if
I need them. He stood at the podium and
held up the very brochure I wrote (not his own), the cover of which heralded
"Solve All Your State Documents Problems -- acquisitions, claims,
checking-in, cataloging, binding, shelving, retrieval." He silently held
it up (it seemed like hours to me, but it was only for about 15 seconds) waving
it back and forth so all could see. (It
was a June meeting, in Detroit as I recall. I had worn a Haspel Wash and Wear
suit and I could feel the sweat trickling down my back. I felt certain that pits of stain were
forming under my arms. Why was he
holding up our brochure, not saying anything?)
Suddenly, in his bass English voice he boomed "Huckster!" I blinked in astonishment (never having been
called a huckster before, but thinking it must take one to know one). He then went on tearing our program apart, saying
nearly nothing about their own. In a way
it didn't surprise me, given his reputation and given both programs were
"announcements" and in fact did not yet exist. Easier to criticize ours than say something
about their own. He looked at me sitting
in the first row with every thrust of his voice.
After about ten or fifteen minutes of my verbal whipping, it
was my turn. I remembered the fear of whether my anxiety-induced sweat would be
evident on my way up to the podium. The
crowd was clearly agitated by the tension Maxwell had created, some librarians
uncomfortable about a verbal confrontation between the two of us. Well, they didn't have to worry about me as I
knew there was no way I could win that battle.
Maxwell knew it too and the smirk on his face showed his pleasure at having
me where he wanted me.
So instead of saying anything about the attack he levied, or
defending our program in any way, or, forbid, attacking his, I basically went
about my business of explaining our program, how it would work, the tentative
nature of it at that point, and we would be eager to have their input as to the
directions we should take. In other
words, I completely ignored Maxwell, as if he had never spoken. Afterwards, librarians came up to me to thank
me for not responding in kind.
Any future contact between Maxwell and myself was confined
to merely passing by one another in the aisles of Frankfurt or some other ALA
meetings, one not acknowledging the other.
He died a mysterious death, presumably having fallen off his yacht in
the Atlantic, after which it was discovered he had raided his company's pension
fund to keep his publishing empire floating.
Another publisher profiled in the book is Fred Praeger whose
parents failed to escape Nazi Germany and died in the gas chambers at
Auschwitz, leaving a profound impact on Fred. He ultimately formed Praeger Publishers and, with
the help of CIA funds, began to publish the very successful "Special
Studies" series that was squarely aimed at the threat of the Soviet Union. One of his early successes was the
publication of Milovan Djilas' The New
Class which sold 50,000 copies, a work I had read in college and have a
copy on my bookshelf ever since.
In fact, to digress somewhat, many of these "immigrant
publishers" shared a kind of Ayn Rand prospective on business and viewed
any totalitarian regime with revulsion, particularly the Soviet Union at the
time. I remember an amusing anecdote involving Walter Johnson in that
regard. On November 9, 1965 I was
waiting for the elevator on the 11th Floor of 111 Fifth Avenue. It was about 5.20 PM and out the window in
front of the elevators, I was gazing north at the top of the Empire State
Building as darkness gathered but the city and the Empire State were still ablaze
in lights. Suddenly those lights started
to go out until the city was in darkness, the elevators had stopped and all
lights in the building were extinguished.
I asked if anyone had a flashlight. No, no one did. Then, I made my way downstairs in the dark to
the 10th Floor. Surely, I thought, Mr. Johnson would know where there was a
flashlight and perhaps what was going on.
He was frantic, listening to a portable radio and indeed, he had a
flashlight and offered to lead everyone down the eleven flights to the street. I remember going down the stairs with Mr.
Johnson, the two of us leading a couple of dozen other employees, Johnson
turning to me and moaning over and over again:
The Russians! The Russians! It's
an attack! They've done this! Set in the
context of how these immigrant publishers landed on the shores of the United
States, the reaction was quite understandable.
So in light of that, it is utterly plausible for a Fred
Praeger to embrace anti Soviet studies while conveniently accepting CIA funding.
My first personal encounter with Fred Praeger - other than running into him at Frankfurt or
some of the scholarly association meetings we both regularly attended - was a day I spent with him at his Westview
Press office in Boulder Co. It was
sometime in the Fall of 1984, not long after Publisher's Weekly had published a long article about me and I think Fred was curious about the competition but
basically I think he wanted me to see his operation and pay homage. Of course I was curious as well. We competed with one another but had chosen
different paths -- he trying to control all aspects of the business, including
manufacturing, whereas my philosophical approach to publishing was to focus on
bringing authors and markets together, leaving all manufacturing to
subcontractors.
We had a good day together and our relationship remained
cordial until the end of 1985 when CBS Publishing put his former business, the
eponymous Praeger Publishers, Inc. on the market. We did preliminary due diligence on the
business and so did Fred. Sealed bids
were submitted. We won the right to
complete the due diligence process and to negotiate a final price based on our
findings. During that process I had my
regularly scheduled Frankfurt Bookfair rendezvous in October. I ran into Fred. He was furious with me. What right did I have to buy a company with
his name? What right!!!???? (The name of course was an inseparable part
of the company.)
He stormed off and my contacts with him from then on at
meetings were his menacing glares. He was a creative publisher, and I respected
him, but he, too, could be a intimidating and difficult person. He sold
Westview only a few years later.
There are other individuals mentioned or portrayed in Immigrant Publishers who I knew or dealt
with, but not to the extent of the three I talk about here. They were exiles from their homelands who
immigrated to the US or the UK in search of security and entrepreneurial
opportunities in publishing. They were
on the cusp of the information age and instinctively they seized that opening
for new, thriving scientific, technical and social science publishing
businesses. They indirectly paved the
way for what we now know as the Internet age (one wonders what they would have
done with today's technology). But it
all harkens back to what constitutes knowledge.
As Charles Kegan Paul (publisher of Kegan Paul & Trench) said
towards the end of the 19th century, "It is by books that mind speaks to
mind, by books the world's intelligence grows, books are the tree of knowledge,
which has grown into and twined its branches with those of the tree of life,
and of the common fruit men eat and become as gods knowing good and evil."
These "immigrant publishers" gave rise to another
generation of publishers -- I was among them -- ones that learned the ropes
from these pioneers. We in turn laid
down the groundwork for the ubiquitous use of computers in publishing and
anticipated on demand and on line publishing.
As that May 25, 1984 Publisher's
Weekly profile concluded its article..."We're
working on disseminating online information," says Hagelstein -- derived
at first from books, but ultimately, he believes, to be online only....What
Greenwood's whole approach seems to be leading to is that so-far elusive
development we are always being told is in our future: books on demand.... Perhaps,
in its own way and with all deliberate speed, [it] is pointing the way to the
future of the book."
