Recent Reads

The Loud Literary Lamas of New York, by Jack Woodford. An entertaining, book-length rant against the chattering classes of the publishing industry, circa 1950. I'm pretty sure it's the only book I've ever read which proudly displays a blurb from Harry Stephen Keeler. (Woodford satirically portrayed Keeler in a 1934 article which is available here. Coincidence? Who knows?) This is, however, balanced out by Woodford's discussion of folks like H.P. Lovecraft, H.L. Mencken and James Branch Cabell. A strange kind of cynosure, indeed, to connect Keeler and Cabell!

A sample of Woodford's opinionated, curmudgeonly style, culled from the prologue:

There are readers, there are writers, there are printing presses. And there are thousands of weird characters living off the readers the writers, and the printers. Nobody knows why.

There are the publishers who turn up five thousand geniuses a year and swear on their book jackets that these will be immortal.

There are the editors who tell the publishers and the public what they ought to publish and what they ought to read -- and the authors what they ought to write.

There are the critics, a portion of whom say this about a book and a portion of whom say that -- none of it important to anybody -- according to how much money a given publisher is yearly accustomed to paying for advertising.

Now the weird parasites have come to an impasse. They have hired so many mental giants to buoy things up for readers and writers that they cannot any longer afford to pay the printers without putting the prices of books so high nobody will buy them.

They can't get rid of the printers and they won't get rid of their expensive masterminds, so they want to take most of the author's royalties away from him on the theory that the author is the only real non-essential in the publishing business. But that isn't the solution. If writers' royalties are lowered they'll quit writing. Most of them don't make a living as it is.

So what is the answer to all this?

Very simple. Bring the reader, the writers and the printer together and eliminate all the weird characters.

The way to do this is obvious and a resounding start has already been made. Self-publication....

None too surprisingly, LLLofNY was published by Vantage Press, one of the best known of the subsidy or "vanity press" companies. In the past, I've taken their imprint as a cautionary sign, a warning that what lay between the covers was most likely of interest only to the author's relatives and, perhaps, denizens of his home town. In most cases, I suspect that this is still true, but Woodford's cranky-but-charismatic book does have its appeal. In some ways, his disdain for the middlemen of the publishing industry seems similar to Ayn Rand's scorn for "second-handers".

I find myself wondering what Woodford would think of the internet. It certainly has weakened, if not totally obliterated, the barrier between authors and readers. The following passage, from chapter 12, suggests that he wouldn't be surprised by the nature of much internet content.

As a matter of fact what the public really wants is comic books full of sadism, masochism, rape and arson, and everything but comedy. The sale of these things makes us all look silly -- all book authors, publishers and editors. The public embraced these abortions because present day publishers bored hell out of them.

He goes on to demonstrate that certain ongoing debates in library selection policy -- "give 'em what they want" versus "give them what they need" -- are nothing new.

The publishing confraternity comeback to this would be that they are trying to levitate the public to "better things". Sure. But "better" according to whose viewpoint...

From elsewhere in the same chapter:

Fantastically enough it is impossible for the average publisher to envision himself as a gadget attached to a printing press rather than a schoolmarm. When the publisher steps out of his legitimate function as a packager and forwarder, he cures people by the millions of the habit of reading books, just as real schoolmarms make windrows of brats permanently allergic to literature by cracking them over the head with the dullest of it.

An entertaining read.

An interesting sidelight: although Woodford is described as a pulp fiction writer in Wikipedia and elsewhere, and although he frequently boasts of his fiction sales in LLLofNY, a search of WorldCat indicates that he was far more successful, in the library world at least, as a purveyor of writing advice than as a fiction writer. Strange fate.