Librarian Publisher Dialog: Jim Carmin Talks to Dennis Johnson of Melville House
By Jim Carmin Sep 15, 2011You can accuse the publishing industry of many things, but just don't call it boring. Developments like Amazon's purported ebook loaning library leave many collection development professionals feeling winded and powerless. Our new Librarian-Publisher Dialog series aspires to reduce that angst by strengthening communication between two major players in the content ecosystem. In July, Kate Sheehan launched us in a big way by sketching the publishing landscape according to Random House in her conversation with Madeline McIntosh. Katie Dunneback followed a month later, filing an ebook-focused talk with Josh Marwell of HarperCollins that avoided exploding in histrionics over the 26-circs loaning cap.
Here, Jim Carmin (pictured below in blue shirt) of the Multnomah County Library illuminates the philosophies of Brooklyn, NY, indie Melville House, which has taken a refreshingly innovative approach to satisfying readers' appetites for print and digital while, why, yes, issuing many librarian authors. Publisher Dennis Johnson's insights on cultural engagement (or, to coin a new term, reader intimacy) could very well make him an idealogical pinup among a certain set of librarians who know that there would be no word of mouth without their brand of proximity to the reading public.
Stay tuned for October's subject: possibly a graphic novel or sci-fi giant.—Heather McCormack, Editor
JC: First and foremost, call me a traditionalist, but I am grateful for Melville House leading the charge in revitalizing the novella with its stunning series, "The Art of the Novella," and its modern companion, "The Contemporary Art of the Novella." Much in the way that I believe a small chapbook may be the ideal vehicle for poetry, these seem to be exactly what has been needed over the centuries to promote, reveal, and celebrate this often overlooked genre. Can you tell us how these series came about, how they've been received, and what's in their future?
DJ: The idea for the novella series came out of my own background as a writer. I've always loved the form and felt it was unappreciated. I became even more aware of this when I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop—it seemed as if all my classmates had written a novella or two and simply stuck them in a drawer because they were impossible to sell, being too long for literary journals and too short for book publishers. So it struck me as a very pure writing exercise, like a poem: novellas were something you wrote because you just had to. Later on, I taught a class in the form, when I was a college professor.
When I became a publisher, there were so many I loved that I thought we should do it as a series. Because the series would include the lesser-known work of very famous writers, we figured it would have a good chance of succeeding. As it turned out, we were right. A series is a good place to put the books you love: there's a good chance they will be displayed better, stay in stores longer, and generate trust in your taste. But it was a very hard sell at first. Some of our key sales reps and the buyers at the chains really hated the books. They thought the design was, well, stupid. They wanted pictures, introductions, afterwords. They just didn't get it. But we persevered. I've seen a couple of those people since then, and they all compliment us for such brilliant design and for not putting introductions in the books, thereby making them more attractive to academics who like their classics unfreighted with someone else's theories; in short, for coming up with a way to have a totally fresh classics line, of all things.
In truth, the thing that started it all was just loving novellas by Chekhov and James. That's the motivation behind the series we've invented since, such as the "Neversink Library," where we're reprinting out-of-print books that we love or translating never-before-translated books that we love, or the "Melville International Crime" series, where we're translating all these foreign political crime books that we can't believe weren't published here before because they're so good.
The HybridBook project is what's next with the novellas—again, a project born out of personal passion. We decided to look at how we read and came up with the fact that while we don't enjoy introductions to the classics, when we encounter a book we love, all of us launch related-reading projects. We go off in search of more information about the author or the book or the time period or the subject or whatever—an attempt to stay in the book, to delve deeper into its world.
So we decided to add a component that accommodates, even inspires, that continuing interaction with a given book. The component is called an "Illumination," and it consists of a treasure trove of additional primary-source material related to the book. For example, the Illumination for the next reprint of our edition of Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener includes letters Melville wrote while composing the book about the philosophy he was reading that inspired it; answers to some of those letters from correspondents such as Nathaniel Hawthorne; extracts from the philosophy itself; a contemporaneous review of Bartleby by Alexis de Tocqueville (he hated it); contemporaneous maps and drawings of Wall Street, where the story takes place; a recipe for ginger snaps, the food Bartleby is always eating (turns out it was made from moldy scraps in bakeries, to which ginger was added to kill the mold—poor people's snack food, essentially); and more. It amounts to hundreds of pages of additional material—a bookshelf's worth.
What's more, we deliver all this digitally, which makes for one of the most fun parts of the project: you just scan the QR code in the back of the book with your phone, and voila! The world's first enhanced print book. (Or, you can just get the ebook, which already includes the Illuminations.)
JC: Another admirable trait of Melville House is its ability to identify spectacular works of fiction that have been overlooked, misplaced, or forgotten. Naming one series the "Neversink Library" says it all: your house revels in taking risks. Please tell us how you manage to identify the intellectually stimulating literary gems among the vast fields of dull granite.
DJ: I'll point out again that I came into this business as a writer, with no knowledge of publishing as a business. My mindset is still to go at it like a writer: I have a certain sense in the back of my mind of an audience that I empathize with, understand, and want to communicate with. You make your moves with a feeling of trust for that audience. And yet you try not to overanalyze—why does a writer pick a certain word? They can probably give you some schematic reason, but the bottom line is it felt right. So when I read Georges Simenon's The Train, I thought: 1.) It's the best thing he ever wrote; 2.) I can't believe it's out of print; 3.) I know our fans will love this book. And that was essentially the entire thought process that went into deciding it had to be in the "Neversink Library."
The process is now greatly amplified, I hasten to add, by the fact that Valerie [Merians, copublisher] and I have been joined by an utterly amazing staff of people who are spectacularly and differently well read, and totally animated by the hunt for books to love.
JC: Clearly one advantage of being independent is your ability to focus on authors you admire and for whom you see a need to be published or republished. I'm thinking in particular of Heinrich Böll and Hans Fallada. Your Fallada novels have, in particular, sparked exciting critical attention. Can you talk a little about the responsibilities and pleasures of a press championing individual authors who are no longer living and perhaps give us a hint about whom you might be publishing next in this way?
DJ: Being a champion for writers and their ideas is basically what a publisher does. One of the real pleasures of being a publisher today is that you can bring old books to an entirely new readership, thanks to the world of new marketing possibilities on the Internet and ebooks. Both things have inspired a lot of people who might not otherwise have heard of these writers, or read them because they don't read print books, to make new discoveries.
The Fallada phenomenon we sparked speaks to another pleasure rooted in the current publishing ecosystem. That is, the publishers that traditionally were champions of writers like Hans Fallda—publishers such as Penguin, say—have become too big to do that as much as they used to. Not that there aren't geniuses and literary champions still within the big houses. But for the most part, they're all giant conglomerates that, going forward, need everything to be a best seller because for conglomerates the bottom line is what matters most—not just staying in business, like the old days, and not just making a profit, but making a bigger profit each quarter. Clearly, they hearken to a different business dictum than little publishers do. And what's more, I would suggest that this has led in some degree to a different ethical dictum, or at least a badly atrophied sense of editorial acumen.
Thus, Penguin passed on Hans Fallada for decades—six decades, to be precise. Then we did him, to huge success and worldwide acclaim, and Penguin bought him away from us! It was just a business acquisition to them. But when I first read him, I knew instantly that we simply had to publish him no matter what. Any idiot could see on a first reading that Every Man Dies Alone was clearly an important book historically—look at the dialog it's inspired about German resistance to Hitler—and that it was even more clearly one of the most stirring novels of the 20th century. It was absolutely my responsibility to bring this book into the English language. And also my job to champion Hans Fallada himself: partly because this book was never translated, he was looked upon by the West as a Nazi sympathizer, which was rubbish. We had to right a literary injustice.
That's more or less what it's always all about. This particular effort proved very successful, but often enough they're not so successful. But the imperative remains the same.
As to what's next along these lines, all I can say is keep an eye on the "Neversink Library," which will be populated by books we acquire in response to that imperative.
JC: I've been focusing on the more historical-literary side of things, but Melville House is also known for its wide range of quirky, contemporary books. You recently published Rudolph Herzog's rather difficult title on humor in Hitler's Germany, Dead Funny, and Christopher Boucher's debut novel, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. How does a small press juggle such diversity and breadth without dropping a book or two in the mix?
DJ: I'm glad to hear you think we haven't "dropped" a book. While in the old days—ten years ago, when we founded the company—it was just Valerie and me at the kitchen table, I can only attribute this claim now to a very hard-working staff who cares deeply about the books we publish, and that, according to you, anyway, has very good taste! We really do work as a team, brainstorming acquisitions, marketing, and design. And we work very long hours.
JC: Both Bernard-Henri Lévy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl? and Anna Politkovskaya's Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches indicate that Melville House is especially concerned with justice in journalism and the need to right the wrongs, which is also an undercurrent in much of your fiction, especially surrounding the trauma of war. Can you tell us how Melville House came to promote and champion this moral focus?
DJ: The company was founded, impulsively, as a kind of moral or at least political act, and I guess that imbues everything we do. I had this blog called MobyLives, one of the first book blogs, and on September 10, 2001, it was named by Yahoo! (the Google of that era) as the website of the week, so on the morning of September 11, I suddenly had tens of thousands of readers. After we heard the attacks and ran down to the water, the police forced us back into our apartments. We thought it was war, so we went online to look for news, and I found people were already writing to me about the attacks—lots of local poets and novelists and literary journalists, friends and fans.
To make a long story short, I began posting things, starting late on the day itself with an email I got from a poet named George Murray who had a day job at 7 World Trade Center. He wrote of his horrifying escape, and it got a lot of attention. Then we posted poetry by some pretty well-known people such as Alicia Ostriker and Stephen Dunn, and it started getting press attention.
By the time George Bush climbed up on the rubble of the towers a couple of days later and started calling for vengeance, with the media chiming in, MobyLives had this amazing other take on events. At some point soon after, Valerie looked over my shoulder and said, "That stuff really tells the story of New York right now so much better than what's in the newspaper. We ought to make a book about it." And we were off, racing along toward the creation of our first book, Poetry After 9/11, although we had absolutely no idea how to do such a thing.
The house has really been rooted in that kind of activist impulse ever since. It's particularly true of our political and current events books. I mean, we did publish the first book on the CIA rendition program, Torture Taxi by A.C. Thompson and Trevor Paglen, which actually was on press the day the president held a press conference to admit to the program after four years of denying it. And those books were not easy to do. For example, when we published Who Killed Daniel Pearl?—in which B.H.L. reported that Pakistan was trading nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea ten months before the New York Times "broke" the story—the head producer of the Today Show cancelled the author's appearance because, and I quote, "There will be no French accents on the Today Show." I mean, remember freedom fries?
In maybe less obvious but similar ways, American society had also become hostile to intellectualism and art making in general, and so our publications of avant-garde fiction and translated work and poetry also feel like works of activism. In short, we do feel motivated, overall, to make the world a better place.
JC: In July, just as the federal government seemed about to leap over the fiscal edge, you published Debt: The First 5000 Years ("Before there was money, there was debt"). Tell us something about the timing of a book's release and how Melville House goes about its prognostications in determining its future catalog.
DJ: That particular book was a good example of how it works for us. In the fall of 2008, we were sitting around doing what we do best—brainstorming at the big conference table in the middle of our office. And we were all incensed by what was going on with the economy. We were looking at how these banks and investment companies had known exactly what they were foisting on the public and how they were getting bailouts nonetheless. But how it had all come down was still, at that point, a complicated mystery. So we were debating whether to create and crash (publish really fast) a book called What the Fuck Just Happened? But who would write it? And so on.
At some point, our senior editor, Kelly Burdick, thought of some things that David Graeber had written about economics and passed them around the office. We all fell in love with these essays and loved that Graeber, although brilliant on economics, was an anthropologist, not an economist. We liked that he was a different voice, that he was putting a human side to things. And then, of course, the best idea of all was to talk about this incident—the debt crisis that's still going on—in a historic context. That's when it all came into place—when it became a real Melville House book. We had the perfect author who was perfectly unusual, and we had a completely different take on it that seemed the very best one to have.
The key is that we have a staff who reads off the beaten trail and pays attention to our culture. By going at it as a team, we keep each other sharp. It certainly doesn't hurt any that, now that we've got a reputation, many authors come to us with projects that seem to fit our character perfectly.
JC: Distribution and marketing are obviously essential elements for any publisher. Melville House's promotion seems particularly effective (video trailer contest for The Duel; your audacious move to publish, as part of your "Art of the Novella" series, five classic novellas all with the same name; appearances on Charlie Rose). Publishers and authors these days are using a wide variety of approaches on Twitter and Facebook and other sites. Would you describe Melville House's take on these media platforms, whether or not you think they're effective, and what differences you'd like to see?
DJ: Look, the publishing business has always claimed—accurately, I think, but blindly—that books sell based ultimately on word of mouth. But you couldn't really prove it. It was just, well, who knows what sold a book? Some good books didn't sell, lots of bad ones did. Why? Ultimately, beyond the obvious massive campaigns of the conglomerates, and in an age when there's precious little discussion of books in the mainstream, no one really knew and chalked it up to word of mouth—aka magic.
But now you can prove it. Now you can actually see the word of mouth on a book and follow it on Facebook and Twitter and lots and lots and lots of blogs and webzines. What's more, you can jump in! It's fabulous, really fabulous. In short, I think they're terrifically effective because reading is after all a social act. It's like we've all been waiting for social media to come along so we could all talk about what we're reading, and find out about more to read.
JC: It seems that many of your publishing activities may be easier because of your independence, but by the same token, you must have a great list of worries, too. I recently attended a gathering at which the owner of the largest independent used-and-new bookstore in the world told us his thoughts about the current state of bookselling: dire and challenging. Your thoughts on being an indie publisher in the 21st century?
DJ: First, you raise a good point in that we are something of a rarity—I mean, most American publishing companies are not privately owned anymore. It means a unique set of challenges. In particular, unlike nonprofits and university presses, which live or die by fund-raising, we live or die by sales. This is not a very good retail environment right now, neither in the straightforward retail marketplace, nor in the academic marketplace or library marketplace. They've all been whacked hard by the economic crisis, as well as by some major cultural upheaval and the country's shift to the right.
My biggest fear used to be the media—the place we hoped our books, and the issues they raise, would be talked about. I was worried about the fact that, you know, you can't get a guy with a French accent on television. That newspapers were dropping all discussion of books (which makes absolutely no sense—no survey has ever shown book coverage to be particularly unpopular and, I mean, hello? Who's more likely to want to read a newspaper than, er, readers?).
The mainstream was particularly shut down to the concept of discussing books published by anyone other than Manhattan's Big Six (still is). But that's one reason for the rise of the Internet and social media, and that stuff seems to me to be the light at the end of the tunnel.
Now I worry mostly about the marketplace for books. Take the recent fall of Borders. It was widely reported as coming about because of ebooks and Amazon: this is a complete canard. For one thing, surveys are already showing that in indie stores located near where a Borders has closed, business has gone up significantly. So much for the notion that Amazon seemed more attractive than a brick-and-mortar store.
The notion that fewer people wanted to buy print books because they love ebooks was a much sexier trend story, and most media ran with it. But the fact of the matter is that Borders was a real estate story. They had a greedy but nincompoopish management team that took on too much overpriced real estate in the boom of the Nineties and had no money to deal with a changing marketplace. All of which was exacerbated by incredibly bad management decisions, such as the time the company decided to replace its entire upper echelon management team with a group from the grocery store business, who immediately tried to sell their aisles to publishers the way a grocery store sells the cereal aisle to Kellogg's.
Witness further how the continent's two other chains—Barnes and Noble here and Chapters Indigo in Canada—are reducing floor space devoted to books by as much as 50 percent, and how most searches on Amazon.com now lead you not to a print book but the ebook version because ebooks and Godiva chocolates have higher profit margins. The lesson is not that fewer people want to buy print books, but that fewer giant corporations want to sell them.
Thus, we have a marketplace that is really not about what people want or what's best for the particular piece of art or politics you're trying to sell, no matter the format. I worry that nobody gets it: this isn't good for print books or ebooks.
JC: Of course, being a publisher today means you must consider how ebooks fit into your catalog, and Melville House has just announced its HybridBook initiative, which keeps the focus on the physical book but also gives value-added e-materials. I suspect your attention to book design has something to do with this, but can you tell us why Melville House has approached the ebook environment in this way, and not the more conventional approach that many mainstream publishers have taken?
DJ: Because the conventional approach many mainstream publishers have taken just strikes me as not being rooted in anything to do with making great literature or speaking truth to power. They're not excited about the possibility—nay, probability—of ebooks leading to new art forms or more voices or a greater ability to reach a new or bigger audience, or because of anything particularly inherent to the form, let alone something more organically inventive such as our HybridBook project. They're excited about ebooks mostly because they look like a more cost-effective way of continuing to do what they've been doing since the rise of conglomerate publishing 50 years ago. No more warehouses! Higher margins! No more printing or shipping bills! Yippee!
And so, perversely, they're not really open to the possibilities inherent in digital media, and they're wasting no time throwing out print technology while they're at it—a technology that is 500 years old, yes, but still superior in many ways to much of what's new. But when we should be talking about co-existing technologies, and optimizing technologies, they're not.
It is, in short, a vacant playground, and so we've been having a very good time, indeed, in it.
JC: Perhaps a fitting final question here: as libraries are picking up on the public's desire for electronic information and ebooks, can you tell us what role libraries have played in your publishing agenda in the past, and if you see any partnership roles and opportunities in the future?
DJ: From the very start, and I think unusually so for a small indie, libraries have been important to us. For our very first book, Poetry After 9/11, Valerie and I did a reading tour of libraries in Manhattan, culminating with the NYPL branch closest to the site of the World Trade Center. (In fact, that was one of the most moving events we've ever done, primarily owing to the introductory remarks of the branch librarian, who spoke of how the attacks had really hit home for her when, after a couple of weeks, she realized how many books hadn't been returned). We just rereleased that book to mark the tenth anniversary of the event, and we're doing another library tour for it.
Going back to the early days of my MobyLives blog, when some of my most interesting correspondents and guest columnists were librarians, it's just always seemed to me that librarians were savvier about the changes book culture was going through. Librarians have always been on the cutting edge of technology, for example, whether for cataloging or storage, or research. They always seemed to embrace it in a way that was heartening. And, of course, because of funding issues they're very hip politically, and who has a better feel for local communities than a librarian?
It's always been an important market to me, and one I like and want to communicate with. Not just to sell books to, either—we've always looked to librarians for book ideas. That's why several of our authors have been librarians; one of the most popular poems in Poetry After 9/11—"What I Said," which has been serialized in numerous textbooks and anthologies—was by a librarian named Norman Stock. More recently, we're thrilled to be doing a book later this fall with Amy Sonnie of the Oakland Public Library. It's a book librarians would love, a look at the rise of community organizing that's a mix of research and activism. It's called Hillblly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power.
One reason behind the development of the HybridBook project was that we saw it as an opportunity for a deeper partnership with libraries, starting with seeing it as a whole new way to revive and champion some of the fundamental works of any collection—works by giants such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, Joyce, and so on. And the very stuff of the Illuminations is a reenactment of a wonderful hunt through the stacks of a library. Isn't that where we all got our start as book lovers?
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Jim Carmin has been the John Wilson Special Collections Librarian at Multnomah County Library (Portland, OR) since 1998, where he also organizes and curates several major exhibitions annually on literary and book arts. Before that he worked as a bookseller (of rare and other books) at Powell's, and as an art librarian at the University of Oregon (where he also earned his MA in art history). Lately his focus has moved to literary concerns, being a writer himself of short stories, and regularly reviewing fiction for The Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune and The Oregonian, and poetry on his blog, Solar Mirage; he is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Dennis Johnson is publisher of Melville House, based in Brooklyn, NY. |
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