■ “I Went to ABA, but All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt,” or Convention Report, Part I. I’m wandering through New York’s colossal Javits Center— there are 1,700 exhibitors and 35,000 people at the 1991 American Booksellers Association convention—hoping to discover the Latest Truth about publishing, but that golden Truth has to be assayed from the iron of promotional discourse, and by the convention’s third day, even the most levelheaded publishers speak like trade-show holograms; they are lifelike, but the spiel is looped, the electronic smiles too taut.
Which reminds me of a certain CEO’s explanation of his management philosophy: “Everybody who works here should wonder if he’ll be fired tomorrow.” Esprit de corps is très abattu. One of the consequences of mergermania is “down-sizing.” At Simon & Schuster, Viking—Penguin, Bantam—Doubleday— Dell, Random House, and Harper- Collins, mergers create redundancies and a cataract of pink slips. New accounting practices demand lower investment but higher and faster projected return. Industry-wide figures may show decreased title output (they ought to: the number of books vying for review attention and retail space had grown unmanageably), but at the Big Five the number of new books continues to increase. Overhead has been reduced. Self-indulgence is out; accountability is in. Fine, except for the lost distinction between the maximum and the optimum.
Comments