Publish or ?

My classmate Charlie Scribner once wrote, “If you want to start a publishing company, the first thing you need to do is marry the daughter of the richest man in America”.

Charlie's great-grandfather, the first Charles Scribner married the daughter of John Insley Blair who started the country store in Butt’s Bridge, New Jersey. Blair began his career as postmaster of Butts Bridge in 1825, and decided the town needed to upgrade its image. The town changed its name to Gravel Hill, and then fifteen years later, with Blair evidently clearly in control of his community, it changed its name again to Blairstown.

John Blair, invested in the Lackawanna Coal and Iron Company (which eventually became part of Bethlehem Steel in 1922) in 1846 when it started rolling the first iron railroad rails in the USA. Blair then got into the railroad business, investing in the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western in 1852, and the Union Pacific in 1860, just as rail lines grew explosively across the country. He eventually managed 16 railroad companies from his own private railcar, which travelled throughout his empire and routinely logged over 40,000 miles a year on the rails. Blair was the largest owner of rail mileage in the world and, like THP, became one of the richest men in America.

Charles Scribner married Blair's daughter Emma in 1846 and started the publishing firm that same year that would become Charles Scribners Sons. Starting an independent publishing company was something of an innovation at that time. Most established houses were either printers, like the Harper Brothers who ventured into publishing to provide work for their presses; or a bookseller like William T. Armstrong who might publish a title to supply extra books to sell in his store.

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Blair had followed the Perkins lead in becoming an early adopter of industrial technology. The Perkins brothers invested heavily in the Monckton Iron Company near Lake Champlaign in Vermont during the War of 1812, started the Perkinsville Manufacturing Company in a mill just outside of Windsor in 1829, and founded the first commercial railroad in America in 1826. The Granite Railroad in Quincy, Mass, moved giant blocks of granite from the quarry in Quincy two and three quarter miles to the Neponset River to be transported by barge to Charlestown for the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument.

William Ticknor, the publisher, had first suggested a monument commemorating the Revolutionary War battle, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins assembled a committee at his house to get the project moving. The design committee included Daniel Webster, George Ticknor, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston. An obelisk design was selected and the corner-stone was laid on June 17, 1825 by Lafayette on his anniversary tour, with Daniel Webster delivering the oration. The celebration was unequalled by anything previously seen in New England.

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In 1980 I married Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, New York. By then, the family fortune had been substantially reduced.

When I told my father that I was interested in this attractive redhead, Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, he seemed unusually interested, and much later I found out that he called up Sheldon and Caroline Keck, the art restorers who had cleaned the Stuart portrait and lived in Cooperstown, to enquire as to the suitability of the match.

Caroline Keck, was well known for her strong opinions and had served as personal conservator for Georgia O’Keeffe and Nelson A. Rockefeller. “Oh, no”, she told my father, “Those are the nice Clarks”, with whom they regularly played bridge, and not the Clarks of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune.

I borrowed money from my father, and, with Phil Zuckerman, my classmate from DU, started an independent publishing company, Applewood Books. We joked that Phil was related to Mort Zuckerman, who had just bought the Atlantic Monthly, but actually Phil came from Levittown on Long Island. We were pretty much on our own.

The times were calling for a fresh approach to publishing. Unpublished and “mid-list” writers were finding it increasingly difficult to be published. The rise of mass media, especially television, and the rise of chain stores such as B. Dalton and Walden Books and the decline of the “carriage trade” were giving rise to the “blockbuster syndrome”. Returns were endemic with some houses seeing returns of thirty to fifty percent.

“A Bushel of New Writers for a New Generation of Readers” was our slogan. We developed some promising writers (Eric Kraft, Alan Cheuse, Richard Elman), and published some entertaining books (Peter Leroy, The Bohemians, Cocktails at Somozas). We were soon being featured in the Boston Globe Magazine and our books were being reviewed in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times.

Phil and I bought two Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, and running Scripsit we set copy for our books (except for Eric Kraft who used his own Wang word processor). We went to Altertext on Brattle Street in Cambridge with their black boxes to convert from one language to another, and then to Compuworks on Mass Ave. where we rented time on its Compugraphic typesetters.

One day, two visiting Chinese publishers came to town and visited our offices. This was in the early eighties, before contact with China became common, but Phil's wife Disty had studied acupuncture in Taiwan and spoke Chinese. I explained with delight to the visiting dignitaries how just two people could run a publishing company using this new technology. I received a blank stare, and envisioned the millions of people in China willing to set copy by hand.

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By 1985, the market forces waved the invisible hand. Lacking the subsidization of great family wealth, my career as an independent publisher came to an end.