A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
Honoring Enoch Soames
Books as business
At last the Dodo said: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 3
ON 3 JUNE 1997, A GROUP OF literary aficionados gathered in the Reading Room of the British Library in London to welcome Enoch Soames, the poet. Perhaps not unexpectedly, he didn’t materialize. What prompted the gathering was this: a century earlier, Soames, having sold only three copies of his book of poems, Fungoids, had made a pact with the Devil. In exchange for his ambitious soul, he had asked to be allowed to visit the Reading Room a hundred years hence to see how posterity had judged him. Unfortunately for Soames, posterity had not judged him at all; posterity had merely ignored him. There was no record of his work in the library’s voluminous catalogue, and in a history of the literature of his period the only mention of his name was in a note that described him as an imaginary character, invented by the English humorist Max Beerbohm. It can only be assumed that for his future readers even his ghost was invisible. So much for the fruits of ambition.
Literary ambition takes on various guises, one of which is the furtive figure dreaded by booksellers and known as the Anxious Author. Cleverly disguised as an ordinary customer, the Anxious Author roams the bookstore in search of his or her own books, berating the salespeople for not having them in stock or rearranging the shelves to give them prominence. Sometimes, the Anxious Author will buy one or two copies, in the endearing belief that where a couple will lead others will follow. Prompted perhaps by such superstitions, in 1999 the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Vise bought not merely a few but nearly twenty thousand copies of his new book The Bureau and the Mole. This gesture may be seen as carrying author anxiety too far, but Vise did not buy the volumes for his own enjoyment. Generous to a fault, he decided to share his work with the public at large, offering author-signed copies on his personal Web site. Vise’s actions (complicated by a labyrinthine financial strategy that involved bulk discounts and free shipping from Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore, calculated massive returns, and the benefit of the bookseller’s special prices for new books and fast-selling titles) deserve a moment’s consideration.
Though the book had appeared on the New York Times best-seller list a few days before Vise’s shopping spree, the twenty thousand copies no doubt prompted its appearance on other such lists. When questioned about his actions, Vise declared: “My goal was to increase awareness of The Bureau and the Mole.”
David Vise is not the first author to invent strategies for getting his book to be read. It seems that the term best seller was coined in 1889 in a Kansas City newspaper, but the ideal had certainly taken root in our psyche thousands of years earlier: in the first century, the poet Martial bragged that all Rome was mad about his book, though we don’t know what methods he used to get (in his words) “readers to hum the lines and shops to stock it.” Closer to our time, Walt Whitman promoted his Leaves of Grass with enthusiastic reviews which he wrote himself. Georges Simenon advertised his new detective novels by typing away in the window of a department store. For a tidy sum, Fay Weldon promised to include the trade name Bulgari in her most recent novel. The young Jorge Luis Borges slid copies of one of his first books into the pockets of the journalists’ coats hanging in the newspaper’s waiting room. In 1913, D. H. Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett: “If Hamlet and Oedipus were published now, they wouldn’t sell more than 100 copies, unless they were pushed.”
And yet, compared to Vise’s deployment, those earlier pushy strategies seem like minor skirmishes, less outrageous than amusing and more amusing than effective. At a time when publishers are no longer enthusiasts keen on midwifing books but have become instead accountable managers of companies within companies, forced to compete under the same roof for space and profit; when writers are no longer (with a few Pynchonian exceptions) secluded and private scribblers touched by the muse but rather performing characters who traipse around the country filling space in afternoon chat shows and serving as talking mannequins on shop floor displays; when so many books are not (as Kafka wanted) “the ax for the frozen sea within us” but rather deep-freeze readymades (like The Bureau and the Mole) concocted in an agent’s office to respond to the current prurience of the public — at such a time, why should a “creative marketing strategy” (as Vise calls it) applied to books surprise us?
In the past, writers sometimes kept a grinning skull on their desk to remind them that the only certain reward for their labors was the grave. In our time, a writer’s memento mori is not a skull but a lit-up screen that allows the writers to see, on one of several best-seller lists, that they too share poor Soames’s fate, their name assiduously absent from these roll calls of the elect.
There are, however, exceptions to this common fate. In 2000, driven by a sense of charity if not humor, a certain Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., decided to come to the rescue of all those woefully neglected writers. Thanks to a gesture that can only be described as truly democratic, Amazon.com’s best-seller lists were now no longer limited to a puny top twenty names but enshrined instead three million titles in order of bestsellerdom — a modest figure dictated only by the number of titles held in the generous memory of Amazon.com, Inc.
Thanks to the new technology, the writer’s memento mori has become a vanity chest. You have published a book, you reasonably suppose it is among the three million offered by Amazon.com, you type out its title, and, presto! You are given the exact ranking of your book among its peers. Think of the satisfied sneer (like that of the last passenger to make it into the last Titanic lifeboat) with which best-selling author number 3,000,000 can now look down on Soames’s anonymous fellow sufferer, lost in the unlisted 3,000,001st place.
Laws stranger than those of chance determine which authors are in and which are out, and, ever since 1895, when the first best-seller list appeared in the pages of The Bookman, books make the grade for reasons that apparently not even the Devil himself can fathom. Of course, if your name in lights is all you want, there are methods to procure you this modest satisfaction. For example, ask each of your friends to buy, on the same afternoon, a copy of your book, and you are likely to shimmer, for one exquisite hour, on the Amazon. com ranking. But for those unwilling to take such steps, it may be salutary to skim through the names enshrined in the best-seller lists of just a couple of years ago. With few exceptions, who are these people? Who are these Ozy-mandiases whose now utterly forgotten books presumably sold in the hundreds of thousands, were counted among the blessed by the compilers of bestseller lists, and then vanished without a trace?
But it is we, the readers, and not casual performers such as Vise and Bezos, who are the paradox. When Sam Goldwyn was negotiating with George Bernard Shaw the sale of the rights to one of celebrated author’s plays, the mogul expressed surprise at the fee demanded. Shaw answered, “The problem, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are interested in the art, while I am interested in the money.” Like Goldwyn, we demand that everything we do yield a financial profit, and yet we like to think that intellectual activities should be free from such material concerns; we have agreed that books should be bought and sold and taxed just like any other industrial product, and yet we feel offended when our obscene commercial tactics are applied to prose and poetry; we are keen to admire the latest best sellers and speak of “the shelf life of a book,” but we are disappointed to find that most books are no more immortal than an egg. In spite of Bezos’s efforts, the saga of Vise is a cautionary tale whose moral was enshrined many years ago by the writer Hilaire Belloc: “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: / ’His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’”
It is perhaps unfair to ask what all this counting means. Lists are delightful things in themselves, the very essence of poetry (as W. H. Auden once remarked), and it would be mean-spirited to deny the author of Fungoids the pleasure of introducing himself at a dinner party with “Hello, I’m best-selling author number 2,999,999. My book sold seven copies!”
But it may be that a little vanity is a requisite quality in literary endeavors. “Seven copies,” reflects the protagonist of Thomas Love Peacock’s early-nineteenth-century novel Nightmare Abbey, “have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.” In these days, when greed is considered a virtue, who would dare quarrel with such modest ambition?