No Reason to Hide It

IN THE SUMMER 1989 issue of The American Scholar, Gerald Howard, freshly forced from his editorial role at Viking Penguin, gave voice to his anger regarding the state of New York trade publishing. The “Cosmodemonic Publishing” industry, as Howard would come to call it, was drunk on corporate greed and sacrificing the quality of literature after having been “neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate[s] that enfolded” its once-respectable companies. Conglomerate publishing was still relatively new at the time; it was only 30 years earlier that Random House went public and Times Mirror acquired New American Library, followed swiftly by the mergers of Pocket Books with Simon & Schuster, Random House’s acquisition of Knopf, RCA’s acquisition of Random House, Gulf and Western’s takeover of Simon & Schuster, and on and on.