“Behind the paradox of being a Jewish publisher in America is the paradox of being Jewish in America. We want a Jewish bookshelf in every bookstore in America. We don’t want our books on it. We want a Jewish community, but we don’t want to be ghettoized. The paradox is that if you want to reach the Jews, you can’t reach them as Jews.”

–Arthur Samuelson

See also Parts I and II

Salman Schocken, a German Jewish magnate and philanthropist, established the Schocken Verlag in Berlin, in 1931. During the seven years his company existed – was allowed to exist – in Weimar, then Nazi, Germany, it published 225 titles of classic Hebrew works important to the cultivated, assimilated Jews of its founder’s class and generation. Owner of a chain of department stores, Schocken was a man of wealth and leisure who devoted himself to collecting fine art and literature. While re-investigating his Jewish roots – he was “greatly influenced” by the TALES OF RABBI NACHMAN OF BRATZLAW, translated by Martin Buber, whose friend he was – he became convinced that the great works of sacred and secular Hebrew writing should be translated into German and published for the sake of his fellow believers.

In 1934, Salman Schocken emigrated to Palestine, while Lambert Schneider, his managing editor, and Moritz Spitzer, editor-in-chief, remained in Berlin, operating the company by virtue of an active exchange of letters with him. In Palestine, Schocken established the Schocken Publishing House, Ltd., under the direction of his son Gerschom. In 1940, Schocken and his family, except for that son, took ship for the United States, where he immediately joined the widening circle of brilliant German Jewish refugees adding their luster to American cultural and intellectual life. Five years later, enlisting Hannah Arendt and Nahum Glatzer as editors, he founded Schocken Books in New York.

Salman Schocken died in 1959. The firm continued under the direction of his son Theodore and son-in-law, Herzl Rome, until the younger Schocken also died, in 1975. The heirs managed to continue publishing for some years, until they, too, began to age. When the company’s revenues went into decline, they let it be known that Schocken Books was for sale. André Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon Books, an imprint of Random House, Inc., was especially interested and in 1987, persuaded Random House to buy Schocken Books and place it under his direction. Random House, Inc., which included Random House, Knopf, and Pantheon, was by then owned by Advance Publications, a privately-held corporation of the Newhouse family, which also owned Condé Nast, the magazine publishing company.

The Newhouse family was particularly concerned by the rate of return on their investment, which it considered inadequate.^* In 1989, when “the first waves of change swept over the place,” Random House, Inc., (or “Big Random,” the publishing imprint being “Little Random”) was organized as follows. The president of “big” Random House was Robert Bernstein. The directors of the various imprints reported directly and separately to him. (Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief of Knopf, had left for the New Yorker in early 1987, following the firing of William Shawn – The New Yorker is also owned by Advance Publications – and been replaced by Sonny Mehta, publisher of Pan, in London. At that time, Knopf, Pantheon, and “little” Random House were separate entities within “big” Random House.) In 1989, S.I. Newhouse fired Robert Bernstein and brought in a new CEO, Alberto Vitale, from the Bertelsmann-owned Bantam Books, part of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell.

During the early- to mid-‘90s, Vitale reorganized “big” Random House. He neatly tri-sected the trade division. Having consisted of between eleven and sixteen imprints, it was now re-arranged into three groups: the Knopf Group, the Random Group, and the Crown Group. The Knopf Group, under the aegis of Sonny Mehta; included Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Schocken, Vintage, and several smaller imprints. The editorial directors of Pantheon, Schocken, and Vintage would thus report to Sonny Mehta, president of the Knopf Group, rather than directly to the president of the corporation, Alberto Vitale. In 1998, when S.I. Newhouse sold Random House, Inc., to Bertelsmann Gmbh., that structure was kept in place. (Later, Anchor Books and Everyman’s Library, which had been part of Doubleday, also owned by Bertelsmann, were moved into the Knopf Group.) The fourth, separate division of Bertelsmann in the U.S. is the Bantam-Doubleday-Westside Group.

Thus is Random House, Inc., now organized, or was, at the time of this writing.

Following André Schiffrin as editor-in-chief of Pantheon/Schocken was Fred Jordan, who remained in place until 1993, when Arthur Samuelson became editorial director of Schocken Books. Samuelson proposed an ambitious plan to refresh the backlist, commission new translations, and publicize Schocken books “in a kind of quasi-commercial mode.” During that time, Dan Frank, formerly an editor at Viking, then at Pantheon, was named as his counterpart at Pantheon, and the two imprints worked separately. In 1999, Arthur Samuelson left Schocken and was replaced by Altie Karper and Susan Ralston, as co-directors. Having come from inside the Knopf Group, these newest directors wove their operation back into the workings of Pantheon and Knopf, warding off functional isolation of their small imprint within the conglomerate.

In the first of these conversations devoted to the history and presence of Schocken Books, I spoke with Altie Karper, then managing editor of Schocken Books and Pantheon, now sole director of Schocken. The second was with Susan Ralston, then editorial director of Schocken and a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf. She has since retired. This third, last talk is with Arthur Samuelson, the former editorial director of Schocken Books, who left the company in 1999, intending to organize a multi-media company devoted to the subject of food, with his wife, Molly O’Neill, former food writer for the New York Times. We talked in May 2001, in his comfortable loft on the West Side. Our conversation lasted about three hours and covered the diverse subjects of Salman Schocken and the history of his company, Jewish identity in the present time, electronic publishing in the present and the future, translation and its possibilities, the job of the “niche publisher” as Samuelson had tried to practice it. What follows is an excerpt that will give readers quite another perspective on the evolution of Schocken Books as a corporate entity, but also, an un-corporate – but cooperative – view of how small publishing might be able to work around conglomeration. Arthur Samuelson’s view of the situation is that of the former insider, or, critical, knowing, combative, defensive, retrospective, and – perhaps – idealistic, but not impossible.

He began by asking me about Archipelago and how I had come to found it; this of course led into a lively discussion about the promise of electronic production and dissemination, the Web, and printing-on-demand, for the future of the book industry.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I think that the electronics is going to change everything, it’s going to change relationships between everybody.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: It’s already done it.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I guess what I am saying is that we are at the very beginning of a change no less significant than the changes that followed the invention of the printing press. Today the publishing industry is a slave to an inefficient distribution system.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Would you describe what you mean?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: It’s a 19^th century system. They call it the “carriage trade” for a reason. You can make an argument that the system of distribution of books in America today is designed to prevent the distribution of books. It’s this huge sieve that…

KATHERINE McNAMARA: …that funnels down to…

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: …that funnels down to a bookseller, not the individual customer or book buyer. Now, part of what the Internet allows you to do is to redefine who the customer is, and that means a completely different relationship with the public than you have now. The tremendous need for capital of this inefficient distribution system means that what are essentially ancillary functions of publishing come to dominate it: printing, manufacturing, warehousing. In other words, the weakness in the system dominates it. What determines the difference between publishers is not necessarily that one publishes better books than another, it’s the distribution system. I think the Web can return publishing to its core functions, which are editorial, rights, and publicity. Editorially, companies are weak because they’re dependent on agents, and whoever controls product controls price. It’s a very simple economic principle.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Say more about the dependence on agents, will you?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Because their time is so filled with the mechanics of publishing and distribution, few editors have the time to find and nurture talent; therefore, they have to depend on literary agents. I don’t have much experience personally, because I spent much of my career in “niche” publishing, where direct relationships with authors was everything, and I had the time to cultivate those relationships, to find my own writers and help develop them. It was a collaboration. I shared the publishing gamble with the writer, and I didn’t pay big advances. I was known as a cheapskate. But I was able to nurture long careers and help create books that earned handsome royalties for the writer and neat profits for the house. One of the biggest books I ever published, I paid $2500 for, and made many millions of dollars.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: What was the book?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: It’s called WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE [by Harold Kushner]. And I did that when I was first at Schocken.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: When did you first go to Schocken?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: 1979, 1980. It was my first publishing job. I was fortunate to be hired as an editor there. I had been involved with political things here and in Israel, involved in selling difficult political ideas. In those days, to talk about having a Palestinian state next to Israel was not a comfortable position to take. It was more comfortable in Israel, where there were many people willing to consider it, including generals and people in government, but here it was much more difficult. There was a kind of “Israel right or wrong” mentality.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Has that changed?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Everything has changed. But in those days, to take a position different from the government of Israel was considered heretical. Ironically, going from selling difficult political ideas to selling books was a lot easier. But when I left Schocken and went to Simon & Schuster, I’d had this big home run. I’d been in publishing maybe six months when I found that book. I knew that book would become a best seller. I didn’t know enough to see any reason that the book couldn’t be a best seller.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: All the things you know now that tell you…?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: This is a profession where one of the most important things you need to do is protect yourself from experience. What you don’t know can help you. It can help you a great deal. Schocken had never had a best seller. I got people to see that it could happen. In fact, Schocken didn’t want to publish that book. They were embarrassed by it, because they thought it was not intellectual enough.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Whom did you have to convince at Schocken? Who was in charge then?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well, Peter Bedrich was there, and Chava Schocken – Chava Glazer – who was the sister of Ted Schocken, Salman Schocken’s son. Everybody is dead now, except Peter and David Rome, Chava’s son, either of whom can tell you about the family and what it was like. In fact, Peter worked with Ted. The Random House part of Schocken’s history is the smallest part, and perhaps the least interesting part of its story. Random House has functioned as a responsible steward, and I would describe much of my work the same way, sustaining but not expanding Schocken.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: I spent hours in the Schocken/Pantheon library looking at titles, and noted how many of the newer titles I didn’t recognize.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: There are not many books on that list now that could not have been published elsewhere, I think. More importantly, if you look at the most important Jewish books that were published in the last fifty years, you won’t find many that came from Schocken. although many found their final resting place there, on the backlist. One of the things that has happened in the last several decades is that Jewish books are no longer “ghettoized.” I do not think that there is a single publisher that does not have some on their list. I’d like to think that I might have put one or two on the list, but there are a number of other publishers that have published very fine Jewish books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: In the last fifty years, you say?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Since 1950. Just at the time Ted Schocken said they were starting to cut back the list.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well, they needed to protect the Jewish books by bringing in other kinds of things, but what also began to happen was that non-Jewish, ah, regular publishers began publishing Jewish books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: So, what books would you…

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: …say were the most important Jewish books in this period? I’d say Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was not published by Schocken, along with a few other great Jewish novelists.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Aaron Appelfeld was published there.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes, I brought him to Schocken. I brought [Elie] Wiesel to Schocken. But we didn’t discover Appelfeld. I picked up Appelfeld from Random House, which had overpaid for a book and, not knowing what to do with it, just wanted to cut its losses. I bought the contract for half the price they’d paid, and at that price, I could afford to give the book the attention it needed to be published successfully.

You know, the biggest problem in book publishing is, if everybody did what they were supposed to do, nobody could do their job. There are just too many books being published. That’s because of the needs of this distribution system: you’ve got to keep feeding this machine. I was lucky at Schocken that I had a backlist. I was lucky at Schocken that I knew that backlist intimately and I could revive it. I mean, we repackaged it, we changed titles, we did all sorts of things to try to give it new life. The backlist could support the house, so I wasn’t under any pressure in terms of P&Ls [profit and loss statements], I had a kind of cushion. We were profitable. I increased our profitability significantly. Random House wanted me to publish more books. I would have preferred to publish fewer books and to put more effort into their development.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: So you were interested in keeping Schocken fairly small, in hand?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I came from small-end print publishing. My skills have always been not at working inside a building, but outside of that building. Schocken within Random House was an imprint that was backlist-oriented in a frontlist house. It was niche-oriented, in a general-interest house. And so, whatever I did that would require the assistance of the organization would always be limited by the fact that, in sales, when my books were measured against a mass-market standard, and despite the fact that they made money, the number of books sold would always look insignificant in comparison. But that’s where I came from, making things happen, that was my job. As a niche publisher, I could make things happen that the larger organization could not make happen. When we published the Bible in its new translation [THE SCHOCKEN BIBLE, tr. from the Hebrew by Edward Fox], it closed many circles: it closed a personal circle for me, because I had acquired that book when I was there in 1980; it closed the circle for Schocken, because they’d published the Buber-Rosenzweig translation in Germany. I think it may be one of the more important Jewish books to be published, to take the Bible back, for the Jews, to Hebrew, to show that English was not the language of the Bible. I published that volume as if I were conducting a political campaign. I co-published it with one of the largest evangelical publishers, which shocked a lot of people and turned the publication into a national, interfaith event, a big deal, teaching both Jews and Christians about their Bible. We were invited to the White House to present a Schocken Bible to Mrs. Clinton and created an event, “Bible Live,” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. People at Random House thought it was insane to do it at a cathedral: why not at a synagogue?

KATHERINE McNAMARA: David Marks, in his new novel [THIS IS NOT A NOVEL], writes that the word synagogue is Greek, and meant a Christian gathering.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Hm. Do you think if we dig deep enough we’ll find that the word cathedral means Jewish gathering? Anyway, I know that, because the Bible belonged to everybody, it had the potential of reaching an extremely wide audience and, in doing so, re-educating Jews about their own literature.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: That seems to me very like the situation of Salman Schocken in Berlin, in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes, he had an agenda and so did I, and it was all I thought about. We got five thousand people to come out to that cathedral, everybody from Jesse Jackson to James Earl Jones. We turned it into an enormous celebration – I mean you could see the tapes someday, it was on CBS – five thousand people, black, white, Christian, Jewish, acknowledging Hanukkah and the release of this translation!

A lot of this has to do with making a virtue out of necessity. If we didn’t do it this way, the book wouldn’t work. There was no other way. I needed something that was going to make this translation stand out above everything else. I knew that once I had done that on the outside, my people inside would take interest, but until then, they wouldn’t – they couldn’t, they had too much to do to notice another Bible. One of the advantages I had was that Schocken gave me connections throughout the world. I had people for whom this book was not a commodity. Really, all I had to do as the publisher was to work that advantage. If you are a general interest publisher – and I’ve done that too, I worked at Simon & Schuster, I worked at HarperCollins – you simply cannot afford to develop the depth of relationships you develop as a niche publisher. As a niche publisher you are, often, selling an idea, not a commodity so, people will help you. The other advantage of niche publishing is that everything you do is, by definition, connected to everything else you do. It’s all the same niche, and therefore each publication feeds the other. One of the problems in general trade publishing is that there is no institutional memory, and what is best remembered are mistakes, and the aversion to repeating them.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Right. It’s like television.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: They will tell you, “We tried this once before and it didn’t work.” There simply isn’t time to think about why it didn’t work – whether it was the wrong time, whether the idea was implemented incorrectly, or whether, in fact, the idea is simply wrong.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Or even if they know what they tried and what didn’t work…

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: In some publishing houses I’ve worked in – this is not true at Random House – there is the idea that every book is guilty until proven innocent. And that is not true. That is one of the things special about the Knopf Group: there is a willingness to risk failure. Every book is a challenge, and identifying the obstacles to marketing a book is not the same thing as having a marketing plan. Identifying the obstacles is the first step; then you’ve got to do something about those obstacles. In the case of what I did, the obstacles were so apparent that I used to joke that my job was made easy by the fact that it was so hard. I could also use books strategically.

Another thing: behind the paradox of being a Jewish publisher in America is the paradox of being Jewish in America. We want a Jewish bookshelf in every bookstore in America. We don’t want our books on it. We want a Jewish community, but we don’t want to be ghettoized. The irony is, if I were to publish a book at Schocken, and Knopf published the same book, we would do it in exactly the opposite fashion. They would figure that it’s a Jewish book, they would target it to the Jewish audience. I would figure I’ve got to get it out of the Jewish ghetto, so how do I do that? How do I make it bigger than that? How do I get it out of that category? And that’s the advantage of a category publisher.

The disadvantage of general-interest publishers is that all they can think of is categories. The paradox is that if you want to reach the Jews, you can’t reach them as Jews.

If WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED TO GOOD PEOPLE had come to me when I was a general-interest publisher, I would have to have seen it as a sort of Jewish self-help book. But it came to me when I was a niche publisher and therefore, I published it as a book for everybody and put together a range of quotes to prove it, from Art Linkletter to Archibald McLeish, and from every different religion. We had a whole array of quotes, because I had this theory of publishing, of promotion, that I call cognitive dissonance. You have to overcome people’s natural reluctance to do anything for your book. The first thing you need is for them to listen. And the way you do that is to confuse them. Having Archibald McLeish and Art Linkletter is confusing if you think WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE is a Jewish book. That is when they start listening.

The entire effort of publishing is knocking down a series of dominos. Each line of dominoes speaks to the line in front of it; each word is a knock-down. The hardest dominoes to knock down are your colleagues. But they speak to people in front of them, who will speak to people in front of them, so, knocking down the collegial dominoes, getting the internal buzz going, is essential. It’s the hardest thing to do, but it is the most important; nothing happens until you’ve done that. The easiest domino is the customer. But you’ve got to go through rows and rows of dominos before you get to the customer. You’ve got to create a tremendous amount of energy to overcome the resistance, because everybody is confronted by thousands of people saying the same kinds of things to get their attention. I’ve worked as the marketing director in a bookstore. I’ve sat with buyers, and I’ve sat with the salesmen, and I’ve seen them come in and sell. If you’ve got a catalog with three hundred books, and if you give every book one minute of presentation, that’s five hours, and nobody’s got five hours. So the triage is committed within the publishing company.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: I was in my local bookshop when the rep from the company that distributes my publisher’s list called in. I introduced myself, but if I hadn’t, I doubt my book would have been mentioned. He had a very thick catalog, and he represented perhaps a dozen publishers.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: You’re probably right, it boils down to time, not necessarily the merits of any individual book. When I first started in book publishing, I had this idea, this naÔve idea, that salesmen were like knights. They would go out and do battle for you, they’d go out into the market place and champion your books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Don’t you think they were that, when they had only one line to represent?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: They may have been, I don’t know; but I know that I came to look at it differently. I figured out that instead of making it possible for them to do their jobs, that is, by writing great catalog copy, creating a must-have look in a cover, I had to make it impossible for them not to do their jobs. And the way I did that was by making things happen, first outside the house, then inside the house. I had to create a situation in which the bookseller asked the salesman about my books. I used quotes, editorial mention, buzz; I sold foreign and serial rights; basically, I did everything. I was a one-man operation, and I really liked it. Yes, I had the Pantheon people to help me; but the fact is that, measured against what they had to do, I was insignificant. So I made a virtue out of necessity. I felt free to do whatever I could, whatever I wanted, and nobody got in my way, because nobody had time to care. At least, nobody had time to care as much as I did.

. And so, for me, publishing is by itself a kind of organic enterprise. For me, buying and selling both come from the same impulse. My job as a publisher and editor is not to know what you want to read. My job as a publisher is to tell you what I’ve read and why I like it. And that means I need to understand myself as a reader. One of the great pleasures of book publishing is that, no matter how good you are, you’re going to fail eighty percent of the time. And I think that’s a great opportunity to learn things. You don’t learn a lot from the books that succeed. They make you think you’re smart, they make you feel good about yourself, but you don’t learn a lot from that, you learn a lot more from the books that fail. In a certain way, they’re more valuable to you because of what you’ve learned from them.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: How do you mean, fail? Critically? In terms of sales?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Either, or both. When I was at Simon & Schuster, I started doing a mental retroactive profit-and-loss: “What did I do? What worked? What didn’t work? What can I get from this to take some place else?” Every book was a learning experience in publishing well, or publishing badly.

Marketing people and sales people can’t think of it quite like that. For them, it’s an assembly line; and for me, it’s a garden. The list is something I’m growing, and if this crop didn’t come up right, then I’ve got another one in the ground, and I’ve got to learn from what didn’t work and try and make this one work. And again, because I’ve been a niche publisher, I can take everything I have and apply it to everything else, so that if one book really succeeds, I can then take advantage of the new doors that have opened up, and then try to bring other things though that door. It was, in a way, jujitsu: I tried to use the strength that came from our weakness. I did some things that I could never have done at a general-interest imprint.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: For example?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: The way I published the Bible: I let my captive audience help me build a bigger and bigger audience, which is exactly what the Internet can, in theory, do for any publisher. What I started to say in the beginning was that most of publishing today is determined not by the economics of book publishing, but by the economics of an old-fashioned distribution system. The Internet is going to change this distribution system. It’s not going to change if we’ve assimilated Amazon as just another book store, just another customer, but if we recognize the revolution that has already begun. Soon, Amazon – heck, any bookstore – will be able to manufacture its own books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Six years ago, in Paris, I met Odile Hellier of the Village Voice Bookshop. She introduced me to a stringer for the Financial Times who had something to say she thought would interest me. What he told me was, there was a machine and it made books. You booted up a disk in one end; a book came out the other! A paperback book! He said to Odile, “You know, in x number of years, this machine is going to be in your shop. This is how you’re going to sell books.” Odile was skeptical. But that’s what you’re saying too: the print-on-demand machine will change things.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Absolutely, a bookseller will be able to replenish her inventory overnight. And that’s going to change everything. What it means is that you no longer need this huge distribution apparatus. It means that publishing gets thrown back to its beginnings, but also onto what has become its weakest foot, discovering and nurturing talent. I am not sure big institutions will be able to meet this challenge, as it is all about individual taste, not monolithic taste. It’s all about thousands of small niche markets, not a giant monolithic market. Corporate publishing as we know it, I think, is going to disappear. And it’s going to disappear in one of two ways. The first is, the playing field will be leveled because the cost of distribution is no longer going to be so high, which will remove the advantage that big publishing houses have had. The second is, these companies are themselves a part of larger media conglomerates, which need to reinvent themselves, need to be reinvented. I think the whole concept of intellectual property and its exploitation could be changed, to where a book is no longer something in and of itself. It may be part of something larger.

That’s the thing that excited me and that I’m still thinking a great deal about. These large publishing houses — Bertelsmann is like the world’s largest aircraft carrier. It’s a very powerful ship and it takes enormous amounts of energy from the people who run it and keep the ship going. But what if there’s not going to be an ocean? What if it’s going to be rivers?

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Or what if they even have to make a little bit of a turn? Not easy.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well, there’s that, but its one thing to steer a big boat and another thing altogether to turn a big boat into a flotilla of little boats. If the future is rivers, not an ocean, you need thousands of tiny river boats, not a gigantic aircraft carrier.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: And that speaks to a third aspect: the changes that have happened in the reading public. The real weakness in the publishing industry is not from the corporate side. The real weakness comes from the culture. We have less and less of a reading public, less and less of a culture. Period. And I happen to think that actually this is a great time to be a writer. If anybody has something to say, he can get heard. There’s more and more product, but less and less that has any value, and anybody, now, who has something to say can easily rise above that noise.

This is an issue that also concerns me, and it’s been drawing me more and more towards education. I’m much more interested in education now than I am in now in book publishing.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Education: what do you mean by that?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: People wanting to learn. Wanting to learn new things.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: So you are becoming a teacher, let’s say?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: No, I mean as a business. Education is selling information. Our whole notion of education can also change as a result of the Internet and of all these cultural forces. I think that the Internet is still, despite the financial bubble that burst, the most radical, revolutionary tool in our, in our lifetime. It is a tool that if you pick up, changes you.

I’ll give you another example of something at Schocken. I was very excited about the Internet for Schocken. Schocken was a company that had, could have, a relationship with individual customers. People would call me up and complain if a book was out of print. There were people out there who felt they owned me. As annoying as that was, it was a great asset. And so, the Internet: in the old days of Schocken, in the ‘30s, they actually published a magazine, they published a little quarterly.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Oh, did they?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: They published a little journal that Martin Buber edited. In those days book publishers often published little magazines. There was Scribner’s, Harper’s. They all had these little, intimate connections. That’s not financially feasible, now; but the Internet makes it financially feasible. So I make the argument: Schocken and Random House are spending millions of dollars on, essentially, a vanity website. It was, basically, promoting books in a new way that is exactly the same way as before, and costing millions of dollars. I went to them and said, “Look, Schocken has the grass-roots audience that each part of Random House needs, so why don’t you make us the prototype for Random House’s website.” They laughed. There were big issues Random House had to confront when it was doing a website. One of them was that Random House itself isn’t one house, it’s one roof over many little houses.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: “A house of many mansions”?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Mansions, rooms, whatever we call them, each aspect of the company sees itself as a world unto itself. And so, when you put yourself up on the Web as “Random House,” you have to decide if you are going to present yourself as one, all-inclusive thing, or as a series of discrete imprints. You have to decide if consumers want to be dazzled by the full range of the possibilities within Random House, or if they want an intimate connection with like-minded people.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: You’ve asked an interesting question. What do you think these consumers – do you mean readers? – care about?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: This is really an interesting question, because booksellers care about the imprint. Consumers don’t care about the imprint. So here’s the big issue: if the Internet is a consumer tool; and if consumers don’t care about the imprint, what they care about is the subject areas; then, we should put out a website that is subject-oriented. It doesn’t matter what the imprint was. But who’s going to do it? So the website was run from the chairman’s office.

There were limited resources, limited...

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Your chairman then being Alberto Vitale, the man who thought that by the year 2000 and something, books would be finished: we all were going to be reading electronic texts at a glowing podium.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes. It was run from his office. – The thing is that Random House, to use another metaphor, has a very small federal government. It’s very big on states’ rights but has a very small federal government. This is the pre-Bertelsmann Random House; I don’t know how it works now. But, the Web is a federal program. But the “federal government” has no resources. In the end, each imprint began to compete for those small resources and, eventually, began to do their own stuff. Sheer economics forced us all to focus on the booksellers rather than the individual customers. On top of that, Alberto refused to let us sell books on-line, because a manufacturer does not compete with his retail customers. So we spent a lot of money without selling a book. That kind of math doesn’t work in publishing any more.

So I said, “Look, for me this is a great tool to reach my audience. If I can build a cyber sandbox for my existing audience, I will expand my audience. There are search engines, there are thousands of people looking for particular playgrounds, and my books can act like little corners in a very particular playground.”

This is where I first started thinking about publishing in a completely different fashion: I need an audience; I have programming. We can put these two pieces together. I can use the Web. I said, “Let me go up as a website that is not commercially-focused. It’s educationally focused. Let me go up, and I will treat it like a magazine. I will find people all over the country or the world to make this their playground. If they want to build a section on “women and Judaism,” I’ll find the people who are interested in that area, and they will build. And along the way, we will use our books as programming The viewers will be exposed to our ethos, maybe to our advertising, or maybe not; but just having them play in our sites is really important. But that means thinking about ourselves completely differently.”

Now, nobody in Random House was going to touch this, because it meant giving away parts of books, giving away what we made our living from, and it also meant beginning to think of ourselves differently, beginning to imagine new ways of making money – and the truth is, all of us barely had enough time or enough money to do what we were already doing, forget adding a whole other aspect.

I figured, Okay, how can I do this cheaply and well? I found a kid. The great thing about the Internet is that the gap between the professional and the amateur is about six months. I found a kid who designed some really nice websites and I hired him for a thousand dollars to sort of create this prototype for me. As an experiment. When we looked at it together, we were all flummoxed. I couldn’t go up as an individual imprint on the Random House site, because the decision had been made not to feature individual imprints – but I couldn’t go up as Schocken.com because I was part of Random House! I pointed out that it doesn’t matter, the Web has no front door, I could put up links. But the dilemma was too freighted, too complex. In the end, I had to figure out a way to use the Web to benefit Schocken by making alliances outside of Random House.

I found other Jewish websites and non-Jewish websites that needed programming, and I created it from our backlist books. See, for me, the whole concept of “frontlist” and “backlist” is a retail concept. It has nothing to do with the way readers think about books. It’s the way stores think about books. Once you get out of that mindset, once you no longer have to think in those terms, you’re free to do all sorts of cool things that you couldn’t do before. I treated my backlist and my frontlist evenly, because everything I sold was an opportunity to sell something else. Frontlist opened the door to backlist. Backlist opened the door to frontlist. I entered into alliances with several web companies. In a perfect world, they would have charged me for the advertising they were giving me, and I would have charged them for the intellectual content I was giving them. But, since this was a new world and nobody knew who the buyer and seller was, and neither of us had any money, we both helped each other. And so I began experimenting with the Web to do these kinds of things, things that allowed me to bypass the dilemma of corporate identity and to stop competing for scarce resources. So that, when I published THE MONK AND THE PHILOSOPHER…

KATHERINE McNAMARA: The book by Jean-Claud Revel and his son…

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yeah. By that time, I had a relationship with the Internet that allowed me to turn a commodity – the book – into an idea – insert here what the “idea” is – which in turn allowed me to sell more books. I really like selling books. I never lost money for anybody I ever worked for. I do not believe there is this sort of divide between good books and profitability. I believe that you can make money selling good books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Well, does that depend, say, on how much overhead you have to support?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: It depends on a lot of factors, but I’m saying that there’s no physiological divide, you know, an unchangeable thing. I have been very successful publishing books that other people might not have thought of as commercial, by treating them as commercial books. Sometimes the fact that a book is not commercial makes it commercial. All right? The Bible is a really good example. I was able to create all of these coalitions and alliances and get us into places we’d never thought we could go before, because I wasn’t selling a book, I was selling the Bible. And there were a lot of people who wanted to help me.

When we published Kafka in new translations, it was the same thing. A lot of people wanted to help me. What we did with Jean-Claud Ravel and his son was this. I went to Harper’s magazine and said, “Let’s create a traveling road show at the universities.” Harper’s was looking for ways to reach into that audience, and I worked with them to create a tour of, I think, sixteen universities. At each of those universities, five or six organizations came together to sponsor the event. So, as a result, maybe 50,000 pieces of mail went out to support this book, none of which came from me, none of which cost me anything. All of which helped me, helped Harper's, and helped the local organizations. The universities had an audience. I had a product. Harper’s was interested in reaching that audience. They could use my product to reach that audience. By doing it, they were helping me expose the book to a good audience. This synergy worked really, really well. It was a non-traditional kind of publicity promotion. It wasn’t something that a publicist would be able to pull off. There was nobody within Random House who really knew the universities, who could call up and say, “How would you like to do this program?” Because I was niche publisher, I had those connections. That’s the thing about niche publishing: you have to spend your time figuring out how to turn apparent disadvantage into advantage, not trying to figure out how to do what general interest publishers do. If you’re playing on their ground, you’re weak. But if you play on your ground, you’re stronger than they are. The Web is a constantly expanding conglomerate of tiny niches. No part of the publishing industry is better suited to take advantage of what it offers than niche publishers.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Let me ask you this then. Do you think that a niche publisher, on his or her own, can do what you’re talking about doing?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Depends on what the niche is. Jewish books have a lower ceiling than, let’s say, food does. Food is a really interesting category. I’ve spent a lot of time on food the last couple of years. We all eat. We all have varying degrees of information about food and various degrees of interest in it, and so it’s a niche category that can support enormous sales as well as consistent small sales. If you look at the way cookbooks are published within large publishing houses, you’ll see they’re published like niche books. Simon & Schuster has a publicity department that only works on cookbooks; HarperCollins may have one, also. That’s an example of a niche that has a very high ceiling.

Look, I knew the numbers at Schocken. When I worked at Schocken in 1988, I knew that list intimately, because I had read most of those books. When I came back in 1995, many of those books were still there. Not all of them; a lot of the list had been trimmed down. But many of them were, and I can tell you that the numbers had not changed much. In other words, the books published by Schocken as an independent publisher with a commissioned sales force, sold in about the same numbers under big Random House. Random House increased Schocken’s reach, but the Random House sales force had a lot more books than Schocken’s to sell. I cannot say that, if a Jewish book was published by Random House, it wouldn’t have been done better than if I had published it at Schocken. I can say, with relative certainty, that we would publish the book differently and would keep it in print and selling longer. Our advantage was the way in which we might publish that book. At least that was my philosophy. Could it be done independently? I don’t think there’s a need for Schocken, independently. When Schocken was started, there were not many publishers of Jewish books. Now, the university presses publish Jewish books. Some of the most important Jewish scholarship in this century has been published by the big university presses.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Is there a need, then, for Schocken to exist besides, let’s say, for Bertelsmann’s prestige?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I don’t think Bertelsmann needs prestige. It has plenty of prestigious imprints. I think that, like being Jewish, Schocken needs to be reinvented every generation. As I said to you before, I believe you can only reach people where they live. The majority of the American Jews of my generation don’t live in a ghetto called Jewtown. They live someplace else, My job has been to expand, not contract the category. And, as I said, it’s a kind of a dialectical thing – we want the category and then we want to be out of it.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Right.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: But being Jewish means something different to kids in their twenties or thirties today, and will mean something different, again, to my daughter, who is ten. My generation is no longer necessarily the core audience for this subject area.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: What generation is that audience?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: The people who are the age you were when you read Kafka or Buber for the first time.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: If you mean me, I was in high school when I read Kafka – my parents gave me AMERIKA for Christmas! – and an undergraduate when I read Buber. I read Buber seriously and wrote papers about his teaching. And when I was in grad school, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a great many books on my shelf were Schocken books. It’s an interesting question, though, because I’m not Jewish, you see, and at the time, I had no idea Schocken was a “Jewish” publisher. I just knew they published books I wanted, even needed, to read.

Those were the years, as I’ve learned, when the editorial agenda was to expand the list. – In fact, let me quote a passage from Ted Schocken’s little essay about Schocken’s 25^th anniversary. He was talking about their publishing program and why they expanded it. “A major part of the program is played by the Jewish paperback,” he wrote. He goes on, “The ambition to put Jewish books of high intellectual caliber into the hands of the young Jewish reader, which played such an important part in our traditional program, is being largely fulfilled through the Schocken paperbacks. The young American Jew arriving for the first time on the college campus finds the Schocken paperbacks in his university bookstore and is assigned by professors in a variety of courses – sociology, history, literature, comparative religion. Thus convinced that they have general acceptance, he often ‘discovers’ the Jewish books, which in the past his parents or his rabbi had tried in vain to interest him in.”

I love this because those books reached me, too, and many other readers like me. So, if Ted Schocken was reinventing the list in order to reach more Jewish university students, a most honorable desire, perhaps one unexpected result was that that list was “reinventing” readers like me, too. But the purpose of Schocken books, after all, is to publish books of Jewish interest – and that means something different, now.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Of course, this constant re-invention is not exclusive to Jewish publishing, or even niche publishing. Just as my generation of Jews only felt comfortable within a larger context, lots of particular readers needed to feel part of a whole, rather than isolated. Sonny recognized this and turned Knopf into what Random House was. Dan Frank [editorial director of Pantheon Books] recognized this and turned Pantheon into what Knopf was. Inevitably, the demands of the audience gradually change the identity of any publisher.

What we are seeing now is that technology can also change a publisher’s identity. I suspect that the need to be part of a larger something is giving way to a need to feel connected to something smaller and particular. This is part a cultural reaction to the largeness and complexity of life. It is partly a possibility afforded by new media.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: I think you are saying something like this: that any publishing concern must inevitably re-think its purpose. I mean, the people in charge, whoever sets the agenda, have to understand their reason for existence – but also, they have to know how to stay in existence.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: These changes are cyclical, but they are constant. Look at what happened between Basic Books and HarperCollins. The more successful Basic became, the more it began to publish books like HarperCollins, and the less reason there was for Basic Books to exist. The reason for Basic Books to exist was to publish books that Harper couldn’t do. You look at what happened to HarperSan Francisco. HarperSan Francisco owned religion! They owned religion, but then they began living off it. They began by publishing religion. Then religion became hot: all of a sudden, anybody could publish it, including HarperCollins. Once you become that kind of publisher, what do we need you for? And so, I thought I needed a reason for Schocken to exist, and that was to be this: not that the books that we published would be different, but that the way we published those books would be different. That the whole could become greater than the sum of its parts. That’s not an American style of publishing, it’s a European style of publishing and, really, what Pantheon represented under André [Schiffrin, formerly director of Pantheon Books].

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Was André Schiffrin there when you were?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: André bought Schocken. Schocken was actually bought for Random House by Pantheon. That closed a personal circle, for André, whose father had been involved in publishing Kafka. [Jacques Schiffrin had been an editor at Kurt Wolff Verlag, one of Kafka’s original publishers, then at Pantheon, when Kurt Wolff opened that publishing house in New York, in 1940.]

KATHERINE McNAMARA: When Kurt Wolff published Kafka; then the rights went to Schocken Verlag.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: At the time, André was also looking for a paperback line to be an alternative to Vintage. But that’s a question you’ll have to ask him: what his agenda was. [See endnote.] But he bought Schocken, and then he was gone; and I’m not quite sure anybody knew what to do with it, then. I tried to give it a reason to exist. As long as you’re making money you are free to figure out the larger, deeper cultural purpose of the enterprise. No one is going to stop you.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: You mean, nobody else in the company?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes. When Bertelsmann bought us, a lot of people joked that I was the safest person in Random House, because they wouldn’t dare upset the Jews. I found that personally insulting, to tell you the truth. That’s like living on the reservation. If Schocken can’t make money for them, then there is no reason for it to exist as a business. Very simple. I wanted to play by the same rules as everybody else. I don’t believe in affirmative action – at least, I don’t want it for myself. And certainly not affirmative action that’s fueled by guilt. I have no problems with Schocken’s being owned by a German company. I have no problems with that German company’s being a large holder of American publishing. We have been a large holder of European and other worldly and cultural resources for a long time. We’re the last ones to talk about cultural hegemony. The fact is that Germans care more about books than Americans do.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: That’s what Marion Boyars said, too. [See Vol. 1, No. 3.]

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: They do care about them more. When people talk about Bertelsmann buying Random House, I think they are more interested in the merger between Doubleday and Random House. Doubleday had basically been taken over by Bantam. Bertelsmann was run by mass-market people. The sensibility of the company was dominated by them. Random House was run by hardcover people. The real importance of that merger was that you now had mass-market people running hardcover people, in a way that those hardcover people had never been run before. The systems they put in place come from mass marketing. The sensibility comes from there. I imagine that that changes things for the publishers of hardcover books.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: For all of them, or at Random specifically?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: All of them. All of them. It’s another sensibility – another philosophy of publishing. It’s not that we didn’t have mass-market lists within Random House – we had two.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: But mass-market was subordinate?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: No. It wasn’t subordinate, it was an accompaniment. I would say they probably felt they were under the thumb of hardcover publishers. People calling the shots were the people who cared about hardcover books

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Those were books, after all.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well. Also, it was their P&L that won. That may not be the case anymore. As I said earlier, there were many houses under this one roof. It’s not just that they’ve added more rooms: it’s that some people on the top floor weren’t there before. As far as Schocken is concerned, I said to myself that if the reason to exist is to publish Jewish books, well, that’s not a reason to exist. There is no publisher that doesn’t publish Jewish books. If the reason to exist is to publish intellectual books, maybe that’s not a good enough reason, either. I don’t think guilt or nostalgia are good enough reasons, either. The only reason to exist is because you can do something better than someone else. But as I said to you before, I take that all as a metaphor: it’s like being Jewish in America. One of the great things about living in this time is that you can take on this identity, you can take it off.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: And it doesn’t sound like it’s a clearly defined identity, always.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: No, you have to constantly reinvent it. And that, personally, is what makes it interesting to me. On one hand, it creates tremendous freedom; on the other, it creates tremendous pressure to reinvent constantly. That can be very healthy, but it means you’ve got to stay alive. To stay alive, you have to be alive. And what I tried to bring into Schocken was some of that liveliness. “If there’s a reason to be Jewish, it had better be interesting, because if it’s not interesting, well, peoples come and peoples go. There are many peoples that can’t trace themselves back as far as the Jews can. When you reach a point where there’s no reason to be Jewish anymore, where enough people don’t want to be, or it doesn’t mean anything to them, there won’t be Jews. That’s evolution. I mean, it’s not worth preserving just for its own sake.” Those were the thoughts that went through my head when I ran Schocken.

They are not exactly publishing thoughts, and they’re probably not the kind of things that concern my colleagues at other imprints. But that’s part of what makes Schocken so interesting. It wasn’t just about publishing books and making money.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: As I listen to you I think of something Michael Bessie [see Vol. 1, No. 4] told me. I didn’t understand why Atheneum had been shut down after Simon & Schuster bought it. Lee [Goerner, last editor and publisher of Atheneum] and I didn’t talk about publishing. Afterward, I asked Michael, “What did it mean when they said Atheneum wasn’t making enough return on investment?” He said simply, “You know, perhaps Lee acted like an owner rather than an employee.” At last, I understood, sort of. The editor was an employee of a gigantic, many-layered conglomerate that had no interest in his values and accomplishment. What did the conglomerate have to do with literature, except to make publishing it more difficult? As a writer, I still think that; but as a publisher, you seem to see it differently.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: As I said, I think that the divide between Art and Commerce is a false one, or can be a false one. I think that fine work can be profitable. It is true that really fine publishing is idiosyncratic, and when it works commercially, it tends to be because there is a strong entrepreneurial sense of ownership on the part of the editor or publisher. There is an obvious conflict between feeling like an entrepreneur and feeling like an employee, but from that tension great opportunities do arise. I mean, Random House hired me because they didn’t know what to do with Schocken, and it was so small that it wasn’t really all that interesting. To me, it was a great opportunity that just fell into my hands. The paradox is, the more successful I became, the more interested they got.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: And then they...

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: …learned a lot about the power of niche publishing. Did that mean that the larger corporation became more interfering? As I became more successful, did I also have to jump over more hurdles? Not really. I suppose that, ultimately, any large business becomes conservative about anything that is a profit center. Perhaps it could have become more difficult to reinvent Schocken. But that wasn’t my experience, nor was it why I left. Ultimately, I found that I’d done what I’d set out to do and had been changed by that experience, had become, increasingly, less interested in the art of words and ideas, and more interested in marketing and business as an art form. I felt far more burdened by Schocken’s constituents and its history, by my own sense of responsibility to each of those things, than I ever did by Knopf or by Random House. As I said, one of the most stunning things about an imprint like Schocken is that its readers really feel that they own it.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Which is right, isn’t it, because you’re in service to readers.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Okay, I had this opportunity to be a publisher, and in that there is a little bit of leading and a little bit of following.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Yes?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: And I could see myself connected to a larger culture and a larger content. I’m not sure my colleagues in general publishing have that. You know, money can be incredibly liberating. You know what Marx said about how under capitalism everything melts into air. Well, one of the great advantages of modern commercial publishing is that it frees us from all those things of tradition, it frees you from all those higher demands; that, ultimately, it’s about making money. If you can sell poetry and make money, that’s fine! If you can do that, it opens up all sorts of things. I used to make a joke that André saw himself as being like a European socialist political party and would never publish something he couldn’t agree with personally. That’s a very European concept of publishing – and it’s very non-American. I’ve published lots of books I didn’t agree with, but, nonetheless, they reflected something that interested me. There is a lot of freedom in just being expected to make money. You don’t get held back by all these other things you know.

I’ll never forget the conversation that I had with Mrs. Glazer who was, as I said, a living Schocken. They, the Schockens, were, sort of, all hung up on what Salman Schocken had done, and on reputation, and on “what good does it mean?”, and all of this stuff. So, when I came with a book that I thought could sell millions of copies, they weren’t sure they wanted to publish it, because they thought it might, somehow, damage the reputation of the house.

I said: “Mrs. Glazer, how do you think your father would feel if we managed to put a rabbi on the bestseller list?” I mean, I didn’t want to make the obvious argument, which was, “If we make millions of dollars selling this book, just think of all the other books that we can publish that may not be able to make that kind of money.”

Somehow, that argument didn’t seem like it would be successful. But what might work was putting it in terms of her father, and what her father had all the time stood for. What he was most interested in showing was what the Jews had to offer the world. Teaching the Jews what the Jews had to offer the world. And, in its own way, in its own modest way, WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE did that. It touched people in many ways. Not only did it reach more people than any book we published, but it also touched them more deeply. Twenty years later, that book still is one of the top-selling religious books, and that’s entirely due to the book itself. As the publisher, we’re like parents, you know: we can give the book a start, we can give it good genes and good nutrition, we can give it a good environment, but then it’s on its own. Finally, that will determine how it’s going to make its way in the world. And that prevailed: the book did enormously well.

Again, the paradox: I’m sure I couldn’t have made that book successful at Simon & Schuster, because they would have categorized it. They would have seen it as a “Jewish” book. They would not have believed me when I said it could become a bestseller, because they knew what bestsellers were, and I didn’t. And so, my great advantage at Schocken was that I could put intense energy into a book. I worked on creating a market for that book for about a year before we published it. I could do that at Schocken even when it was part of Random House. At Random House, nobody begins working on a book until three months before it’s published.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: A book has a “publishing cycle,” doesn’t it.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Yes, because they’re working on a cycle. It’s like a conveyor belt: the needs of distribution. I could start working on a book a year before it was published, and I could continue working on it a year after it was published, because I didn’t have that many books to work on. It’s not that I am better than anybody else, it’s that I had the opportunity to give the books the attention they required to be successful.

What I enjoyed about publishing was coming home at the end of the day and telling my wife, “I made something happen today. I did something.” The needs of distribution make it so that publishers are looking for books that need the least amount of help. That come pre-sold – that’s the best, the ones they don’t have to do anything for; they’ll throw the most resources behind those. When I was at Simon & Schuster, I told Dick Snyder [former publisher of Simon & Schuster, then Golden Books] once, “Look, you have your most expensive people in publicity working on books we know are going to be bestsellers. You have your least experienced people working on the books that need the most help. Why not reverse that? Why not put the junior people on the big books and put the senior people on the little books.”

KATHERINE McNAMARA: I can imagine his response.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: He thought that was really funny. Impractical, but a point to be taken. There isn’t anyone in publishing who is not trying to figure out what comes next, particularly the potential of technology.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: It seemed obvious, early, that publishers didn’t know the technology of computers or what they did and could do. The language about computers – “download, “interface” – is only a referential language. And if you learn it secondhand and try to use it, you sound phony, because you are speaking this jargon and you don’t know what it means. They talked about what they didn’t know, in a language they didn’t understand. It was it was the language of fear that they used. They used a jargon, but the animation of it was fear.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Whereas, if you come in underneath the conventions, not with a lot of money but with an idea, then you can figure out a way to make it happen.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I’ve tried and wasn’t successful.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Well, not yet.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: That’s true, none of this is going to go away. Gradually, gradually, we are all figuring out how to make it work, how to make it profitable, or even just sustainable. The entire world is under that pressure right now, not just the publishing industry.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: The difficulty, too, is that when you’re rushing forward, that’s just when you need to stop and learn this stuff.

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Well, that’s why innovation so often comes from outside, has to be done outside. Corporations like General Electric, and others: what they do is set up companies outside for precisely that purpose. But book publishers haven’t done that yet. Let me put it this way: it may be that the problem in traditional book publishing is not that they are being run like businesses whereas publishing is maybe not a business. The problem may be that they are not being run enough like businesses, like traditional businesses. It may be that publishers can learn from the software industry, which is also another form of intellectual property that invented its own distribution system, that invented its relationship to its customers. There may be all sorts of new things to learn. Other manufacturers threatened or challenged by technological change have adapted different kinds of strategies, as well.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: You spent some time working on developing a website and company with your wife, Molly O’Neill, the former food-writer for the Times, and you’ve been away from book publishing for a little while. In this new sort of life, what are you reading?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: Publishers should give editors sabbaticals every seven years, so they can read. I’m reading now, but what I learned was, I had to learn to read all over again. In publishing, you read differently – you don’t read, in a way; you’re scanning, you’re reading for something; you’re looking for what you can get out of the book. But in reading, the book takes you. It takes you to places you’ve never been. You give yourself to the book. In publishing, I rarely read for fun. Then, when I started to read again, I realized I had forgotten how.

KATHERINE McNAMARA: How did you start again?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON: I read Hebrew.I am fluent but I read it more slowly than English. I had to teach my eyes to slow down to read, and reading Hebrew was a good way to do that..

KATHERINE McNAMARA: Do you know Milosz’s poem about reading the Gospels in Greek? These lines: “…it is proper that we move our finger / Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone, / And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable, / We discover the true dignity of speech.” Perhaps this is the true nature of reading, a kind of recollection?

ARTHUR SAMUELSON That is very nicely said.

Afterward

In late February of this year, in New York,. I was informed that Altie Karper was now the sole director of Schocken Books. Susan Ralston officially had retired though would serve as the consulting editor of books for which she had been responsible. At Random House, corporate managers were trying to cut costs – by reducing the editorial staff, the heart of the enterprise! Certain senior editors and members of related departments had been invited to limit their working week to four days, with attendant reduction in salary – while, I gathered, not likely having to do less work, given the nature of their task. Some of them had taken retirement instead. My source was not an official spokesperson. Therefore, and yet again, I caught the haze of dismay, anger, and a kind of resignation circulating through the book-filled offices. I note that Bertelsmann has announced it is going to become a publicly-held corporation.       

-KM

 The series of conversations about Schocken Books is made possible by the
  Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.

Aharon Appelfeld, THE CONVERSION, THE IRON TRACKS, THE RETREAT, UNTO THE SOUL

Martin Buber, TALES OF THE HASIDIM; ON JUDAISM

         (with Franz Rosenzweig) DIE SCHRIFT DIE FUNF BÜCHEN DER WEISUNG (Berlin: Schocken Verlag,

        1925); (with F.R.) DIE SCHRIFT (Berlin: Schocken Verlag: 1936)

Everett Fox, tr., THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES: The Schocken Bible, Vol. I.

Franz Kafka, AMERIKA, THE CASTLE (tr. Mark Harmon), THE METAMORPHOSIS,

IN THE PENAL COLONY, AND OTHER STORIES, THE SONS, THE TRIAL (tr. Breon Mitchell)

Harold Kushner, WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

David Marks, THIS IS NOT A NOVEL (Counterpoint)

Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, THE MONK AND THE PHILOSOPHER

Isaac Bashevis Singer, IN MY FATHER’S COURT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

André Schiffrin, THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing

Elie Wiesel, THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE, THE ACCIDENT, ALL RIVERS RUN TO THE SEA,

        AND THE SEA IS NEVER FULL, A BEGGER IN JERUSALEM, et alia

Schocken Books

Schocken Books Teachers Guide to THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, tr. Edward Fox

Kafka: the new translations: “On the occasion of the publication by Schocken Books of a new translation based on the restored text of THE CASTLE, PEN … sponsored an evening of tribute, reflection, and re-examination of the work of Franz Kafka. The evening, directed by Tom Palumbo, took place on Thursday, March 26, 1998, 8:00 p.m. in The Town Hall, New York City.” Jewish Heritage Online Magazine broadcasts recordings of that evening.

A Conversation with Marion Boyars, Archipelago, Vol. 1 No. 3
A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Vol. 1 No. 4 and Vol. 2, No. 1
A Conversation with William Strachan, Vol. 2, No. 4
A Conversation with Samuel H. Vaughan, Vol. 3, No. 2
Reminiscence: Lee Goerner (1947-1995), Vol. 3, No. 3
A Conversation with Odile Hellier, Vol. 4, No. 1
A Conversation with Calvin Reid about Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, No. 4
A Conversation with Altie Karper about Schocken Books, Vol. 5, No. 2
A Conversation with Susan Ralston about Schocken Books, Vol. 5, No. 3