The Non-Mysterious Past of Publishing

Friday, November 24, 2017

I’ve written each of these editor’s letters before. Turning down someone who has spent a decade writing the book that defines their identity. Suggesting a different direction to an author who thinks she knows what she wants to write. Urging a writing project on a scholar that you know will consume his life for the next half decade. But these weren’t my letters, rather they were ones written by editors at Scribners and Thames & Hudson in the early 1960s to archaeologist Walter Fairservis and buried in Walter’s archives at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge.

I was there for a very different reason. Fairservis had explored the Helmand River Valley in Afghanistan the year I was born and recorded dozens of archaeological sites. His published report, creatively titled Archaeological Studies in the Seistan Basin of Southwestern Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, Volume 48 Part I of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, contained much of the information I needed for my research on this region based on the archaeological project that I participated in during the 1970s. But what didn’t he include in that detergent blue-covered survey report? A couple of days with the Fairservis papers at the Peabody archive was the ticket to find out what else he could tell me about Sistan.

Got to Box 24 of correspondence and there it was. An unexpected file labelled: Scribner. Charles Scribner’s Sons had published a few lightweights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and Edith Wharton. They had used Fairservis as the archaeology consultant for their science division in the 1960s. I also came across files for Collier’s Encyclopedias and the art book publisher Thames & Hudson. I took a sharp detour as a new line of investigation opened up. How had publishing changed in the five decades between these editor-author exchanges of typed letters on corporate and museum letterhead and the recent day that I walked away from negotiating with scholarly authors via email blitzes? Was the golden age of book publishers all it was cracked up to be? In those 1940s movies, The Publisher always appeared as a character of great wealth, power, and intelligence.  There are even biographies of people like Maxwell Perkins and Bennett Cerf.

The simple answer was that not much had changed. I saw in this correspondence the same phrases that I kept in my shoebox of excuses of why we wouldn’t publish someone’s book:

• “based upon our marketing department’s assessment of potential sales, we will have to forego the pleasure of publishing your exemplary research”
• “while the project is of great interest, our list in this field has developed in a different direction”
• “the peer reviews we received were not strong enough to warrant moving forward” and, of course, the ultimate passive-aggressive response,
• “we don’t feel we can do justice to this excellent work”

Many of these phrases, as all editors know, are encoded ways of saying: “This is a stupid idea,” or “when will you ever learn to write,” or “I hope you have a lot of relatives because no one else will buy this book,” or “this might be a great book, but you’ve been such an asshole in this dialogue that I wouldn’t publish your book under any circumstances.” Though the editors’ names have changed from the Scribner crowd, the language of editors has not.

There were a couple of differences, though. The manuscript of Archaeological Studies in the Seistan… had been given to a copy editor who had hacked poor Walter’s wording apart and sewed it back together. The revised version was yards better than the original. Not that Walter was a bad writer, he authored a dozen or more stage plays and and equal number of pop archaeology books in between his archaeological trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The anonymous copy editor had reshaped Fairservis’s language in a way that today’s editors rarely have the time or expertise to do, even left a checklist of detailed notes for the production department and author to follow up upon.

Even more eye opening were the illustrations for Fairservis’s proposed coffee table book for Thames & Hudson. Lost Civilizations. An artist was commissioned to paint the illustrations for the book based upon notes from Fairservis and his editor. To paint them. And there, in the files, were the first drafts of the paintings. Each contained notes of changes required for Miss Chapman, artist, for when she would go back to the literal drawing board and paint the picture over again. A far cry from scouring Wikimedia or one of the stock photography companies to pull a few images for a book.  

As an archaeologist, there is always the temptation to imagine myself back in the time periods that I am studying. But having myself bridged the analog to digital decades in publishing, it required very little imagination to eavesdrop on a 1962 editorial meeting in Scribner’s Fifth Avenue office.  I’ve lived this meeting and dozens of others like it. I’ve written the resulting letter to the author in almost the same words.

This is one case where The Mysterious Past really holds no mystery.

(C) Scholarly Roadside Service

Thanks to the Peabody Museum Archive in Cambridge, MA, for allowing me to browse their files on Walter Fairservis

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