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The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature.

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The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners, and the Business of Literature. By Robert W. Trogdon. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. 320 pp. Cloth $39.95.

Fifteen years ago, James L. W. West III published an article in Sewanee Review entitled "Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Have the Right Publisher?" For most scholars, this was the heretical equivalent of asking whether Jesus might have fared better as a Buddhist or Mohammed as a Unitarian. Even today, two decades after Charles Scribner's Sons merged with Macmillan and then was bought out by Simon and Schuster in 1994 and reduced to little more than a boutique imprint, the once venerable firm continues to exert a myth unlike any other in publishing circles. General readers to whom such important American industry names as James T. Fields, Bennett Cerf, Pascal Covici, or Nan A. Talese mean nothing know of editor Maxwell Perkins--and not because Perkins brought J. P. Marquand and Alan Paton to the house, either. It thus seemed a poke to the eye of literary legend for West to ask whether This Side of Paradise might have been an actual bestseller as opposed to a succes de scandale had a competing publisher with a more daring business approach rolled out a massive print run on the red carpet of a publicity blitz. Who else but Perkins would have stuck by Fitzgerald through his penurious years? Who but Scribner's would have printed Tender Is the Night at the bleak height of the Depression? Who would have encouraged The Last Tycoon knowing fully and sadly well that its author was unlikely to last to its completion?

In the end, West's provocative essay was less the critique of Scribner's methods that its title suggested and more a reminder to fellow scholars that publishing was--and always will be--a commercial endeavor. As any number of frustrated writers can testify, how a book is distributed and advertised often plays as much of a role in the making of reputations and readerships as any measure of its quality. Between production costs, promotion, and the always abstruse accounting methods by which books are discounted, returned, and--the worst fate this side of being pulped--remaindered, publishing continues to be one of the snakier capitalist shell games. Few in the profession, including the bean counters, are able to do more than cross their fingers and hope the ledger ends up more black than red. And yet that very financial ambiguity in many ways creates a space for "literature" to exist in a commercial environment--because there is an ingrained expectation that the majority of one's seasonal list will not turn a profit, publishers are (or used to be, anyway) more tolerant of losses. Often the goal is only to make enough to keep creditors at bay until next year's batch hits bookstores.

Publishing used to be a gentleman's business, in other words, and writers used to benefit from that fact. However flustered Fitzgerald may have been by Scribner's inability to justify why Paradise peaked at...

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