|
|
|
The received wisdom in the publishing community is that backlist -- books published some time ago but that keep on selling -- is the bread and butter on which a publishing
house thrives. Ask Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with Isaac Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and John McPhee, or Penguin, whose backlist regularly contributes more than 60 percent of its North American sales.
However, there can be surprises. In 1985, when I took over as trade publishing director of Hutchinson, an English publishing house, I started to research the 98 years of Hutchinson's history and discovered that (excepting best sellers by Kingsley
Amis, Anthony Burgess, Ruth Rendell and Frederick Forsyth) Hutchinson had only five books over four years old that still had reasonable sales. One was a business book, ''Getting to Yes,'' first published in 1981. Three
of the others were collections of religious light verse by an American, Helen Steiner Rice. The remaining title was ''Mein Kampf,'' Hitler's apologia, composed in prison in 1924. Its original title was ''A
Four-and-a-Half-Year Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice,'' but Hitler's publisher, Max Amann of Franz Eher Verlag, who had been Hitler's company commander during World War I, persuaded him to use the shorter
version. By the time of Hitler's death, after which publication of the book was banned, more than eight million copies had been sold in Germany.
Hitler had granted his German publishers world rights, and as Eher Verlag regularly used the literary agency of Curtis Brown to handle its sales in Britain, Curtis Brown took over the German Chancellor's book. As the agency says now, ''He
was a respectable head of state, democratically elected.'' In America, Eher Verlag decided to handle the rights themselves, and sold the book to Houghton Mifflin. The small firm of Hurst & Blackett, later to be subsumed into
Hutchinson, bought the British rights, paying just £350. In October 1933, the book was published in an abridged version in both the United States and Britain, with a translation heavily censored by the German Embassy in London. The
German version had 781 pages, the English-language edition 297. Even so, the book's main message was clear. The reviewer in The New York Times noted, ''It is with sadness, tinged with fear for the world's future, that
we read Hitler's hymn of hate.''
In January 1939 Hutchinson published a translation of the full text. Three years later the Americans commissioned their own version, from the highly respected translator Ralph Manheim. None of this was sanctioned by Berlin. The American and British editions
went ahead throughout the 1930's without any contract with the author -- almost as if war had already been declared.
After the war there was a lull. The book was seen as largely unreadable, and there was little interest in it even as a historical document. Then, toward the end of the 1950's, another literary effort by Hitler, written in the late 20's, was
discovered and published as ''Hitler's Secret Book.'' It created considerable controversy, and what Hitler had written before coming to power suddenly became a subject of interest.
By this time Hutchinson was run by the eccentric Robert Lusty, who set about resurrecting ''Mein Kampf'' from the backlist. The whole project took time, with various plans for either a new abridged version or a heavily annotated complete
text. By the mid-60's questions about the book were being raised in the House of Commons, and sections of the British Jewish community were claiming that ''Mein Kampf'' would be a focus for anti-Semitism. Donald
Cameron Watt, the political historian who had been commissioned by Lusty to write a new introduction, wrote an article in The Spectator accusing Hutchinson of loss of nerve. Eventually the complete text was republished, in 1969, and it
has been in print in Britain ever since. Each new edition has prompted a letter of complaint from the German Government.
The questions we faced at Hutchinson were, what were a publisher's responsibilities when confronted with such a book, and should we do anything to try to increase sales? Our sales manager acknowledged it was not like selling any other work on the
list but asked if we could use a slightly more attractive cover than the solemn two-color jacket the book then had, and it was arranged that at the same time we should update the blurb. The editor responsible checked the revised material
with the company's new managing director, who complained that it had to be changed. The wording contained the phrase ''this evil book.'' That wouldn't do. ''We can't say a book is evil if we
ourselves are publishing it,'' the managing director argued. The editor demurred, not least because the reprint was overdue and changes had to be kept to a minimum. By the time the final version was published, the phrase had
been changed anagrammatically to ''this vile book'' -- a triumph of publishing economics.
''Mein Kampf'' still sells its regular 3,000 copies a year in Britain. All royalties are channeled through the Curtis Brown agency, which does not take a commission but passes the money on to a suitable charity. When the agency first
tried to find a recipient for the money, the West German Government refused it, and so did all Jewish charities based in Germany, regarding the royalties as tainted. Who now receives the money? Curtis Brown declines to say. As the agency
explains, ''If the name of the charity who receives the money were made public, they'd immediately have to announce they could no longer take it.''
In America, the book has been continuously in print with Houghton Mifflin since its original publication. Until the United States entered the war, royalties were sent directly to Eher Verlag; then, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, they were paid
to the State Department. In 1979 Houghton Mifflin was allowed to stop paying any royalties. By then the United States Government had received over $90,000.
In January Houghton Mifflin will publish a new edition -- the Manheim translation, but with a fresh introduction by the historian John Lukacs. Houghton Mifflin's present publisher is Wendy Strothman, who says: ''It's difficult to imagine
being in the position of the editors who originally decided to release a book that they profoundly disagreed with. But I admire their prescience. At that time, without the diversity of media we possess today, the book served a function
that could be carried in part by other means of communication now. I'd also argue that nowadays it is one of the most powerful rebuttals we can deliver to Holocaust revisionists.''
Houghton Mifflin is not publishing the book purely for academic study, but for the general reader. Shouldn't the book be published in a special way -- with the literary equivalent of a public health warning? Here Strothman is adamant: ''I
defer to our own First Amendment. Ideas are sometimes messy, but it's far more dangerous to suppress them in fear of their falling into the wrong hands than to reveal them for what they are.''
Meanwhile, the publishing world itself is changing. In Britain, Hutchinson has long since been purchased by Random House. But dog eats dog, not always aware of what has gone to make up its meal. Random House is in the process of being purchased by the
vast German conglomerate of Bertelsmann. Thus Hitler's racist tract, unavailable in German bookstores, will shortly be published throughout Britain and the Commonwealth by a German company.
THE head of Bertelsmann's North American trade book operations, Peter Olson, was surprised to learn that Bertelsmann was now the publisher of ''Mein Kampf.'' ''It certainly wasn't the motivation for buying the company,''
he said with a laugh. ''I don't imagine anyone's going to be delighted to hear about it,'' he added. ''I admit I have to suppress a twinge of uncomfortableness, but there's not going to be a
call by me, or any of my German colleagues, telling Hutchinson they shouldn't publish it. There's not going to be any central interference on a book because of political concerns. If Hutchinson decides they don't want to
publish it, that's O.K. by me. If the opposite, that's O.K. too. It's an interesting question whether Bertelsmann would choose to publish 'Mein Kampf.' Probably not.''
While Bertelsmann remains secure in its policy of editorial noninterference, the fate of ''Mein Kampf'' is far from an academic matter in the world at large. Earlier this year, the book was banned in Portugal, the publishing house
Hugin Editora having reached an agreement with the German Embassy for all copies of ''Mein Kampf'' to be recalled and pulped. The Federal State of Bavaria, which controls all rights to the book except the English-language
editions, has also caused it to be banned in Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Switzerland and Hungary. In Israel there had never been an edition available until 1995, when Academon, an imprint of the Hebrew University, issued a limited edition.
The publisher was sharply criticized, and the book is now out of print. For the time being, in Britain at least, Bertelsmann remains Hitler's publisher. Which leads to a further irony. Last year Random House purchased from Reed Elsevier
the Heinemann general list. Among the backlist authors is Winston Churchill; so Churchill and Hitler may shortly nestle next to each other on Bertelsmann's backlist -- as they do on Houghton Mifflin's. ''Mein Kampf''
is now published by Hutchinson's sister imprint, Pimlico. There is a new blurb on the back cover -- with ''this evil book'' reinstated.
|
Home |
|