my new scrivener

rearranging cards on the publishing deck

As I’ve mentioned a few times in this newsletter, I’ve been slowly working on a new book, which I currently am referring to, a bit ridiculously, as a short history of American publishing. There are precious few such books, a blindspot if there ever was one, the canard that “books about publishing don’t sell” notwithstanding. I think about this absence often. When I was playing in scholarly fields, I was involved with the then-nascent field of book history. I presented one of my first conference papers at one of the first conferences of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing). But the P is by far the least written about in the acronym. I sometimes search research databases just to prove this theory. Of biographies and memoirs by distinguished publishers we have many; of histories of the industry, few.

The most-oft cited book that could be called the standard is Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of American Publishing by John Tebbel, published in…