Over at The New Republic, Alex Shephard is concerned about what he calls the “conservative publishing industrial complex.” You know how conservatives churn out dishonest book after dishonest book just to make a buck while liberal writers—slaves to honesty and decency—are just trying to make a difference with books like Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like and Lynda Lopez’s forthcoming AOC: The Fearless Rise and Powerful Resonance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Well, that needs to stop:

Henry Holt, a nonpolitical imprint that publishes, among others, Hilary Mantel, drew fire for its decision to continue publishing Bill O’Reilly after multiple accusations of sexual harassment were made against him. Some Hachette employees I spoke to expressed discomfort about the company’s conservative imprint, Center Street, which publishes Donald Trump Jr., among others.

Publishing such authors was once uncontroversial. The conservative publishing industrial complex has been a mainstay ever since Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind topped the bestseller lists. Free speech has always been a slippery concept in book publishing. At times it is presented as a badge of honor—we stand by Salman Rushdie!—but mostly, it is an excuse to publish something that is profitable but otherwise valueless. Beleaguered publishers have understandably cast themselves as slaves to the marketplace: They publish whatever it is people want to buy.

The imprint model helps publishers from collapsing under their own contradictions. The large houses are federations containing many largely autonomous fiefdoms. The right hand rarely knows what the left is doing, which enables Big Five CEOs to claim innocence when one of their imprints acquires a controversial book. But that is less true than it was in the past. The idea, for instance, that Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch wasn’t aware of Woody Allen’s controversial memoir—which had been acquired a year earlier but concealed from the public and nearly all Hachette employees—is laughable. When Threshold Editions acquired Dangerous, it was Simon & Schuster, not Threshold, that got the heat.

At the same time, these publishing houses are, like many corporations in the country, being asked by their employees and customers to live up to a set of values. And that would seem to be impossible while also publishing the likes of Tucker Carlson, who declared on his show earlier this week that the protests across the country are ‘definitely not about black lives.’ (Carlson’s most recent book, Ship of Fools, was published by Free Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint.)

Some have suggested that a form of quality control is required. ‘I’m OK with books being published from different political viewpoints—in fact, it’s necessary for debate and being able to see a whole picture,’ publicist Kimberly Burns told Vanity Fair last year. ‘The problem is when authors write things only to get themselves attention or to make news, instead of to enhance a dialogue. If publishers are going to continue to cash in, as they have been, it’s time for those publishers—certainly the Big Five publishers—to bring in fact-checkers and more copy editors.’ The lack of fact-checking in corporate publishing remains a scandal, but there are few signs that any conglomerate publisher plans on making the expensive decision to apply basic scrutiny to its books any time soon.

Fact-checking would, it’s also worth pointing out, make it impossible to publish a great many conservative books.

Amen, Alex, it is absolutely worth pointing out, and while you state in passing that fact-checking can be a problem for “nonconservative books,” too, you and I both know that’s not really true. As you say, “being forced to tell the truth is not an existential issue for most of publishing; it is for conservative imprints.” Plus, if Henry Holt dropped O’Reilly and Trump Jr., it’d have more room for “cloyingly adulatory paeans to” nuanced appreciations of figures like Nancy Pelosi. The hypocrisy needs to end.

My only criticism is you need to expand your mind a little. Let’s be honest: fact-checking peoples’ view of Black Lives Matter or transgenderism or socialism should not only make it impossible for them to publish books, it should make it impossible for them to hold public office or teach or work in any industry for that matter. I mean, let’s not just get rid of the dishonest money grubbing in publishing. Let’s get rid of it everywhere. Maybe we could start a new kind of citizenship test where only honest answers are allowed?

In other news: Bookshop.org has been very successful very quickly, but some independent bookstore owners are worried: “Bookshop is on track to exceed $40 million in sales this year, blowing past the sum that Mr. Hunter initially hoped to reach by 2022. The site sold some $4.5 million of books in May, and more than $7 million in the first two weeks of June. More than 750 bookstores have joined, and Bookshop has generated more than $3.6 million for stores. The company is preparing to expand its operations to Britain later this year, where it plans to partner with the book wholesaler Gardners . . . Not everyone sees Bookshop’s growth as a boon for independents. Last week, at a virtual town hall organized by the American Booksellers Association, some members questioned whether Bookshop was poaching business at a moment when stores need every sale. Mr. Hunter said that the site was created to capture book sales from Amazon, not independents. ‘If we ever felt we were damaging indie bookstore sales in any way, we would change course,’ he said, according to a report in Publishers Weekly. Some bookstore owners have bristled at the way that the site has been held up as their industry’s savior.”

The Guardian reports that “Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since he won the Nobel prize for literature, about an artificial being called Klara who longs to find a human owner, will be published in March 2021.”

Do you know what the first motto on U. S. coins was? “Liberty—Parent of Science and Industry.” Robert J. Stern tells the story in Athenaeum: “Reach into your pocket or purse and take out a coin. Take a moment to study it. Like every other artifact, coins reveal interesting things about the culture that made them. One story that U.S. coins tell is the increasing importance of the President. From the time that the United States minted its first coins at the end of the 18th century until the beginning of the 20th century, every one of its coins featured either an abstract female or a Native American. Faces of dead U.S. Presidents began to appear in 1909, on the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth. Lincoln was joined in 1932 by Washington on the quarter, Jefferson in 1939 on the nickel, Roosevelt in 1946 on the dime, and Kennedy in 1964 on the half dollar. Faces on coins tell stories —as do words, especially in mottoes. A motto is a short sentence or phrase that encapsulates key beliefs or ideals guiding an individual, family, or institution, in this case the United States of America. On a modern U.S. coin you will see three mottoes: ‘Liberty,’ ‘In God We Trust,’ and ‘E Pluribus Unum’ The first two are on the front (obverse or ‘heads’), the last is on the back (reverse or ‘tails’). Each of these messages encapsulates a core belief or ideal of our nation. Where did they come from? Which was first adopted for coins and when? And are these the original slogans of U.S. coins? ‘In God We Trust’ is the most recently added of the three slogans, first appearing on a U.S. two-cent piece in 1864 . . . ‘Liberty’ is the oldest motto. It appears on the first coins that the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia made in 1793. But experimental coins were struck by the U.S. government in 1792 and a different motto is on these coins. Thereby hangs a tale . . . ”

James Panero writes about the life of one of the subjects of John Singer Sargent’s portraits: Anna Bowman Dodd. “John Singer Sargent could trace out subjects who were larger than life and as illustrious as his brush. He drew the brilliance of the brilliant. ‘John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal,’ the exhibition that was on view last fall at New York’s Morgan Library, reviewed in these pages in December by Mario Naves, was a Who’s Who of Sargent’s bright new century. As the artist turned from paint to pencil, a glittering gallery of famous figures looked out across the threshold of the twentieth century in the light of renewed confidence. Ethel Barrymore, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Henry James, Lady Diana Cooper, and William Butler Yeats were among those illuminated by Sargent’s dashing strokes. Even a century on, many of his subjects remain household names—or, in our amnestic age, at least they remain names known by certain households. Yet, even by these standards, there were a few faces here that called out for rediscovery. You can be sure that those subjects who have slipped from our collective memory have done so through our failings rather than any fault of their own. Sargent was a far better talent scout than our culture would permit today. One figure who dared us to look back was Anna Bowman Dodd (1855/8–1929). Her appearance was anything but flamboyant, especially compared to many of Sargent’s more theatrical bright young things. But get close to her portrait completed around 1900, most likely drawn at a time when both the artist and the sitter were living in Paris, and this middle-aged doyenne with eyebrow raised and lips curled seems to suggest she knows something we do not. Just what she knows is the question: we have to be led into her secret. The answer, as it turns out, is that she could see the future.”

Being Beckett’s biographer: “Halfway through her book Parisian Lives, the American biographer Deirdre Bair confesses to a crime. For years she had tried to get her hands on Samuel Beckett’s personal letters to Thomas MacGreevy, sure that they held the key to why Beckett left Ireland in October 1937 and moved to France. At last she got her chance, when MacGreevy’s nieces reluctantly permitted her to read them under strict conditions. But as she sat typing in their home that wintry Sunday in Dublin, listening to the family having lunch in the next room, Bair knew that she did not have enough time, in the limited hours the sisters had allowed her, to transcribe all of the correspondence she needed. ‘I made the only dishonest decision of my professional life that afternoon,’ she admits. She discreetly tucked away a selection of the correspondence into her handbag to take back to her hotel room . . . Deirdre Bair returned the stolen letters to the MacGreevy collection the following day, and no harm was done. Yet it’s a revealing admission, showing that, like the trained reporter she was, she was prepared to go to any lengths to get a scoop. And a scoop it certainly was. When Samuel Beckett: A Biography was published in 1978, it caused a sensation and put a lot of academic noses seriously out of joint.”

Photos: Delaware

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