Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

I was saddened by the news last week that Tom Wolfe had left longtime publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux for Little Brown, seemingly because Little Brown offered him more money for this new novel, Back to Blood. Wolfe is a writer I have long liked and admired, and when I first saw him speak in New York a couple of years ago I was as excited as when I saw Woody Allen (another hero) in the flesh walking through Central Park. I also used to work with FSG when I worked for their parent company, Macmillan, and during my time there I witnessed first-hand the amazing job they did with Wolfe and the commitment they had in general to literature. FSG is a storied company, and as Wolfe acknowledged last week to the Observer, “Roger Straus published my first book when absolutely nobody else was interested. An unknown newspaper reporter wants to publish a collection of magazine pieces, and he took a chance.” So I’m sad to see that Wolfe has decided to chuck a relationship built over four decades, and adopt a “take the money and run” attitude instead.

Not only that, but Wolfe seems to have turned into the kind of person he once used to satirize (not that a person who wears spats and custom-made white suits was ever too far from satire in the first place). With this move it seems that Wolfe is in full-on Master of the Universe mode, demanding big bucks and saying to the world that it’s all about the cash. Because there’s almost no way Little Brown can make back that kind of money. So what they’re buying, basically, is not Wolfe’s book but Wolfe himself. They want him as both an icon and a symbol of status, much the same way that the greed-obsessed characters from Wolfe’s best book, Bonfire of the Vanities, treated the Concorde as a clubhouse and complained that they couldn’t live on million dollar salaries (and those were, mind you, 1987 dollars). At a time when publishing is facing new challenges, not only to its bottomline but to its very existence (in the sixties you might have seen kids with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test under their arms, but now they have iPods in their ears instead), for Wolfe to make this be about money is extremely disheartening.

It reminds me of the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is trying to convince the townspeople of Bedford Falls not to panic and pull all their money out of his Bailey Building and Loan, saying that their savings are never kept on hand but are instead invested in the property of their neighbors. But one grumpy old guy doesn’t get it (named Tom, by the way). Rather than be concerned about the town or the company, all he wants is his cash. ”I got two hundred and forty-two dollars in here,” he insists, not willing to listen to reason, “and two hundred and forty-two dollars isn’t going to break anybody.” Realizing it doesn’t have much choice, the Bailey Building and Loan hands over money it knows it can’t afford. So the old guy grudgingly gets his money, the same way Wolfe will get his. And of course later, at the end of the movie when Stewart is declared “the richest man in town,” it’s not meant literally. Instead, he has things that money can’t buy: respect, admiration and strength of character. Those bells at the end of the film signify an angel getting its wings, but right now Wolfe seems to be concentrating on the sound of a cash register.