`Deracination" is a word that could have been invented for America, or those citizens who live in the United States thereof. In a land bound only by rule of law, decorum is everything. And as New York is America's European interface, so do its publishing houses speak for its peoples. Instinctually conformist, alluringly possible, the trade absorbs still the brightest of talents, drawn by the need for narrative. "Storytelling - transmitting the wisdom and history of the tribe through word, gesture, and song - is an innate human function that flourished long before the modern publishing industry existed and will flourish long after it is gone," to quote Jason Epstein. His survey follows hard upon Andre Schiffren's The Business of Books (each perfunctorily titled), and his authors - Morrison, Mailer, Korda, Doctorow, whose plaudits adorn the back jacket - have reason to be grateful to him, both as an active editor at Random House, and as begetter of two institutions vital to cultural life in New York: the New York Review of Books, co-founded with Barbara Epstein during the New York Times's strike of December 1962; and the Library of America, born of a conversation with Edmund Wilson during the 1960s and realised in the mid-1980s. The one a fortnightly journal without peer, the other an outgrowth of its French counterpart, La Pleiade, both of them organs of a magisterial conservatism whose genesis is interestingly recounted here.
Book Business, though, is a curiously disjointed extension of Epstein's original essay piece in his ex-wife's journal, developed through a lecture series at the New York Public Library Center. In its attempts to codify and classify the powerful aesthetic of the book in Western culture, the uneasy fit of form to content exposes a paucity of analysis between its boards.
The author is a patrician figure whose sublime self-regard gives an ahistorical colouring to this part-memoir; contra Schiffren, there is no nod to European origins (are all Americans, "Native" excepted, born again?). The past of the subtitle seems continually sacrificed to an unread future; footfalls echo in the memory, but not here; vatic prognostication about the e-book ("The appropriate technology, in embryo, is already at hand and I have seen it") appears at the expense of an etiolated present. By failing to enlarge upon his milieu, Mr Epstein's slightly dispiriting opus seems thin gruel to this hungry reader - all means without end.
Yet he is instructive about bookselling and the mechanics of the market-place ("inventory and rent are a trade-off . . . high occupancy costs demand rapid turnover of undifferentiated products incompatible with the long, slow and often erratic lives of important books"), and has occasional bright shafts of description (William Faulkner on Fourth Street station: "a coatless, white-crested, red-faced Mississippi bantam amid the colorless Northern poultry that crowded the rush-hour platform in winter") and Johnsonian stricture ("What a critic likes or dislikes is an irrelevant personal confession, like preferring the colour green to blue or Stilton to cheddar") blended with brahminic anecdotage about Auden, Lowell, Nabokov and Trilling. Epstein ends with an upbeat glimpse of the "infinitely expandable shelves of the World Wide Web" with a "virtually limitless variety of books that can be printed on demand or reproduced on hand-held readers or similar device". Sounds familiar? Handy thing, a book.
Antony Farrell is a publisher at The Lilliput Press