Hans Fallada at his desk

No, not really (he’s long dead), but Melville House publisher and Fallada expert Dennis Johnson appeared on air in his place and chatted up his work with Leonard Lopate for the launch of their summer “Underappreciated” series.  They talked about everything from the duel/murder by Fallada of his close childhood friend to his stint in a Nazi insane asylum to how he avoided writing a novel for Goebbels.  Good stuff!

If you didn’t catch it live, here’s the full clip:

David Davidar

Could it get more torturous? David Davidar has issued a press statement (through his attorney) in response to the $523,000 wrongful dismissal and sexual harassment lawsuit against him and his former employer, Penguin, explaining that, well, maybe he did come on to his rights director, Lisa Rundle — but it was consensual, damnit! Yep, he has admitted to a “consensual, flirtatious relationship that grew out of a close friendship,” according to a Globe and Mail report by Joe Friesen. As the report summarizes,

Their offices were next to each other. She invited him to her club to play tennis. They went to lunch, they went to the theatre. He read poetry to her. He saw her as his closest friend and confidante, and then he kissed her, not once but twice, at the Frankfurt book fair.

Rundle’s statement (see the earlier MobyLives report) claimed Davidar forced her to kiss him in her room at Frankfurt; Davidar’s statement says not only that that isn’t true, but that she later went to his room and they kissed there, too. What’s more, “Ms. Rundle subsequently told Mr. Davidar that she had enjoyed their kisses in Frankfurt, whether or not they were ever repeated. She did nothing to convey to Mr. Davidar that his attention was unwanted,” says Davidar’s statement.

Davidar’s three-page statement says gift-giving continued, she wanted to go public, he — a married man — did not, until “In February, a few months after the death of his father, Mr. Davidar claims he assessed his life and decided his personal relationship with Ms. Rundle could not continue. He says he told her their relationship should be strictly business.” He says she wanted a raise, but salaries were frozen, so he arranged for her to move to another position that paid $10,000 more.

In short, says the statement, “Mr. Davidar was at pains to remind her from time to time that no matter what happened between them on the personal front, Ms. Rundle’s professional career with Penguin would never suffer. This was the case.”

Meanwhile, what about that other woman who says he harassed her? She “asked him to act as a reference last month, he claims.”

And what about, you know, his wife? “The statement concludes by saying: ‘David Davidar is happily married. He deeply regrets the trouble that has been visited upon his wife in recent days. He apologizes to her.’”

Meanwhile, Leigh Anne Williams reports in Publishers Weekly that people in the Canadian book biz are worried about what’s going on at Penguin:

When Penguin Canada first announced Davidar’s departure June 8, it said Penguin Canada would report directly to David Shanks, the CEO of Penguin USA, but that the Canadian publishing program would not be affected by the reorganization. That announcement was greeted with dismay in Canada …. Penguin Canada has since promised that a new head of the company will be hired, but the first suggestion shook confidence in the industry about Penguin’s commitment to Canadian publishing.

“It’s such a flip-flop for them to say they weren’t actually going to have a Canadian president to them now saying they will,” said agent Jackie Kaiser of Westwood Creative Artists, who said she found the first announcement disturbing. “Is it going to be a temporary maneuver to keep the company in a strong position during this tumultuous time? Or is it truly some kind of recognition that a Canadian publishing company could do without a Canadian president? Even Simon & Schuster Canada, which doesn’t have a publishing program, has a Canadian president. It really gets into that branch plant mentality.”

Robert Laffont (1917-2010)

Robert Laffont, the man regarded by many as “the grandfather of French publishing,” died in Paris on Friday at age 93. As this obituary at The Bookseller by Barbara Casassus notes, Laffont “created his own publishing house, Editions Robert Laffont, in 1941, and was responsible for more than 10,000 titles, including a number of bestsellers, such as Henri Charrière’s Papillon.” Among his other authors were Mickhail Bulgakov, Dino Buzzati, Gilbert Cesbron, Bernard Clavel, Graham Greene, Henry James, John Le Carré, Norman Mailer, Claude Michelet, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John Steinbeck, and Olivier Todd.

Laffont, notes Casassus, was “not without enemies. He was generally scorned by intellectuals and was sidelined by the annual literary prizes, said the French daily Libération. In 1986, he took a full page in the newspaper to denounce the monopoly of Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil, which ‘for more than a quarter of a century have controlled the juries of the major literary prizes’.”

In a statement, French President Nicolas Sarkozy credited Laffont with understanding “that it was not demeaning to wish to increase the circle of readers by making books more popular, cheaper, more accessible. He was able to transmit his passion for books to his readers and (some of) his children, who have followed in his footsteps.”

Michael Bellesiles, to your average historian

In his regular Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee tees off on the New Press, saying its press release describing 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently by Michael A. Bellesiles “may be the most striking and provocative bit of prose concerning a scholarly book to have circulated in some while.” Here’s the passage in question:

A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) — ‘the best kind of non-fiction,’ according to the Chicago Tribune — which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.”

Says McLemee, “Every word of it is misleading, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” In reality, he continues, Bellesiles “is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession’s standards of scholarly integrity … gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources.”

In fact, McLemee is so upset by the release that he has demanded “a public apology for violating the trust its readers have in it” from the New Press.

McLemee’s remarkable column seems to have drawn other coverage: In a Publishers Weekly report, Andrew Albanese reviews the case against Bellesiles, going so far as to note his author bio on Amazon, where “Bellesiles is billed as a ‘celebrated historian’ who has been ‘vilified, many think unfairly,’ and claims this book will ‘reestablish his reputation.’”

The History News Network, too, has taken note. A report there by David A. Walsh also cites the New Press press release, and quotes several historians critical of Bellesiles, such as University of Colorado, Boulder professor Gloria Main, who says “I never realized I was a ‘swift-boater’!” And Randolph Roth, of Ohio State University, who says,”The evidence, quantitative and qualitative, undid Arming America.”

Even on the right, Eugene Volokh, in a comment on his Vookh Conspiracy blog, seems more upset about the New Press letter than the return of Bellesiles, saying, “Bellesiles suffered amply (though rightly) for his misconduct, and it’s good that he’s getting a second chance. But the publicity letter that HNN quoted calls for a reminder about the facts.”

One of America’s premier indie publishers, David R. Godine, is being celebrated in Boston tonight on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his eponymous publishing company. At the Boston Public Library, Godine himself “will be giving an illustrated talk on Four Decades of Independent Publishing.”

In a thoughtful look back on the company website, Godine says,

When I started this company, some forty years ago in an abandoned cow barn, I was only twenty five and had no idea what the word “publishing” meant, much less how to do it. … As the years went by, I decided to concentrate on publishing and, like many deluded capitalists, dreamed of growing what clearly is — and should remain — a cottage industry into a major international player.

Now, he declares,

for better or worse, this will always be a small company involving a few fanatics, selling to a relatively small lunatic fringe who still care about the niceties of a well-turned phrase, a neatly produced book, and an eclectic list. This is not exactly the recipe America prescribes for achieving commercial success.

However, he says he’s decided, “As another of our favorite writers, Montaigne, observed, “It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters.”

THe former John "Jock" Arnaud Robin Grey

Sure, the early list included books with titles such as Observations on the Utility and Administration of Purgative Medicine in Several Diseases, and Hints to the Bearers of Walking Sticks and Umbrellas, but it also included Charles Darwin’s An Abstract Of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through Natural Selection and the works of Lord Byron, making John Murray one of the greatest publishing houses in British history.

Since its founding in 1768, says Ian Sansom notes in an appreciation for the Guardian, the “extraordinary story” of the company has been “a tale of regeneration and of the significance of a name,” with generation after generation of John Murrays at the helm — even sustaining when John Murray V failed to produce a son. Instead, his sister’s son, John “Jock” Arnaud Robin Grey, legally changed his name to John Murray, and the line continued. “So, after more than 200 years the business was in good order and the succession assured,” notes Sansom.

So what happened? According to Sansom, “in the end the conglomerates did for John Murray. There was no longer room for an eccentric and independent family publishing business – and the young Murrays wanted to live their own lives. John Murray VII steered the firm through the 1990s as chairman, but it was sold to Hodder Headline in 2002. The Murray family are free to live and work as they will: the dynasty is dead.”

In a follow-up to yesterday’s MobyLives post about the quick rise of three print-on-demand vendors publishing what R.R. Bowker calls “unclassified” and “nontraditional” public domain reprints: PW reporter Andrew Albanese has published a profile of the largest player in the field, Charleston, South Carolina-based BiblioBazaar, which published 272,930 titles in 2009.

It’s an interesting piece: The executive team behind BiblioBazaar is made up of Mitchell Davis, Bob Holt, and Andrew Roskill, who earlier collaborated on the print-on-demand company BookSurge, which was acquired by Amazon in 2005, and later became part of Amazon’s CreateSpace. Mitchell Davis went on to work for Amazon for two years. As Davis explains the new company: “”We are really a software company that has books coming out at the end of our process… We have built a large IT infrastructure and a proprietary platform where we take disparate inputs and turn what is essentially a picture of a book page, into what a reader expects a book will look like, and we do that for more than a thousand books a day for distribution through multiple POD channels, in multiple countries and markets.”

In response to a PW question about why the company isn’t getting more press — any at all, really, if you consider that it “published” more books than any other firm last year — Davis noted that “”We aren’t a press release-centric company, and we are really focused on unique materials that are not part of mass digitization projects… Who has that content and how we are getting it is something that is a competitive advantage.”

The typical design -- or lack thereof -- of a Kessinger book

If you do much Amazon searching, you’ve probably come across the yellow-covered editions published by the Kessinger Publishing company, a print-on-demand reprint house that specializes in classics. The books are of varying quality: some are scanned from old editions, others are newly and simply typeset. There’s something to be said for making the texts available: but the newly produced editions are sloppy, looking as if they were made using Microsoft Word. The scanned editions are more impressive, and useful.

According to the company’s website, the firm is located near Glacier National Park in Montana and is dedicated to “publishing and digitally preserving important literature for future generations.” What they don’t boast  is their incredible title output: last year alone, they published 190,175 titles.

It’s a staggaring number of titles: but Kessinger’s output is actually less than some of its competitiors. According to a PW distpatch, R.R. Bowker has found that the number of “unclassified” and “nontraditional” reprints being published via print-on-demand is growing exponentially. The company BiblioBazaar, based in Charleston, SC, produced 272,930 titles; Books LLC produced 224,460.

Jennifer Joseph

In 1984, Jennifer Joseph was 23 and living in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and spending “most of her time reading entire books in City Lights or hanging out in Caffe Trieste, where she mingled with other poets such as Gregory Corso and Jack Hirschman.” As she now recalls, “I was, like, out of my mind inspired and writing all the time. And I thought about getting published … and my mom was friends with this, like, hotshot literary agent in New York. And he was, like, forget about it, kid. Nobody publishes poetry anymore; you could be Shakespeare and not get published.”

So, she did the only reasonable thing: As Evan Karp details in this San Francisco Chronicle profile, she got “The Publish It Yourself Handbook” and started her own publishing company, kicking things off with her own book, The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.

Twenty-five years later, with a short timeout to play guitar for a band called The Furies, and to tour with the Flaming Lips, Manic D Press has become one of San Francisco’s — and the country’s — leading indie presses, with authors including Amber Tamblyn, Beth Lisick, and Michelle Tea.

Says Karp, “Today, Manic D can boast many books that have been used for high school exit exams or have been taught at top-tier universities such as Harvard and Penn. A recent title, ‘Intersex,’ was taught last semester at Princeton.”

According to Joseph, “People become professors and they’ve grown up with the books we’ve produced. … It’s acceptable. They’re making it acceptable. That’s the thing with being a little bit in the avant-garde, it’s like you’re ahead of the curve and you’re just waiting for society to catch up. But it’s not a question of waiting, because you’re consciously moving the culture forward.”

Bob Giroux

It’s the birthday of Robert Giroux – yes, as in Farrar, Strauss, Giroux — who was born on this day in 1914. As an editor first at Harcourt Brace, that at FSG, he published many of the greatest writers of mid-twentieth century literature, such as T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Carl Sandburg, and Susan Sontag.

In addition, he almost published J.D. Salinger’s first book, The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, he had an agreement with Salinger to do so. But, as he explains in this Paris Review interview, after he showed his boss at Harcourt Brace the manuscript, he didn’t get a reply for a long time.

GIROUX

… No reply for much too long, maybe two weeks. I finally went to see him. I said, “Gene, I’ve told you the story of Salinger visiting this office, and the fact that I shook hands with him. We have a gentleman’s contract at this point.”
He said, “Bob, I’m worried about that manuscript.” I said, “What are you worried about?” He said, “I think the guy’s crazy.”

INTERVIEWER

Talking about the kid, Holden Caulfield, or Salinger?

GIROUX

Holden Caulfield. Gene said, “The kid is disturbed.” I said, “Well, that’s all right. He is, but it’s a great novel.” He said, “Well, I felt that I had to show it to the textbook department.” “The textbook department?” He said, “Well, it’s about a kid in prep school isn’t it? I’m waiting for their reply.” I said, “It doesn’t matter what their reply is, Gene. We have a contract for the book.” I felt like saying, “You son of a bitch, this is the greatest insult to me that could ever be.” The textbook people’s report came back, and it said, “This book is not for us, try Random House.”
So I went to Mr. Brace. I gave him the whole story. I said, “I feel that I have to resign from the firm.” I hadn’t got in touch with Salinger because I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him.

INTERVIEWER

Did Brace ever read the book?

GIROUX

He didn’t read the book. Mr. Brace was a wonderful man, but he had hired Reynal and would not overrule him.

INTERVIEWER

Are you kidding?

GIROUX

I’m afraid that’s true. That’s when I decided to leave Harcourt….