When I first put my toe into the door of mainstream publishing, I learned some astonishing things from agents and sales crews which did not make sense to me at the time - but which makes eminent sense today.
One of the things I learned was that certain publishing houses, planning to bring out a certain title slated for bestsellerdom, would scour the publishing landscape to buy up competitive titles to bring out small, token edition - and shred them!
I lerned this around the time of "The Thorn Birds" - a novel that wiped out every other novel of that year. I have never forgotten that lesson - that books are bought ***not to be sold but to be kept off the market***.
Against that backdrop there is an interesting and telling article by Richard Cohen in the June 28, 1998 New York Times Book Review section called "Bookends." It is an article that deals with the potential fate of an interesting and controversial book.
From this article one gleans a number of rather thought-provoking glimpses.
It turns out that a British publishing house called Hutchinson had rights to this title and considered it its "bread and butter" backlist title - only one of five titles that held their own and kept on selling sturdily over more than four years.
The original title (news to me!) had been "A Four-and-a-half Year Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Çowardice." This title was later shortened to "Mein Kampf."
Prior and during World War II in Germany, the book had sold a staggering 8 million. Afterwards, the title was banned in Germany. Curtis Brown, a well-known New York based agency, was handling the sales in Berlin and, according to this article, holds the rights in Britain to this day.
Said a Curtis Brown agency spokesman: "(Hitler) was a respectable head of state, democratically elected," and quoted in this article is a New York Times book reviewer who chimed in with "It is with sadness, tinged with fear for the world's future, that we read Hitler's hymn of hate."
It seems that several abridged versions went into print both in the UK and the USA, and eventually, a full text was republished, in 1969, which has been in print in Britain ever since.
Writes Cohen:
"Each new edition has prompted a letter of complaint from the German government." (...)
"'Mein Kampf' still sells its regular 3000 copies a year in Britain. All royalties are channeled through the Curtis Brown Agency, which does not take a commission, but passes the money on to a suitable charity.. . . Who now receives the money? Curtis Brown declines to say. As the agency explains, "If the name of the charity who receives the money were made public, they'd immediately have to announce they could no longer take it."
In America, Houghton Mifflin holds the rights and has repeatedly brought out the title. Recently, there was a minor snag.
"The company's new managing direction complained that the jacket of the book had to be changed. The wording contained the phrase 'this evil book.'
That wouldn't do. 'We can't say a book is evil if we ourselves are publishing it,' the managing director added. This was changed to 'this vile book' a triumph of publishing economics. (...)
"In January, Houghton Mifflin will publish a new edition - the Mannheim translation, but with a fresh introduction by the historian John Lukacs."
Writes Richard Cohen:
"Houghton Mifflin is not publishing the book for academic study, but for the general reader. Shouldn't the book be published in a special way - with the literary equivalent of a public health warning? Here Strothman (the new publisher for Houghton Mifflin) is adamant: "I defer to our own First Amendment. Ideas are sometimes messy, but it's far more dangerous to suppress them in fear of their falling into the wrong hands than to reveal them for what they are."
Back in Europe,
". . . Hutchinson has meantime been sold to Random House, who in turn has been sold to the vast German conglomerate of Bertelsmann. Thus Hitler's racist tract, unavailable in German bookstores, will shortly be published throughout Britain and the Commonwealth by a German Company."
The head of Bertelsmann's North American trade book operations, Peter Olson, is quoted as having opined:
"It's an interesting question whether Bertelsmann would choose to publish Mein Kampf. Probably not."
"Mein Kampf" has already been banned in Portugal, the publishing house Hugin Editora having reached an agreement with the German Embassy for all copies of "Mein Kampf" to be recalled and shredded. According to the Cohen article, the Federal State of Bavaria, which controls all rights to the book except the English language editions, has already caused it to be banned in Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Switzerland and Hungary. Meanwhile, Houghton Mifflin seems to be hanging tight. Says Houghton Mifflin's present publisher, Wendy Strothman, defending the new edition slated for January:
"I'd also argue that nowadays it is one of the most powerful rebuttals we can deliver to Holocaust revisionists."
No kidding! I wish she'd put ***that*** on the dust jacket.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Boy, if they are going to use "Mein Kampf" to rebut revisionism, we are in pretty good shape!"
(Ernst Zundel)