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Not only the bestsellers offer lessons on how not to write. John Simon, sardonic critic and author of Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, notes that grammatical blunders are showing up more frequently even in the scholarly books of university presses. Most readers are sophisticated enough to know that the best writers suffer lapses. But readers are beginning to wonder why so many mistakes remain, like chiggers, in the texts. Who—definitely not whom—is minding the storehouse of language?
The answer: editors, who are, after authors, the most important figures in the literary world. They are also the most anonymous. Thirty-three years after his death, at 62, the most famous book editor remains Maxwell Perkins, the legendary guide of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Today there are a handful of editorial celebrities: Knopfs Robert Gottlieb, an outstanding bookman, put the title Catch-22 on Joseph Heller's first novel. Today he enjoys a recognition rarely found in publishing.
Readers across the country know Michael Korda as the author of Power and Charmed Lives although few outside the business recognize him as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster. But the vast majority of editors are unknown and not very well paid. Editorial assistants usually start at about $200 a week, and a senior editor earns $30,000 to $40,000 a year.
Bookmen do not entirely agree on the current state of editing, but most concede there has been a decline in standards.
Little, Brown's Genevieve Young theorizes:
"Something really happened in the 1960s. People forgot how to spell, didn't recognize run-on sentences. I gather it was considered elitist to teach proper English in some places." Agrees Maron Waxman of Macmillan: "You get people coming out of top-rated schools who don't know how to put a sentence together. That's got to affect copy editing." Knopfs Gottlieb takes a more defensive view: "There has always been garbage. There happens to be a spate of it at the moment, but I don't know if you can blame editors in particular."
This cup of responsibility passes over desktops, lunch tables and beach blankets at the Hamptons, literary Manhattan's summer capital. The most frequently mentioned culprit is financial pressure. Business was rosy during the '60s, when the Federal Government poured money into textbooks, which indirectly supported publishers' general lists. The counterculture, the civil rights and antiwar movements produced dozens of new writers, whose books were eagerly snapped up by affluent armchair guerrillas. Attracted by profit potential, conglomerates bought most of the major publishing houses, giving them much needed capital and managers who could read the bottom line.
Today the bottom line is in danger, and the harsh facts of economic life have become the rude facts of literary life. Inflation pushes up the cost of paper, printing and distribution; recession makes buyers think twice about purchasing a book for $12.95, almost three times the cost ten years ago. Adult trade book orders were down in 1979 to $831.1 million, from $940.5 million in 1978.