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Nobody yet knows how mergers of this kind will affect trade-book publishing, though many bookmen are pessimistic. Roger Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, envisions huge factories that will turn out books like sausages. Big publishers "are through as serious influences in literature," he says. William Jovanovitch of Harcourt, Brace disagrees. He believes, with many other experts, that television, for instance, "has increased the use of books by contributing to an ambiance of information, art and instruction. Greater assimilation of information means greater literacy, and greater literacy means greater use of the language. And that's good for us."
But greater use of the language does not necessarily enhance the present quality and future prospects of American literature. Few of the approximately 2,500 novels that are produced every year are really worth reading. And today the complaint is no longer that good or experimental work goes unpublished—on the contrary. "It's too easy to get published today," complains John O'Hara. "People get to be writers before they are writers."
Non-Books & Osmosis. There are many first-rate novelists at work today whose output is read widely. O'Hara's books invariably become bestsellers. Bernard Malamud's The Fixer is sailing along profitably. Cheever, Updike, Steinbeck, Mailer, Bellow, Styron, all have ready audiences as well, despite the torrents of trash that flow off the presses alongside their work. Truman Capote insists: "There are more gifted writers in this country now than there have ever been before."
Probably—but among the gifted, where are the truly distinctive voices, let alone the great ones? Fiction writing—and reading—has declined over the years. Last year, $210,000 in fiction prizes went begging for want of suitable entries. "When I entered the business," says Cerf, "fiction outsold nonfiction five to one. Today the situation is exactly reversed."
It is information and not fiction that is at the center of today's publishing. Books are often commissioned like magazine articles. The nonbook flourishes more than ever, sometimes recognizable by its title: Murray The K Tells It Like It Is, Baby; How to Make Yourself Miserable; The Red Chinese Air Force Exercise and Diet Book (a spoof). Human Sexual Response, a technical laboratory discussion, was never meant for the general reader, but it has been on the bestseller lists for 31 weeks on the strength of its title and clinical content. Typically, it has spawned two illegitimate children, What You Should Know About Human Sexual Response and An Analysis of Human Sexual Response, both mere condensations of the original, both non-books.
How many books among those sold are actually read? "It's almost a process of osmosis," according to President Paul R. Andrews of Prentice-Hall, "as if the book becomes a part of you just by your act of buying it." This is sometimes true even of novels. John Earth's labyrinthine allegory,