Read any good books lately? If you haven’t it may be because the art of book editing is fading.
Book editing is the most silent, the least honoured and arguably the most unique of all creative crafts. Painters don’t call in editors to help them touch up their canvases, composers don’t have to take their manuscripts to someone else before their music is performed in public. But the editor is indispensible to the process of writing. At mid-century legendary editors like Malcolm Cowley and Maxwell Perkins were credited with bringing the genius of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway to fruition.
But today publishing houses, once the domain of wealthy gentlemen who loved literature and didn’t mind making a few dollars from it, are now profit centers in multi-national media conglomerates. Editors who once spent most of their time looking for ways to help authors shape their books now spend their days playing corporate party games, power lunching, making friends with the vice-president of marketing and protecting their backs. The dying art of book editing is next.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Peter Davison, poet and retired editor of Houghton Mifflin
Betsy Lerner, past senior editor of Doubleday
Sylvia Burack, editor and publisher of The Writer.