Thursday, December 21, 2006

Look out for Bellow

Adam Bellow, a son of the venerated Chicago novelist nonpareil Saul Bellow, was one of my predecessors as an assistant editor at The New Leader -- his first job in publishing, I believe (and mine). He's been in the game ever since. His newest venture deserves a careful and watchful eye. He is bringing back pamphlet publishing with an outfit called The New Pamphleteers. Why should writers be bound to either 1,000 word essays -- maybe 5,000 if they are lucky enough to be in, say, the London Review -- or 50,000 word books (if not longer)? Surely there's a middle ground -- and an audience for it, when people are telling the publishing industry in myriad ways that whether it disapproves or not, they don't have the time for big books. Why not emulate the Revolutionary War intellectual Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," a concise pamphlet and still one of the most widely read political works of all time?

Bellow, in the words of a Columbia Journalism Review writer who interviewed him, "believes the Internet has become the central arena for intellectual debate in America [and how!--Ed.], and it is from this source -- reprinting digests of blog posts or letting individual bloggers pull together collections of their writing -- that he hopes to harvest most of his material." An intriguing next step for publishing, though we might counter that there's still a big place for print. Nevertheless, Bellow's enthusiasm comes through, and he's got a point:

What I am describing as the blogosphere is basically a Wild West situation, an oil boom, a gold rush. From the perspective of the traditional publishing company there is something to tap into, but not much of an understanding of how. What they are typically doing is applying the old familiar paradigm, the horse-and-buggy paradigm, bloggers should be writing books. Well, of course many bloggers do write books. But that is a different matter. That's turning them into a different animal.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:05 PM

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