The Business of Words

by André Schiffrin

What can be done to save the word—be it in the form of the book or the newspaper? That is the question posed by André Schiffrin—for thirty years the publisher at Pantheon and now director of The New Press. Having published authors like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, and Art Spiegelman among others, ten years after being forced out of Pantheon, Schiffrin wrote The Business of Books. Part-memoir, part-history, this irascible, acute and passionate account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing has since appeared in some thirty countries, not only across Western Europe but also in China, Japan and Russia. In 2010, Schiffrin followed it up with Words and Money, which discusses the crises in publishing following the breakdown in the world’s capitalistic system and the solutions that have been sought in many countries to the new problems of corporatisation and the unabashed pursuit of the bottom line.

The Business of Words is the first combined edition of both the books. It will make everyone seriously interested in ideas and information think again.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

André Schiffrin was a European-born American author, publisher and socialist (born 1935).
Schiffrin was the son of Jacques Schiffrin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to France and briefly enjoyed success there as publisher of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which he founded, and which was bought by Gallimard, until he was dismissed on account of the anti-Jewish laws enforced by the Vichy regime. Jacques Schiffrin and his family had to flee and eventually found refuge in the United States. As the younger Schiffrin recalls in his autobiography, A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007), he thus experienced life in two countries as a child of a European Jewish intellectual family.
Schiffrin opposed both the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the U.S. war in Vietnam. He was one of the founders of the organization that became Students for a Democratic Society.
For nearly 30 years Schiffrin was director of publishing at Pantheon Books, where he was partially responsible for introducing the works of Pasternak, Foucault and others to America. Schiffrin quit Pantheon in 1990 and established the nonprofit The New Press, explaining that he did so because of economic trends that prevented him from publishing the serious books he thought should be published. Schiffrin discusses what he regards as the crisis in western publishing in his book The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).