The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel

by Thomas M. Engelhardt

Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail -- the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin -- after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir. Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters. Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Miriam · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know how when you're reading a book you know you SHOULD read and you SHOULD like and the voice in your head just starts yelling "Don't Care. Don't Care. Don't Care" and then you just CAN'T read it? That's how I feel about this book. Don't Care. Don't Care. Don't Care. Sorry.

[Ata · Rating 1 out of 5]

If literature means writing in a way that it is incomprehensible, then yes, this is literature.

Save me.

[Ella · Rating 1 out of 5]

i’d give it zero stars if i could

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently, this book connects better with Baby Boomer bookies and their elders than with serious readers (and future publishers) in their 20s. I read "Last Days" while sitting beside a lake in the high Cascades on a particularly beautiful late summer day. This was two days before the fall term would begin at PSU, and sitting there with the book finished, I drifted into an internal discussion I'd been having over the summer about how to reorganize the Introduction to Book Publishing course. If this ever happens to matter to you, it's ill-advised to attempt a major revision of a well-tuned syllabus just before class. You might as well show up and say the dog ate it.

Anyway, I added Englehardt to the reading list, anticipating an engaged, enthusiastic discussion. After all, to understand the new directions of publishing, it's worthwhile to appreciate what's come before. The changes have been monumental over the past several decades, but more so recently, and Englehardt is my age, though his experience in corporate, mainstream publishing is quite different. There's oddly little literature about these massive shifts, though they're determine literature's future, and here's a novel that seems highly autobiographical about an old fart editor lamenting his lost past, sure that the sky is falling, and not quite recognizing the revolutionary possibilities of the moment. Or, perhaps, he's afraid of those possibilities because he does not understand them and they might seem to invalidate his life in publishing. It seemed like a good choice, and it could be enjoyable to get some of the history from a novel. Plus I like his writing--not great writing, but solid and engaging with graceful moments.

On the day for the class discussion of this one, I was looking into about twenty faces that read like (I'm sorry) a book. This was DOA. Surprise!

If It failed completely with nearly everyone in an audience I thought would be interested in the book for its historicity, if not for its storytelling, it was missing the mark on lots of levels. The dislike was so palpable that I didn't even feel like going for the "teachable moment."

My initial rating of this was partly based my belief that it would do what I had hoped for in the class. That it would inspire discussion about what's to be lost and gained. So, I'm changing the rating.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

“How to explain an object that inspires such residual awe and resists so many reports of its own imminent demise?” “But perhaps I should just drop to my knees and thank the gods of the postvellum world that this half-millennium-old space between boards reserved for pulped tree detritus and marks made from vegetable or mineral derivatives should still be venerated in any way.”

There is a bit of envy, I would guess, among editors in my segment of the publishing industry for the glamorous world of trade publishing. The media tours, the parties, the NYT reviews… apparently there is sex involved. Still, despite shrinking library budgets and uncertainty over the future of the academic book, we have, I would say, so far mostly avoided the soul crushing commercialization of our world portrayed in this book. The narrator, a former sixties activist, laments the takeover of his company by a multimedia conglomerate bent on maximizing revenue with mass-appeal bestsellers. He also laments the dying of the sixties. In fact, the publishing angle seems in some ways a ready vehicle to moan about the loss of that decade’s ideals. The loss of that era’s morality and idealism led inexorably to the death of high-minded publishing

The books chapters appear as stand alone vignettes of the narrator’s life as an idealistic but cynical editor in a commercial world. The dialogue is rather unrealistic, as is much of the action, but I still found the overall effect fairly compelling. Interestingly, Engelhardt, an editor himself, published this novel with a small university press.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was supposed to read this book for class, but I must confess that I got less than half way through it. It's technically a novel, but as Engelhardt has had a long career as an editor, I couldn't help but feel that there was a lot of himself in the main character, Rick Koppes. There were moments where I really enjoyed Engelhardt's writing--his sarcastic humor and his sometimes poignant descriptions of ordinary interactions. Nevertheless, I felt lost in this book from page one and never seemed able to find my way out (until I gave up on it). Engelhardt writes as an insider to an insider. Unless you have a good grasp on the inner workings of the publishing industry, you will likely get lost as well.

[Cozette · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure how this was meant to be about the last days of publishing, it just seemed like the account of a man's career ending. Moreover, the voyeuristic undertones of the narrators interactions with women made me kind of ill. The prose itself was at times compelling, and, being written by an editor, the text was as clean as to be expected, but the voice was too whiny for me to appreciate.

[kira · Rating 2 out of 5]

A story that ended up being more about the protaganist's midlife crisis and remembrances of the '60s than about the publishing industry.