We all entered the book publishing space early in life without realizing it – it was the day we were first aware that the words on a printed page meant something and that the words and meanings stayed there.

As a practical matter, our next significant entry probably came in school, college or out in the working world when we realized we could attach our life’s work or major interests to some aspect of the industry – perhaps, originally, not even realizing the connection.

So it was for me -- passing through childhood in a small Bronx apartment filled with my mother’s books, few of which I read (but of those few marked by them forever by the wonders of imagination), World War II military service, a civil engineering degree and thirteen years in the printing business -- before I crossed the line to work as a production manager for what was then Monarch Press, a competitor to Cliff’s Notes in their early days.

Fast forwarding through work at Random House, Psychology Today Magazine/CRM Books and Prentice Hall/Goodyear and 24 years in Southern California in book production, trade organizations, small town civic engagement, writing columns in the local papers and independently consulting, I came back east to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1992 and by virtue of good fortune was engaged by Victoria Sutherland and Mardi Link to help them plan ForeWord Magazine in time for Book Expo in 1997. I stayed with them ever since as Editor at Large.

So now, ten years later, the internet and digital technologies have created a new platform for expression and infinite opportunities for publishing in many forms and formats.

Limitless subjects to blog about

In this blogging column I will seize the opportunity thus presented to talk about the past, present and future horizons of all of the elements that make up the functions of publishing – “making things generally known,” as is its generic definition.

We are at the center of a transforming industry and culture. So many of the legal foundations, business models, technologies and marketing tools that we use don’t seem to apply to the realities around us or when, as many of them do, they apply in new ways.

There is no end to the topics we can pursue , the ideas and the practices we can challenge:

• How should we manage intellectual property in the digital era of cyberspace?
• Will upcoming generations care about reading? In what interest areas? In what forms? For what purposes?
• What literary genres are ebbing and flowing – such as graphic novels, mind/body spirit, religion, science fiction – and what does it say about society in general?
• Does the author really make a difference? If so, how and when? Or is free access to content a right we enjoy without obligation.
• What are the new roles emerging for brick and mortar libraries and bookstores in the cyberspace world?
• How much does human nature need the codex (written book) as a medium of story-telling, information collection and cultural transmission?
• How will content and all of the existing publishing channels find synergies with portable hand-held, wireless portable multimedia devices?
• Do we need new business models to create revenue streams to compensate authors and publishers?
• How will new supply chain and work flow efficiencies affect job descriptions, job opportunities and career planning?
• To what extent will toner printing replace offset printing, and more importantly, how will real-time updating and multiple versioning of books affect reading patterns as well distribution channels?
• And super-ordinate to all of this are the issues affecting local politics as well as world order, civil society, faith, the creative and practical arts and human liberties – all of which are the stuff that publishing is all about.

And that is just a partial list.

There is no wanting for questions to ask; ideas to offer and challenge, new practices to learn about and old practices to wonder about. And, reaching back into our histories, commenting on the present and speculating about the future.

They are all game for this blog. What’s on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz

For starters, I would like to share with you my own recollection of the printing business in New York City, which is how I got into all of this, and is why I have been a champion of small business, free markets, and the civil societies on which they depend, ever since.

Reading recently an article in "Heard on the Web" (www.bosacks.com) – a bulletin from Bosacks (Robert Sacks) – brought me back to an earlier era in the 1950's in New York City, and a neighborhood a bit northeast of the rumbling (and sometimes roaring when you got close) presses of the Hudson and Varick Street sector of the printing  business in lower Manhattan.

I'm thinking of the network of commercial printing job shops south of Union Square and north of Canal that handled much of the short run brochure, announcement, newsletter, booklet, broadside and direct mail needs of the city's businesses, agencies and studios, and non-profits.

I started out as a young salesman in 1954 for Carnegie Press, Inc., a small letterpress shop (two #2 Kelleys, a Miller Simplex and Miehle Vertical), on the 10th floor of 104-110 Green Street, corner of Prince - now converted to an upscale condo in Soho. My bosses, Lou Auerbach and Ozzie Schroeder (the outside man and the inside man) took me in and taught me the ropes.  My beat was South Ferry to 57th Street.

We shared the floor with Winslow Ink Co., and all the 12 or so floors of small businesses relied on one freight elevator and a wide flight of stairs.. If Winslow couldn't come up with a special ink we needed (I would sometimes watch the chemist mix matching swatches with his pallette). I would hike over to get it at Superior Ink in the Puck Building on Lafayette Street. We did all our binding (except for small Baumfolder jobs) with Tomash Bindery on Astor Place, who picked up sometimes twice daily.

We got our paper from houses such as Lindenmeyer, Milton, Case and Marquardt - ordered by phone and by the job (early forms of just-in-time inventory), and delivered by them the next day. Marquardt was just a few blocks away and so we could pick up a rush order of pastel colored Strathmore or Curtis texts in emergencies. Lindenmeyer provided us with rice paper and other specialities. We used a steady supply of Warren antique book, lustro gloss and machine coated Printone - firsts or job lots - from a variety of merchants.

Occasionally an account gave us a large job to farm out, and we'd get 77" offset sheet work done at Landes Offset on Broadway, or get a book plated and printed and bound at H.Wolff.

Athough we had our own two Model 8 linotypes, foundry and Ludlow selections, we jobbed out a lot of special typesetting jobs - I remember one of those times when that elevator broke down, and I lugged a load of monotype that we got from H.O. Bullard up 10 flights of steps for a NY Bar Association publication that was on deadline.

We had a folding box shop on the ground floor, and various die-cutting, engraving and finishing shops dotted all over that neighborhood. Those were the days of zinc and copper engravings, Dupont's introduction of Dycril as a plastic substitute (which we tried with some success), and decorative wood type from American Wood Type.

There was a great old mahogony bar-anchored tavern at the corner of Prince and Green, with cut glass windows in the doors, and a special ladies entrance (for the evenings I suppose), where we'd get a quick savory corned beef and cabbage and/or potatoes hotplate, rye on  the side, and a mug of beer for lunch.

From dawn to dusk the neighborhood was teeming with people coming and going on the sidewalks, and with trucks vying for curb space for pickups and deliveries. NYU, Carl Fishers, Wanamakers, Cooper Union, Little Italy, Kleins on the Square, used book store row on 4th avenue (Park Avenue South), Greenwich Village -- all those great features of lower Manhattan so easily accessible ringed the area and were part of our reward -- we who powered the clatter and the hum of the printing shops and all the other light manufacturing, converting, supply and distribution services that pumped life and opportunity into our great city.

Which, at the time, seemed perfectly normal  -- seeing as the whole island was alive with enterprise.

What's on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz