Publishers Sell Good Books, Dummy

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers. -- Jimmy Breslin

Maureen Dowd. Don't leave, please, just bear with me a moment.

She's on vacation, and Timothy Egan is filling in with an opinion piece up at the New York Times about writers and writing, which launches a boring and predictable diatribe against a couple of conservatives who have the gall to put their thoughts into printed words. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. This column will still be here when you wake up from your idiocy-induced blackout.

Good, you're awake again. I'm sorry I had to do that. You're stronger for it.

I certainly understand the sentiment that's behind that third-grader's rage, but it fails completely to strike a sympathetic chord with me because you can't even make it from the front door of the Border's to the Seattle's Best coffee shop in the corner without passing through a section filled with more pretentious crap than anyone without a triple-pierced lip will ever want to read. It's also pretty clear to me that there's plenty of room in said Borders for two more books, even if they are by Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

And I may be going out a shade far on an already precarious limb, but I'm going to go right ahead and say that there may well be other bookstores out there.

Point being, the market for books is large, and very, very wide. These two people aren't going to push the hungry masses of starving artists out of print and into obscurity. They were there to begin with.

John Kennedy Toole was dead before he was published. A Confederacy of Dunces won him a posthumous Pulitzer. Were his publishers rushing potboilers to print which prevented him from getting a foot in? Probably. It's pretty hard to market a comedy of the type he wrote. Is that the norm? Not really.

JD Salinger was famous during his liftime, because people thought that what he wrote was poignant. Vonnegut was famous in the same way. So was Hemingway. So was Twain. This was because their writing was exceptionally good on a regular basis.

The next generation of Twains, Vonneguts, and Hemingways won't be kept down by potboilers either (hopefully, the next Salinger will be an exception). They won't be, because their writing will be exceptionally good on a regular basis. People who are having trouble breaking into the industry, by and large, are having trouble for a reason.

And the reason isn't that Sarah Palin wants to write too.