The crisis in scholarly publishing

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by William C. Dowling

Yet it would be a serious mistake, I think, to suppose that the subjects or topics or titles of these books play anything but a minor role in such stories of marketing success. For there is, first of all, the simple fact that the culture on which they report is immensely more "sensationalistic" than anything that could be found on the Cultural Studies bookshelves. Tonya Harding and female impersonation are not, after all, news to the millions who view TV "trash" talk shows, and who, if they should happen to want more information, would be far more likely to turn to People magazine or a supermarket tabloid than a title published by Routledge or NYU or Duke University Press.

Then there is the fact that large commercial publishers, with far greater resources and even fewer misgivings about being accused of intellectual prostitution, have taken aim at the same market. It is its despairing sense that the very notion of intellectual prostitution has ceased to have meaning among American publishers, for instance, that drives the New Republic to an almost desperate irony in reporting on a new children's series to be put out by Random House:

Last week Maureen O'Brien of The New York Post reported that Random House is planning a series of fast tabloid books about sensational crimes ... for children. A spokeswoman for the publishing house told O'Brien that these books will be "exposes of the most provocative, frightening, other worldly and until now 'adult' current events." We're not sure what "other worldly" means, but the meaning of "until now 'adult'" is perfectly clear. Random House is preparing to pander to kids. The same spokeswoman admitted that "if another Jeffrey Dahmer and Amy Fisher were to come along and make the news, that's precisely the type of crimes that we would want to cover in these books." (See Amy fire. See Jeffrey chew.)... The first volume is called Unabomber: Handled with Care. Another shrewd publicity person at Random House did us the favor of sending along the book's first three chapters. They are special. Chapter One tells of a botched explosion on a Boeing 727 carrying seventy-two people:... "The bomber went to a lot more trouble than he had to. He could have bought a lot of the stuff at Radio Shack." (Cool.)... And so on. We wish the publishers luck in hell.

The Belle du Jour scenario

Were they simply entries in the Jeffrey Dahmer-Amy Fisher market, there is no reason to suppose that books like Women on Ice and Barbie's Queer Accessories would be selling any more copies than the average scholarly monograph. There is simply too much competition, both in the media generally and within publishing from commercial firms like Random House, to explain their success as being due to an attentiveness to market trends to which traditional scholarly publishers have remained oblivious. This is what directs us to look for an explanation in a source of "transgression" having very little to do with Barbie dildos or nude torture victims and a great deal to do with a titillation presumed to arise from seeing authors trained in serious scholarship displaying an absorption in such topics.