Encounter Embraces Big Ideas

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 2, 2000 | by Robert Stacy McCain

Ex-1960's radical turned conservative publisher says he's `serious' about nonfiction.

Don't look for celebrity diets or self-help psychobabble from Encounter Books. The new San Francisco-based press aims to make "serious" nonfiction books its stock-in-trade. "We need good books," says publisher Peter Collier. "Good nonfiction is an endangered species in our time."

Since bringing out its first title in March -- Creating Equal, a critique of racial preferences by Ward Connerly -- Encounter has developed a short list of books by known and unknown authors, including The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America by Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative journal New Criterion; The World According to Gore by syndicated columnist Debra Saunders; and Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World by Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.

The publisher also is reissuing books that have dropped out of print, classics such as Against All Hope, Cuban dissident Armando Valladares' account of 20 years in Fidel Castro's Cuban political prisons. Originally published by Knopf, Valladares' book was unavailable until Encounter secured the paperback rights. "For that book to be out of print is like Darkness at Noon being out of print," Collier says. "It's particularly important now as we reorient ourselves toward Cuba in a new administration."

This fall, Encounter Books plans to release Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh of George Washington University; The Culture of Death: The Destruction of Medical Ethics in America by anti-euthanasia activist Wesley Smith; Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thornton, humanities professor at California State University, Fresno; and The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana by British journalist Peter Hitchens.

Encounter Books describes itself as a nonprofit firm intended to fill a gap that developed in the publishing world after the New York-based Free Press moved away from its original conservative niche. Under publisher Erwin Glikes, Free Press issued titles such as Allan Bloom's best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, an expose of political correctness on college campuses. Glikes died in 1994, just when a wave of consolidation and cost-cutting swept through the publishing world.

"The Free Press had become part of that Simon & Schuster empire and lost its identity," explains Collier. "The need was felt by certain people for a kind of new publishing enterprise." Michael Joyce, head of the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, urged it to bankroll the press with an initial $3.5 million grant. Encounter Books responded by rescuing several important titles that had dropped out of print: Fred Siegel's 1997 urban history, The Future Once Happened Here, and Keith Windschuttle's 1997 critique of radical theory, The Killing of History. "All of these books wouldn't be in paperback if we hadn't done them," Collier says.

Encounter Books' real coup, however, was securing the paperback rights to The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Under-class, a 1993 study by Myron Magnet that Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush credits with helping to inspire his "compassionate-conservative" philosophy. The book's original publisher, New York-based William Morrow & Co., "was commercially shortsighted ... to let it go out of print," says Collier. "This is a book that should be in print, regardless of whether it has this big boost from Bush's statement. It's arguably one of the three or four most important books ever written about the sixties and their destructive impact on the country."

Collier, 60, knows that impact first-hand. A leader of the student movement at the University of California at Berkeley, he became editor of the left-wing magazine Ramparts. He and colleague David Horowitz collaborated on a series of books, including biographies on the Rockefeller and Kennedy families, before falling out with their radical past.

While Collier is concerned about the politics of publishing, he stresses that the book trade has bigger problems. "The crisis is one of serious books," he says. "We live in a publishing culture that has become addicted to celebrity biographies, this sort of kitschy stuff that sells easily in this country.... It's the vulgarization of the culture and trivialization of the publishing culture that is the problem as I see it, rather than some sort of left-wing hegemony."

So far, Collier says, Encounter Books has done well, selling 20,000 copies of Connerly's Creating Equal and 15,000 copies of Kimball's The Long March. But Encounter's slogan -- "promoting intelligent debate" -- signals the publisher's long-term commitment to its mission. "What is kept in print, it becomes part of our collective memory," says Collier. "A solid backlist is sort of the spinal column of a publishing house, so you're not just publishing in a slash-and-burn fashion for today. You're making a commitment to keep an idea in circulation."