Suffolk Closeup: What Books You Read Is Determined By Book Publishers

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

With major publishers, one after another, buying up other major publishers, the existence of a small, independent, highly active book-publishing firm in Suffolk County is notable. The company was put together by Martin Shepard, who passed away in December, and Judith Shepard, his wife.

HarperCollins, in a $349 million deal last month, bought Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a venerable U.S. publishing company. Will Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, follow in its tradition? Highly unlikely. And this is just the latest consolidation among major publishers. As The New York Times reported in its story on this sale: “The book business has been transformed by consolidation in the past decade.” 

This has included Penguin Random House buying Simon & Schuster last year—in a $2 billion deal. That acquisition, said The Times, “has drawn scrutiny from antitrust regulators and has raised concerns among booksellers, authors and agents.” 

It and the other consolidations in book-publishing should raise concerns for everybody. For books, newspapers, radio and TV and other media, many voices, a variety, are needed to keep people fully aware. As English free press crusader John Milton centuries ago described it, a “marketplace of ideas” is vital for an informed citizenry.

The good news is that here in Suffolk, along Noyac Road in Sag Harbor, there is a publishing house—literally a house—a trailblazing operation begun by Marty and Judith.

Judith had been an actress, Marty a psychiatrist and author. In an interview with book reviewer Norm Goldman on the website www.bookpleasures.com in 2011 he related how he had written 10 books, all these for major publishers. When he wanted to “revive an out-of-print book” and “when none of my publishers wanted to reissue it, we decided to do it ourselves…So that’s how we began: starting two imprints: Second Chance Press and The Permanent Press.”

Mr. Goldman started the interview by speaking of their commitment “to publishing works of social and literary merit and how, over the decades” their publishing house “gained a reputation as one of the finest independent presses in America.”

Marty also commented in that interview how his going into publishing was “an extension of my own life-long sense of rebelliousness from arbitrary and misguided authority.” For instance, during the Vietnam War, he noted, he co-founded Citizens for Kennedy/Fulbright—“the first ‘Dump Johnson Movement. We had chapters in 15 states, preparing to deny LBJ renomination, and eventually [President Lyndon] Johnson retired.”

Marty said of major publishers that they “no longer give new and mid-list writers the attention they deserve, and if a first- or second-time author doesn’t sell a minimum of 10,000 copies, that’s it: on to the small independent presses with you. This is good for us, but bad for new writers and for the public who are being fed the same formulas over and over again. The joke is that despite all this, the conglomerates are still losing money while pursuing their dreams of what might make ‘Best Sellers’ instead of choosing ‘Best Books.’”

And this was before the consolidation further producing homogenized publishing.

Marty and Judith published three books I wrote. The first was Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. After the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979, Hilda Lindley of Montauk, a top New York literary agent, got in touch with me knowing of my journalism on nuclear power and asked if I would write a book on nuclear power. I began writing it but then Hilda came back telling me no major publisher was interested saying nobody would be interested in nuclear power several months past the TMI disaster. An environmentalist, she was shocked. I ran into Marty, told him what Hilda had encountered, and he and Judy said they would publish the book. It’s been out now for more than four decades and become an important handbook on nuclear power especially because it’s full of facsimiles of actual key—and damning—government and corporate documents.

In 2011, after the Fukushima catastrophe and the earlier Chernobyl disaster, Marty thought major publishers would now be interested in reissuing my book on nuclear power, updated. He asked me to put together a new edition. Meanwhile, he approached major publishers but got the same “no” that Hilda got.

So Marty and Judy took the new edition—and put it online for free downloads!

How’s that for a bold, independent press operating from Suffolk.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.