Veteran publisher, John Oakes may never have joined the industry if it hadn’t been for Samuel Beckett. He was a senior at Princeton when he decided to base his thesis on the Irish playwright and writer, best known for the tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. So he reached out to Beckett’s publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press, the man behind numerous literary legends including DH Lawrence, Pablo Neruda, Henry Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre and Vladimir Nabokov. “He was nice enough to pass my questions to Beckett and the latter answered them,” he smiles over a Skype call from Delhi (he is travelling).
The New York-based publisher, co-founder of independent publishing house, OR Books, has been part of the American publishing industry for over three decades now. He has published authors such as Julian Assange, Andrea Dworkin, R Crumb, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman and Edmund White; is the publisher of the newly-revived Evergreen Review and is founding director of the New School Publishing Institute, New York.
His initiation into the world of agents, distributors and royalties was a trifle serendipitous. After graduating from Princeton in 1983, he worked as a journalist for a couple of years, freelancing for Le Monde and the International Herald Tribune before landing a job at the Associated Press in New Orleans. “One day, Barney contacted me and asked if I wanted to move to New York to become an editor. I was very young then and didn’t know any better so I agreed,” he grins.
Changing the system
He worked at Grove for two years before founding an independent press, Four Walls Eight Windows, in 1987. He ran it for a number of years, before selling it to Avalon, a larger company and took over as publisher of that press till 2004. “I worked in independent publishing for many years, but it wasn’t working out as I had envisioned. I thought I couldn’t do it any more,” says Oakes, who has been rather vociferous in his disapproval of the American publishing industry in its current form.
He refers to it as a “dysfunctional system” which generates too much waste in “inventory and printing”.
The American publishing industry comes from the UK tradition and it is centuries old, says Oakes, who believes that the system needs to change, and quickly. “I thought publishing was doomed, then along came this thing called the Internet using which we could sell directly to our consumers,” he says.
In 2009, he founded OR Books, with Colin Robinson, another publishing veteran. The publishing house sells books directly to the customer in either print-on-demand format or as e-books.
“We have a modest 55,000 people who buy from us on a regular basis. Any publisher can do this and I think we were among the first to throw ourselves into this so completely,” says Oakes, who admits that his stint in OR has been his best publishing experience so far.
The book collector
Is this the beginning of the end for print? Perhaps not, admits Oakes. “Print is not dead, but it has certainly had a shock. It is just not the absolute ruler it once was,” he says.
Technology has democratised publishing to a large extent, making it accessible to more people. “When I started off in the industry, there were tens of thousands of books being produced. Now according to my last estimate, the States alone produces 2 million new titles every year,” he says. The flip side of this, of course, is that there are now fewer gate-keepers to curated content. Oakes agrees that lowering entry barriers means that there is more “junk” prevalent in the system too.
Which is perhaps why he does very little fiction—commercial fiction, though popular, is not his thing and literature doesn’t sell, he says. Some of OR’s titles include Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship(an autobiography of the publisher of the hugely controversial, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer), Eleuthéria, a “lost” play of Samuel Beckett and Going Rouge: An American Nightmare, a parody of Sarah Palin’s own memoir (Going Rogue: An American Life)
And did he ever manage to speak to Beckett? No, he grins, though he tried to. “He sent me a very nice note saying that he had a one-way telephone that only called out,” he says.
John Oakes will be speaking at Tara Books on June 17 at 7 pm. Call 42601033 or mail nancy@tarabooks.com for more details.