A Reader on Reading

Literary ambition takes on various guises, one of which is the furtive figure dreaded by booksellers and known as the Anxious Author. Cleverly disguised as an ordinary customer, the Anxious Author roams the bookstore in search of his or her own books, berating the salespeople for not having them in stock or rearranging the shelves to give them prominence. Sometimes, the Anxious Author will buy one or two copies, in the endearing belief that where a couple will lead others will follow. Prompted perhaps by such superstitions, in 1999 the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Vise bought not merely a few but nearly twenty thousand copies of his new book The Bureau and the Mole. This gesture may be seen as carrying author anxiety too far, but Vise did not buy the volumes for his own enjoyment. Generous to a fault, he decided to share his work with the public at large, offering author-signed copies on his personal Web site. Vise’s actions (complicated by a labyrinthine financial strategy that involved bulk discounts and free shipping from Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore, calculated massive returns, and the benefit of the bookseller’s special prices for new books and fast-selling titles) deserve a moment’s consideration.

Though the book had appeared on the New York Times best-seller list a few days before Vise’s shopping spree, the twenty thousand copies no doubt prompted its appearance on other such lists. When questioned about his actions, Vise declared: “My goal was to increase awareness of The Bureau and the Mole.”

David Vise is not the first author to invent strategies for getting his book to be read. It seems that the term best seller was coined in 1889 in a Kansas City newspaper, but the ideal had certainly taken root in our psyche thousands of years earlier: in the first century, the poet Martial bragged that all Rome was mad about his book, though we don’t know what methods he used to get (in his words) “readers to hum the lines and shops to stock it.” Closer to our time, Walt Whitman promoted his Leaves of Grass with enthusiastic reviews which he wrote himself. Georges Simenon advertised his new detective novels by typing away in the window of a department store. For a tidy sum, Fay Weldon promised to include the trade name Bulgari in her most recent novel. The young Jorge Luis Borges slid copies of one of his first books into the pockets of the journalists’ coats hanging in the newspaper’s waiting room. In 1913, D. H. Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett: “If Hamlet and Oedipus were published now, they wouldn’t sell more than 100 copies, unless they were pushed.”

And yet, compared to Vise’s deployment, those earlier pushy strategies seem like minor skirmishes, less outrageous than amusing and more amusing than effective. At a time when publishers are no longer enthusiasts keen on midwifing books but have become instead accountable managers of companies within companies, forced to compete under the same roof for space and profit; when writers are no longer (with a few Pynchonian exceptions) secluded and private scribblers touched by the muse but rather performing characters who traipse around the country filling space in afternoon chat shows and serving as talking mannequins on shop floor displays; when so many books are not (as Kafka wanted) “the ax for the frozen sea within us” but rather deep-freeze readymades (like The Bureau and the Mole) concocted in an agent’s office to respond to the current prurience of the public — at such a time, why should a “creative marketing strategy” (as Vise calls it) applied to books surprise us?

In the past, writers sometimes kept a grinning skull on their desk to remind them that the only certain reward for their labors was the grave. In our time, a writer’s memento mori is not a skull but a lit-up screen that allows the writers to see, on one of several best-seller lists, that they too share poor Soames’s fate, their name assiduously absent from these roll calls of the elect.

There are, however, exceptions to this common fate. In 2000, driven by a sense of charity if not humor, a certain Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., decided to come to the rescue of all those woefully neglected writers. Thanks to a gesture that can only be described as truly democratic, Amazon.com’s best-seller lists were now no longer limited to a puny top twenty names but enshrined instead three million titles in order of bestsellerdom — a modest figure dictated only by the number of titles held in the generous memory of Amazon.com, Inc.