Autobiographical

Today’s post is about Ted Williams, the baseball player who might have been the greatest hitter who ever lived. There’s no attempt here to make the piece accessible to people who neither know nor care about baseball so, if you came to the blog for publishing or digital change today, please come back for the next post.

But if you know and care about baseball, you’ll be getting three stories of interest that never appeared in any Williams bio I ever read, and I think I’ve read them all. Each of these stories contains a little surprise about a character we thought we knew well. The first one is short and indicates that he wasn’t the hard-hearted SOB many sportswriters made him out to be. The second is a bit longer and shows that the great student of hitting learned from some apparently unlikely teachers. And the third is a lengthier tale that shows that Williams could also learn from a fan.

The first one came to me just a couple of weeks ago from Roger Waynick, the owner of Cool Springs Press, a gardening publisher I’ve written about before on this blog.

When Roger was in his mid-teens, before he had a drivers license, he went on a trip with his father to Islamorada, Florida to fish for tarpon. The group that included his dad breakfasted one morning and then, for some reason, left Roger behind when they went to the boat.

Ted Williams, a pretty famous tarpon fisherman (one of his major endorsement deals was with Sears for fishing tackle), noticed the young man sitting by himself and asked him what was going on. Roger explained that his dad and his dad’s friends had left him behind. Ted invited him to spend the day with him fishing on his boat.

Waynick has two great memories of the day. One was about the legendary Williams eyesight. (It was claimed that he could read the label on a 45 rpm record while it was spinning on the turntable.) Waynick explained to me that fishing for tarpon is like hunting; you see the target game first and then “cast to it.” As Waynick put it, “he had brilliant eyes and could see the fish long before I could!”

But the other recollection Waynick has nearly 40 years later is about Williams’s strength. “We caught several fish and I was amazed how he could hold his rod almost vertically as these huge fish pulled. For me, I was being pulled around the boat…but not him. He stood still and straight. Splendid.”

In the late 1980s, I spent a couple of spring training seasons in Florida with a press pass working on a book called “The Baseball Fan’s Guide to Spring Training.” I even saw Williams once working with young hitters on a back field at the Red Sox camp, then in Winter Haven, Florida. But that’s not the second story.

One morning I was hanging around with other writers and broadcasters at the batting cage at the Phillies spring home, then at Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater. (Jack Russell was a charming red brick edifice, one of my favorite spring training ballparks. It has been replaced, but at least the new park the Phillies built, Bright House Field, is perhaps the nicest of the new generation of spring training parks.) Also at the cage that morning was Tony Kubek, the former Yankee shortstop who was then a broadcaster. Kubek was talking about his first All-Star game appearance.

He was witness to a conversation between Williams and Kubek’s teammate, Yogi Berra. This would have been in 1958. (I had to look that up. Kubek was rookie-of-the-year in 1957, but he didn’t appear on the All-Star roster that year.) Williams had won the batting champtionship with an astounding .388 average in 1957; he was on his way to winning it again in 1958, but with an average that was 60 points lower. The defenses were shifting on him, loading up the right side of the infield and daring him to hit to left field.

Berra was a left-handed hitter, like Williams, but, unlike Williams he could hit effectively to left field. So Williams asked Berra for at tip on going the other way.

As Kubek related it, Berra said, “you have to throw the top hand over. Make a throwing motion with the top hand as you swing to hit line drives. Otherwise you’ll pop the ball up.”

I was amazed. “You’re telling us that Yogi Berra taught Ted Williams to hit to left field?” I asked Kubek. “Exactly,” he said.

There’s a coda to this story that has nothing to do with Williams. As it happened, a day or two later I was at the Houston Astros training camp in Kissimmee, Florida. Yogi was a coach for the Astros at that time so, with my press pass again allowing me on the field before the game, I went looking for him. I learned that very hot day that Yogi sought the shade. He was never in the sun before that game. I found him in the dugout. So I approached him.

“Hello, Mr. Berra,” I said, offering my hand. He made no move and just stood there. “I’m Mike Shatzkin, a writer from New York. I’m working on a book on Spring Training. Yesterday at the cage in Clearwater Tony Kubek said you taught Ted Williams to hit to left field.”

Berra didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge a word I said. He showed no expression.

“Is that true?” I said. “Do you recall it?”

Still no reaction. I gave up; “slinked away” would be an accurate description.

Later in the press box I told a Houston writer the story. When I got to the part about approaching Yogi in the dugout, he said, “Did you get him to say anything?” “No,” I said. “No surprise there. He doesn’t talk to writers he doesn’t know.”

The third story originated with a movie producer introduced to me by a Hollywood friend in the late 1980s. This fellow (whose name eludes me 20 or more years since I last spoke with him) had apparently secured the rights to do a movie about Ted Williams. The film would revolve around an amazing story about Williams, still largely unknown (not in those bios!) But, sort of like the Berra coda to the Kubek story, I have an extra twist to offer.

Williams had missed most of the 1952 and 1953 seasons serving in Korea. He came back for the last few weeks of 1953 and hit well, but, nonetheless, announced in a national magazine before Spring Training that 1954 would be his last year. He would become 36 years old during the season and had been in the big leagues since 1939. As the movie producer told me the story, his wife at that time had very clear personal preferences: “no weddings, no funerals, no ballgames.” And as if to confirm that his plan to quit was the right one, Williams broke his shoulder making a tumbling catch in left field in one of the first exhibition games of the spring. But he rejoined the club early in the year and was, as always, hitting well.

After a game with the Orioles in mid-season, Williams was alone in the Baltimore train station when he was approached by a stranger. “You’re Ted Williams, right?” “Yes.”

“Are you really planning to retire when this season is over?” “Yes.”

“Well, you better not do that if you want to make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. The writers vote for the Hall of Fame and they hate your guts. And your numbers just aren’t good enough. If you quit after this year, you’ll never make it on the first ballot.”

Since Williams had hit well over .300 in every season he’d played, and hit with power from the very beginning, he was skeptical. “What do you mean my numbers aren’t good enough?”

“You missed too much time fighting in the wars. Your lifetime totals just don’t cut it.”

Williams’s curiosity was piqued. He arranged to meet the fan again soon in New York. They stayed up all night talking. At the end of the session, Williams said, “OK, what do I have to do?”

The fan said, “you have to hit 500 home runs. If you do that, they can’t possibly keep you out of the Hall of Fame. They’ll have to put you in on the first ballot.” At that time, only Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, and Mel Ott had hit 500 home runs in all of baseball history. Lou Gehrig was 4th on the all-time list with 493 home runs.

At the end of the 1954 season, Williams had 366. The following spring, he was divorced, reported late, and started the season late. But his pledge to retire had been forgotten and he kept right on hitting. And his new friend kept in touch with him, kept encouraging him, and kept tracking how Williams was doing against the lifetime records that had been posted before him.

Williams hit .356 in 1955 and .345 in 1956. In 1957, the season in which he turned 39, that .388 average won the batting championship by more than 20 points over Mickey Mantle’s career-best .365. In 1958, the year Kubek played with him in the All-Star game, he won his sixth American League batting championship.

But age caught up with him in 1959. He had a painful pinched nerve in his neck that hampered him all year and, for the first time, his average fell below .300. He only hit .254. But he finished the year with 492 home runs, one behind Gehrig, eight short of 500. He couldn’t retire!

So he volunteered for a pay cut and came back for a final year in 1960. He climbed back above .300, hit 29 homers to total 521, and, in a final act that inspired one of the most famous New Yorker articles ever by John Updike (”Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”), hit a home run in his last at-bat in the major leagues. Five years later, after the mandatory waiting period was over, Williams was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

What a story, I thought. I told the movie producer: you need to turn this into a book. He agreed. Could I help him find a writer?

I had a friend named Lawrie Mifflin, who was one of the first woman sportswriters. She had started covering the New York Rangers for the Daily News and then covered them for the New York Times. Her husband at that time, Arthur Kimmel, had just left a job at an advertising agency. Arthur was a good writer, and really knew sports. I decided to see if he’d be interested.

So I called Arthur and said, “I have a guy who wants to make a movie about Ted Williams and needs a writer to do a book of the story.” And Arthur said, “have you ever heard the amazing story about Lawrie’s father and Ted Williams?”

The fan who influenced Williams — almost certainly the most important fan in baseball history — was Eddie Mifflin.

Lawrie is still with the Times, a Senior Editor working on new digital initiatives, and still a friend. What a nice series of coincidences. The most influential baseball fan in history is the father of one of the first women to cover professional sports for a major daily. Her friend who dabbles as a baseball historian finds out about it through the most circuitous imaginable route. And a dabbling baseball historian has three stories about the greatest hitter that ever lived which never made it into mainstream lore.

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I am finding an eerie similarity between the disastrous Gulf oil spill and the parlous state of America’s bookstores. In both cases, the forces are in place for a disaster that will play out over the coming months and years. And while the tragedy of what is happening in the Gulf is far more consequential to everybody on the planet than what is happening to our bookstores, we are appoximately as powerless to prevent an eco-system disaster of the first magnitude in both cases.

Of course, the causes of the problems are quite different. British Petroleum, it would seem from here, could have operated differently and the blowout might not have happened. If the US government had the same offshore drilling rules as the Canadian government, requiring the relief well to be dug at the same time as the main drilling well, the disaster might have been averted.

Just like the shrimpers on the Gulf Coast, we are entering the highly visible stages of what will be a painful and accelerating change in the circumstances for general trade publishing. In an exchange in the comments of a post here from last November called “Why are you for killing bookstores?”, I was told by a resident of Orange County, California, that he didn’t even know where his nearest bookstore was. Now there is news that Laredo, Texas, is aware of its status as the largest city in America without a bookstore because its local B. Dalton outlet has been closed. Unfortunately, I don’t think Laredo will retain that status for very long. Much larger cities will be joining Laredo. These are like ships not bothering to leave the harbor because there is nothing out there worth catching.

Bookstores in the US are being pushed aside by the forces of what in the larger sense is definitely progress. The four biggest villains are the switch by consumers to Internet shopping (which affects all brick-and-mortar retail; Walmart’s sales are down too) and three aspects of that switch that amplify the problem: the ubiquitous availability of used books sold alongside the new, competition from long tail books that would have disappeared from commercial view in years past, and the rise of ebooks. All three of these effects reduce print sales in terrestrial stores, crippling retailers and damaging publishers as well.

The trend is impossible to ignore. Borders, just rescued by the latest White Knight that believes the business can be saved, announced that same store sales were down over 11% in the first quarter compared to a year ago. Barnes & Noble’s reduction in same-store sales was put at “2 to 4 percent” in its most recent reporting. [Late add: B&N actually reported same store sales down 5.5% in the most recent quarter.] Borders is a financially challenged operation with an inadequate supply chain, which could have led to not having the books they need to get all the sales that might have been available to them. But, if that’s true, the well-financed and well-operated B&N would be benefiting from their rival’s problems. (They probably are; sales would have been down more if they weren’t.)

I first worked in a bookstore almost 50 years ago, in the summer of 1962 in Brentano’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. I’m going to guess that there were about 25,000 titles in that store: 10,000 hardcovers upstairs on the main floor and about 15,000 paperbacks downstairs in the brand new paperback department where I worked. Maybe there were more, but not a lot more. And this was one of the best bookstores in America at that time.

There just weren’t a lot of bookstores in America in 1962. Mass-market paperbacks were on sale in many drugstores and on many newsstands, and were in somewhat limited supply in bookstores. Paperback distribution then was just about exclusively through rack-jobbing local wholesalers and offered lower margins than trade books. Even Brentano’s, which was one of the few stores served direct by mass-market publishers, displayed the mass-market paperbacks by publisher rather than by subject to make it easier for the publishers’ reps to check their stock and fill in empty pockets every week.

Department stores were critical outlets for publishers. They provided what amounted to local chains in each city which were, at that time, just beginning to expand into suburban locations through a nascent shopping center industry. Reps for Dolphin Books (Doubleday) and Collier Books (Crowell-Collier, later Macmillan), two trade paperback lines begun by my father, were putting racks of their books into barber shops and motel lobbies in many parts of the country which had virtually no bookstores at all.

Running a bookstore was very hard. Publishers were numerous, title acquisition was fragmented. The only national wholesaler, Baker & Taylor, was really a provider for the libraries, which were willing to wait for B&T to go get the book after they ordered it from them. Local wholesalers, sometimes the same operations that rack-jobbed the mass paperbacks, didn’t attempt to stock much more than the bestsellers, the resupply for which was their real profit center.

In the late 1960s, as shopping center construction heated up, this started to change. Two national chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers, grew on the back of that expansion. Shopping center developers preferred a national chain to a local independent as a tenant; they were more “bankable” when the developer was borrowing money to build. So these two chains started to grow as fast as suburban mall development would let them, which was pretty damn fast. When I went into publishing sales in 1974, each of the chains had about 300 stores nationally.

Dalton revolutionized backlist sales. Before scanning technology existed, Dalton instituted unique SKU numbers for every title which the cashier would punch into the register when each sale was made. (The SKU number was on a sticker on the book.) That enabled an automated reordering system to bring core backlist (designated “model stock quantities”) back in as they sold it.

Dalton had a “hot list” and a “warm list” of titles. The “hot” titles sold 10 copies a week across the chain. The “warm” list sold 10 copies a month across the chain. That was in a chain of about 300 stores and gave me my first real understanding of how few titles sold very much in a bookstore! Those lists were very important. If your book wasn’t on the hot list, it wasn’t going to get noticed by a buyer for re-ordering. And if it wasn’t on the warm list, the title was likely to be returned.

At about the same time, the early 1970s, the Ingram Book Company introduced technology that changed life for the independent bookseller: the microfiche reader that allowed every retailer to know, before they ordered, what Ingram was carrying. All of a sudden, just as Dalton was demonstrating how important a broader selection and in-stock backlist could be to a store’s economics, independent stores could imitate that strategy by ordering regularly through Ingram. Although computerized inventory management help was still a few years in the future, just being able to get the books from a single reliable supplier enabled independents to begin to compete and grow. (Of course, independents still didn’t have the advantage of 300 locations providing data so they could detect a “hot” book or “warm” book that might not be evident in a single store.)

There were two newer operations spawning stores with robust backlists in the 1970s: Paperback Booksmith and Little Professor. Both jump-started new independent stores with their branding, their inventory, and systems to support both new title buying and keeping key backlist alive. The Doubleday and Brentano’s chains had fewer stores, but bigger and richer ones.

From the publishers’ perspective, this was all providing more and more opportunity: more stores, more efficient stores, more backlist-conscious stores. So general trade publishers grew. Title outputs grew. Dalton and Walden grew. Independents and various smaller chains grew. Ingram grew. Baker & Taylor grew.

In the 1980s, the growth continued, fueled by increased efficiencies. Machine-readable fonts enabled Walden to imitate Dalton’s point-of-sale monitoring without having to sticker every book. Computerized inventory tracking systems improved efficiency at stores far and wide and at the wholesalers as well. New retailer Crown Books pioneered a new idea: a more limited selection of new books, combined with a lot of remainders and bargain books, and aggressive discounting of bestsellers. Even while the chains grew, the independents grew and became more powerful. A newly-energized American Booksellers Association became an aggressive advocate. They sued major publishers, ultimately forcing changes in sales policies that were deemed too chain-friendly.

Throughout the 1980s, the independents were the ones building the big category-killer stores. Good independents were confident that they beat the chain stores on title selection. They were even competing pretty much at full price against Crown’s deep discounting simply by being the place you could find the books you wanted. In the late 1980s, Borders and Barnes & Noble, along with Wall Street, saw the opportunity. Borders acquired Waldenbooks and B&N acquired B. Dalton to give them operational scale, and then they started to open very large 100,000+ title stores (under their own brands, not the acquired ones) in a model that had been developed by a Texas operation called BookStop (which was acquired by Barnes & Noble.) This just meant more growth for publishers; more backlist being stocked in more places. This might have been when the big indies first started feeling a pinch; I recall Andy Ross of Cody’s expressing concern about a big Barnes & Noble opening in Berkeley about that time. But the indies and the chains had a much bigger problem just over the horizon.

In the summer of 1995, Amazon.com opened for business. And, probably since Day One, but certainly increasingly and increasingly obviously, Amazon has been damaging the ecosystem which spawned a robust bookstore network and, which, in turn, fostered large and powerful general trade publishers. That was when the wall protecting the water that fed bookstores and trade publishers was breeched by the oil of digital distribution.

The analogy is not precise. Amazon is not a villain like BP. They aren’t just destroying an old eco-system; they are building a new one. To the consumer that is finding shopping easier than it ever was before, finding books they could never find before, being presented with cheaper choices of used books and electronic books that were not available before, there is no crisis here. In fact, there is no problem.

But to bookstores that depended on customers that had little other choice but to come to them for the books they wanted, shop from what was available under the store’s roof or wait for something to be brought in from outside, and who were effectively restrained by geography from shopping around for price or selection, the waters have become toxic. And to publishers that built a business whose principal competitive advantage is their ability to take intellectual property and put it onto bookstore shelves, the imminent prospect of reduced revenue, increased costs, more difficult title acquisition, and competition from old IP long-sold or long-dead, are now fouling the drink for them as well.

All of the eco-destroying forces that have so far hit the  bookstores, like the oil coming onshore in the Gulf, are just harbingers of much bigger waves of challenge to come. More and more people buy ereaders and cut print consumption drastically; more and more books get digitized; the long tail only gets longer as more and the more digitized stuff meets increasingly efficient print-on-demand. And more and more competitive material enters the supply chain with some appeal to the public but with no participation in the structure that makes bookstore stocking easy. The bookstores’ problem is not just about demand, it is also about supply. That’s competitive advantage for trade publishers in getting their books on bookstore shelves, but it is competitive disadvantage for bookstores competing against a universe of content a click away from more and more eyeballs and mindshare.

In an exchange in front of a large audience at BookExpo last week, one prominent publishing executive took relative comfort in the fact that “more than 90% of our business is still print.” That’s (still barely) true, but only about 70% of the business is still occurring through brick-and-mortar outlets. That number will be under 50% in 12 to 18 months, and the slide will still be accelerating. Big publishing grew in an eco-system of expanding retail shelf space. It has been challenged in the past 15 years as all that growth was stopped by the new forces unleashed online. Now that shelf space is going to start to shrink faster and faster, it is hard to see how big trade publishing can avoid doing the same.

Another aspect of this problem was raised this morning on a mailing list I’m on. Public libraries are losing the funding they need to stay open. Public libraries buy a lot of books from trade publishers, although most of those sales go through wholesalers and not all publishers are managing library sales discretely the way they should. Library purchases have tended to act like ballast in previous recessions; public funding wasn’t usually as volatile as consumer spending. Unfortunately and somewhat coincidentally, the erosion of the bookstore infrastructure is occurring when we’re also facing what is likely to be a longterm crisis in public funding as well.

Two Australian booksellers were in my office last week. The trauma they face is even worse than it will be here. Geography has protected Australia from competition so books are priced 50-to-100 percent higher than they are here. That’s been great for bookshops. Their trade looks like ours did 15 or 20 years ago.  With the arrival of ebooks and POD, they’re probably facing the changes we’ve seen since then in the next two or three years.

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I’ve written several times about my father’s life in the book business, which shaped quite a few careers, including mine. Here’s one. Andanother. This post, for Mother’s Day weekend, is about my father’s other great passion: my mother.

Eleanor Oshry Shatzkin — Elky to everybody who knew her — was the first woman to graduate from the engineering school at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), earning her degree in physics in 1941. She was, in a way, a management consulting pioneer, running the consulting operation for the accounting firm J.K. Lasser and Company from 1957-1962. For a dozen years after that, until Dad dragooned her into the family book distribution business, Two Continents (the place where I really learned about the trade), Elky ran her own consulting company. She was a “better, faster, cheaper” consultant: a designer of systems and the rigorous author of “procedures” (as workflow documentation was called then.) Her clients included substantial law firms, for which she designed billing systems in the days before computers, and the Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency.

One of Mom’s clients for many years was The Longacre Press, a printer of book jackets based in Mt. Vernon, New York. Among other things, she designed a scheduling system for them. Working for Mom on that project was a critical piece of my early education in the book business.

She was a feminist before Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique”, although she explicitly resisted the label. But she was so totally devoted to my Dad that there were aspects of her capabilities and personality that we didn’t see in full flower until after he died when they were in their 80s.

Elky Shatzkin grew up in Pittsburgh, the younger child and only daughter of a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist family. Her father, Sam Oshry, sold life insurance in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. It was family lore that when Sam encountered a person begging for money for a meal, his frequent response was to bring them home for dinner. Mom’s older brother, Howard, was her intellectual inspiration (before she met my Dad) and since he became a physicist, her inclination was to follow in his footsteps.

Elky and Len got married in Harlem in 1940 (Len’s family lived in New York) and went back to Pittsburgh for their senior year at Carnegie Tech, living together at the Oshry home. Their marriage was not announced on campus to protect Elky’s scholarship, but they were serving together on the school paper, the Carnegie Tartan: Len as editor-in-chief and Elky as managing editor.

In the winter of that year there was a strike at Kaufman’s Department Store in Pittsburgh and scabs were hired to break the strike. Len wrote and published an editorial castigating that practice in the Tartan; the problem was that the Kaufman that owned the store was a regent of the university. About two months later, the administration used the claim that an April Fool’s issue that imitated past practices of lampooning faculty and staff was in bad taste as the excuse to fire Len from his position. My mom, his secret wife, took over as editor for the balance of the school year and, in effect, nothing changed. That incident characterized their 62 years of marriage: they had each other’s backs.

During World War II, Elky worked for Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, doing pioneering work with radioactive isotopes. In early 1943, she was getting bored with the job and she went to Columbia University to apply for another position. It didn’t sound appealing to her, so she decided to decline it by saying she expected Len to be drafted soon and she expected to be going to wherever he was in basic training and interrupting her career. “What does your husband do?”, she was asked. “He’s a printer,” she said. Len was then Production Manager for House Beautiful magazine. “Where is he?” “He’s waiting for me downstairs.”

This led to Len being interviewed and hired to work on the Manhattan Project, which kept him out of the war. But while the war was going on, he didn’t tell Elky what he was doing. The secrecy requirements were stringent and she would have understood that and not pressed him.

About a year later, Elky and Len went to the theater with a woman friend who had a loud voice and a vivid imagination. Len had to visit the draft board every six months to get his deferment renewed, and that was the night, so he didn’t arrive at the theater until the intermission. While they were outside between acts, friend Florence said, “I know what you’re doing, Len. You’re working on that new atomic bomb!”

Elky jumped in immediately. “Oh, no, Florence. Of course, he isn’t. We discussed the possibility of an atom bomb in my senior class in physics at Carnegie Tech. It’s simply not possible to gather enough fissionable uranium to create a chain reaction. You can’t make an atomic bomb.”

Elky could never have told a lie. If she didn’t believe that to be true, she wouldn’t have said it!

After the war and after my sisters and I were born, she got a job, with her physics background, working for the Picker X-Ray Corporation in White Plains. In short order, she was reorganizing their files and systems. That piqued her interest in management consulting and she was lucky enough to get a meeting with Peter Drucker for career advice. He hooked her up with a consultant named Bill Porter, who took her in and trained her. That led to her consulting career.

Aside from being a devoted wife, career woman, fantastic hands-on mother (she created a Benjamin Franklin costume for me on Halloween in 1957 that was definitely the coolest one in the entire village of Croton-on-Hudson that year), and running a complicated house that always had guests coming and going, Elky was a very active “citizen.” For example, she went by herself to the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. (I never really got the story about why she went and Len didn’t and we didn’t and now it is too late to ask.)

Elky’s greatest civic achievement was the Croton Shakespeare Festival, which she organized in 1962 with two other local Moms and which ran every summer, introducing the Bard and theater skills to local students and their parents, for 25 years. The full story of the Festival could take a book, let alone a blogpost, but it was a product of her boundless energy, unbelievable organizational skills, and public-spiritedness.

Over the years, Mom mentored countless young people. I have many childhood memories of the children of her friends coming to our house to be tutored in algebra. My sisters and I have many contemporary friends who learned office and organizational skills working for Elky. She was a tough boss: a perfectionist who never tired of making you go back and do it again to get it right. She could yell and scream at you too, and she terrified some people. But you found out pretty quickly that she had a heart of gold and unlimited generosity and, in fact, her demanding perfection of you was a compliment, because she knew you could do it.

For the last few years before Len died in 2002, Elky’s singleminded focus was helping him maintain a high quality of life as congestive heart failure progessively weakened him. They didn’t cut back much on their lifelong habit of traveling as often and as broadly as possible. In the last two decades of Len’s life, they traveled to every continent and spent months at a time living and doing volunteer work in Brazil, Venezuela, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Russia, India, and other places too numerous for me to recall. They maintained a wide circle of friends the world over.

When Len died, Elky lost the focal point of her life, but it didn’t slow her down for very long. A month or two later she was bouncing back, joining a weekly vigil and protest of America’s impending entry into Iraq. In 2004, she spent the last week before the election walking the precincts of Florida, trying to get John Kerry elected.

In the winter of 2006, Elky discovered a Democratic Congressional candidate in her local (always Republican) district named John Hall. She quickly “sold” him to my activist sister Nance (whose family had lived since 1990 with Elky and Len in the house we grew up in) and they joined the campaign. Elky didn’t let the pancreatic cancer diagnosis she got six weeks before Election Day slow her down; she ran phone banks and volunteer operations for Hall right up until Election Day. And the very last trip she took was to Washington in January, 2007, to be in Hall’s office to congratulate him when he came off the House floor after being sworn in. She died about two weeks later.

My mother was a great person, a great teacher, a fabulous parent. She didn’t teach me as much about the book business as my Dad did, so she doesn’t show up on this blog as often, but she sure taught me as much about life.

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I contributed to a long-standing industry argument I usually try to avoid when I speculated that ebook growth could lead to a situation which threatened the returnability model for book inventory shipped to retailers and wholesalers. I should have been more emphatic that what I was actually suggesting was that the model of using speculatively-printed inventory to sell books was threatened, and that returnability, which is a subset of that model, would go along with it.

Coincidentally, Ken Auletta wrote a New Yorker piece at the same time in which he demonstrated that lots of smart people, he among them, don’t actually understand the economic impact of returns, let alone the promotional impact of the practice of using books as posters and display props, which is responsible for most of them.

Misunderstanding the economic implications of returns, failing to grasp how it is most useful to think about and analyze them, and various misinterpretations of them are very common up and down the ranks in publishing, in big companies and small.

I recall in the early 1980s I had a small publisher client that was distributed by a larger one. I used to go into the big publisher’s office every couple of weeks and leaf through the sales rep orders, trying to figure out which reps were best selling my client’s books effectively and which ones perhaps needed to get a refresher course on the sales handles.

The sales director in this shop, who ran sales departments for several large publishers in his career and who was both a nice guy and thought of as a “numbers man”, kept tabs on the returns percentage from the two national chains: at that time, Walden and Dalton. He calculated those percentages meticulously at the end of each month, based on that month’s shipments out and returns processed.

Well, you could count on the fact, every year, that returns percentages for both chains were astronomical in February, when few new big books shipped and every excess of optimism going into Christmas was punished. And you could also be sure that both chains had low returns in November and December, when retailers are much too busy building up stock for holiday sales to send anything back.

In other words, the calculation produced a result that was, literally, useless. It simply confirmed the obvious. I bring up this straw horse because it demonstrates an important fact that is just as true when analyzing returns for an account for any period of time, even a year.

The returns in any period of time are at least partly driven by purchases made in a previous period of time. So if sales in a prior period were high, the returns percentage in a subsequent period of lower sales will also be high, and that’s regardless of the appeal of the books being shipped in either period.

So as sales fluctuate, as they inevitably do, publishers will find that all weak sales years have apparently high returns and strong sales years have low returns. This isn’t cause and effect; it is more like a tautology: the inevitable consequence of the fact that returns are based on the sales made three months ago, six months ago, and sometimes a year ago, not on the sales being made right now.

One way a publisher might try to analyze their way around the timing problem is to look at returns by title which, if the calculation were done when an edition’s life was completed (perhaps on the hardcover after it has been remaindered deep into the paperback’s life), would seem to be a valid number to analyze on a stable base: the shipment of one particular book.

But even calculating things that way is not very useful as an analytical device. Returns come from the inventory in the pipeline when the book declines or dies. If the book has already sold for years in that edition, the base for the returns calculation (all books shipped) includes those from many printings long past. The copies in the pipeline at that point might only be 10% or 5% of the total the book has shipped in its lifetime, so the returns will, of course, come in under those percentages.

A publisher trying to manage inventory efficiency needs to be concerned with the books in her own warehouse and the books currently in the supply chain and subject to return. Those sold long ago are not part of that inventory. Taking 100,000 copies back on a book that sold a million or two million and calculating the returns percentage won’t produce any flashing caution lights, whereas taking back 25,000 of 35,000 pushed out on a new “make” book will produce a lot more internal scrutiny and hand-wringing in most houses. But a tighter focus on how to to manage the inventory actually in the supply chain in the face of declining sales would be much productive than an “analysis” that produces nothing but a historical observation. A publishing company can realistically make a lot more progress and save a lot more money figuring out how to reduce the 100,000 than the 25,000.

One factor that affects returns percentages and is not often considered by a publisher is the frequency with which an account orders. I’ve never had the opportunity to do the analysis, but I’d bet there is a very strong inverse relationship between the frequency with which an account orders a publisher’s books (whether direct or from wholesalers) and returns percentage. There are two interrelated reasons for this.

The obvious one is that the store that reorders is signaling that they’ve sold books, meaning that what is available to be returned as a total of what they’ve ordered is less, the effect we’ve noted above. But the other is that an account that orders less frequently is raising returns as a percentage in one of two other ways (depending on the book): they’re either over-ordering to prevent going out of stock or they’re failing to reorder when they are out and losing sales, which means that whatever is returned (of other titles, in this case) is calculated against a smaller sales base than should have been the case.

And all of this is very important to take on board right now because publishers are likely to be entering a sustained period of declining brick-and-mortar sales (which is the part of the inventory pipeline most likely to generate returns), caused in part by declining brick-and-mortar shelf space. That means that advance sales on new titles are going to be lower than before and the number of backlist titles being stocked is going to steadily decline at the same time. And that adds up to a higher returns percentage on a declining sales base.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if stores close or cut back their shelf space, they’ll be sending books back that will increase returns rates. But it will not be simple to separate out how the current strategies for inventory placement are working and to avoid having the “noise” of returns made because of contraction cloud those judgments.

The “good news” is that the old measurements (total returns in a year against total shipments out in a year) will deliver an exaggerated picture of how much current new title sales are declining (although they will be delivering a true picture of a very sad fiscal reality.) The bad news is that we’re going to start hearing about companies whose overall returns percentages have gone from the 20s to the 30s and then higher.

I wrote in the piece that I referred at the top that it looks like sales registered online — whether print or electronic — will be half the sales of new narrative text books published by 2012. When that number gets to 90%, there won’t be much of a premium on a publisher’s ability to understand, and thus to be able to manage, their returns with sensitivity and sound analysis. But between now we will be living through several years when it will be one of the critical skill sets for all publishers fighting to survive sea changes in the business.

For a few years earlier in the decade, we had a thriving little business called “Supply Chain Tracker” in which we took the sales and inventory data provided by major accounts and delivered publishers reports in Excel to help with analysis. We created what we believe were some critical metrics to watch: percentage of stock on hand sold, week by week in each account; percentage of each book’s stock in an account’s Distribution Center (if they had one); total inventory in the retail pipelines we could see and what percentage was selling through in a week (by title), and then the same for wholesale and distribution centers. Most of a publisher’s supply chain inventory is really visible today, if a publisher takes the time and care to look. Just glancing at each spreadsheet an account delivers for how things are going on top sellers was never sufficient; the price to be paid for such inattention in the future will only escalate.

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Only a short post on a rainy Sunday, a little folksier than usual. But I did think of something sort-of analytical at the end.

But when I write about my Dad, nice things happen. Last week I got this link sent to me by a friend in London, reminding me of the disclaimer in In Cold Type. Dad was actually pretty proud of it. I also got a call from a retired CEO who encountered him early in his career and was permanently influenced. And next week I’m having coffee with a literary agent  who started her career working with a dose of his mentoring at Doubleday in the 1950s.

Dad’s book is a tour de force. Nobody ever thought more analytically about every single process in trade publishing or brought such a comfort level with technology to their thinking.  He should have gotten more attention for correctly predicting the inevitable decline of mass market publishing at a moment when few saw it: very shortly after what remains the biggest paperback deal in history. (That was Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz, from Crown to Bantam Books, for $3.1 million, in 1979.)

It was a real struggle for Dad to get the book published. Although, as Dad pitched it, this was a book for everybody in book publishing and anybody interested in book publishing, that could only be true in the Cliff’s Notes version. Indeed, this is a book only for people with a deep interest in publishing. But time has proven that, for those, it is compelling.

David Replogle was the head of Houghton Mifflin’s trade department in the early 1980s and he had worked for Dad at Doubleday in the 1950s. All of the big houses had turned the book down. Was it because it wouldn’t sell well enough? Maybe. Was it because they didn’t want their authors and agents and shareholders asking them whether they did things the Len Shatzkin way, which they usually didn’t…? (What were those? Standardized trim sizes and text designs, much larger sales forces, statistically-driven print and pricing decisions, publishing companies encouraging retailers to allow them to manage  inventory at the point of sale…) I believe the nuisance factor crossed more than a few minds. Anyhow, Replogle, in a decision that was X parts business and Y parts sentimental favor, signed the book.

It sold well enough in hardcover to warrant a trade paperback edition. And when it reverted, Dad was one of the first to sign up for Lightning Print, almost two decades after he wrote In Cold Type. New technology always did appeal to him.

Clicking on a few links that I hadn’t for a while for this post made me realize something new about The Long Tail. While Dad’s book is in Lightning, there’s hardly any reason for somebody to buy the POD version anymore. The combination of the ones we’ve sold over the past 10 or 12 years and the relentlessly-increasing efficiency of the online used book supply system means there are probably enough copies in circulation to require bulk demand — for, say, 25 or more copies — for it make sense to do anything but shop the net for used. This is happening book by book. It would mean that the valuable shelf life of many scans for POD purposes might be considerably shorter than forever and that some books probably sell their very last newly-printed copy every day. That’s a new thought to me.

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I was extremely fortunate in my “choice” of parents. I had both admiration and affection for them, and I always had a great time just shooting the bull with my dad, Leonard Shatzkin. He was a real visionary about the publishing business and was also very witty and cogent. A great deal of what passes for my insight is really just a recycling of his.

He died in May of 2002. Until the last six months or so of his life when the heart failure that killed him so weakened him that he couldn’t really think anymore, he was still working hard on what he always considered to be the most important commercial challenge for book publishers: how to manage the inventory in retail locations. In fact, he was developing a system he hoped to commercialize as a solution for independent stores. I didn’t want to say “what independent stores?” to him back then, even though it was already obvious to me that their existence was seriously threatened. Dad had shaped his view of publishing during the 1950s, when the industry was near the front end of what was nearly half-a-century of unfettered growth.

That period of growth was over by 2000, and those of us who were trying to measure the trajectory of digital change in the early 2000s couldn’t avoid seeing it. Dad might have seen it 10 or 20 years earlier, but he was intellectually and emotionally incapable of accepting it in the last few years of his life. In fact, while taking control of the inventory in independent bookstores had been the key to the growth Dad fostered at Doubleday in the 1950s and in building the Collier Books imprint, which he created, for what we now call Macmillan I in the 1960s, it didn’t present the same level of opportunity in the 2000s. He had been right for many years about this, but he wasn’t anymore.

Another immutable truth in my father’s picture of book publishing which also turned out not to be permanent was his belief that book publishers should just keep expanding their lists, pretty much without limits. When Dad launched Collier Books by doing 600 titles a year in 1962, the entire industry only produced about 10,000 titles. In Dad’s time, it was probably true that most books big houses did contributed to profits, so the more titles you did, the more profits you made. Tom McCormack, who was a protege of Dad’s in the late 1950s and then went on to a long and successful career as CEO of St. Martin’s Press (now part of Macmillan II), attributed much of his success and St. Martin’s to Tom’s own recycling of Dad’s insight.

There is this beast in publishing known as the “title P&L.” The “title P&L” proceeds from the mistaken premise that titles, standing alone, deliver profits or make losses. In fact, that’s not true, because a substantial chunk of a publishing house’s costs are not title-specific; some costs are not really attributable in any sensible way.

The way “title P&L”s normally work is that “overhead” — rent, salaries, etc. — is figured as a percentage of sales (which, if you look back to last year, is, indeed, a calculable number across any company.) By “distributing” the unattributable costs that way, the logic says, you make sure that each book covers its “share” of the costs of keeping the doors open. But, as McCormack pointed out many times over his career, the rent didn’t go up because he signed a new title and it was nonsensical to charge each title, let alone each sale, for the rent.

Dad had a very succinct and persuasive way to explain the folly of the “title P&L” logic. What he suggested is that every house do a recalculation of their overall P&L at the end of each year. To do it, they should take out every title that failed to earn back the overhead charge (usually somewhere between 35% and 45%) because those had, by the internal logic, “lost money.” Surely, if you take out all the titles that lost money, you would see your overall calculation of profits rise. Right?

But it never does, it always falls. Why is that? Because most of the titles deemed to have lost money by “title P&L” logic actually made a contribution to overhead. That is, the direct revenues attributable to that title were greater than the direct expenses charged to it; they just weren’t sufficient to be scored as profitable when the overhead tax was deducted. But if you subtract all the books that earned 6% or 10% or 19% or 34% margin on sales, you subtract actual dollar contributions to overhead and profit.

Important point: overhead and profit are both produced by gross margin on sales. When enough margin has been generated to cover all the overheads, the margin becomes profit. So titles don’t earn profits or losses, they contribute more money or less to overhead and, in some cases, actually don’t recover their direct costs. The titles that don’t recover their costs clearly have lost money; all other titles contribute to overhead and, if it is covered, to profits, but they aren’t, strictly speaking, profitable in and of themselves.

All that was true in Dad’s day and is still true today. What has changed (I think; I haven’t actually done the analysis with a real house’s numbers) is that the percentage of titles that don’t even recover their direct costs is rising. It is actually getting harder and harder to publish new titles successfully, even if the standard of success is lowered to “recovered all costs” from “delivered its pro rata contribution to overhead.”

That’s because each title published today is facing a much more challenging commercial environment than each title published two, three, four, or five decades ago. Each title competes with more titles in the marketplace and more new titles coming into the marketplace: print-on-demand and online used books have snared a great deal of market share that used to be available only to new titles and backlist kept alive in print-run quantities by publishers. And, for the past 10 years, each new title is coming into a marketplace that has less shelf space available for books overall than it had for the last title.

So the “keep publishing more and more” paradigm that Dad believed in and that McCormack credited with St. Martin’s growth may not actually work anymore. In fact, any sentient publisher today would have to look at their output regularly to recalibrate what new title publishing is actually profitable. I expect that analysts in every major house are slicing and dicing their lists, trying to figure out whether they can discern — by level of advance or subject matter or by imprint or editor or agent — which bets will return the cash invested and bring profit to the house.

We can assume those analyses are being done, but can we assume they’re being done right? Without any inside view of the details (and I don’t have one), we’ll assume (hope) that the crude application of a single overhead percentage to each title is not the standard for analysis. If it is, the house doing that will almost certainly be led to erroneous conclusions, just as Dad and Tom pointed out they were if they saw a book that contributed 30% margin as “unprofitable” and would think they’d be better off not publishing it.

The big publisher of 2010 has another problem besides the reality that new titles are harder and harder to launch to any standard of acceptable return. They also have to feed a machine built to handle a certain volume of printed books when the decline of print book sales is being accelerated by the shift to digital. The additional margins in digital (which are being produced as long as prices can be maintained) are not very helpful if they need to be diverted to pay for warehouse space, field sales forces, and higher unit printing costs because there is less print “throughput” to support them.

Big publishing management is aware of this challenge; it is part of what drives up the value (and prices) of big brand franchise authors. The big authors are still the fastest way to guarantee the volume of print output and sales necessary to fill those volume-guarantee contracts with the printers, absorb the warehouse space, and cover the cost of calling on accounts that sell print only. And look at the irony. With less volume, unit costs per book go up, which reduces total gross margin. And if warehouse and sales organization costs are fixed (they aren’t but it is hard to adjust them quickly, the way you can cut a press run or a marketing spend), then the percentage of sales they will consume will go up. So much for calculations of overhead as a percentage!

The big variable publishers have to deal with today is marketing cost. The most common rationale for list-cutting is that it will allow a greater amount of marketing attention to the books that are published. But that articulation actually begs the question, because marketing resources are variable. If you add more, you increase the overhead nut you have to cover before you get to profits. And if you reduce those resources, then you’ll be chasing your tail trying to put more marketing effort behind each title.

The analysis of how to cut has to be done; it is pure insanity for publishers to keep cranking out new titles if they are losing on many of them. Some of the ones they lose on have the potential to be big but just don’t make it; some aren’t even seen to have that potential. But the ultimate answer is not in how or how much a publisher can reduce title output, but in how they focus it. That’s the secret to reducing marketing costs and it is something we will certainly explore in another post someday.

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Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

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I lost a very dear friend who was a unique figure in the publishing world two months ago when Caroline Latham died in Novato, California. I am pretty sure she was 68 or 69; her close friend Joan was sure she was 70. Even Caroline didn’t know for sure.

I met Caroline in 1978 when my family’s Two Continents Publishing Group, a distributor along the lines of PGW or NBN, and her Latham Publishing Company, a packager of college textbooks, were in their last days. Two Continents was desperately looking for more books to distribute; Caroline was desperately looking for additional ways to monetize content assets she held. We couldn’t solve each other’s problems then, but we became friends and I got to know one of the most extraordinary people on the planet.

Caroline had been raised in an oil-industry family; her father was an engineer. She had grown up in various places in the US and in Iran, and went to Oberlin College very young. She graduated from Oberlin at the age of 16 or so (later events established that she didn’t really know) and, as she put it to me, married the richest young man in town who had a job as a college traveler for Macmillan, putting Caroline in touch with the college textbook business. For several years, Caroline lived a relaxed life, bearing a son and daughter and indulging her lifelong passion for the written word. She read extraordinarily fast and could literally devour several full-length books a day. By the time she was in her early 20s, she had read more books than most well-read people consume in a lifetime.

Then, after they had moved to New York so he could move from sales to being an editor, her husband suddenly disappeared from her life. As I recalled the story, he was discovered a few years later, having had a total emotional breakdown, in Detroit. Caroline abandoned his family’s fortune to him for a variety of reasons — one being that she knew he would need it to live out his life — and immediately shifted to writing textbooks to earn a living in New York for herself and her children, Scott and Sarah Bridge. Her kids were just about grown and out of the house when I met her and she began to work in trade publishing.

The first project we worked on together was for a Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Jack Eisner, who had made a fortune in the US after World War II and then, in the late 1970s, was underwriting the telling of his story through all available means. Caroline ghost-wrote his book, “The Survivor”, and Abby Mann was hired to write the play of the same name (which closed very quickly despite Jack’s efforts to build a success on Broadway.) Caroline and I together made a deal for the book with William Morrow; then she supervised a team following scripts I wrote to augment the house’s sales efforts with calls to bookstores all over the country, an effort that seems rather quaint today but actually produced measurable results back then.

Caroline was really good at the ghost-writing thing. She could “become” any person and produce an appropriate style or voice. She never violated the trust by telling me his name, but I know that she ghost-wrote many of the books and articles signed by the head of the business school of one of the country’s better-known universities. She also ghost-wrote a sociology 101 textbook that became a standard in the field.

From ghost-writing and a brief unsuccessful stint as a literary agent, Caroline moved on to authoring. She wrote celebrity bios of movie and pop stars (many of them penned in a few short weeks): her bio of Michael Jackson hit the bestseller list. She co-authored “Life with Rose Kennedy”with Kennedy secretary Barbara Gibson, another book that hit the lists. She did a bio of David Letterman 20 years ago. Our Filedby web site has pulled together the biggest list available of her credits, but I’m quite sure it isn’t complete.

Of course, the Eisner book doesn’t show up on Filedby under Caroline’s name; it was ghost-written. Another project we worked on together that was ultimately published was a book to reveal the duplicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War by a Denver lawyer and peace activist name Joe Amter. There were others…

By 1990, Caroline’s kids had moved to the West Coast: Scott was pursuing a career in Seattle as an agent for exotic travel and Sarah was in the real estate business in San Francisco. Caroline moved to the Bay Area and, with Sarah, started a new business called RealFacts. RealFacts is a database surveying rents and occupancy in multi-family housing, a business Caroline grew and ran — sometimes with Sarah’s help and sometimes without — until her death.

But none of this — not raising two kids without a husband; not writing dozens of books; not even picking up, moving on, and starting a completely new business at about age 50 — describes what made Caroline so extraordinary. You see, she couldn’t. That is: she couldn’t see.

From the time I met her, I was aware that she had trouble with her vision. She wouldn’t know me if I passed her on the street (we lived not far apart in New York, so that happened.) She had to hold written material very close to her face or look at it through very thick glasses. She drove a car, but admitted to me that she probably shouldn’t (she drove slowly and, as with everything she did, with a huge application of intelligence.) Apparently she had an accident earlier in life that rendered one eye absolutely useless; the stark worsening of diabetes in her 50s, concurrent with the ailment that compromised her heart, robbed her of much of the rest of her vision and for the last years of her life she was legally blind.

But, somehow, she read; she wrote; she built and ran a business.

It was in the late 1990s that Caroline suffered an infection which lodged in her heart and induced congestive heart failure. The Mayo Clinic branch in Phoenix told her in 1998 that she had three months to live. She then took over the custodianship of her own health care, pretty much telling the doctors what to do from that time on. A few years later her kidneys also started to fail, which is when I learned (from her) that just about everything that helps the kidneys hurts the heart, and vice-versa. She was managing a very sensitive balance, which she did — for years.

Her health issues became further compounded with a digestive malfunction that, as far as I know, was never successfully diagnosed. But it meant she was deprived of one of her great pleasures — eating. What used to be a source of great joy and amusement became a chore and a challenge. But she persevered and, although she went from being a rather large and round lady to a lean and frail one, she cheerfully lived with the condition for the last several years of her life.

Caroline was a totally unique mixture of a brilliant intellectual with eclectic tastes that ran from very middle-American to quite sophisticated, the former being perhaps a product of her family’s tight connection to a little town called California, Missouri (she called it “CalMo”) right in the center of the state. She could parse professional material in business, science, medicine, statistics, and real estate. But she loved gossip about movie stars and celebrities, spending time at the beach (when I met her her “ambition” was to own and run a small hotel on a Caribbean island), sports, and pop culture. (A CD of her favorite music that she gave out at her 65th birthday party was testimony to that: it starts and ends with Ray Charles and in between you find artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, and the Beatles, and June Carter Cash!) She was not a beautiful woman, but she usually had an affectionate and caring boyfriend, often a Caribbean man with a limited education. She related to everybody.

And she cared about everybody. She not only wrote more books than any two people I ever knew, she also lent a personal helping hand to more people than anybody I ever met. Over the years, RealFacts had employees who were down on their luck or otherwise found themselves in dire need. Whether through fault of their own or not, Caroline was always there to help them. Sometimes they let her down and she had to let them go, but if they got on new meds or turned a corner some other way, she’d take them back.

I found out that Caroline didn’t now how old she was when she had her 65th birthday party in Novato in 2005. She celebrated the party because she found out that Social Security thought she was 65, even though she thought she was 64! I remember getting that party invitation in about January and her birthday was in June. We wondered whether she’d make it; she was already frail, it was years past the 6-month death sentence from the Mayo Clinic, and she was on the heart-and-kidney teeter-totter that was the story of the last decade of her life.

But she did make it; she made it to that party and for several years beyond, including a wonderful 1-week trip back to Manhattan, along on which she brought an entourage and took an apartment on West 55th Street. She continued to consume books (by audio now, with the help of a friend named Don Christensen in New York who remotely picked out the books to be delivered to her for her from the local Marin County Library System.) She put a program on her computer that blew type up to a huge multiple of its normal size — so big that you had to move the type across the screen with the mouse to read more than a word or two at at time, and she continued to read and write. (I know because she answered my emails!)

Being Caroline’s friend for the past several years has meant knowing a phone call delivering news you don’t want could come at any time. I got the call last May from Caroline’s friend Joan Winer Brown, who told me Caroline was about to die. She had been taken to the hospital with blocked intestines, unable to take in any more food. Doctors were telling her there was no point to surgery; Joan felt they were about to stop heroic efforts.

But a month later the news had changed. Caroline had, from the depths of her illness, mustered the strength to tell the doctors and her caregivers, “yes you will operate. Do whatever you can that might save my life.” And they did. Caroline moved to a rehab facility by the end of June.

I last spoke to her on the phone when she was in that rehab facility and about to go home. Talking on the phone was something Caroline always loved to do. Her voice was weak, but her mind was clear. She knew the odds against her were long, but she was determined to manage things toward a solution as long as one was possible. She was happy to be going home.

I’m glad she got that last couple of months in her own house and the feeling, to the end, that she was in some ways at least the master of her own fate. She leaves a daughter and granddaughter and son and brother and countless friends who will never forget her and her kindnesses, and will certainly never meet another like her.

I am indebted to Caroline’s close friend Joan Winer Brown for some key information that is in this post.

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To regular readers of this blog: I know I haven’t posted much lately, and this post has almost nothing to do with publishing (although there’s a book link in it!) I’m in London on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write it. I will resume more regular contributions to the dialogue about publishing and digital change, but posts may remain sparse for a couple more weeks…

Last weekend, the New York Times carried an obituary of a Polish cardiologist, socialist, and Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Marek Edelman. One untold part of his life story touched my family.

Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of what were (according to the Times) 220 armed fighters who constituted the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. Two of the others were a man named Friedrich (whose first name I’ve forgotten if I never knew…and, as you’ll see, I’m running out of people to ask who might remember) and another named Bernard Goldstein. Goldstein came to the US in 1948 and I knew him well in my early youth; Bernard died on December 7, 1959, which was the only day of my childhood when I remember seeing my father cry.

Friedrich was credited with being the man who followed the tracks out of Warsaw that carried the railroad cars that took Jews being removed from the ghetto to an unknonwn destination. Friedrich reported back that the destination was a concentration camp where the Jews were being exterminated. For that effort, and for his part in the doomed uprising of April 19, he was deemed a hero by the survivors after the war, particulary those in the Jewish Socialist Bund, which also claimed Edelman, Goldstein, and my grandparents on both sides as members.

Friedrich had a daughter named Elsa, born on December 18, 1936. Elsa was smuggled out of the Ghetto to live in hiding with a Catholic family in about 1941. Thus she escaped being killed when the Jews in the Ghetto were virtually exterminated during and after the uprising.

As the Ghetto was burning, Friedrich and Edelman were on a rooftop watching the final carnage. Friedrich extracted the promise from Edelman that if Edelman survived the war and Friedrich didn’t, Edelman would take guardianship of Elsa.

And, indeed, that came to pass. Elsa had been about 5 years old when she was “adopted” by the Catholic family, and although she recalled the necessity of concealing her story during the war, she was apparently happy in her new home. So when Marek came and took her away from her familiar and comfortable surroundings, honoring the promise he’d made to her father, it was a wrenching experience for a child then only about 9 years old.

The global organization of the Bund knew about Friedrich and knew about Elsa’s circumstances. They considered it anathama that the daughter of a hero could be consigned to such a bleak future, growing up in poverty-stricken, anti-Semitic Poland, even as the control of the hated Soviets (the socialists were very anti-Communist) was being established in the country.

So, using their power as a global organization, the Bund hunted for an American family that would take Elsa in and raise her in this country. My father’s parents, Julek and Helen Shatzkin, agreed to accept the responsibility. They were then in their early 50s; my father and his younger brother, Uncle Sock, were both in their 20s, married, and starting their own families. My grandparents moved from New York City, where they had lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn since arriving as immigrants in 1920, to northern Westchester. They built a house and prepared for a new life, raising a daughter in suburban post-World War II America. The political clout of the Bund found sympathetic help from New York Republican Senator Irving Ives, who sponsored the special legislation that allowed Elsa to immigrate legally to the United States.

Elsa was a girl of great talent: very beautiful and also brilliant. She was also always troubled, always haunted by the lives (intentionally plural) she had left behind. The spiritual gap between this young woman striving to be a “normal” American and my grandparents, who were culturally still very Old World, created strains. My grandmother was never particularly comfortable with the arrangement; my grandfather was smitten with his new daughter and wanted to spoil and indulge her. From the perspective of her 10-1/2 years younger nephew (which I was), Aunt Elsa was hip and pretty and virtually unapproachable for most of my childhood.

In the mid-1950s, Elsa graduated from Lakeland High School and went off to Cornell, majoring in English, from which she graduated in about 1957. She went on to study for a master’s at Columbia, where she met and fell in love with ayoung historian named Robert Dallek. They got married in about 1958. By that time, Elsa had changed her name to Ilse. I remember that Robert always pronounced it as she spelled it; she remained Elsa to the rest of us.

In about 1960, Ilse had a nervous breakdown. I remember visiting her in a mental institution of some kind (once again; I’m short of surviving family old enough to give me more details.) But she got out, ostensibly recovered; her marriage to Robert resumed. He continued to study for his PhD and she for her master’s.

Bernard Goldstein, like Marek Edelman, was a leader of the armed resistance. For the ten years I knew him in my childhood, he was much like a 3rd grandfather. My father had translated his memoir into English and it was published by the house Dad worked for, The Viking Press, as The Stars Bear Witness in 1948. (We have a copy of The Wallinscribed to Dad from John Hersey because Bernard’s book was critical research material.)

Elsa was always very uncomfortable in Bernard’s presence, which was very painful for him. He wanted to relate to her affectionately; he had known her father; to him, she was a flower that had amazingly survived the conflagration of Warsaw. But to her, he was a reminder of the beginning of her traumatic life and the loss of her real family. These perspectives could never be reconciled.

I remember spending the night at the apartment of Aunt Ilse and Uncle Robert in my early teens along with my friend,Tony Klein (now a Vermont State Legislator), after a rained-out Yankee game we had intended to go to. Ilse was then in her mid-20s. She and Robert came in from an evening out and Ilse proceeded to change into short shorts and start cleaning up the apartment. Tony was agog. This is your aunt, he said? His aunts were all old and dowdy; mine was young and vital and attractive. And tortured.

In October of 1962, Ilse committed suicide. She checked into a hotel on the upper west side, near where she and Robert lived, and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently she left a note; I never saw it. My father got the task of identifying the body at the morgue. My grandfather went into an immediate depression; the pain of losing an adopted daughter he loved was compounded by the feeling of having failed in a political responsibility to the Bund. The electro-shock treatments prescribed at that time to snap him out of it were blamed by my family for the blood cancer that ensued and killed him in November of 1964.

In college, Ilse’s best friend was a woman whose married name was Faith Sale; her husband was the historian and social thinker Kirkpatrick Sale. Faith became an editor at Putnam. She died, much too young, of cancer a decade ago. Before Faith died, I had lunch with her to talk about my Aunt. This was more than 30 years after Ilse’s death, but Faith was still touched to uncontrollable tears by recalling the tragedy and pain of her friend’s existence.

In 1980, my parents’ proclivity for going where the revolutions were (a story that requires some research for another blog post some day) took them to Poland, where Solidarity was leading the change which ultimately swept across the Soviet-dominated countries. Marek Edelman, by then a prominent cardiologist, was a key player in Solidarity. He and my parents connected.

As I understood it from Dad, Edelman regretted that he had ever taken Elsa from her Polish Catholic family. He had done that to honor the commitment he had made to her father, and then he relinquished her to the Bund’s equally well-intentioned and equally ill-fated desire to find her a better life in America. He felt pain similar to my grandfather’s. He had tried to save this girl, but the demons within her played cruel tricks with those intentions.

There are few of us left to remember Elsa: my Uncle Sock’s widow; my sisters; and my cousins in Sock’s family. What we’re left with is the lesson that great tragedy can come from the best of intentions, and the fact that some victims of Hitler died two decades after he did, my aunt and my grandfather being among them.

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The transition from print to digital is going to be a continual lesson in branding for publishers and in merchandising for retailers. I got a dose of that trying to make use of modern technology to deal with an old common problem last week.

I knew two or three weeks before that I was going to Boscobel to see Much Ado About Nothing on Friday night. If you’ve never been there to see Shakespeare, I recommend you put it on your calendar for next summer (this season being about over.) Boscobel is a beautiful site above the Hudson on the eastern shore opposite West Point, with beautifully manicured gardens leading to a stunning river overlook.

They put on Shakespeare under a big tent. The direction is uniformly excellent and imaginative; the performances often very good. (I am not an expert in theater, but I did have the good fortune to act in several Shakespeare plays in my youth, including a turn as Tybalt in a Romeo and Juliet that had subsequently famous actor Peter Strauss playing Benvolio. Our duel in the first scene is a story I’ll save for another time.)

I didn’t think I had ever read Much Ado, and it turned out I hadn’t. But I was both busy and dilatory. So it was only last Thursday, the day before the show, when I got back from London, that I finally went on BN.com to buy a copy of the play to put in my iPhone so I could get it read over the next 24 hours.

And that’s where I encountered some branding lessons.

What you get on the first screen from BN.com when you search ebooks for “Much Ado About Nothing”, in order, is the SparkNotes Guide for $4.95 (that’s a dormant Barnes & Noble-owned brand, and I’m sure the notes are good, but at that point I wanted the play); a “Digital” (that’s presumably a brand) eBook for $2.99 on which I could get a free sample; then 8 free versions each labeled “from Google Books.”

I should have loaded the “Digital” sample (but didn’t at the time; I am not familiar with the brand) and I would have seen it was well worth the $2.99 to buy it. I tried 3 from Google; they all turned out to be from Princeton’s “William Seymour Theater Collection” and they were, to put it gently, unsuitable. The typography, design, and editing were old and impractical.

So I changed my search criteria to “Shakespeare’s Comedies” and bought a Modern Library volume by that name that came up on the first page of the search. It came equipped with a Table of Contents and it is quite readable. Only twenty bucks. I paid it. I needed it and in my disappointment over what I got from Google I had forgotten the much-cheaper “Digital” edition of the single play above all the Google-branded ones.

But then on Friday afternoon, I had hardly cracked the play and I was running out of time. I remembered that last year at Boscobel time I had bought a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare for my Kindle. I found it stashed at Amazon online and downloaded it to my iPhone. When I looked at it, I remembered what was wrong with it: no Table of Contents. Last time I had to scroll through the entire book page by page to find the play I wanted to read. I remembered that what I had done was make the font on the Kindle the smallest possible size to make that laborious process go faster.

Then I remembered that I had figured out after the fact that I could search on the Kindle for the play title and find it! Great. But the Kindle for iPhone doesn’t have the search function! So I retrieved the Kindle from my wife (who got it as a hand-me-down when decided I could do all my reading on the iPhone), searched for “Much Ado About Nothing” and was taken to the opening page of that story. I noted the Kindle text chunk number, found that chunk on the iPhone and, bingo, I was in business.

That wasn’t easy. It uncovers a number of points worth noting as we enter the digital book age.

1. Google’s books will be acceptable if they are the only choice available for the title. They will almost certainly not be the version of choice if something really prepared as a digital version in a modern way is available. Their “brand” will rapidly be seen as “last choice” if you have a choice. This is not good.  And if they intend, as they suggest, to sell new books as well as giving away PD books, they better do something about it. Imprint branding may not be the most highly developed skill set at Google (but don’t get advice from a publisher!)

2. And the retailers shouldn’t interpret downloads as popularity when they present choices. It wasn’t good merchandising for BN.com to show me all those identical Google editions for Much Ado so near the top, which one might assumes might have happened because they are free.  B&N should note, if they’re keeping score, that I downloaded them because they were free. If they’re looking into my ereader for useful information (in ways that will give many people the creeps, of course), they will see that they’re already deleted.

1A and 2A. Both Google and any retailer selling their books would be very well-served if they tagged (”branded”) the books which are uniquely available in Google editions.

1B and 2B. Both Google and any retailer selling their books would be very well-served if they refrained from displaying multiple copies of what is effectively exactly the same thing, particularly since they do so without making that clear.

3. Random House’s Modern Library brand sold me a $20 book of Shakespeare’s comedies because I wanted to read this play and didn’t have time to fiddle around once I’d found that a presumably competent commercial publisher had an edition available. This undercuts my supposition that publisher brands are meaningless. I still think that’s true for most purposes, but in this case it wasn’t and the brand was worth a high-priced, high-margin sale to them.

4. Kindle for iPhone isn’t as functional as Kindle on the device. There’s no text search capability. There is such a capability in BN.com’s ereader, however. That’s a reason I’ll be buying and reading from BN, not from Amazon.

5. Non-functional (unlinked) Tables of Contents are a real no-no in an ebook.

Having found the right spot in Lamb’s, my wife and I were both reading the story of the play in our seats during the ten minutes before it began, she on the Kindle and I on my iPhone. This attracted a great deal of interest around us and no small amount of envy. I think it is highly likely that we inspired some of our neighbors to be doing this themselves next summer. By then there’s hope they will have a smoother shopping experience than I just did.

Two codas to this piece.

Right after I finished it, I got a note from Ami Greko of Macmillan to tell me that Tor is making its Wheel of Time series available on Kindle for the first time and, to do it, the full text of the books has been retypeset to better accommodate the ebook format and all original illustrations and maps will be retained in these new releases. Tor appears to be the industry leader in establishing a 21st century sci-fi brand and taking this kind of care with a flagship series is good for their readers and good for the brand.

On another front, a great discussion broke out on Brantley’s list about publishers trying to squeeze textbooks onto iPhones. A number of us made the point that books originally intended for 150 square inch presentation need to be rethought to be effective within 6 square inches. Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly was the most articulate and compelling on the point when he said:

The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as “how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone” is framing it wrong. The challenge is “how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses — sight, speech, and hearing — along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly always on Web connection to accomplish the “job” of educating a student.” That’s a much more interesting problem to me than “how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen.”

Even when all a publisher is doing is presenting the same text in an ebook, the way Andrew suggests we be thinking is the right approach. And almost every publisher has a long way to go to cover even the basics on a consistent and competent basis. Defining what “competent” ebook-making consists of in 2010 will be a topic at Digital Book World.

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