There was a Galassi quote from Hothouse that still has me thinking. He commented on how publishing is much better as a commercial enterprise. Better is vague, and subjective of course. So I wonder, better for who? Is it just for the big, booming publishing houses like Random House and Simon & Schuster? What about the smaller publishing houses just scraping by? And with regards to scale and profit, literary magazines are hardly a commercial enterprise. But, can this sometimes be better for the writer? For the art? For the readers? It’s concerning for me that the woman we spoke to on Friday at Grand Central admitted that they’d basically accept any Patterson book regardless of content (from a business standpoint, obviously this makes sense). But from a literary perspective? Depending on the business, the person, the advertiser, the consumer, "better" is going to have different meanings, but I think it's something worth investigating.
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