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42
April 16, 2007

Sunday night, April 15. Deadline time for many. For most, it's the IRS, the reckoning of a year's taxes. For Mist Place, it's due time for getting requests and proposals in for fall 2007 author readings and signings. One of the publishers due is Viking Penguin. This one is easily enough done, technically - lists are typed out, requests made. It still takes intention and application.

The other, more sizably and complex, are the Random House color duo, Random Green and Random Blue, all to be played out on excel spreadsheets. Ah, challenges.

Three times a year this is done, the language of proposing and projecting. It takes a certain mindset to enter that realm, one which procrastinating tendencies aid and abet. Tonight, there is no dodging. Finally, it must be done.

For diversion or background, it seems like a good idea to fire up the other little screen. It's April, it's Sunday - that means there's baseball, unless the scheduled game is on the soaked East coast. No, there's a game very much in progress. San Diego is at Los Angeles. All seems well and right, a spring evening in southern California. But something is different: everyone ... everyone on the Dodgers is wearing jerseys with number 42.

It's soon apparent that three things are going on. Least and last is the live game that's being played. Running front and center is tribute paid to Jackie Robinson who, on this date sixty years ago, broke baseball's color line, changing not only baseball, but, as various stories attest, helping change the fabric of life in this country altogether.

While those tributes are woven throughout the broadcast - old black and white clips of Jackie Robinson playing ball, taped interviews, and in-booth visits with broadcasters Joe Morgan and John Miller by the eminent likes of Hank Aaron, Rachel Robinson, and Frank Robinson - there was also a second discussion going on.

What was Jackie Robinson's legacy on the game now? There was much discussion of the decline in numbers of African American players in the major leagues now. Whereas not so many years ago, they constituted almost a third of baseball's rosters, the percentage now is around 8%. And where strides had been made in front office and management positions, there seems to be a retrenchment, ground now lost. Only a few have become executives such as general manager. And the field manager level is now comprised of only two African Americans out of thirty. This isn't an entirely new discussion. It's been read and heard before, but not quite in this context.

All of that was being sorted and sifted as I churned through the catalogues and spreadsheets. It occurred to me that what I was seeing on television had its reverberations, if not out and out parallels in the bookworld. Here, for starters, was the whole huge Random House enterprise, its offerings for fall 2008. Granted, it's only one season of three, and this is but one, albeit vast, publishing house.

I'll leave it to someone else to count the number of Random imprint titles I at one point did some intentional sifting through, but out of it all, seven total books by African American authors were what I could come up with. Two of them, by Maya Angelou and E. Lynn Harris, were paperback reprints. There was a new cartoon collection by Aaron McGruder, a humorous volume by 'Fonzworth Bentley,' and, from the One World imprint, a genre novel, a gansta rap memoir, and and an anthology on Christmas 'in the hood.' That would seem to be it. Interestingly, somewhat like baseball, which does have many players of African descent via the Caribbean, there are some excellent books - the standout ones on this list - by Africa-descended writers originally from out of the US: Edwidge Danticat, Caryl Phillips, and paperback reprints Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Wangari Maathai.

This is only one season and one company's lists, albeit a big publisher. It does feel reflective of some tendency that's out there - and  in 'here' now. Certain authors or figures can be pointed to - the success of a Barack Obama (as an author here), the singular influence Oprah Winfrey can have on books - much as certain other figures can be pointed to (a Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell), and one can say that once upon a time this would not have been possible.

I can think back broadly and say that there is perhaps more than there was twenty-five years ago - of authors, of people working in publishing and bookselling. I would also say that I think there is markedly less going on than there was a decade ago. It feels that way. Some of it is a feeling of retrenchment - in bookselling and publishing, there's been the scramble to hold onto what jobs there have been, much less be out making overtures. The mode overall is short-term - getting through the quarter, the season, the year. There's the matter of who comes in the door, with what aspirations and expectations. In the same way that the baseball conversation is complex, has many aspects, so it is for the book world, moreso than can be sorted out this Sunday night of excel spreadsheeting.

Posted by Rick Simonson on April 16, 2007 | Comments (0)