For the purveyors of culture, this transition time, representing new freedoms and opportunities, is at once exhilarating and frustrating. An editor with backgrounds in book retail management and financial planning, I was asked to talk about distribution, new cost-saving technologies, and relationships between publishers and large book chains in the United States. My real aim here is to look at American publishing through the lens of what is now happening in Poland and to show how issues there shed new light on the nature of commercial publishing and the printed word as commodity. This is a brief lesson in perspectivism, an Emersonian jaunt, by which I intend to unsettle things. The general mood of the conference was optimistic and forward-looking.
Publishers are happy to exchange old challenges under communism for new ones.
No one wants to resurrect old orthodoxies, and certainly no one I met wants to return to the days of furtively printing Samizdat literature in Warsaw's basements. These observations serve as context for all subsequent remarks about the situation in Poland. Unlike Americans, Poles do not enjoy the luxury of taking liberties for granted. The historical situation that gave rise to Milosz's observation has changed but the point remains. Americans can no more imagine a day when liberties suddenly disappear than they can a war waged on American soil.