End of an era

I looked up from my computer, stunned.  “You booked us to leave three days after I retire??”  

Never shy about taking action, Bill had set our three-month world tour to begin a weekend away from my last day of working life, after 45 years on the job.

I thought at first it must be a mistake.  “Oopsie, I did that?” he’d say.  Now, I’m sure he did it on purpose, and with wisdom.  Like throwing a kid off the dock in the firm belief that it will swim.  Why dilly-dally?

Why should this unsettle me? 

I’ve been in college textbook publishing since 1970, two-thirds of my life ago. This is long enough to have attended outlandishly costly dinners, schmoozing tipsily with authors and senior editors in Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Miami.   Picture Mad Men, just a couple years later.  These were the good old days before textbooks were dying, when one could still smoke in one’s office, order plural bottles of costly wine for the table, wax wildly creative, put on a sound-and-light show to present a new book at a sales conference. "We shall be both dog and pony." 

I brought all the wide-eyed earnestness of a newly minted English major to the job. My hair cascaded down to my waist. My skirts were up to there.  I was dazzled by my seniors and my authors.  Even when my redhead editor-in-chief vanished one evening, en route from dinner to his hotel room, only to reappear, red-eyed but unfazed, the next morning at our convention display booth, I suffered no disillusionment.  When senior sales managers careened drunkenly about in golf carts at a Key Biscayne resort and stole the establishment’s granite fountain on a lark, I was delighted.

In those days, my editorial superiors were blue-blazered, chino-clad, rep-tie gods--with a sense of humor—the likes of the legendary Sieb Adams (whom, sadly, I never met, only heard of), noble Clark Baxter, jocular Jeff Sund, laconic Jim Moulton, impish Will Ethridge. You could easily picture these guys having a grand time mingling with Don Draper and Roger Sterling.

There were, of course, goddesses as well, including the perfectly bronzed Susan Badger and the prickly New Yorker Cheryl Kupper, gatekeepers of quality in print and design. It is telling that Cheryl chose bulldogs as pets.  When I returned to work after my father’s death, she inquired crisply, “Are you over it?” To this day, I don’t know if it was a test of some sort.  At least I didn’t burst into tears. 

Matriarchal Eleanor Wiles, of the sturdy practical shoes and blue pencil, whupped my ass at Scrabble more than once. 

I’ve known epic freelancing “Janes” who have become coauthors themselves—Jane Tufts, sage advisor to economists Gregory Mankiw and Paul Krugman; Jane Reece, coauthor of a massive biology textbook.  

Any one of them could write more eloquent prose than can be found anywhere outside of the New York Times today.  If only the audience were still capable of reading it. 

I idolized them all.  Lesser beings have tried, and failed, to supplant them. Editors aren’t even called editors anymore; they’re product handlers.  There’s even talk of eliminating textbook authors altogether.  Who needs ‘em?  

What a world.

Textbook publishing is struggling today.  College students read their smartphone texts more than their print.  The three remaining textbook behemoths—which have swallowed all seven companies where I’ve worked--are fumbling their way into the digital world.  

Like many other industries, textbook publishing has become more heartless.  And I have nearly lost my heart for it. As Clark would say, “I have lost the will to publish.”

Meanwhile, Bill has made all the plans for our itinerary, from JFK to Iceland to Amsterdam, Prague, Rome, back up through Italy, then Thailand and Bali.  

It all begins very soon.  

For this I have the heart!