Hurrah for grocers

Well, where have they gone? Incorrigibly literary though the piece was (if I hear any more about how Tom Maschler turned a tea-chest of waste paper into The Great Gatsby I shall vomit), the question is worth asking. Off the top of my head, I’d say some have drunk themselves to death, some have become literary agents or book doctors, some are now writers, some have retreated to smallholdings in Wales. Indeed, some literary agents have become editors, thereby becoming literary editors, just to confuse things. Some, presumably, are still beavering away at publishing houses, and rather resent the idea that they have disappeared, or are too busy being marketeers to edit. An alarming case of a woman who only got any editing done by staying at home looking after the children was cited. "A culture that doesn’t care about editing is a culture that doesn’t care about writing," said Morrison solemnly, apparently ignoring the possibility that there might have been a culture that didn’t care too much about Maxwell Perkins either.
Still, editors don’t do much harm, and I dare say society is better served by them than by telephone sales executives. What shall we do to maintain a good supply? Enter Jim Bildner, a former grocer. From the Boston Globe comes news that Mr Bildner, having made his pile, is now devoting himself to philanthropy, and one of the targets of his munificence is the publishing business. Hurrah!
His Literary Ventures Fund will "apply venture capital rules to book publishing". So far, so dull; venture capitalists have been the bane of publishing for 20 years, although Nigel Newton would disagree. But wait: "LVF will make small investments, and thus own portions of promising novels, non-fiction works, and even book series. It’s the spread-your-bets-and-hope-for-a-hit VC model. If one out of 10 investments pays off big, you get rich." This of course is the way publishing has always operated; nevertheless, it is interesting. Instead of chucking all his money at unworthy chief executives, Mr Bildner is, in effect, chucking it at authors.
And how to spend this money? In some cases it may go on yet more brown ale. But it could equally well--and this is where we came in--be spent on a damn good edit, thus ensuring a permanent supply of editors. The writer wasn’t born yet who couldn’t do with one, after all. Henry James called editing "the butcher’s trade", according to Morrison. Now there’s someone who could do with an edit . . .