Publishing and Its Discontents, 1948 Edition

“Keeping up with present-day costs is as tough for a publisher as for an author, and there does not seem to be an end towards the increase.”

There is little doubt that the economics of publishing and the arts are being dramatically disrupted today as we grapple with the challenges of post-industrial creativity — from individual crusades like Amanda Palmer’s brave quest for creative crowdfunding to the many models with which publishers are experimenting as alternatives to ad-supported media. Yet, like most problems that appear unique to our time, these issues are anything but: Take, for instance, book publishing and its discontents.

In 1942, dealing with many of the challenges authors face today and unable to find a publisher for her short story collection Under a Glass Bell (public library), Anaïs Nin started a small publishing house called Gremor Press, taught herself the art of letterpress and type-set the book by hand, printing a limited-edition of 300 copies with gorgeous engravings by her husband, which she sold via an innovative subscription model. But while the book became a prized collector’s item, exhibited in galleries and museums, it wasn’t bound for the kind of commercial success that would allow Nin to make a living, so she continued to look for a mainstream publisher. Eventually, Gore Vidal, whom Nin had befriended and enchanted, convinced his publisher, Dutton, to give Nin a chance.

In early 1948, writing in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947 — 1955 (public library) — the tome that gave us her meditations on embracing the unfamiliar, escaping from city life, and the role of character and personal responsibility — Nin records the following exchange with the president of Dutton, which mirrors many of the backward economics of contemporary publishing:

I asked Dutton for an advance on Under a Glass Bell.

* * *

My dear Anaïs:

Nick tells me that like the rest of us you are in need of some extra pennies. One of these days when we are really scratching the bottom of the barrel I think I will write to five hundred of our authors and suggest that they send us $100 each. That will come to $50,000 and help no end. Keeping up with present-day costs is as tough for a publisher as for an author, and there does not seem to be an end towards the increase.

At any rate, I enclose a check for $250 which is the amount of the initial advance due on November 1 1947 on Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories.

I hope that you are well and happy. With kind regards,

Sincerely,
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
Elliott [Macrae]
President

Under a Glass Bell went on to become Nin’s first entry into the upper echelons of the literary world and is still regarded by many as her finest work, on par with her prolific diaries.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month ♥ $3 / month ♥ $10 / month ♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

Celebrated author and dedicated diarist Anaïs Nin was born 110 years ago today. To celebrate, here is the second installment in my ongoing collaboration with author, artist, philosopher, design interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman. Like our first collaboration, this beautiful typographic collage drawing is based on one of Nin’s most timeless insights on love, culled from her many volumes of diaries and her love letters with Henry Miller. Like last time, the artwork is available on Etsy, with 100% of proceeds benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists. Enjoy:

Complement this beauty with Nin’s timeless meditations on the meaning of life, Paris vs. New York, embracing the unfamiliar, and why emotional excess is essential to creativity.

See more of Debbie’s beautiful visual essays and poems online and in print, and follow her on Twitter.

Previous Brain Pickings artist series have included Susan Sontag on art and on love by Wendy MacNaughton, Anaïs Nin on life by Lisa Congdon, and Salvador Dalí’s “My Struggle” by Molly Crabapple.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month ♥ $3 / month ♥ $10 / month ♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Kurt Cobain’s Letters & Journals

“No amount of effort can save you from oblivion.”

On February 20, 1967, legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain took his first breath. Twenty-seven years later, after a debilitating struggle with addiction and depression, he took his own life with a shotgun to the head and became the tragic patron-saint of the grunge generation. The posthumously released Kurt Cobain: Journals (public library) offers an unprecedented glimpse of the modern icon’s inner life, from an anatomy of his eclectic influences — John Lennon, the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, PJ Harvey, Public Enemy, David Bowie — to a chronicle of his tumultuous psychoemotional landscape to sketches and drawings that would later grace Nirvana album covers and that, like those of Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Richard Feynman, have been acclaimed for their artistic acumen.

The book begins with a meandering letter Cobain wrote to Melvins drummer Dale Crover in 1988, discussing the first glimmers of fame, the mediocrity of late-night television, the superficiality of publicity, and the decision to name the band Nirvana:

Hello, this is me saying ‘everything is basically raining, dull, and OK.’

In another piece, Cobain offers a mediation on culture underpinned by deep self-awareness with undertones of self-loathing:

I like to complain and do nothing to make things better. I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & government to deface the movement by using the Mansons and other Hippie representatives as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases, and in turn the baby boomers became the ultimate, conforming, yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced.

What might at first appear as an inability to embody the ideals of Bertrand Russell, Galileo, and Eleanor Roosevelt regarding conformity, opinion, and conviction is in fact Cobain’s subversive strategy for changing the status quo from the inside:

I like to calmly and rationally discuss my views in a conformist manor even though I consider myself to the extreme left.

I like to inflate the mechanics of a system by posing as one of them, then slowly start the rot from the inside of the empire.

In what reads like the more hopeless counterpart to David Foster Wallace’s meditation on popular taste, Cobain bemoans the American propensity for fads:

The conspiracy toward success in America is immediacy. … Here today, gone tomorrow because yesterday’s following was nothing more than a tool in every individuals need for self-importance, entertainment, and social rituals. Art that has long lasting value cannot be appreciated by the majorities. Only the same, small percent will value arts patience as they always have. This is good. The ones who are unaware do not deserve false suggestions in their purchasing duties.

Cobain notes the warped mythologies of fame, which disguise for the mainstream the enormous role of “minorities” — who were really creative majorities in many regards — in shaping the history of modern culture:

I like the comfort in knowing that women are generally superior and naturally less violent than men.

I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll.

I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American invented rock and roll yet has only been rewarded or awarded for their accomplishments when conforming to the white mans standards.

I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American has once again been the only race that has brought a new form of original music to this decade.

(For an inspired and timeless testament to all of the above, look no further than reconstructionist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “grandmother of rock and roll.”)

A grim, angry, fragmented note laments the cult of commercialism:

The late 1980′s

This is a subliminal example of a society that has sucked & fucked itself into a rehashing value of greed.

[…]

You get the overall feeling that you paid way too much for literally nothing stimulating.

[…]

The jokes on you so kill yourself

No amount of effort can save you from oblivion. …

No Address
No Editor
No Ad rates

On page 204 of Journals, which writers were reportedly forbidden from reproducing due to the controversial nature of a self-portrait it contains, Cobain cites six cut-and-pasted lines from Alicia Ostriker’s stirring poem “A Young Woman, A Tree”:

Passing that fiery tree — if only she could

Be making love,
Be making a painting,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe

Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow blazes –

But perhaps most moving of all is Cobain’s strikingly earnest and aspirational, if also strikingly misspelled, list of life advice — reminiscent of Woody Guthrie’s 1942 New Year’s Resolution list — followed by a disclaimer that applies to just about every aspect of living with personal integrity:

1. Dont rape
2. Dont be prejudice
3. Dont be sexist
4. Love your children
5. Love your neighbor
6. Love yourself

Dont let your opinions obstruct the aforementioned list.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month ♥ $3 / month ♥ $10 / month ♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.