Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library [NAL] Revisited: (17)

 Two other New American Library [NAL] employees I vaguely remember, after so many years, were an elderly couple, seeming to be in their late 50s or early 60s, who--almost in their own outer office world across the aisle from me, worked in another one of the offices with (like the NAL publicity director's office) a skyscraper window , out of which one could see the street below.  The white elderly husband and his white elderly wife had apparently previously made some kind of a deal, with either NAL or with the Times-Mirror media conglomerate, to sell their previously independent Daw paperback-publishing firm to either NAL or Times-Mirror.

So now, their Daw paperback firm, that published science fiction and fantasy paperback books--which apparently had never been able to sell as many copies as the books that Stephen King wrote in the decades after 1970 did--was now just a subsidiary of a mass media conglomerate, in an office surrounded by NAL executives who seemed to rarely interact with them.

I can't recall having exchanged any words with the culturally straight, elderly couple. But during my time as a NAL wage slave, my impressions is that the beardless husband, who wore glasses and always came to work dressed in a suit and tie, and the conventionally-looking wife, who always came to work wearing a dress, were used to working together alone and ignoring everybody else at the office. So they barely noticed or cared that no one at NAL seemed interested in socializing or conversing with them; despite Daw being now distributed and marketed by NAL. 

I had been into reading science fiction paperbacks and watching TV shows like Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But by the time I was publicity clerkin' at NAL in the mid-1970s my reading interests had changed so much that, when I did read fiction, I mainly read fiction that reflected a socialist realism, feminist, African-American, Beat Generation or working-class aesthetic. So I don't recall which science fiction novels were published by NAL with the Daw imprint or whether its science fiction paperbacks were generally considered to be of higher literary quality than what other science fiction paperback publishers were publishing in the 1970s.

What I do recall, though, is that--after I opened for the NAL publicity director some envelopes (which each contained a photocopied clipping of the latest print media reviews of NAL-published/marketed books) and noticed that one of the mailed-in print media reviews included a mean-spirited and personal attack on her husband's qualification to hold his position as NAL's Daw imprint editor/publisher, which I first showed to the Daw woman co-editor/publisher (before letting the NAL publicity director see it), she read it and then quickly tore up the hostile photocopied clipping.

The only other New American Library Library [NAL] worker I still have some memory of so many years later, mainly because I did have a conversation with him alone inside the office in which he worked, was a usually casually-dressed white visual artist in his late 20s, whose job was to create and draw the different illustrated covers that were printed on each of the NAL paperback books.

The NAL visual artist didn't have to work 9-to-5 while dressed in a suit and tie when he came to his skyscraper office "studio"/ private office each day.  And he could pretty much spend the day creating and drawing the illustrations used on the book covers, without having to interact personally with any of the business-oriented NAL executives and higher-up corporate-types.

But my impression, after chatting with him alone in his private office at some length, where I had been told to go to in order to pick up some rush book cover illustrations he had been assigned to complete, was that this NAL paperback book cover illustrator would have preferred to be at home during the day or in a studio, working on his own paintings, rather than being in the skyscraper each day doing what he likely considered to be "hack work." 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (15)

 So many years later, I no longer have much memory of other people who worked at New American Library [NAL] during the mid-1970s. The person at NAL who seemed to then have the most influence, from an editorial decision-making point of view, in determining which submitted manuscripts were to be finally accepted for publication, was a culturally-straight-looking and dressed white upper-middle-class white woman in her late 20s or early 30s.

This top NAL editorial decision-maker received a copy of each puublicity release, that was written by the NAL publicity director, Marge, and typed up by me, about every paperback book that was being publicized by NAL; at the same time copies of  the press release were put into envelopes and mailed out to various corporate media newspaper, magazine or radio-television book reviewers.

Most men then would likely not have considered the NAL editorial decision-maker as physically attractive as Marge still was in the mid-1970s, despite the chief NAL editor being younger. But with her smiling, easy-going, good-natured personality within the office--which seemed to reflect the fact that she now felt happy with the kind of work she was being paid a good salary to do within the world of publishing--most men in the mid-1970s would still not have considered NAL's then-most influential editorial department decision-maker unattractive.

Politically, the NAL's top editorial decision-maker seemed to be, like Marge, just an anti-racist and anti-war, culturally-straight liberal in the mid-1970s; who had not been involved enough in the late 1960s or early 1970s hip youth counter-culture to have developed a more politically radicalized, anti-imperialist and pro-Black Panther Party antii-racist political consciousness, like I had.

But, given some of the early 1970s women's liberation movement-related and feminist paperback books that NAL had started to market (after the white middle-class's feminist movement began to receive much more favorable corporate mass media coverage, following the well-attended Women's Liberation march in Manhattan in the summer of 1970, and the idea of "women's lib"  then became a trendy one within U.S. upper-middle-class white liberal circles), it's likely that NAL's editorial department boss was a more conscious bourgeois feminist in her political views than Marge was in the mid-1970s, when I was publicity clerkin' under the two of them at New American Library.

Many years later, I noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that this same NAL editorial director may have graduated from Barnard College in the early 1960s--in the years before historical events and Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] chapter campus organizing had eventually politically radicalized many Columbia and Barnard students.

And many years later, I also noticed some info appearing on the internet that seemed to indicate that some of the post-World WarII baby-boom fiction writers (who weren't ever as politically or culturally radical as most pre-World War II-born novelists or Movement activists, like Marge Piercy, Carl Oglesby and Abbie Hoffman, or most pre-World War II-born or post-World War II baby-boom 1960s underground New Left Movement writers)--like Maine-based left-liberal Stephen King (who still believed in the 21st-century that the Warren Commission's "official" version of what happened in Dallas, Texas between November 22, 1963 and November 25, 1963 was true)--were promoted within the paperback book publishing world by this particular white upper-middle-class woman NAL editor in the 1970s.

Not sure, myself, how true the info on the internet I came across was. But most of the writers who became best-selling U.S. fiction book authors in the late 1970s and in the 1980s pretty much failed to reflect the literary values and historical social/economic realities experienced by most hip counter-cultural, post-WWII baby-boom working-class people of all racial backgrounds, in their fiction.

So the class situation reality, middle-class life interests, fantasies, values and ideological/political perspective of the NAL editor likely were reflected by the particular best-selling U.S. fiction writers whose literary careers she chose to promote, I suspect.