The Internationalization of (Paperback) Publishing

NEW YORK —  If ever the global village was on display, it was so during the furor that erupted over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.” Suddenly, it was clearer than ever that the world--not just any one country--reads books. And the world reacts to books.

The Rushdie affair made the timing of Vintage International, an imprint of 20th-Century classics from around the world, seem almost eerie. The new line of paperbacks made its debut March 28 with the simultaneous release of 15 titles. Its immediate front-runner in sales was Rushdie’s earlier novel “Shame.”

A Random House imprint, Vintage International, “was supposed to tie in with ‘Satanic Verses’ because we had ‘Shame,’ ” Jeff Stone, the vice president and marketing director of Vintage Books, said. “We were prepared” for a reaction, Stone said, “but we could never be this prepared.”

“The international character of culture is a fact of life in the 20th Century,” said Erroll McDonald, vice president and executive editor of Vintage. McDonald, who is overseeing the launch of Vintage International, has been the U.S. editor for Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature, as well as Oscar Arias Sanchez, Edward Said, Manuel Puig and Helmut Schmidt.

“Science and technology; music and art; popular culture and fashion; graphic, home and industrial design, even cuisine: The development of all has benefited from a convergence of international influences,” McDonald said. “This has not been true of American publishing. For a variety of reasons, American publishing has tended to be isolationist.”

Vintage International, said McDonald, seeks to “combat the conventional wisdom that Americans are at heart xenophobic and that international literature is, for the most part, inaccessible and unsalable.”

To begin to attain that aim, marketing director Stone took the formula of distinctive, highly recognizable packaging that helped boost Vintage Contemporaries to success a few years back. Also a trade paperback line, Vintage Contemporaries (or “VC” in Random House-speak) served as the literary launch pad for Jay McInerney, among others.

Stone spiced up his recipe-for-success by banishing the word “foreign” in favor of the loftier term “international.”

“We are no longer talking about foreign writers, we are talking about international writers,” Stone said. “It’s like cars. We don’t drive foreign cars. We drive international cars. We’re getting rid of that xenophobia.”

The effort to move beyond literary ethnocentrism also provided a vehicle for resurrecting a backlist of Vintage authors that Martin Asher, editor in chief of Vintage Books, termed “just staggering.” A year ago, when Asher came to Vintage from the Quality Paperback Book Club, he said he was stunned to discover an inventory that included Camus, Mann, Nabokov, Lessing, Primo Levi, E. M. Forster, V. S. Naipaul and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Also on the Vintage backlist were works by Ford Madox Ford, Amos Oz and Marcel Proust.

By “giving them a cohesiveness as a body of work” offered by a single publisher, Asher said Vintage International was “really trying to present them to the American public as books rather than as things you had to read in school.”

It was a matter of “taking them off the backlist and putting them on the frontlist,” Asher went on. “Bringing these books from the back of the store to the front of the store.

“Buyers will see the new line in paperback,” Asher says, “and say, ‘Oh, it’s a book now, not an artifact.’ We’re trying to position these books as books, not as furniture”--i.e., cloth.

Vintage International’s aggressive marketing will bring out 56 titles by the end of the year, by which time more than 1 million copies of Vintage International books are scheduled to be in print.

The primary guideline for each work published in the series is that “it must be written by a writer universally acknowledged to be a master of the 20th Century or by a major contemporary literary writer whose works have been translated into various languages throughout the world,” McDonald said.

In some cases, though the authors may be famous, the titles are less so. Another theory behind the conception of Vintage International is that the big names will support less familiar titles, Stone said.

“We’re trying to weave them all together,” said Stone, one of the original “longhairs” behind Vintage Contemporaries. “It becomes the ultimate universe.”

One difference between VC and the new imprint lies in the age range. The Contemporaries targetted an audience that began at about age 20, Stone said. The Vintage International series will hope to climb up the age ladder, he said, aiming for readers who average between 25 and 45 years of age.

But what pleases Stone and his colleagues most of all is that the minute the Vintage International series hit the bookstores here, they began to see a response.

“These books are selling!” Stone crowed. “I mean, this is not a public service announcement. We are seeing ‘Lolita’ become a best seller.”

TROUT FISHING TURNS 20. At Houghton Mifflin, three books from a decidedly American author, Richard Brautigan, have been reissued in a paperback omnibus edition that honors their 20th anniversary as separate paperback editions. “Trout Fishing in America,” “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster” and “In Watermelon Sugar” sold 2 million copies worldwide and made Brautigan an instant underground hero after they were released as Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte titles two decades ago. Lawrence declared that he had discovered “an American original in the tradition of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner” when he reissued the books Brautigan had first published in a small press in San Francisco.

Brautigan’s works, his friend Tom McGuane said, reflected an author who was “crazy with optimism.” They were emblematic of the era of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and Meher Baba, the original don’t-worry, be-happy guy.

Unfortunately, Brautigan’s own center failed to hold. He ran out of money, and worse, in his own mind, out of readers. In the fall of 1984 he shot himself at his Bolinas retreat. He left no suicide note. But before he ended his life he gave his trout fishing rod to his friend McGuane.

ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! It is no coincidence that this column about paperback books appears on this particular Sunday. Easter has come and gone, but this week marks the resurrection in Book Review of a paperback best-seller list. This list has been absent for more than a year, and while it was on sabbatical it had a little format transplant. The old list included 10 mass-market paperback titles and five trade-paperback titles. Fiction and nonfiction were not divided. In its new incarnation, the paperback best-seller list will include seven fiction and seven nonfiction titles. Mass-market and trade-paperback titles will not be divided.

The old list was based in part on data from wholesalers and other-than-bookstore outlets. The new list, like its weekly cloth cousin here in The Times, is based on a poll of local bookstores.

A final transformation: The old paper list appeared weekly. In its new, improved edition, it will be published monthly, in conjunction with The Book Trade, itself a monthly feature appearing the first Sunday of each month. The polling will be done weekly, however. Interested readers may learn Times paper (as well as cloth) rankings as early as the Wednesday before the Sunday of publication by calling (213) 237-4336 after 11 a.m.

The Book Trade, a monthly feature, will next appear May 1, 1989. Next week’s feature: Bloody Sunday.