André Schiffrin

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André Schiffrin is a European-born American author, publisher and socialist.

1 Life
2 Works
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Life

He was director of publishing at Pantheon Books for nearly thirty years, where he was partially responsible for introducing Pasternak, Foucault and others to America.

Schiffrin quit Pantheon in 1990, and established the nonprofit The New Press, because of economic trends which prevented him from publishing the serious books he thought should be published. Traditionally, publishing houses had been run by individuals with a commitment to disseminating ideas. The old formula was to have a few commercially successful best-sellers generate the bulk of the profits, and fill out the list with important books that were less successful but still profitable. Now, big conglomerates have bought up publishing houses (and book stores), and publishers demand that every title earn not merely profits but a return on investment of 20%. One publishing executive told him to pulp (discontinue) every title that sold less than 2,000 copies a year, which, said Schiffrin, is a respectable sale for a backlist. This crisis in publishing is explained in his work The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

His autobiography A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007) , described his life as a child of a European Jewish intellectual family growing up in the United States. As an anti-Communist socialist, he opposed both the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the U.S. war in Vietnam. The purpose of the McCarthy era, Schiffrin wrote, was not just to attack Communists and the democratic socialist left, but to undo the New Deal, as the Bush Administration is doing today. In the McCarthy era, people were frightened to engage in political activity. When he founded the organization that became Students for a Democratic Society, as an anti-Communist socialist movement, people were afraid to be on the mailing list, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring them. Many American socialist organizations were funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, as anti-Communist front groups, so that the CIA could control the socialist movement, said Schiffrin. In Europe, there was no McCarthy era, so intellectuals were able to have a real pluralism, instead of the fake pluralism we have in this country, he said. That, for example, is why the Canadians and Europeans have government-paid health care and we don't.^[1]

He is the son of Jacques Schiffrin, an ex-Russian Jew who emigrated to France and enjoyed success briefly there as a publisher of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade editions, which he founded, and which was bought by Gallimard, until he was dismissed on account of the anti-Semitic laws enforced during the Vichy regime in France. Mr. Schiffrin had to flee and eventually found refuge in America.

[edit] Works

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000)
A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007) ISBN 1933633158