The Evolution of Book Publishing: A 44-Year Journey with Andy Hughes

What happens when a lifelong love of literature leads to a storied 44-year career in the publishing industry?

Join me for an intimate conversation with Andy Hughes, the recently retired Senior VP and Director of Production and Design at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. From his earliest role at Cornell University Medical Library to responding to a "must love books" job ad in the New York Times,  Andy offers an enthralling look at the pre-digital era of book manufacturing and his pivotal move to Knopf. This episode is packed with captivating stories and insights into the evolution of book production and the publishing industry over the decades.

Andy discusses the complexities of merging corporate cultures and computer systems and gives a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of implementing new systems across Knop's imprints. We discuss the resilience shown during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a surprising surge in book sales, adding to the compelling narrative of an industry in flux.

Our discussion also celebrates the nuances of book production, from the meticulous editorial process to the significance of cover design. Andy shares memorable projects, including collaborations on graphic novels for Pantheon and the prestigious Everyman’s Library series. Reflecting on his career and deep connection to literature, Andy leaves us with a renewed appreciation for the intricate art of creating high-quality books and the enduring love of literature that binds us all. Whether you're a bibliophile or simply curious about the book publishing world, this episode offers a heartfelt tribute to the people and processes that bring stories to life.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 257. 257. Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes in the actual making of a book? In this episode, I'm chatting with Andy Hughes who, until 2023, was the Senior VP and Director of Production and Design for Knoth Doubleday Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Hi, andy, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Well thank you very much for inviting me, Mandy. I'm very happy to be here, and a big thank you to our mutual friend, Lynn Cox for introducing me to you.

Speaker 2: 1:18

Well, I love Lynn. In fact I traveled with Lynn to India when we did Swimming, to Antarctica. So yes, Lynn is somebody very dear to me.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Yes, Lynn is a treasure. Okay, let's begin by learning about you and what led to your position as Knopf's Senior Vice President of Production and Design, a career with Penguin Random House that spanned 44 years.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Yes, a long time, Well, and again it's been very, very episodic. I mean, you know it's a long kind of complicated story, but let me just say that it started by answering an ad in the New York Times when they had help wanted in classified sections and I had had a job, you know, right out of college I moved into New York with a painter friend and I was the one who basically was responsible for paying the rent and doing the laundry and buying the food. He was a painter and so we needed, you know, basically to have somebody who was responsible. And I basically got a temporary job at Cornell University Medical Library and it was a great exposure to books, because I'd always loved books and I always, you know, would go to the library and take out a bunch of books and just love the reading experience. So I worked at the library and again, that was another great opportunity. I met some great people there who ran the Cornell Medical Library and my job is basically to restack books. So I was exposed to all these medical students and it gave me an opportunity to become friends with some of them and they were just about my age and I expressed interest in things like autopsies, and so you know, they would have make it available to me to go watch an autopsy.

Speaker 2: 3:03

But that job was not long lasting. And again, as the boss, mrs Akiyama, said, do you know the myth of Sisyphus? Of course you know. It was, you know repeating, you know putting a book back on a stack. So I scoured the New York Times looking for another job and there was an advertiser that said must love books. I said that's perfect. You know, that's exactly up my alley and I had no prior training to you know anything to do with publishing. So I went for the interview and it was at a company called the Haddon Craftsman. And this is in 1970, 71. And at that time it was a completely different manufacturing book manufacturing landscape. And Haddon Craftsman was one of many, many New York book manufacturers, some of whom began in New York City and then relocated outside of the city. But this one happened to be in Scranton, pennsylvania. They had a secondary facility, a printing plant in Bloomsburg, pennsylvania and then a composition facility in Allentown, pennsylvania. So I interviewed and I guess I said the right things and I got hired.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Now, at that time production people at publishers did not speak directly to the manufacturing facility. Instead you liaised through the New York sales office. So I worked for a guy named Dave Pelmets who was a salesman to a bunch of publishers in New York. Each salesman had a group of publishers that they dealt with. For instance, one of our clients was Norton Books, which of course is still around, and we would go to their offices and collect information.

Speaker 2: 4:54

This is now pre-computer. This is where you took notes, pre-faxes. Everything was very Ludddite, so it was a matter of being with the production person, getting their information, bringing it back into the office, writing up memos and instructions and then send you to the plant. Now we had what was called a trunk and you know, all of the material you know that were necessary for making of a book were put in this trunk and, along with our correspondence, and sent down to the factory where there would be a customer service person who could then, you know, regurgitate this information and then respond to us. So it was a very time-consuming process of communication. It seems now completely absurd, but that's the way it was. At some point we got a machine called the Telefax I think that was what it was called, but it was a very rudimentary fax machine and you know we could type up and you know, then send that, you know communication electronically, but you know it was hard to read and you know there was no editorial correcting. You know you just had to get it off on the machine.

Speaker 2: 6:10

So I did that for a number of years and usually when you work, and again at this point in time, there were numerous publishers, most of them which been subsumed into larger corporate entities or gone out of business. Dial and delacorte were two of them that I dealt with, along with norton and hawthorne, regnery press and a bunch of others, and some of them are still around but a lot of them have been, you know, again integrated into larger corporate entities. Um, so one of the go forward means in sticking with the bookmaking business was then soliciting for a job at a publisher and I was told this is after about three years that there was an opportunity at Knopf. Now, knopf was one of our clients and I was, you know, very familiar with, you know the quality of their books, you know the beauty of production and the design and the editorial excellence. So I applied and I interviewed with a woman named Ellen McNeely who has been a lifelong friend and she is now long retired, but Ellen was my mentor.

Speaker 2: 7:27

The thing about publishing at that point in time is that many of the publishing production operations were run by women and they reported to men and again most of the corporate executives, or even imprint executives, were men. But these women were a breed apart. They were strong, knowledgeable and, let's say, sometimes very testy. Sometimes, you know, you didn't want to give them a wrong answer. You know you wanted to do your homework, you wanted to make sure you got all your facts straight. Again, when now we have the collection of information you know on a computer, in an excel spreadsheet, etc. Etc. This, you know, was basically hand-captured information and and and done in a very, very labor-intensive manner. Uh, I remember when mckay german at holiday house, when you know, we had a dispute how many books were delivered to the warehouse and I think I gave an account of you know 10.

Speaker 2: 8:31

And she then dragged out her information and said no, that can't be so, that has to be inaccurate and you know these kind of battles. So you had to know that you had to be as exact as possible. So I did that for a number of years, um, you know, at the entry level, as a knopf uh, entry level production person, um, uh, production assistant, and we were at that point uh, random house, uh before. You know some additional expansions that occurred over the decades and you know, for instance, in, I think, uh, 84, 85.

Speaker 2: 9:14

You know, uh, crown publishing group was acquired by random house and valentine and random house little random as what we called it, but knopf uh had been taken into the random house fold in the mid 60s. You know a deal between alfred knopf and bennett surf and donald cloffer and, uh, we, we had been fully integrated into, uh, you know, the random house corporate orbit and they, um, uh, and they were owned by at that time, rca, believe it or not, and RCA you know this is way before you know all its other permutations for instance, financed the building of our first warehouse in Westminster, maryland.

Speaker 1: 10:01

I didn't realize. Rca owned Random House. Correct, yes.

Speaker 2: 10:07

I can't tell you exactly when RCA acquired it, but I would assume it would have been in the late 60s or early 70s. So one of the great secondary benefits of getting hired by Ellen McNeely, who is the director of production for Knopf, was that our president of Knopf was Robert Gottlieb. The estimable Robert Gottlieb. You know, bob, you know, of course, his reputation always preceded him and he was just mercurial and brilliant. And the authors you know that were published by Knopf at that time were, you know, the exemplars of the greatest in American uh writing, uh, international writing, you know, uh. So it was a great privilege to be exposed to. You know his genius and you know it was it was still at that point pretty much a kind of a family.

Speaker 2: 11:04

Yes, we were part of Random House, but Knopf, each of the imprints. One of the things Random House was renowned for was the autonomy of the individual imprints within you know the corporate structure. So you know we operated very independently. Yes, we depended upon the services of, you know, corporate back office, you know, which would include warehousing, of course, which is critical, and distribution paper. And the other thing you know, which you know became even more and more paramount in importance at that time was that, you know, the power of the corporation to negotiate with manufacturing vendors for contracts. So volume, you know, uh would then predicate, you know, the product price agreement that we would arrive at. Uh. So it was a much smaller footprint at that point in time. So, uh, just to skip ahead.

Speaker 2: 12:00

Uh, after those bob got Gottlieb years, in 1979 or 80, bob was asked by a sign who has to come to the New Yorker.

Speaker 2: 12:12

And that was extraordinary, riveting event for us because you know, here was our great leader was leaving us to go to the New Yorker, which was a lifetime dream of his.

Speaker 2: 12:22

So we waited, you know, for who would be the replacement of the great Bob Gottlieb at the prestigious, wonderful House of Knopf, and it turned out to be Sonny Mehta. So Sonny came over from Pan in England and you know it was a difficult transition at start for him, for all of us, to acclimate ourselves to each other's aisles. But you know the rest is history. You know Sonny turned out to be probably one of the last great international publishers of such extraordinary skill and brilliance and I got the pleasure of working with him for 30 years and you know I remember when he first came in we were doing Catherine Hepburn's autobiography called Me and various different circumstances occurred which then I became kind of the quasi designer at the time, because the designer had to take a medical leave and I was a production person and Sonny, you know, had just recently taken over from Bob. So I fell into an opportunity to deal directly with Captain Hepburn.

Speaker 1: 13:31

Wow, what an experience.

Speaker 2: 13:33

Yes, and I would go over to her Turtle Bay home and I remember going under her bed.

Speaker 1: 13:39

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2: 13:41

And looking through photographs and, you know, helping you, you know, to pull this book together and again it became, you know, a big bestseller. But the next book was her making of the african queen, and that's when sonny was just getting his grounding. And you know it was an opportunity to work closely with sonny because he trusted me and he found that, uh, uh, you know my advice and and and going about. You know, putting the book together with the illustrations that were included were um agreed upon, so that was a great experience. So I got off to a good start with Sonny and Sonny um, as I said, you know, was a par excellence and he created an atmosphere and a team spirit that was unequal. I mean, you know the devotion to the purpose. You know Alfred Knopf and the company in 1915. One of the things that you know I was also responsible for was the 100th anniversary bomb that we did. That listed every single book that knopf had published in its 100 years. 2015 was the anniversary and now we're gonna.

Speaker 2: 14:56

You know, dictum was that not only would the books he publishes, be it of the greatest or the best editorial content, but that the value of design and and craftsmanship in their manufacturer was paramount. And you know that's right up my alley. I'm I'm a control freak, I like the detail of craftsmanship and making a beautiful artifact, so I wanted to carry on which. My previous, my boss, who at some point moved on into corporate because she was an early this is Ellen McNeely. She was an early instigator in bringing computer technology into our production activities. So she was someone again this is in the late 80s who really really struggled to understand how computer technology could be utilized in our operations. So she was called upon to work in a corporate department to start a desktop publishing operation and what was your position at that time?

Speaker 2: 16:10

okay. So I was there 12 years when ellen moved into the corporate area and I was made the head of uh production and design, which included uh vintage anchor pantheon cannot. And shocking I should just interject here that then in 1996 and 97, as far as the corporate structure goes, we were acquired by bertelsmann, who is a german media company, and they had already had possession of bantam, double day, dell, and so now we were sold. Well, I actually I skipped another owner uh, in the early 70s, uh or the mid 70s or thereabouts, we were sold by rca to advance publications and that you know was cy newhouse and condi nast and and all their operations with, at that time, vogue and you know other magazines and the New Yorker which then led to Bob's going over to that magazine.

Speaker 2: 17:18

So what I'm trying to convey is that you know, in all these two decades up to that point, you know there had been significant changes and enlargements in the corporate imprint or footprint. Likewise, you know the other big five that we know about were also acquiring different imprints Macmillan getting FSG FSG was one of my hadn't craftsman clients, so I used to call on them and Simon Schuster, of course, and Hachette, which was Little Brown, and then HarperCollins, so each of them were consolidating and growing and at that time we were then Pet Random House, so the largest publishing operation in the world allegedly publishing operation in the world allegedly. A little later on, going into the aughts in 2009, I believe Bertelsmann acquired Penguin in a partnership deal which essentially then became a full integration and ownership and renamed Penguin Random House.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Yeah, that was a big deal. That was a huge deal. Yeah, that was a big deal.

Speaker 2: 18:29

That was a huge deal. Yeah, because Penguin, you know, which you know, had Viking and numerous other imprints. They had also been, you know, I guess the big six now became the Random House operation. You know we're a storied operation, very, very prestigious imprints and a long, long history. So you know they were downtown at that point on Hudson Street. We were uptown.

Speaker 2: 18:55

I should say that at some point we moved from 201 East 50th Street in Manhattan's East Side to the corporate headquarters that was around just around 9-11, in a transitional stage in temporary headquarters on Park Avenue after we got sold by Advance to Bertelsmann. Finally, bertelsmann built a building at 1745 Broadway, which is the current corporate headquarters, and so Penguin, when they got acquired, had to be, you know, move eventually into our headquarters. So that was pretty traumatic for everybody. And again, you know each publishing group or corporation had its own culture and computer methods systems. We had SAP at this point. That was another big, huge transition that occurred in the 90s when we got bought by Bertelsmann. So enterprise software systems that are critical for production operations. You know you have to be very facile in working in that environment, that computer environment for all transactional activities.

Speaker 1: 20:04

So at this stage I'm guessing all of the software had to be compatible across the board, right with all of the software had to be compatible across the board, right with all of the different imprints.

Speaker 2: 20:12

That's right.

Speaker 1: 20:12

Well, that must have been an interesting time.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Yeah, well, it was our second time around, because the first time around, of course, was, you know, when we had gotten acquired by Bertelsmann. And then the next time was when, you know, to integrate the Penguin operation into that and kind of get a unanimity of operation, you know, because everything had to be integrated with the warehouse activities and all sorts of back off activities. Finance, of course, leads us to just to give a history of my career as how I got into the business and what prevailed over the next four decades to 2020. And, as I said, we had our 100th anniversary in 2015. And, you know, everything was going along and Sonny was increasingly becoming more frail over the subsequent couple of years. And, you know, one of my great satisfactions in life was that on my 40th anniversary, you know, sonny, we always had a Christmas party and it would be a time with, you know, acknowledge the longevity of each employee, how many years they were there. And then, you know, for Sonny to bring me up and, you know, congratulate me on my 40 years was a great honor.

Speaker 2: 21:29

However, you know that December, sonny became increasingly ill and died at the end of December. So the next couple of months, you know, january through February and then early March. You know it was a very unsettling time because our leadership that we had loved and respected and were devoted to, of 30 years was gone. It was very traumatizing. And you know most of my colleagues that I work with I worked with for four decades. You know our managing editor, catherine Horgan, had been there 60 years as managing editor, many of the editors Anne Close you know who her author, jane Ann Phillips, just won the Pulitzer Prize and she did Oppenheimer and she, which you know, won the National Book Award and Alice Munro was her author. And you know who just passed with the Nobel Prize, anyway, you know, just passed within the nobel prize. Anyway, you know the friendships and the tightness of operation.

Speaker 2: 22:31

To have lost our leader was was really difficult. So at that point in time, madeline mcintosh who, uh again, is somebody who I've known many, many years but rose through the ranks became the president of random house, hired maya muujavid to be president of Knopf and Reagan Arthur to be a publisher of Knopf. Reagan subsequently, a couple of months later, hired Lisa Lucas to be publisher of Pantheon. What happened on March 13th, covid? So you know, all went remote. Here we have new management, new leadership and we all then disappear. And so for the next two years there was only Zoom contacts and, you know, no one went to the office, and we had to reinvent the manner in which we basically communicated with each other.

Speaker 1: 23:31

Yes, that was indeed a strange and scary time for everyone and in the publishing industry. Book releases were delayed, book tours for authors were cancelled and, while everything was really scary, worldwide at this time, people started reading books and they wanted to support independent businesses where they lived. So what happened was books were in demand. Now, the flip side of people wanting to read more was that books were often quite difficult to get. There was a global paper shortage. Did this affect you?

Speaker 2: 24:10

to get. There was a global paper shortage. Did this affect you? Utterly? Absolutely yeah, no.

Speaker 2: 24:19

One of the great ironies is that 2020 and then subsequently 2021 were huge sales years for books. I mean a lot of it. Backlist, but again a front list author, you know, deprived of a tour and you know all sorts of other promotional marketing opportunities, really got the sat into the stick. It was a really problematic, but books were being bought and you know it was interesting because you know there had been a slow slide in book sales, you know, over the last number of years, and yet this was like a jolt to the system. So, yes, irony on irony was that, even though there was a great demand for books, it was extraordinarily disruptive to manufacturing, because these are factories with people and so you know you'd have a COVID hit at a manufacturing operation and half the people were not available to come into the office or go to work or work in the assembly line. So you know that required us to basically expand to use Remember I've mentioned earlier on that we would have contracts with specified vendors, that we would have contracts with specified vendors. We had to go out beyond those vendors who we had relationships with to find alternative vendors to fill in that gap of demand. And so you know it was a capacity demand situation. And paper too, you know, all raw materials because of the adverse effects on those supplier operations became really, really, really difficult. So there was a lot of juggling, a lot of inventive activities and a lot of expansion globally.

Speaker 2: 26:02

Now I, you know, have done many, many books in China. That you know cookbooks. You know one of the reasons we use China the three mantras price, quality and service is something you always look for in vendors. And you know the Chinese manufacturers that we utilized delivered on all those scores high craftsmanship and excellent service. I could communicate at the end of a day by email and then I'd have an answer first thing in the morning. They're very scrupulous. And then price, and again, that's an argument that one could have about subsidized businesses, but they made beautiful books. So we did a lot of our cookbooks there. Knopf has had a long legacy of doing quite a few beautiful cookbooks, starting with julia chod, you could say, and going on through the decades.

Speaker 2: 26:54

But you know the cooks became more elaborate, you know they had many more illustrations and beautiful photography, and so, uh, the problem in in printing in china was compounded by the failure to get containers in the right location. So you know we had, you know, typically prior to then, a lead time of oceanic delivery. Add to the manufacturing schedule about 10 weeks, but it had escalated to over 25 weeks. Now, if you have a book that took off that you manufactured in China, this is a serious problem because you're not replenishing stock. So there was a lot of very, very, very difficult decisions being made, always about how will we best serve this author in this book, deliver the quality of what we want at a decent price point, but then also being deprived of, you know, an opportunity to manufacture in the US. This a little bit, if you want is that. You know it's become kind of vanillaized, homogenized. You know most monocolor books. You know novels, uh, non-fiction, one color books are manufactured in america.

Speaker 2: 28:21

Uh, and again, many, many, many companies that I work with over the decades either consolidated or went out of business. But you know, primarily the major printer was RR Donnelly. Now, subsequently RR Donnelly went bankrupt and they had new corporate ownership and then they reinvented themselves, not once but three times. They're now called Lakeside Books and they're owned by a financial investment firm, but there was companies like Quebecor. Prior to that they were Arcata, there were Maple Press, there were a number of these printers that just simply didn't last.

Speaker 2: 29:04

And when we got bought by Bertelsmann, who prior to our acquisition had bought Doubleday, doubleday had built a factory for the manufacture of their books in two locations. One was Garden City, long Island, where they did the literary books when book clubs were something, and then they had a facility in Berryville, virginia, and it was exclusively a bookmaking facility. So when we got bought by Bertelsmann, they wanted us to reorient our manufacturing to their captive plant, their own plant, berryville, certainly to me, to deal with a situation where, you know, train these people, uh, to comply with the certain standards that we were trying to achieve in book making, fine printing, uh, halftone reproduction and binding, and I can get into that a little bit later. But and I can get into that a little bit later but the success of our relationship with Berryville then made them the premier printer for pretty much all of Random House.

Speaker 1: 30:19

And are they still printing?

Speaker 2: 30:21

They're still going. They're still going.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Earlier you mentioned Julia Childs, and in the TV series, julia Judith Light plays Blanche Knopf and Fiona Glascott plays editor Judith Jones. The scenes between Knopf and Jones show the tireless hours and dedication of editors. I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention the editors affected by the recent layoffs and buyout offers from Penguin Random House. With this in mind, how do you envision these losses affecting the publishing industry's future? Because, as every writer knows, editors are gold.

Speaker 2: 30:58

Well, inevitably it'll have an effect. I mean, you know there's so many things that are going to affect publishing's future. We all move on. As I said, knopf is 100 years old, you know. It had a prestige that it achieved in the 20s and in subsequent decades. The people that I worked with when I started, many of them, moved on Back to your point about an editor's critical organizing nature in the publishing house.

Speaker 2: 31:24

Well, of course, they acquire the book and there's all sorts of editors, you know the editors are very involved in every single detail. There's editors who are hands-off. There's editors who know that you know they'll want to deal with what they have to manage, which is, of course, editing, author relations and then all the activities that go into publishing a book, marketing, which of course now involves social media but advertising, you know, all sorts of other duties that you know are extraordinarily complex and demanding on their time. So you know, we hear, you know, often editors, at least the ones that I work with, would be editing weekends and nights, you know. And then they had to deal with the business of the operation in the daytime. You know there's always talk about too many meetings, and you know, and then they had to deal with the business of the operation in the daytime. You know there's always talk about too many meetings and you know confabs. You know where everybody is. You know kind of like coming to a consensus. But an editor and I've worked with unbelievably brilliant, wonderful editors and you know to gain their trust they say you're the professional in. You know, know the design and the manufacturing and you know um, trust in you is one of the great, great pleasures of the professional experience and you know the um in editors. You know some editors you know can be intrusive. You know maybe. You know beating dead horse to death. You know others are there. You know beating a dead horse to death. You know others are there. You know basically to learn and understand and know what you know the process actually is.

Speaker 2: 33:00

Because, again, so much of now is computerized. You know it's all done digitally. So you know it's a little bit. You know abstract, yes, we end up with an entity, artifact, that's. You know paper and board and topography, yet the making of it is a completely, to their point of view, oftentimes an obtuse activity.

Speaker 2: 33:24

You know we had a great editor, carol janeway, who handled our foreign rights transactions globally.

Speaker 2: 33:31

She was renowned, sadly deceased many, I guess over a decade ago, absolutely brilliant, brilliant editor, but also doubled, you know, went to Frankfurt and London Book Fair and, you know, basically transacted all the rights, buying and selling. And you know, at a point she said to me, you know, andy, you know, at a point she said to me, you know, andy, you know it's all now where it was film or repro or physical things, you know it was now all digital assets. And so, you know, the negotiations with foreign publishers to acquire those digital files and their, their particular demands, you know, were just no longer a burden that you wanted to maintain. So my department took over those foreign rights transactions, she made the deals, we fulfilled all the uh deliveries of, of files. You know, first it was on media and then, of course, eventually it was all done remotely and and transmitted, you know, over the internet. So that's another thing, depending on an editor to see where they want to fall back and then pass on the responsibilities to the operations areas to do all those things.

Speaker 1: 34:45

You spoke earlier about being under Catherine Hepburn's bed looking for photographs and I was wondering do you have a few favorite books you've worked on and, if so, which books and what made them special?

Speaker 2: 34:58

Well, I've been asked that question before and it's impossible to answer. You know, one of the things that I did, you know I handled all Pantheon graphic novels. I did all the books for Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and an array of other graphic artists and you know that was another whole world. You know, because there I dealt directly with the graphic authors you know, who were really committed to fine bookmaking. So they were very intense about the quality of the manufacturing, of the binding, of the paper that was used in the reproduction, and there's many, many reproduction challenges.

Speaker 2: 35:40

Another thing you know that you know I worked on for over 30 years was Every Man's Library, which you know. I don't know if you're familiar with the series, but we have over 700 books. We have, you know, the pocket poets and the short stories and the adults great world classic literature that are, if you're familiar with the series, you know, I think, the finest book making in the world. I manufacture all those in germany. One of my great privileges was, you know, on in September, prior to my departure, I went to the manufacturing plant in Germany where we had our two millionth copy of an Everyman Library book and it was Virginia Woolf's Orlando. But anyway, to have, you know, the opportunity to work on a series that you know is smite zone, binding full cloth cases, beautiful topography and exquisite manufacturing, but fantastic. I worked on all of ken burns books over the years, starting with civil war, through every subsequent title over the day oh, that's a lot of photography.

Speaker 2: 36:51

A lot of photography I printed. You know them again, some of them I, because of the quantity, you know it was a, you know, like a half a million, like baseball or or, um, his book on the vietnam war, or more recently, uh, a book of his favorite photographs in american history. Uh, I would print those on a web press. I haven't even gotten into the manufacturing of the differences and quality issues, or printed abroad, in Germany again, to maintain the level of quality that that book demanded. The original of Laura by Nabokov was a great pleasure. You mentioned Anne Carson's float. You know many, many. I started working with Alice Quinn in the early 1980s handling the Kana poetry series and so working with many wonderful poets again. You know the slim, beautiful, you know needs of a book of poetry and to do those properly with the right kind of paper. Initially I was able to do it on laid stock and do it letterpress printing et cetera. You know these are the kind of things that contemporary, current, you know manufacturing, are very difficult to achieve.

Speaker 1: 38:02

And, with this in mind, I like to remind my listeners to envision a book as a pie, and every slice represents a different aspect or a person or a team that has gone into making that book From the author, the team of editors, the proofreaders, the formatters, the cover designers, the printing, the marketing and PR teams.

Speaker 1: 38:26

They all need a piece of the pie, and books are one of the only products we purchase that has a fixed price. If you buy a book from an independent bookshop in a state where the cost of living is cheaper than, say, someone living in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles where rental space and hourly wages are higher, that piece of the pie, for everyone who's gone into the production and the writing of and the editing of that book, becomes much smaller. And this is why I get a little frustrated with a company like Amazon who discounts books because the pieces of the pie get smaller and smaller. Books are expensive to produce. When you hold them in your hand, you actually get that understanding that this is a beautiful creation, and that's one of the main reasons I encourage listeners to purchase books from their local independent bookshop. They cost a lot of money to produce and, honestly, I don't think they should be discounted.

Speaker 2: 39:29

That's right. Well, you've opened up a couple of tangents that I could go on forever about.

Speaker 1: 39:34

Well, I think it's important for listeners to understand the importance of this, so why don't you give us the condensed version of why you think this is important?

Speaker 2: 39:43

Well, I agree, I buy all my books at independent bookstores. Luckily, up here in the Catskills I have a wonderful bookstore in a local town up here in the Catskills, I have a wonderful bookstore in a local town, narrowsburg, and then there's in my neighborhood in Manhattan. Well, there's several books Shakespeare and Company, you know, and others, so you know. And then of course there's always the Strand. But you know it is a real conundrum because you know it is expensive and you know, and let alone the number of people, as you say, who are participants and get a salary and are making that book happen. And again, yes, it's a 50-50 split relatively between the bookstore and the publisher, but then the publisher has to pay all its overhead, the rent and all the salaries and any kind of promotional activities, the rent and all the salaries, and you know any kind of promotional activities, the manufacturing of course, and the author paying off in advance. One of the responsibilities of production was essentially three responsibilities One is scheduling a book, the other is estimating a book and the other is making that book. You know estimating a book, and the other is making that book, you know guiding it through manufacturing by basically working closely with the triumvirate of operations, which is production, editorial, design and the production department, and we work very collaboratively and closely together and again, in service to the editor and to the author and ultimately to the publishing house. So, a production person, you know when a book, you know a list, materializes. You know my job was basically to get the entire list estimated on a title by title basis, and so you know you're basically determining. You know what the trim size is, the dimensions of the book, the page count. You know if it's a cookbook, obviously it has lots of illustrations and other requirements of that particular book. You know, and pricing is going to be determined by the quantity and the materials that are going to be used to make that book. So you know if it's a high-end book, obviously, and a small quantity, the unit cost is going to be quite a bit higher than if you're doing, you know, like Anne Rice, or you know, a high-volume printing where you know, because of that volume, you have a lower unit cost. The other thing you know production calculates is what's called the plant. So we have the plant and the ppb, the ppb being paper printing and binding. The plant are your one-time investment costs and that's book composition maps that you may have to acquire, or commission and a translation, if there is one copy. Editing, production activities, proofreading, the cost of the jacket, design, all those things you're going to do essentially once, and that's called the plan. Uh, the ppb will be repeated if that book goes in reprints. And you know, again, we have a sales department that you know is out soliciting orders for the books from the independent bookstores and from the big mass retailers and that's going to determine a quantity. But there's a speculation about at the time of estimating what that quantity would be. So we do an estimate and then you know we'll have give and take in the publishing house about whether or not we have to diminish the specs, whether the quantity is going to be larger or smaller, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a process that's ongoing.

Speaker 2: 43:21

And again, this list on top of list. On top of list, some books you know are combined. We say it's a nine month gestation period for a book, seed of manuscript to the book delivered to the warehouse and then subsequent publication. But lists overlap each other because you know you might have a very complex book that you started two years earlier or longer. That's happening during the next list. But back to the triumvirate of production, editorial. Production editorial, you know, basically liaise with the author on a more day-to-day basis. They'll be responsible, as I said, for the copy editing, hiring a freelance copy editor that gets reviewed by the editor and that author to respond to inquiries that they proposed about issues with the manuscript, that they proposed about issues with the manuscript and then subsequent, you know, when production then takes that manuscript and sends it to the typesetter.

Speaker 2: 44:18

Now let me just interject. You asked about process. We encourage all authors to submit their manuscripts in a Word document because we came up with a workflow in accommodation to e-books and ultimately to audio, to prepare files with xml, you know, coding, so that that word manuscript would flow from one system to, whether it be e-book or to, ultimately, audio. But for the process of book composition we take that and we use in design the adobe creative suite. We started with quark when we first got into desktop in the 90s but, you know, over time adobe, you know, came up with the pdf and acrobat, photoshop and all these extraordinary illustrator, all these extraordinary publishing tools. We adopted word and then in design and have processes in which we flow that manuscript into an indesign template created by the interior design department and create what we call first pass.

Speaker 2: 45:31

In old it was galleys, when we were doing books in linotype, and then that would be proofread total art. We'd have several proof readers and there'd be a master proofreading set and the author would get a copy of that first pass and the production editor's job was to integrate all the feedback onto a master set and then production would send that to a typesetter, a composition house. Now we could, and sometimes do, combine the activities in-house, but we want to depend on these outside entities, these composition facilities, to make sure that they will make their professionals. They're outside of New York to make sure that they will make their professionals. They're outside of New York, there is a lower labor rate, but they are people who are better suited to make the corrections or deal with the rewriting that inevitably occurs in that past and it's a very exacting, detail oriented process. So we'll go through maybe a second pass, a third pass until we get a final pass and we'll distill that in design document into a pdf.

Speaker 2: 46:36

And again, this is a whole long process of development and learning and and handshaking, collaboration with our vendors to take that pdf and then output plates, offset printing plates directly to the printed to the metal. Uh, where prior you know, it'd been CTF computer to film. Prior to that it had been cameras taking pictures of repro which were printed pages that then they would make film for offset printing. So, you know, when we realized that you know, e-books, you know, was definitely every book has an e-book edition, every book pretty much has an audio edition we wanted to prepare files that were versatile and available to all those different product lines. You asked, you know, in one of your questions about what is pertinent, you know, to be involved, either a production editor or a designer or a production person, and that is, you know, being so detail-oriented and conscientious of every single step in this process to fulfill the author's vision and make the author look good, you know, not to have errors in the book. So it's a very scrupulous, intense series of activities that production oversees and you know.

Speaker 2: 48:00

Then, of course, you know we're also working with the art department. Art departments are responsible for the covers and the jackets, and covers and jackets. You know we had, you know, probably a renaissance of cover and jacket design at the cannot publishing group uh in the 90s, under carol carson and chip kid and other notable uh designers and sunny was very, very much a promoter of. You know, the beautiful jacket. You know seductive enticing jacket. That, you know seductive enticing jacket that you know basically conveyed so accurately the content of the book but also was something that somebody just had to have you know. So jackets, you know, are a very important part. So we're in production, we're responsible for making that jacket and the physical book and then integrating that together.

Speaker 2: 48:51

One other thing I should mention is that we're also preparing files so that they're archived and I was very involved in the 90s in developing a corporate archive of all of our digital assets and so every single component, every single aspect of the book is archived for retrieval and reuse. So when we have vintage anchor paperback editions coming out subsequent to the hardcover edition, maybe a year out, we're going to repurpose those archive files to output the paperback edition and develop tools in which we'll manipulate that file to be suitable for the traditional vintage trade paperback edition and develop tools which will manipulate that file to be suitable for the traditional vintage trade paperback which is five and three sixteenths by eight inch. You know they're all pretty much the same size. A book may be either six by nine or five by eight, or variants thereof, suitable for the manufacturing equipment that's out there. That that's why you know there's a reason why books are the sizes they are. So you try to find, you know, iterations to be accommodated by the existing equipment.

Speaker 1: 49:59

That was wonderful information. Thanks, Andy. We've almost run out of time, but there's a couple of questions that I want to ask you that I believe are important. While the big five continue to publish extraordinary authors, small and medium presses are signing brilliant authors and winning major awards. For example, Shihan Karuna Talaka's the Seven Moons of Mali Almeida was published by Sort of Books in the UK and won the Booker Prize in 2022. In a world run by large corporations, how do you see the place of small and medium presses in the future of book publishing?

Speaker 2: 50:37

I think they're absolutely essential and I think there's a tide turning. Corporate big publishing is not going to go away anytime too soon and not nor should they. But I think that you know the regionalism opportunities for small presses. You know Random House has Random House Publishing Services. Simon Schuster has something equivalent. I think each of the major operations have distribution clients and it's all populated by these small regional presses.

Speaker 2: 51:07

And I've talked to a number of these regional presses who have asked me for information about manufacturing and other things that I am delighted to be of assistance because I think the artifact of the book they want to make something that is beautiful and keepable and not disposable, and so I hope that the real difficult challenges that they face can be overcome, because those are manifest. Distribution how do you get it out there? Marketing you know. Talk about book prize winners. Paul Lynch, you know he won, you know the Booker on a very small printing of a very specialized book. I think this is where you know there's going to be a great future for book publishing because of the commitment that people are willing to make to contribute to you know, our literary history.

Speaker 1: 52:19

Yes, I do agree. Distribution and the marketing and PR are challenges the small and medium presses face. That's one of the reasons I have this show, because I truly believe in small and medium presses and appreciate the risks they take on their authors. I think this is an exciting time for book publishing in the literary world.

Speaker 2: 52:42

One of the last books I worked on, adenon by Linnea Axelson, who wrote about the Sami people, a poetry book and a saga, a sammy saga. I mean you know the editor and the author were so committed to wanting, and as a lengthy book, you know a book that was of extreme. You know beauty and and you know to have that opportunity to do that hopefully, you know the bigger houses can continue, but she had been, of course, published by. You know the bigger houses can continue, but she had been, of course, published by, you know smaller places prior to that, but that's the surprise and the wonder of publishing that you know things can come out of, you know, left field that you know are very, very, very important, you know, to our culture.

Speaker 1: 53:24

Yes, it certainly is Okay, Andy, what are you currently reading? Okay, Andy, what are you currently reading?

Speaker 2: 53:29

Well, I'm reading a lot, and very eclectically. Actually, one of the last books, my last Knopf book that I did was Amy Tan's Backyard Bird Chronicles.

Speaker 1: 53:40

Oh my goodness, and such a beautiful book.

Speaker 2: 53:43

Yes, it was submitted to her editor, dan Halperin. Dan sent it to me because I was the editor of David Sibley's books on birds and I also do the Audubon series at Knopf and so I asked David Sibley if he would write an introduction. But in any case, the editor sent me Amy's preliminary notes and diary and some of her artwork and said what do you think? And I said I think it's great. So I asked David if he would write the preface. And so I got to work very closely with Amy on making what I think came out to be a very beautiful book and I was happy. It was my last book at Knopf and because I, although I was the head of production, operations and design, I still handled titles on my own.

Speaker 2: 54:30

I saw Amy a couple weeks ago at a book party in New York and she was so gracious and appreciative and it culminated. You know all the hard work that went into that and you know how well it came out and it was just a great joy. I'm reading Barbara Klingsover, you know right now Demon Copperhead and we've got a Gerdades so many different books, three Body Problem, because I was intrigued by that Netflix program. Yeah, I brought home and I have at home several, many thousands of books and I, you know, said I'll read that when I retire. So I managed to read about two or three books a week and it's going to continue on and I won't finish them all, but you could always dip in.

Speaker 1: 55:17

Yes, exactly, and meanwhile, what a fun journey. Yeah, and Andy, I'm sure you feel the same. But every book I have tells a story of its own, especially the older books. When mom passed away, I was in Australia and my sister and brothers and I were cleaning the house and going through everything from mum and dad's history, and when we got to the bookshelves I was like, oh my goodness, they had a beautiful collection At the top of one of the bookcases in mum's office. It was a double row and behind the first row of books were all these romance books and I just thought, oh my goodness, this is a side of mom I didn't know existed. And so my sister said what on earth are we going to do with them all? I said I'm taking them all back to the US with me because it was a part of mom I didn't know and I wanted to explore.

Speaker 1: 56:11

I have since read them all and she seemed to really love Jamaica Inn. I just thought it was great. So, yes, I don't throw away books. I love them and they all have memories. The beauty about books is they have the story inside, but they also have the story and the memories around that book. Well, I around that book?

Speaker 2: 56:32

Well, I understand that completely. I had. You know, having grown up in New York in the 70s and the 80s and 90s. I have many friends who passed away and I absorbed their collections and you know I see these books on my bookshelves that I got from them. You know I had to clean out their apartments or their homes and again they're a tangible memory, a book that I know they loved and that meant something to them. And you know that book has that. Books have that connectivity to people's interests and let alone the author. But you know it's just a privilege to have a life involved in books.

Speaker 1: 57:16

Andy, from all the readers around the world who have held one of the books that you've helped create, thank you. Thank you for all you've done for authors and for readers around the world. Thank you for being on the show and I'm thrilled that I have now a part of your history documented on the Bookshop Podcast.

Speaker 2: 57:37

Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure and a wonderful opportunity for me to reminisce about my career.

Speaker 1: 57:46

You've been listening to my conversation with Andy Hughes about his 44 years of working in the book publishing world at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Random House. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, adrian Otterhahn, and graphic design by Francis Barala. Thanks for listening. And graphic design by Frances Barala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.