Notebook: Return of the Freestanding Book Review!

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

“Renewal” isn’t a word that comes up too often in the world of books coverage, but the book world had happy news recently when The Washington Post resumed publication of its freestanding eponymous book review, Book World. Physical copies of Book World will be distributed as a separate broadsheet section to local Post subscribers on Sundays, and reviews will land all week on Book World’s new digital doorstep. Reminiscing for the occasion about his early days at Book World, which he joined way back in 1978, still-regnant Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda used words like pneumatic tube and linotype and rolodex.

Book World met its demise as a cost-cutting measure amidst a convulsive book review contraction in the mid aughts. The Boston Globe shut down its freestanding book review in 2001; the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2007; and the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. In 2007 alone, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Raleigh News & Observer eliminated their book editor positions; the only full-time book critic at The Dallas Morning News accepted a buyout offer; and the Orlando Sentinel, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune dramatically reduced coverage, all this even before the 2008 recession and its catastrophic plunge in advertising revenue, setting off dire predictions for civilization which in some ways seem to have been realized. (Here’s one, in The New Republic, that we can assume to have been written by its then literary editor, Leon Wieseltier.)

One culprit that was cited for the enfeeblement of the print book review was the siphoning off of publishers’ advertising dollars by the then-mighty chain bookstores, which secured “co-op advertising” fees from publishers for prominent placement of their books. (Still-standing chain CEO James Daunt of Barnes and Noble has suspended the practice. One wonders how much the murky fees that Amazon demands of publishers for “marketing”—equaling, to some unknown extent, prominent search placement—has supplanted this budget line.) But as Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, pointed out, the book reviews always lost money. He quoted former New York Times Book Review editor Mitchel Levitas: “We lose money, and we always have, but I don’t know how much.” When Wasserman pigeonholed then newly named Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., with the question of whether the Times Book Review had ever turned a profit, Sulzberger replied, “I think, Steve, someone in the family would have told me if it had.” (Way back in 1985 the LA Times itself found a year in which its own book review, alone among the flock, had inched out of debt.) So when San Francisco Chronicle editors justified laying off the paper’s book critic John McMurtrie in 2019 citing book reviews’ sorry click results (“that level of non-engagement cannot continue”), they were not exactly up on the history.