Notebook: Unevenly Distributed

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Inside Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, California. Readers could show up at that door and pick up a book.

Perhaps book distribution does not sound like the most exciting subject to you. I myself can claim no expertise! When I try to follow booksellers chatting on this topic I feel like I’m in Cape Canaveral. But plunging in this week (for reasons I will get to) I found the history notably colorful—indeed, pivotal! To go by Buz and Janet Teacher’s recent omnibus of publishing lore, Among Friends, most of the early US book distributors seem to have gotten their start in Berkeley, where, after a day of pouring over piles of three-by-five index cards tracking inventory, they would head for the warehouse, turn up the music, get high, and start packing books. They rival each other in descriptions of how laid back they were. Many, like their counterparts in the almost accidental alternative California publishing scene that brought us The Whole Earth Catalog, Juggling for the Complete Klutz, and The Moosewood Cookbook, stumbled into it after a few post-college years building geodesic domes, picking lemons, or river rafting. But they knew they had information to share and an audience for it that were not being covered by the notably clubby circles making publishing decisions Back East. They were also far away from a lot of the books: another early distributor, Raymar, was created because the postal service book rate (for which this newsletter is named!) was so slow, and shipping heavy books so expensive, that West Coast booksellers needed someone just to get the books physically across the country to them before they were out of date.

The lag in travel and shipping for books was the source of the now-perhaps-fully-anachronistic practice of full-price book returns: a bookstore can return to a publisher a book that they do not sell at no cost to them, leaving the publisher in the dark for long stretches as to how much money they have actually made. This practice was established, we learn in Among Friends, during the Depression to encourage booksellers to clear the shelves of old books when the new ones finally made it to the store. The slow pace of shipping also contributed to opacity in inventory: when bookstores were ordering books they never knew for sure if publishers would have enough copies to cover their orders, and they knew reorders would arrive long after whatever unexpected public burst of enthusiasm might make them necessary. This sluggish and clumsy apparatus was part of why bookselling was so sleepy into the mid twentieth century, with bookselling mostly limited to major cities, making programs like the Book of the Month Club and Readers Digest attractive reading alternatives in much of the country. The paperback revolution was taking place elsewhere, on racks filled by so-called jobbers in drug stores and train stations.

In 1962, Bronson Ingram, the owner of an industrial shipping and fulfillment company in New Orleans, bought a schoolbook depository in Tennessee as a favor to a friend, to give him a job managing it. The friend soon lost interest, and Ingram turned his Tennessee warehouse over to a legendary salesman and avid reader named Harry Hoffman. The book business was just ticking up because of the construction of big box stores like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the malls that were sprouting up across the country, and because of President Johnson’s Great Society program’s public spending on school books for children. Harry Hoffman contemplated the inventory problem and developed a solution. He had the idea of buying a thousand copies of the biggest selling books from publishers and delivering them to bookstores around the country. Soon that number grew to ten thousand. In 1970, lifting a notion from (depending on which of Among Friends’ Rashomany descriptions you accept) either a bookkeeping practice at Random House or his previous job at a camera manufacturer, he began producing a weekly microfiche that he distributed to his bookstore customers, who bought machines to read them, attaching a five-digit number to the books in Ingram’s inventory and updating their status in his warehouse. (The short number helped to minimize expensive minutes on their 1-800 line for receiving orders. Soon it would be replaced by the now-nearly-universal International Standard Book Number, ISBN—ignored only by Amazon’s self-publishing program, helping to keep Amazon’s own numbers inscrutable.) Longtime publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin writes in Among Friends:
The effect was massive and nearly immediate. Stores throughout the country started getting microfiche readers and Ingram supply information … More stores opened and were suddenly much more profitable because they could get the books their customers wanted quickly and efficiently. Ingram went from a fill rate in the low teens—unable to fill the vast majority of what was ordered from them—to more than 90 percent because stores ordered what they knew was available.

In 1976 Ingram acquired Raymar to extend its reach in the west. Michael Shatzkin continues:
Ingram sales grew by one hundred times, from about $1 million in 1970 to over $100 million in 1979 … Computerization lifted the entire book business. Walden and B. Dalton … grew to many hundreds of stores. Independents increased in number and size.

Today the Ingram Content Group is the consolidated giant of US book distribution, having swallowed up most of those Berkeley upstarts (some of whom had grown themselves by learning BASIC and developing nascent computerized systems) and other more home-grown regional book distributors. Ingram provides books and tracking technology, digital descendants of Harry Hoffman’s microfiche, to most independent bookstores and bookstore chains, the online market Bookshop.org, and even Amazon itself, in spite of Amazon’s famous preference for relying on its own infrastructure; Jeff Bezos opened his business a few hours away from Ingram’s Roseberg, Oregon, warehouse, Michael Shatzberg explains, enabling him to advertise a “promise date” based in whether books were on hand in Roseberg.  Unlike the Big Five publishers and Amazon’s book wing, which are owned by corporations with other agendas and usually, as they say, extractive intent, Ingram is a family-owned business largely devoted, now, to book distribution, invested in the survival of bookselling. But the absence of meaningful competition means that US book distribution, like publishing and indeed printing, paper, and book manufacture, is an effective monopoly, its policies set by very few corporate hands. (The Big Five publishers also now have their own very powerful distribution systems, especially the giant Penguin Random House.)

A problem with Ingram’s dominance is that its terms, which are based on scale, are prohibitive for smaller publishers, and many smaller publishers do not even qualify for participation in its ubiquitous infrastructure. We mentioned in a recent Notebook that Belt Publishing in Cincinnati, a smallish publisher devoted to work from the Rust Belt that is noted for its pragmatism (documented in director Anne Trubek’s illuminating newsletter, Notes from a Small Press), was recently acquired by Arcadia because they were not able to break even selling books as the market is currently constructed—to be beneficial to big players. A more dramatic illustration came this week when Small Press Distribution (SPD), the nation’s only nonprofit book distributor, serving publishers too small to meet Ingram’s minimums, abruptly closed down, leaving the very small publishers whose financial vulnerability brought them to its doors without any information about the status of their inventory or funds owed, funds they need to pay their authors and costs. “I don’t know where else these presses can go,” Meg Reid, executive director of Hub City, both a publisher and a bookseller in Spartanburg, SC, told LitHub.

SPD also had its origins in Berkeley, founded in the back of the legendary bookstore Serendipity by Serendipity’s owner, the collector Peter Howard, and future North Point Press founder Jack Shoemaker, helmed for many years by an energetic band of dedicated poets and well-wishers who, unlike the Ingrams, were not specialists in industrial logistics. Many of the books they have distributed, monitoring their passage from printer to warehouse to bookstore, collecting the small checks from bookstores who themselves were scraping by, to deliver them to poets’ basements and haphazard collectives, are now staples of course syllabi. Cody Morrison, buyer at our partner bookseller Square Books, says that although Square is a general interest store not specializing in hard-to-find literary books, SPD has provided a valuable point of access for work from smaller presses when they need it, and they are worried about small press books remaining visible amid widespread consolidation.

In 1967 editors George Plimpton (The Paris Review), Russell Banks (Lillabulero), William Phillips (The Partisan Review), Reed Whittemore (The Carleton Miscellany, New Republic), Jules Chametzky (The Massachusetts Review), Robie Macauley (The Kenyon Review), and others founded the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), to help small magazine publishers band together to secure funding and resources. CCLM received substantial support from the newly instituted National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which recognized in its early years that small publishing has an important part in literary culture with a broad portfolio of grants (reduced dramatically under Presidents Reagan and then Clinton) to publishers and writers that CCLM helped them to identify. In 1989 CCLM expanded its remit to include book publishers. In 1996 SPD became a nonprofit and in 2001 the entity now called the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) hired Jeffrey Lependorf, an experienced literary nonprofit administrator, as executive director, with SPD hiring him a year later to work concurrently to encourage small publishing both with programs and with distribution. During Jeffrey Lependorf’s tenure many CLMP small presses became nonprofits and, with CLMP’s help, secured philanthropic and NEA support. CLMP nearly doubled in size during that time, coming to include five hundred small magazines and presses, providing services that benefited the increasing number of writers and readers who were not being served by consolidating mainstream commercial publishing.

There were some mixed feelings: some argued that once scrappy, sometimes anti-authoritarian bohemians were selling out to big philanthropy and the feds, that small publishers should be driven by literary values and not funders or the lure of sales; that a growing bureaucracy of grant application favored larger presses with more development apparatus and conventional business practices. Others argued that universities and other nonprofits were sheltering nonviable small publishers who were sucking up needed resources. But even in the face of a political environment resistant to support of the arts SPD was distributing more small publishers than ever, some four hundred by the time Jeffrey Lependorf left in 2019 (about the same as last week).

SPD’s trajectory, come to think of it, follows that of many arts organizations in the postwar years, growth in an era of expansion and public largesse, struggle at a time of government austerity favoring private funding and commercial imperatives, and then a crisis of management in late 2020, in the wake of the Me Too movement and the George Floyd protests, as once-tolerated working arrangements came to be understood as exploitive, or at least unenlightened. New management was brought on and readers of the noncommercial, literary writing SPD distributed stood by to see what would come next. There were some promises of upgraded offerings and some ominous signs, but no one expected the lights to go off and the phone to be unplugged as they were last week.

Literary Twitter was apocalyptic, and saw the developments as one more sign that the reigning commercial structures for publishing have no quarter for serious work that is not bestsellers. Anne Trubek called on her readers to sell directly and put their energies into sustainable methods of manufacture and distribution over which they have control. There were glimmers of hope. A new distributor called Asterism was just opening shop, with inventive terms that can serve some small publishers’ needs. Some hoped the new demand might spark a revival of regional distribution. SPD’s own long run, dependent on some but not gargantuan philanthropic and government largesse, and the success that some publishers found within it, suggests that alternative models can function. (I was impressed by the amount of money that some of small publishers said they had tied up in SPD.) Booksellers who serve more literary communities expressed their commitment to stock such books through whatever means. Small publishers wondered whether the success that self-published authors have found recently, directly communicating with audiences, might offer lessons.

The distribution problem for challenging or noncommercial work doesn’t end with whether there are functioning businesses to move such books from printer to reader. Many environmental boulders can land in books’ path. Even Big Five publishers complain that too many of their own books are published “without support”—that there is no such thing as enough publicity or marketing to advocate for all the books to which readers have access in an environment of limitless options. It is not enough for a small press book to be on a store’s shelf, a reader has to know to pick it up.

What’s clear is that, through SPD and other dexterous upstart distributors, and the tenacious small publishers they served, and those more patient independent booksellers who make the extra effort to stock books from outside the all-too-ready-to-hand mechanisms offered by Ingram (since that microfiche Ingram has maintained its centrality by developing self-favoring technology for managing inventory that continues to dominate bookselling), is that once again the culture is made richer and more dynamic by people working very hard on the margin of profitability and even survival. Philanthropic and government support have at important moments made the difference between important work being available to readers and not. Small shifts in the commercial dynamic, or independent factors like the price of paper or the availability of health insurance, can make the difference between the bookstore in your town having the book of poetry by the future mainstay of Freshman English and not. In other countries that book’s fate is not so uncertain.

The bookstore in your town today might manage to put important, scrappily produced and distributed work in front of a person who would never encounter it in the vast ocean of the internet, especially as the internet becomes more and more shaped by the majoritarian forces of algorithmic social media and large-language-model artificial intelligence which learns from the mass. They might, or the distributor who spoke to that bookseller about that book might, have found a way to read it and cared enough about it to pull it out and hold it up. Creating conditions that allow the best in our culture to thrive and be a part of people’s lives is a matter of individual and political effort, effort we can make or not make as a society.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.

Ann will appear with David Alff at Rizzoli Bookstore at 1133 Broadway in New York City on April 29 to talk about his new book, The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region. Dave has written for Book Post on quarantine, parking, and (on Wednesday) road kill, and we discussed his work on the history of infrastructure in a Notebook about libraries and broadband.

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