In Need of Loving Care!

 

Eat a good breakfast!

Are you taking care of yourself? You need to. It’s been a rough week, and the road ahead doesn’t look any smoother. 

Dinner, too. Keep up your strength. (See that spinach?)

Now here, not that anyone asked, is my take on what’s going in in Washington: 

 

There is waste in every organization, and the federal government is many, many organizations, so of course there is waste. Serious, close, careful review of government programs with an eye to trimming budgets and reducing and eliminating waste would be make perfect sense, but that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Shutting down programs overnight is nothing but wanton, wholesale destruction. It’s as if you decided that an apartment building was inefficiently heated, so you immediately razed it to the ground and left its residents homeless. Shutting down foreign aid and medical research is a twin disaster-in-the-making, inviting world pandemics the like of which we have never seen before.

 

And to think that all this destruction is not being carried by responsible elected officials or vetted appointees but----! Well, if someone had written our current America as a novel even as recently as ten years ago, it would have been considered too wildly unrealistic for belief. 

 

***

 

But let’s shove that mess off the table and look for a minute at the soothing world of books. At least, I want to start with books, but it won’t take long for me to work in a metaphor and get beyond bookshops and libraries.

 

Books have always been threatened….

 

As time has gone by, threats to the survival of books have become more and more serious. The materials that make up books almost from the beginning and especially since the invention of printing have gotten progressively worse. Rag paper replaced vellum, paper made from shorter fibers replaced rag paper. Alum sizing of paper—a process which allows the paper to be printed on—replaced gelatin sizing and, in the process, made the paper highly acidic. Pasted-on endbands replaced sewn-on endbands. Binder’s board (a specialized cardboard) replaced wood for covers.

 

Accompanying the decline in materials was a similar decline in structure. Now the most common binding is the ironically named “perfect” binding. [The irony is unintentional. As a conservator, the writer sees irony in a term where others well might not.] It is an economical method of binding that unfortunately does not stand up to heavy use or allow for repeated rebinding. Modern hardback books are seldom satisfactorily rounded and backed and consequently their text blocks pull away from the spine even as they stand on the shelf. 

 

-      Saving Our Books and Words exhibit label, quoted in A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Books Arts Apprenticeship, by Annie Tremmel Wilcox

 

A beautiful story --

The quoted passage above calls up a series of thoughts for me. 

 

First thought: “Books have always been threatened” might seem to echo the challenging or banning of book content but actually has to do, we learn quickly, with the way the physical book is threatened by the physical world. It’s a specific example of the general truth of the law of entropy. Put simply, in time, things fall apart, order becomes disorder.

Second thought: Some things fall apart faster than others, and some books fall apart faster than others. As a dealer in used, old, and rare books, I see this on a daily basis. Cheaply produced novels from the early 1900s, e.g., much-beloved adventure novels collected by those who read and loved them when young, are often characterized by brittle pages turned brown with time. A cheaply made book is like an old, cheaply made violin: Quality not inherent at the beginning does not accrue over time. On the other hand, books originally printed on high-quality paper and bound with care can last for centuries. They are living messengers from past generations of human beings and can still speak to us today. What a miracle!

 

Third thought: My late husband, the Artist, could usually identify a book club edition right away when he picked it up, without needing to look for a blind stamp on the lower back board or checking the dust jacket to see if it lacked a price. He could feel the difference in the bargain edition’s flatter spine. He had both an eye and a feel for quality in materials and production in all manner of objects. It was the reason for his large collection of beloved Harris tweed sportcoats (34 of them!), and it broke my heart when local consignment shops had no interest in these garments because they were more than a year old. Well, yes, Harris tweed clothing is not “fast fashion,” to be worn a couple times and discarded! The garments are made to last! 

(Thank heaven one young Leelanau man, much taller than the Artist, was able to wear one of David’s sportcoats. He has a pair of the Artist’s cowboy boots, too. I’m glad there are some people who recognize and care about quality in all realms of human life.)

 

Fourth thought: In the story of book conservation, I cannot help seeing a metaphor. It is natural to me, personally, to see truths of inert materials naturally extending to the world of life, and it is natural to human language in general to work this way, but I’ll not be taking up that larger topic today. I’ll just tell a little story to illustrate my point.

 

Many years ago, editing a book on welding for a faculty member in a university school of engineering, I was struck by the way the writer’s facts about chemistry worked as metaphors for human connections. Some pairs of metals, I learned, can never result in a strong and lasting bond. No matter what degree of skill the welder brings to the task, that weld will always be weak. Different pairs when welded together, however, form a strong and lasting union. That is, some metals are, as it were, antagonistic to each other, like those little Scottie dog magnets—and others have such a natural affinity for each other that when welded together they are as strong as if they had never been separate. Think true friendship. Think strong marriage. Think soulmate. 

 

And so, as metaphor, I see in those quoted paragraphs on book conservation a truth applicable to American government today. It is not only the quality of human “materials” that is problematic (to put it mildly) in the current White House administration. Lack of experience is a problem, too, as is the abandonment of any criteria of qualification, other than partisan—no, more like personal--loyalty in crucial and essential government appointments. But beyond ignorance, inexperience, and lack of skill is the deepest, most chilling problem: These people have no loving concern for their work. They are not careful conservators of what has been laboriously constructed over almost 250 years “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Instead they seek to destroy what generations have built. Dismantle, if you want a gentler word, but there doesn’t seem to be any gentleness in an approach aimed at inducing trauma. This is the standard shock-and-awe approach employed elsewhere by our country but only now unleashed on the U.S. federal infrastructure.

 

I always seek to end each of my posts on a positive note, and that’s difficult this week, as a gang of unelected young men wet behind the ears has been given free rein to run roughshod through the financial data of every American, but maybe revisiting the Second Law of Thermodynamics can cheer us up. Did you follow the link to watch the video? If not, do it now. I’ll wait….

 

Okay, ready? At the moment, our country has pretty clearly descended into chaos, and chaos is a hallmark of despotism. In the interest of remaining calm, let’s step back and simply call it disorder. Our political system is horribly disordered at present. Things are not just falling apart,  but are being torn apart. Think vandals in a library. The destruction is intentional, not accidental, and order will not be spontaneously restored.

 

But there is still hope! Hope lies in the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and human beings are not a closed, isolated system. As a species, as a nation, as the population living in this present moment, we are continually drawing energy from other sources, and this energy is available for rebuilding and reordering society, as has been done in the past following periods of chaos and destruction. 

 

The arts are a source of energy on which we can draw, as are skilled craft, any manual work done with loving care, care for the earth and its creatures and each other, and so on and on. I have no plans to become a book conservator, but I do care for books that come into my little world, and I also care for the people who come to my shop seeking books, conversation, strength, and community. I try to use language with care, in this blog and elsewhere. Even if we are stumbling around in the dark much of the time, it’s important for us to do our best, whatever we are doing. Our poor, beautiful, irreplaceable gift of a world is so in need of our loving care!

 

Also, while this may seem a contradiction of the laws of energy, I find that when I expend energy in positive directions—when I focus on my writing (as I have been doing here) or contact my members of Congress or simply prepare a satisfying meal or play Frisbee with my dog—I do not feel my strength and energy depleted but renewed. And yes, the natural world around us is available as a source of strength.

Beautiful, life-giving sun!

This is the good news: I am not a closed system, and neither are you. The earth’s human population is not a closed system. We have sources of strength and energy all around us. Draw on them now! 

And that's my positive message for today from Northport. Bon courage, my friends!

Where all the women are trying to be strong!

My Kind of Positivity (More than $$)

My work environment --

Megan Greenwell, in an article “Can Private Equity Be — Nice?” (published 9/19/23 in Moneybox), makes a clear statement about the publisher Simon & Schuster being bought by private equity firm KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.): "Private equity’s entire M.O. is maximizing profits.” Greenwell posed questions to the co-head of KKR about what it means to employees that they will now be “given a stake” in the company. 

Q. How would KKR maximize publishing profits to enrich employees as well as high-level officers and big-money investors? 

"I’m sure you know the brand Zara. The entire success of Zara is their supply chain. Zara basically said, 'We’re going to massively shrink lead times. We are going to more locally source everything that we do, and we are going to have the most responsive supply chain in the world. We will test at the beginning of a season, colors, fits, and we’ll see what sells. And then we’re going to shift our whole supply chain to what’s selling.' That’s how Zara made gazillions of dollars. No one has ever tried that type of thinking in book publishing, and there’s no reason those types of ideas can’t work, right? It’s just, what’s the incentive?” - Pete Stavros, KKR’s co-head of global private equity, quoted by Greenwell from interview with him

"No one has ever tried that type of thinking in book publishing." He said that. Shifting the supply chain to what sells best — whatever that may be — in order to maximize profits is to be the new face of publishing under the old name Simon & Schuster. The best-case scenario that Stavros outlines would result in more employee engagement and fewer people quitting their jobs: 

"I think people would agree, if those two metrics move meaningfully, it’s irrefutable that the culture has improved. The other part, from an employee perspective, is that they generate meaningful wealth for themselves, and it’s great for our investors. That’s the home run you’re always trying to hit: People are happier, they participate in the value creation, and investors did great. That doesn’t have to be a blowout deal. It can be a good deal and people can make a lot of money.” - Pete Stavros

Two important points, less anyone misunderstand me: 

1) I am not saying KKR is some kind of evil entity. Reading their public statements, one finds strong commitment to employee welfare and also to investments that are environmentally as well as financially sustainable, worthy principles that certainly cast maximization of profits in a kindly light. And I don't know much more about them.

2) Nor do I believe that making a profit is bad. Modest as my own business is, if it hadn’t turned some kind of profit over its history, it would not exist today, 30 years after its inception. 

(I am not anti-capitalism, only anti-unregulated/unrestrained capitalism that leaves no area of human life untouched, but even that is a bigger topic than I have in mind today.)

My only concern with a private equity company owning a publishing house is the idea that a publisher should crank out “whatever sells.” Not that they shouldn’t make money, not that they shouldn’t share profits with employees, but in my ideal world a book publisher would also be concerned with quality of its list -- value apart from dollars; a different kind of value -- and that I don’t see anywhere in the interview.

A private equity company buying a publishing house is one way employees can be given a stake in the business, but it’s not the only way. W. W. Norton & Company has been an independent, employee-owned publishing house since 1952. Here is a link to the fascinating Norton story, concluding that Norton’s “Books That Live” motto, adopted in the 1930s, meant then and means now that the books Norton publishes are “not for a single season but for the years.”

And that, my friends, as I insist on continuing to see the world, is the best principle of traditional publishing: to publish books the house believes will be of lasting importance. Books are not hula hoops or pet rocks, and manufacturing and selling them in the same way as those fad items cheapens the history of literature.

Mint -- nothing to do with my story.

Postscript: Since I drafted the foregoing, a happy story has come from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the effect that Zingerman's partners are "giving the store away" -- to their employees. Quoting from the Ann Arbor Observer: 

Zingerman’s Perpetual Purpose Trust will be the legal owner of the Zingerman’s brand. Its terms prohibit the company from going public, being sold to an outside company, or franchising. “The intent is that it keeps the decision-making power and the profit local,” says Weinzweig, “as opposed to what generally happens [when founders sell], which is both of those move further and further geographically afield”—a process he likens to “colonialism.”

You can read the whole story here. When I re-read the story or even think about it, I can't stop smiling! 

Postscript two days later:

 

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books (October 19, 2023) takes a look at two new books that scrutinize private equity firms, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou, and These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America, by Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner. I don’t have the books at hand but already find plenty to worry about in Kim Phillips-Fein’s review, entitled “Conspicuous Destruction” (NYRB, Vol. LXX, no. 16). Before considering the titles under review, Phillips-Fein gives readers an introduction to what “private equity” is.

 

At its most basic level, a private equity fund is a type of exclusive investment fund – a pool of money managed by professionals to maximize returns for rich investors. Because private equity funds are not subject to regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, investors must be accredited and provide proof of family wealth, and funds often have minimum investment requirements of $10 million or more…. [They] buy up all the shares of publicly traded companies, gaining complete managerial control. …Usually a purchase is financed with heavy borrowing, so that a newly acquired company is saddled with debt that it needs to repay quickly – often by selling assets or laying off workers.

 

Later in the piece she writes –

 

Distant investors [who have managerial control, unlike other forms of investment] have little knowledge of day-to-day operations.

 

Nor do they have any commitment to community or workers. In effect, private equity funds are the newer, leaner, hungrier model of what were “leveraged buyouts” (LBOs) in the 1970s and 1980s, many financed by junk bonds that brought about the bankruptcies that brought us bailouts of banks “too big to [be allowed to] fail.”

 

Note that private equity funds are only for the very, very wealthy who can prove their financial worth. Note also that they are exempt from SEC oversight. 

 

Now, here is a partial list of the kinds of businesses that private equity likes to take over: hospitals, nursing homes, medical billing centers, day care centers, for-profit universities, medical practices, dental practices, veterinary practices, payday loan companies, ambulance companies, hospices, and prison services, from collect phone calls through ankle monitors to debit cards. In other words, private equity likes businesses that rely on vulnerable populations, are often funded in part by government programs, and can be counted on to generate debt for the populations “serviced” and profit for investors in the funds. 

Reading this makes me say again, with Christopher Morley’s fictional character Roger Mifflin, “Thank God I am a bookseller!” And then I add, “And not a millionaire!”

"Merely a medium of exchange" (to quote my father)