A Tiny Firm Will Publish Meese Commission Report

A tiny Tennessee publishing house whose previous biggest seller is a collection of Southeastern regional recipes has announced it will publish the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography.

Ron Pitkin, vice president and co-owner of Nashville’s Rutledge Hill Press, said his firm plans a first run of 40,000 copies of the report, set for Sept. 5 publication as a 650-page, $9.95 trade paperback.

The move by Rutledge Hill comes after most major New York publishers and a number of religious houses reportedly declined to bring out the controversial report. Earlier, the federal government had printed 1,500 copies of the Meese Commission report in a cumbersome format that sold for $35 per copy.

“Publishing dropped the ball, pure and simple,” Pitkin said. “We’re doing this by default.”

Likening the significance of the report to the Pentagon Papers, Pitkin said by telephone from his office in Nashville that “the ultimate benefit is to educate the American people as to what is happening today in this area, and to give them an intelligent basis for deciding what they want done, if anything.”

And he added, “By golly, people’ve got a right to read this information.”

On the other hand, Pitkin freely admits the Meese Commission was not something he or partner Larry Stone, president of Rutledge Hill, had followed closely.

“I didn’t even know who was on it,” Pitkin said of the 11-member commission, assembled May 20, 1985, with the purpose of studying the effects of pornography and recommending “appropriate measures” to control its production and distribution. “I just didn’t pay all that much attention.”

Nor did Pitkin feel passionately about the subject of pornography, one way or the other. “I could take it or leave it,” he said.

But watching a “Nightline” telecast about the commission and its activities, Pitkin found his curiosity growing. Later, Pitkin said, when syndicated newspaper columnist Mike McManus approached Stone, wondering if Stone could help find a publisher for the report, “My partner, in a moment of joking, almost foolishness, said ‘well if we can’t find a publisher, we’ll do it ourselves.’ ”

As a writer who focuses on ethics and religion in American life, former Time magazine correspondent McManus covered the Meese Commission’s hearings and said he was troubled by what he found to be a low level of media interest in the subject. “It simply has not been covered by the media,” he charged.

McManus, however, felt strongly about keeping the commission’s findings in the public eye. “I felt an extra sense of responsibility to write about this unpleasant subject in depth,” he said from his home in Stamford, Conn., “because so few of my peers were doing so.”

Branding the government’s version bulky and overpriced, McManus was equally determined to see the commission’s report made easily accessible to the general public. “The key was, I decided it was important,” McManus said. “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a movement of consequence to get rid of obscenity in this country . . . unless people become informed about the scale of the problem. And this book is an education.

“You need to know that women and children are being hurt by what’s out there,” McManus said.

But when he approached publishing houses about reprinting the commission’s report, McManus said the reaction was, for the most part, “frosty.”

Every Major Publisher

“Every major publisher in New York,” McManus said. “You name ‘em, I talked to them. Anyone who could have done an instant book, I went to.”

There was no comment from several New York publishers regarding the Meese Commission report.

McManus called the publishing community’s aversion to the report “ideological.” As he described it, “there’s just a feeling that this is going to lead to more censorship, and therefore they’re opposed.”

Said McManus: “These defenders of the free press run when it comes to publishing something they disagree with. If it were only one company that turned it down, it would be one thing. But all of them did.”

McManus said he was also turned down by “three major Christian publishers, for totally different reasons.”

It was through “one of the Christian publishers who turned me down” that McManus made contact with Rutledge Hill. Was he surprised that a small publishing concern founded four years ago as, Pitkin said, “a hobby” would take on such a potentially hot potato?

“Yes, you bet,” McManus said. “I thought the major publishers would snap at it. I thought it would be a best seller. I still think it will be a best seller. But it has to be published before it will be a best seller. If you’re censored by the publishers, what are you going to do?”

Even Rutledge Hill was amazed that none of the New York houses had picked up the Meese Commission report. “My expectation was that somebody like Bantam who does those instant books would have wanted it,” Pitkin said.

The report was public domain, Pitkin said, and before long, he and Stone had not only decided to publish it, but had contracted with McManus to write a 20,000-word introduction. Lacking a major distribution arm of its own, Rutledge Hill arranged for the book to be distributed by Word Inc., a religious publishing house out of Waco, Tex.

Things Come Together

“It was one of those situations where a bunch of things come together and you say maybe this isn’t as crazy as I thought it was,” Pitkin said.

With minor corrections in grammar, punctuation and in some cases, possibly erroneous identifications of individuals, Rutledge Hill will publish the report in its entirety. On the advice of the firm’s attorneys, some examples of pornography included in the report--such as the complete screenplay of “Debbie Does Dallas”--have been summarized. The deletions will be marked by a symbol showing a pair of scissors.

The cover will be bright red, Pitkin said, with this quote from pollster George Gallup across the top: “Americans should not ignore this report, which deals with a problem that is having an undermining effect upon society. The report is important reading whether or not one favors stricter community standards on the sale of sexually explicit materials. The decisions of citizens should be based on informed opinion, not hearsay.”

Pitkin added that the book will carry a disclaimer “saying there is material in it that will be offensive to most adults and should not be purchased or read by children.”

While McManus, for one, cautions that “frankly, the report is very poorly written, poorly edited,” he maintains nonetheless that “this is a viable publishing venture. We’re talking about something that people want to read.”

Pitkin agreed. “I don’t anticipate us making a lot of money, but we will make some,” he said.

Still, Pitkin predicted that this venture into major national marketing would be “a blip on the radar screen” for Rutledge Hill. “We are a regional publisher,” he explained. “What we do is pretty much historical and regional books.”

Starting in 1982 with a book called “Chosen Exile,” about Tennessee “cultural pioneer” Septima Sexta Middleton Rutledge, Rutledge Hill published only one book per year for the first three years of its existence. Then in 1985, “the first year we started taking it seriously,” Pitkin said, the firm came out with 12 books, accounting for $450,000 worth of business. One of those books, the “Original Tennessee Homecoming Cookbook,” has sold 50,000 copies since its release last fall. By January of 1987, Pitkin said Rutledge Hill will have 42 titles in print.

Political Ramifications

As for possible political ramifications of publishing the Meese Commission report, Pitkin laughed and said that “the ironic thing is that most of the people who know me regard me as a left-wing Democrat. I’ve never been a member of any right-wing group in my life, never a member of any of these groups that are fighting pornography. I’m not very much in sympathy with the Reagan Revolution, and I voted for Walter Mondale.”

Surrounded by page proofs, Pitkin said his new familiarity with the attorney general’s report had made him speculate as to why “Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese waited five or six years to do something like this.

“My personal opinion,” he said, “is that this is their tip of the hat to the Moral Majority.” He paused. “But what do I know?”