Prizes Without the Prestige

The attempt of the Assn. of American Publishers to sponsor an annual and official set of book prizes comes to an end of sorts next month. The American Book Awards, which began as a program of many prizes on the model of Hollywood’s Academy Awards and has more recently become a program of just two prizes on the model (it is said) of Britain’s Booker Prize, severs its last ties with the Assn. of American Publishers on Dec. 31, 1986.

At that time, the American Book Awards Inc.--already in existence as an independent corporation with AAP seed money--will become self-supporting as the National Book Awards Inc., (reverting to the name of the prize whose demise in 1979 brought the American Book Awards into existence in the first place. Henceforth, the National Book Awards will have to raise its own money. Some of the larger individual publishing houses may support it with ad hoc grants. Its grant applications will undoubtedly benefit from the prestige of its board: Howard Kaminsky (Random House), Brooks Thomas (Harper & Row), Larry Hughes (Morrow), Richard Snyder (Simon & Schuster) and Jeremiah Kaplan (Macmillan). However, its claim to be the industry prize will now rest more on unofficial and moral support than on official or fiscal support. Cut loose from the Assn. of American Publishers and unsupported by any other authenticating institution or any opinionated philanthropic individual, the National Book Awards now stands not only by but also for itself alone. Anyone with the necessary money and a respectable set of judges could give a prize that would mean as much.

Speaking of money, Richard Snyder suggested at the ceremony honoring the last pair of American Book Awards winners (E. L. Docterow in fiction for “World’s Fair”; Barry Lopez in nonfiction for “Arctic Dreams”) that future National Book Award prizes need to be much larger to count. But money does not always talk. The Nobel Prize is worth $200,000, and everyone has heard of it. On the other hand, William Templeton, the mutual-fund genius, has for a decade now been awarding his $200,000-plus Templeton Prize for religious leadership, and who has heard of it or of its winners? Rather than a larger monetary prize, of course, what all authors would prefer is a prize that could bring enhanced sales and new readers: riches and honor at a stroke. Britain’s Booker Prize and France’s Prix Goncourt have an enormous sales impact.

In the United States, oddly, no American prize sells books; only the Nobel Prize does, and it doesn’t sell many. No one has seemed to know how to change this state of affairs. As of the end of 1986, the Assn. of American Publishers, which might seem to know best, has officially stopped trying.