The 1986 Computer Assist

In the Dec. 5 issue of Publishers Weekly, book technology specialist Jerome P. Frank declares 1986 to have been “The Year of the Publishing System.” Computer technology, which arrived in newspaper and magazine publishing in the 1970s, has been arriving in book publishing during the 1980s. By far the most important reason for book publishing’s lag has been that industry’s decentralization.

The typical book is under a different roof for each stage in its gestation: writing, editing, design, composition (typesetting), printing/binding, and sales and distribution. Implementing computer technology has meant not just getting the many employees of a large corporation “on board” the ship but getting many different corporations and many artistically and/or literarily inclined individuals to agree on what sort of ship ought to be launched in the first place.

What has been needed is a set of manufacturing conventions to which all would adhere. Before these conventions were in place, a major computerization could prove a costly and isolating mistake. And so, the middle-sized and smaller publishers have hung back, waiting for the larger publishers to make their historic, convention-defining moves. This past year, according to Frank, those moves began to be made, marking “a kind of culmination, a dropping of a shoe, so to speak, of the industry’s wait for major book publishers to commit to the modern age.”

The feet in the two shoes that dropped belonged to Lippincott, which opted last August for a Penta system and Tegra imager, and to McGraw-Hill, which has more recently committed itself to a Xyvision composition system and a Xywrite editorial package. Book publishing will not soon be as completely electronic a process as newspaper or magazine publishing, but these decisions constitute a major step in that direction.

TURN LEFT AT THE TRAVEL BOOK SECTION: Fodor’s Travel Guides, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has been acquired by Random House from United Newspapers. In 1986, 121 titles were available from Fodor’s, a line that began with the publication of “1936 . . . On the Continent.”

NEW LINE: With “Guilt: Letting Go,” by Lucy Freeman and psychotherapist Herbert S. Strean, John Wiley & Sons will launch a new line of trade psychology books. Series editor Herb Reich stresses that the line, scheduled to begin this month, will not be pop psychology books. “Instead,” Reich said, “Wiley’s trade psychology series will focus on serious issues that will interest the sophisticated reader.”

DREAMS OF PEACE: The word from Sierra Club Books, in the printed personae of Nobel-Prize winners physicians Bernard Lown and Evgeny Chazov along with editors Penney Kome and Patrick Crean, is that the self-centered “me decade” has given way to the “peace decade.” In “Peace: A Dream Unfolding,” the authors and editors contend that peace activities in the last decade have gained worldwide momentum, with activists joining professionals “in pursuit of a common goal.”

TAKING CHARGE: Beaufort Books president Eric M. Kampmann has announced that editor-in-chief Susan Suffes has been named publisher. Forthcoming titles from Beaufort include a biography of Jacques Cousteau and “A Talent to Annoy,” a collection of essays and reviews by Nancy Mitford.

SPY STORY: An agreement between Atlantic Monthly Press publisher Carl Navarre Jr. and Thomas Phillips, publisher of Spy magazine, will provide a publishing home for Spy writers and books based on articles that appear in the magazine. Navarre is an investor in Spy, described as “an irreverent city magazine.”

IMPRIMATUR: Also from Atlantic Monthly Press, an exclusive imprint arrangement with former Simon & Schuster editor Morgan Entrekin. The self-financed imprint will be known as Morgan Entrekin/Atlantic Monthly Press Books and will supply eight to 10 fiction and general nonfiction titles each year. Among titles scheduled for the spring ’87 list are “Republican Party Reptile” by National Lampoon editor and Rolling Stone writer P. J. O’Rourke and “Invisible Frontiers” by Steven Hall.

IT’S NO JOKE: More than 8 million people around the world have bought “Barefoot Gen,” a cartoon story of Hiroshima written and illustrated by a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, Keiji Nakazawa, and translated by an international group of volunteers called Project Gen. Published in this country by Philadelphia’s New Society Publishers, the U.S. edition carries a foreword by Paula J. Paul of Educators for Social Responsibility. Soon, the book cover promises, the 284-page cartoon will be issued as an animated feature film.

WHODUNIT: Still among the most popular characters in the history of literature, Sherlock Holmes is the subject of a surprising plot in Charles Marowitz’s “Sherlock’s Last Case” (Marion Boyars Publishers Inc.). As associate director of the Los Angeles Theater Center, Marowitz, founder (and for 12 years artistic director) of London’s Open Space Theater, holds forth in Malibu, legendary land of sun-baked writers. Publication by Marion Boyars puts Marowitz in the lofty literary company of, among others, three Nobel Prize-winners.

AFTER ONE MONET WATER LILY TOO MANY: London Times art critic Guy Brett turned his attention to “politically engaged” art. The result: “Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History,” from New Society Publishers.