The Publishing Industry Joins the AIDS Fight

Sasha Alyson was chilled when he assimilated the gruesome prediction: Within five years, one-third of his friends might be dead from AIDS.

His imagination took a macabre turn. Of his 10 closest friends, which three would succumb? Soon thereafter, one of those three was diagnosed and told his death from AIDS was imminent.

Alyson, founder and head of a small Boston publishing house specializing in books for a lesbian and gay audience, wondered how he and his colleagues in publishing could “put our skills to use” to deal with the growing crisis.

The result, for Alyson, was “You CAN Do Something About AIDS,” a slender, 96-page book he expects to see available in bookstores in early May. Its distinction, Alyson said in a telephone interview, lies less in its “practical, concrete” approach to “what the average person” can do about AIDS or in its projected 150,000-copy first-run printing than in the fact that it will be published for free, distributed for free and made available in bookstores for free. Its 35 contributors, including advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, novelist James Carroll, Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, fashion model Beverly Johnson, U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker, Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop and an entire high school class in Springfield, Vt., all have offered their entries for free.

“It’s crazy and it’s brave,” said Jane Isay, editorial director of Addison Wesley Books in New York. “It’s also wonderful.”

Alyson’s effort reflects a growing proliferation of books about AIDS. Many say the flood of books on a subject once treated gingerly by mainstream publishers began with the huge success last fall of San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic” (St. Martin’s Press). The book shot to best-seller lists, proving that a book about an illness commonly regarded as a gay disease could earn what publishers call crossover appeal with a wide audience.

“That was the book that finally made people aware of AIDS in all its ramifications--as a personal problem, as a government problem, as a public health problem and as a how-do-you-treat people problem,” said Caroline Reidy, publisher of Vintage Books here.

“I could see that book had very, very broad appeal,” said Nancy Neiman, publisher of Warner Books. “It showed that people were hungry for information.”

Neiman’s own Warner Books had big success in 1985 with a paperback called “The AIDS Epidemic,” written by James Slaff MD and John Brubaker. That book, one of the first to address the question of heterosexuals and AIDS, was published as an instant book and now numbers 337,000 copies in print. But another Warner paperback, “Conquering AIDS Now” by Scott J. Gregory and Bianca Leonardo, came out in 1986 and has just 15,000 copies in print.

Still, the publishing floodgates seem to have opened to AIDS, as publishing house after publishing house adds books on the topic to its forthcoming lists. Scholarly Yale University Press has a book out on the legal ramifications of AIDS; Harvard University Press has two books on AIDS on its next list. A novel due this summer from Putnam’s, “At Risk” by Alice Hoffman, courts the so-called women’s-book audience as it deals with AIDS and children.

Manuals on how friends and family members should respond to people with AIDS have come out from Crown Books and New American Library, among others, and at least two houses have books about women and AIDS on their spring or fall lists.

Stonewall-in-Editions, a line of nonfiction gay books within St. Martin’s, is coming out with a sex advisory book, “Terrific Sex in Fearful Times,” geared to the era of AIDS. In “Safe Sex in a Dangerous World: Understanding and Coping With the Threat of AIDS” (Vintage), television physician Dr. Art Ulene tackled the same topic for a mainstream audience. Ulene’s book has sold about 50,000 copies since its publication last spring.

In March, the sex-manual team of Masters and Johnson, along with physician Robert Kolodny, also will take on the subject with “Crisis: Sex in the Age of AIDS,” to be published by Grove Press.

The giant NAMES project quilt, emblazoned with the names of more than 3,000 AIDS victims, will be the subject of a Pocket Books hard-cover book, to be published May 11. Pocket Books publisher and president Irwyn Applebaum expressed confidence that the $22.95 book, the profits from which will be returned to the NAMES project, will “enhance the public’s awareness (of AIDS) and contribute to the national healing process.”

As books about AIDS become more acceptable, even appealing, to a broader audience, the AIDS memoir is yet another genre marching full force into the publishing arena.

“Illness, like war, has its correspondents,” Hill & Wang publisher Steve Wasserman said. “That’s what we’re seeing, reports from the front.”

In August, Hill & Wang will publish Emmanuel Dreuilhe’s “Mortal Embrace: Living With AIDS.” Observing from the relatively detached point of view of the publisher that “disease often results not only in great suffering, but also in great art,” Wasserman likens that book to Daniel DeFoe’s “Journal of the Plague Years.”

“Finally it was inescapable,” Wasserman said of the publishing industry’s somewhat sudden embrace of the topic. “AIDS almost replaced real estate as the chief topic of dinner-table conversation in New York.”

Less cynically, Wasserman and others point out that AIDS is a disease with a long incubation period, and publishing is an industry where lengthy gestations are not at all unusual. A chunky nonfiction book can easily take two years to produce, and fiction projects are not necessarily any quicker. And as Wasserman commented, “Not everyone who is struck by the disease has any writing talent.”

“The kind of book that is textured and investigative and digs deeply into the story simply takes a while to conceive, prepare and publish,” said Gary Luke, a senior editor at New American Library.

But the products, Luke said, may be nothing less than “social history.” Luke compares one book he edited, “Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic” (due out from NAL on April 26), to such epics as “Hiroshima” or “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” The new work’s author, George Whitmore, was diagnosed as suffering from AIDS while writing the book.

That steady and increasing encroachment of AIDS into the lives of people in publishing may also have contributed to the industry’s growing concern for the disease.

“More and more people finally did know people who were diagnosed or died with it, or maybe they began seeing the children of co-workers fall ill with AIDS,” said Vintage Books publisher Reidy. “Finally the sheer numbers started reaching people who had not been reached.”

“It’s what we do in the face of crisis and of changes in our lives and our society. We publish books,” Addison Wesley’s Jane Isay said. “So it’s natural that we would publish books about AIDS.”

Isay recalled a conversation she had with a German publisher at last spring’s convention of the American Booksellers Assn. Both agreed that “AIDS was on everybody’s tongue,” in Europe as well as in America. Isay, searching for a “meta-book, a book on how to conceptualize AIDS,” responded three months later by signing on anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson and Amherst College immunologist Richard Goldsby to write “Thinking AIDS.” That book, examining “this tiny virus, through the human ecology up to the world civilization,” will be published in September.

Isay speculated that one reason publishers may have shied away from AIDS books in the initial phases of the epidemic was a fear that books about a fatal disease would be perceived as excessively negative, and hence unwelcomed by the public.

“But we want these books to be about life, not death,” she said. “There’s no way of controlling the appearance of new diseases. But the way in which our society deals with this disease is a test for what kind of society we are. We can become more repressive or we can become more informative.”

But when Sasha Alyson began knocking on the doors of fellow publishers, seeking support for his own AIDS project, the response was far from universally enthusiastic. Several publishers told him outright that “it was not to their interest to make a book available for free,” Alyson said. The “amount of resistance” from many publishers surprised him, Alyson added.

Michael Bessie, publisher, with his wife, of an imprint within Harper & Row called Michael and Cornelia Bessie Books, was among the first publishers to contribute to Alyson’s brainstorm.

“Cornelia and I have had more than one friend go from AIDS,” Bessie said. Though “unusual” in its conception, Alyson’s book, Bessie said, “had the promise of being helpful.”

The same allure apparently attracted the Book-of-the-Month-Club Inc. to Alyson’s book. BOMC had earlier recognized the market appeal of books about AIDS, signing on the novel “At Risk” as a main selection for this summer, as well as alternate selections “Borrowed Time” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), an AIDS memoir by Paul Monette, as well as the Masters and Johnson-Kolodny manual “Crisis.” Yet another AIDS book, “AIDS: Facts and Issues” (Rutgers University Press), by Victor Gong MD and Norman Rudnick, will be made available to BOMC members and Quality Paperback book club members this summer at its cost of $3.50.

With its $10,000 donation to “You CAN Do Something About AIDS,” however, BOMC became Alyson’s largest contributor. The Nashville-based Ingram Book Co. soon followed suit by agreeing to distribute Alyson’s book for free.

“I think it was a matter of everybody wanting to do something to help what we perceive as a major problem,” Ingram’s marketing manager Neil Webb said.

Because it involves labor rather than a direct financial contribution, Webb said Ingram’s contribution was hard to translate into a dollar figure. But he said his company endorsed the proposal because “one of the main goals in publishing, especially with this AIDS thing, is the dissemination of information. No matter how much information there is, there is not that much that gets into the hands of the average person.”

Alyson conceded his idea to publish a book for free was unusual, and arguably a little bizarre in a profit-oriented industry.

“The point was just to get the publishing industry to do something, to get people headed in the right direction,” he said.