Another Reading Light Turned Out : Publishing: By ousting Pantheon Books’ director, its owner chose freedom of the proprietor, abrogating the freedom to publish.

Removing ancient shards from one country to another is an action now recognized as cultural theft. Smashing a cultural vessel ought to be recognized as another sort of crime against culture.

This is precisely what S. I. Newhouse, whose family owns Random House Inc., has committed by forcing the resignation of Andre Schiffrin, Pantheon Books’ longtime managing director. Insisting on the freedom of the proprietor, Newhouse has abrogated the freedom to publish. Random House executives have insisted that Pantheon publish far fewer books. As a result, four of the five senior editors at Pantheon have resigned in protest.

Why should anyone care? For three decades, Pantheon has been unique in the world of commercial publishing. It has made a habit of collecting square pegs. It has been an enclave of accessible intellectual seriousness in an industry going blind as one eye strains toward Wall Street and the other toward Madison Avenue. Many publishers publish significant books, books that stretch the boundaries of what is known and discussed. But Pantheon has been singular in mainstream publishing--it devoted itself almost exclusively to the serious and challenging book, the book that deserved to be published on its merits. It published Art Spiegelman’s tour de force “Maus,” the brilliant comic book about the Holocaust and its crimes against families, after 16 publishers had rejected the manuscript. It published path-breaking history: E. P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class”; Herbert Gutman’s “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom”; John W. Dower’s “War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War”; David Wyman’s “The Abandonment of the Jews.”

It has imported such Europeans as Gunter Grass, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Anita Brookner, Eva Figes, John Berger, Gunnar Myrdal, Alva Myrdal, Harry Mulisch, Etty Hillesum, Michel Foucault, Peter Schneider. It has imported such Latin Americans as Julio Cortazar, Eduardo Galeano, Ariel Dorfman, Antonio Skarmeta, Luis Rafael Sanchez and Elena Poniatowska. It has published books by George F. Kennan, J. William Fulbright, Ralph Nader, Jonathan Schell, Orville Schell; the photography of Walker Evans, Annie Gottlieb, Susan Meiselas, Brassai, Robert Frank; the humor of Matt Groening, Tom Lehrer, the Marx Brothers and Monty Python, and all the books of Studs Terkel.

Obviously not averse to publishing famous names, it has also done the harder thing: It has cultivated the little-known, helping some--such as Terkel--become household names.

But Pantheon did more than acquire. It inspired. Editing, after all, is a form of thought, and Pantheon was nothing if not thoughtful. Its editors, mirabile dictu, edited--argument by argument, line by painful line. When senior editor Tom Engelhardt edited one of my books, he found within a fat manuscript a thinner argument straining to get out, and knew it better than I did. Writers gravitated to Pantheon not only from elective affinity--and certainly not for fat contracts--but because they could learn something.

This is the publishing house that is being gutted because greed apparently knows no bounds.

If civic virtue were alive, a proprietor worth billions would let his most profitable enterprises subsidize others that serve the public good. He or she would take pleasure in a reputation for good works, the sheer prestige of an enterprise of Pantheon’s standing. After all, in its original meaning, the word “enterprise” meant “bold undertaking.” Today, Newhouse seems more interested in serving as bold undertaker. Last December, Robert Bernstein, chairman of Random House, was forced to resign. Bernstein was renowned for his commitment to human rights. Now Schiffrin joins him as sacrifices to the greater glory of the bottom line.

Last week, speaking to a joint session of Congress, President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia set out with lovely simplicity this principle: “The only genuine backbone of all our actions--if they are to be moral--is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.” By this standard, the gutting of Pantheon is an act of supreme irresponsibility.

In recent months, Americans have manned the cultural barricades against Japanese invaders. “Sony Invades Hollywood,” screamed a Newsweek cover last fall when the company bought Columbia Pictures. The thought of the Japanese buying Rockefeller Center inspired racist jokes. America’s corporate gladiators have been depicted as heroic defenders of the national patrimony. But here the crime against writers--which is also a crime against readers and a crime against public life--is being committed within our borders, in the name of the freedom of the proprietor to abort genuine enterprise.

This has been a good year for celebrating the freedom to write, to read, to organize throughout the world. All sorts of walls have fallen. Playwrights and musicians helped organize revolutions in Czechoslovakia and Romania; poets and essayists ran for Parliament in Hungary. In America, while official celebrants crow that the rest of the world is becoming more like us, a light is going out.