A Book Fix for Web Refugees

Independent and niche publishers are the real success stories of the contemporary American book trade. So it probably was only a matter of time before a new niche book review emerged.

The “preview issue” of Bookmarks, based in San Mateo, began circulating this week. Its founders are two former software and technology company executives; its target is media-savvy Gen-Xers who haven’t really read a book since college but are eager to reconnect with literature, though uncertain how to do it.

Bookmarks--which bills itself as the journal “for everyone who hasn’t read everything”--is a glossy, slightly fizzy bimonthly survey of classic and contemporary literature designed for readers who like their graphic interfaces glitzy and their information in strobe-like bites.

Think of it as a literary halfway house for recovering dot-comers and their codependents.

What it shares with traditional book reviews is a certain idealism about books and reading. Publisher Allison Nelson and editor Jon Phillips met at Harvard Business School, then spent several years working in business development, marketing and technology development at Silicon Valley firms. When both found themselves with young families and in need of a change of direction, they conceived a start-up based on their love of reading.

As Phillips explained, “We created a magazine we wanted to read.”

Though each issue will feature “book-by-book profiles” of classic authors and publishing news, the magazine’s staple is a survey of current literature that provides a synopsis of a given book, excerpts from its reviews in established critical journals--including The Times’ Book Review--and a consensus of opinion represented by the familiar star-based rating system. (Five stars indicate a classic, “one of the best of its kind;” one marks a book that is “not worth your time.”

Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “Atonement,” gets 4 1/2 stars; Richard Posner’s “Public Intellectuals: a Study of Decline” gets just one.

“I think that our approach is drawn from what we’ve learned about the integrative potential of the Web,” said Phillips. “To use the new media term, we are ‘aggregating content,’ and obviously the Web spurred some of those ideas for us. But what we are trying to do is also a reaction to the increasing marginalization of book coverage in so many magazines and newspapers. In that sense, we’re a publication for people who want to come home to books but have made other media choices for a long time and now are intimidated by the considerable investment of time learning about books requires. There’s an ocean of book choices but a puddle of advice on what to read.”

Bookmarks’ first regular bimonthly issue will be available on newsstands in September. In the meantime, copies of the preview issue can be obtained by sending an e-mail to preview@bookmarks magazine.com.

Publisher in Peril

Meanwhile, in a publishing universe far, far away, the travails of what might be called the literary-industrial complex seem to continue apace.

According to a recent issue of the German newsmagazine Der Speigel, that country’s von Holtzbrinck Group--a family-controlled and intensely private media company--is hemorrhaging red ink. This is an issue of consequence to American readers because von Holtzbrinck is the largest foreign owner of American book publishers, after Germany’s mammoth Bertelsmann conglomerate, which has had its own difficulties with its sprawling Random House division.

Its U.S. properties include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt and Co., St. Martin’s and Picador USA. FS&G;, as it is called in publishing circles, is arguably America’s most distinguished literary publisher. Since its founding by Roger W. Straus in 1947, it has published the work of no fewer than 21 Nobel literature laureates.

Though all four U.S. houses are healthy, their German parent may not be quite so robust. Under a headline that roughly translates as “A Horrific Document,” Der Spiegel alleges that von Holtzbrinck is carrying a corporate debt of $1.2 billion, which exceeds its yearly sales by more than 50%. The magazine also reports the group suffered an operating loss of $46 million last year.

Family spokesman Stefan von Holtzbrinck told European financial news services that though the group’s debt is “substantially below” that reported in Der Spiegel, the firm nonetheless is planning to sell television and radio properties. “We want to get out of these areas,” Von Holtzbrinck said. “We do not want to further increase our debt. So it makes sense to sell off non-core assets.”

Work in Progress

Michael McClure has published 16 books of poetry, six collections of essays, two novels and 10 plays, including “The Beard.” He was one of five Beat movement poets who participated in the seminal reading at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in 1955: “As ever, I’m working on a new book of poems. At the moment, this sequence is so elaborate and complex that I am hoping it will white itself out and ultimately simplify in the reader’s mind. This book involves taking from my poems that already exist and using the parts as moments in space, places from which I can move away from the direction in which I’m moving now.

“I’m also putting the journals I’ve kept since 1957 into chronological order. Right now, it’s a stack of paper 12 feet high and out of it keep dropping drafts of full-length plays. Those I’m rereading, revising and--in some cases--completing. It’s a process that began last year when I rewrote a play called “Red Snake.” It’s based loosely on the last Jacobean revenge tragedy by John Sireley, which was performed in 1641. I’ve added more blood and more murders.

“My most urgent ongoing project, though, is a collaboration with Ray Manzarek, the former keyboardist for the Doors. We’ve done more than 175 performances together and have made two CDs. Our next gig will be at the Los Angeles Central Library on July 14, Bastille Day. I’ll be reading, and Ray plays the piano at the same time I recite. It’s not accompaniment, but something collaborative, an extension of the tradition that goes back to Kenneth Rexroth and his famous reading with jazz at the Cellar. But what we do is more like Miles Davis.”