FREE delivery December 6 - 12. Details

Usually ships within 11 to 12 days

[{"displayPrice":"$27.10","priceAmount":27.10,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"27","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"10","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"rffErWyMzHR2ZsJ%2FqfdhkDm%2FR8ZxfUa2pt4DyWKobBHIadzslZDWrd5dqHS8hJxWT0GCePnDwwGwFu8hgaHxhnSdguZQRXMeMKo5wW5dPNTs7TtDeJqz%2Bd40LYduuSI2EC8PZZ8gAuuWd%2Bu%2BbzNB%2FFB%2FWtLg9CFP33msCidSaOnqRdMnIgYDng%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$6.82","priceAmount":6.82,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"82","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"zEIFmEXV2f8l5%2B%2BWP3dz8dRoA8EQaurbah0HfaCdZSpMbCPEDZycBLAjungKd4E3JgNxTWOgg6LlRz%2BNdPFcrpgwQgDS%2FbxZjZStZceevF1SA8WKlzAWkmLgbDGWS9iCOH9U1S6WTqLV9aasgPOLwNIIQx3QfpVdnSbGBJ0T6K4KQ0UUOlNWrg%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$27.10 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Book Depository US

Sold by

Book Depository US

Details

Ships from

Book Depository US

Sold by

Book Depository US

Return policy: Returnable until Jan 31, 2023

FREE delivery November 22 - 23. Details

Or fastest delivery November 16 - 21. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Like New | Details

Sold by WonderBook

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Follow the Author

Tom Engelhardt

The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel Paperback – September 21, 2005

by Thomas M. Engelhardt (Author)

9 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$4.95

—

$4.95

Paperback

"Please retry"

$27.10

$10.98

$3.00

Enhance your purchase

Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail―the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin―after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.

Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.

Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date

September 21, 2005
Dimensions

5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

1558495061
ISBN-13

978-1558495067
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An ex-editor laments the death of the book―by writing a wonderfully observant novel about an editor whose career and way of life are both coming to an end. Having been a senior editor at Pantheon for 15 years, unsurprisingly, has given Engelhardt an easy command of the tone and texture of the publishing world, but the graceful abilities he also demonstrates in bringing character, place, and mood achingly to life must be the gifts of the man alone. Engelhardt's narrator, Rick Koppes, has also been a New York editor for many years, at Byzantium Press-which has just been 'swallowed up' by a huge media giant, the Desmond & Dickinson Publishing Group. For Koppes-aged 56, cultivated, sensitive, thoughtful-this beginning of the end of life as he's known it contains also an unusual personal element; namely, that his own ex-wife of 20 years, Connie Burian, is one of the new firm's top people and sees the future of the book in far, far different ways than does Rick. Only at story's end will the true sorrow of Rick's life-and his love-be revealed fully, but along the way there will be forbodings galore, some so simple as lunch with another editor, a decades-old friend who's been 'remaindered'; a call from a hustler agent that, wonderfully, brings about a trip to the American Natural History museum and an unflinching consideration, among other things, of extinction; and, in the tiny hours after one odyssey-like day, a visit to the shabby West Side walkup of the conscience-ravaged daughter of one of the airmen who bombed Nagasaki-and who wants Rick to publish her book. Conscience, indeed, may also be Rick's most notable trait, helping determine what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees-from the look of the new Times Square to the loathsomely smug boy-emperor and boss of Desmond & Dickinson. A brilliantly realized cri de coeur, pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought."―Kirkus Reviews

"A mordant gem, at once elegiac and deeply witty. I can't think of another novel that so powerfully conveys the sense of what it means to be an editor who does such a labor out of love, and not out of ambition for an office higher in the corporate tower."―Mark Crispin Miller

"A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers . . . a skillful novel of manners―of very bad manners. . . . [A] tone of amused, wistful Manhattan romance, like that of an F. Scott Fitzgerald brought up to contemporary speed. . . . "Though this novel can be read as an anatomy of the publishing business, year 2003, and a lament for. . .somewhat better times the characters depicted are not mere stick figures or roman à clef gossips. The scenes are vividly set, and this writer, made of stern stuff, was laughing through his tears. . . . The episodes in Engelhardt's account emit a sense of autobiographical anguish, seasoned with an ironic notch at one corner of his mouth."―Herbert Gold, Los Angeles Times

"A fiction that, uniquely, brings us into the mind of an editor―a master editor at that―and wittily shows us how much more is at stake in publishing than money and glamour. I found it moving and revelatory."―Todd Gitlin

"Engelhardt has written the rarest of books: a truly intellectual novel. This faux memoir uses the decline of quality book publishing both as landscape and metaphor to explore in ways that are often heartbreaking the failure of the sixties to drastically change the world and the devastating moral and cultural consequences of that failure."―Ariel Dorfman

"Original, authentic, and compelling. Engelhardt is a smart, clear, and bold storyteller. He takes us on a multifaceted journey through a world in flux and renders it with vivid immediacy. Drawn with truthfulness and tenderness, his characters reveal the persistence of humanity."―Beverly Gologorsky

"A brilliantly realized 'cri de coeur,' pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought."―Kirkus Reviews

"A former editor at Pantheon Books, Englehardt (The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation) has penned an opinionated, nostalgic novel about the trials of a seasoned book editor in the information age. Rick Koppes, a literary purist, former commune resident and anti-Vietnam War activist, works at highbrow Byzantium Press. His publishing house has been taken over by German magnate Bruno Hindemann's Multimedia Entertainment, where executive David Marsden, many years his junior, hopes to capitalize on Koppes's lone bestselling author with videos and merchandise ("We want to brand him awesomely"). Koppes's ex-wife, a treacherously bottom-line-minded publishing exec, becomes his boss. He meets his old friend, Larry, a fellow longtime editor, for lunch and learns that Larry has been fired for not bringing in enough money. In his agitated state, Larry berates the waiter at their Vietnamese restaurant, while Koppes wonders silently whether the waiter had been tortured by American soldiers during the war. Woven through these apocalyptic snapshots are laments about the ramifications of electronic publishing and the decline of the reading public. The novel will likely try the patience of any reader not wholly fascinated with the publishing industry; though there are some emotionally vivid passages, the book often gets bogged down in descriptions of the minutiae of the business. Engelhardt seems primarily to be addressing his colleagues, but even those inclined to agree with his view may find his hero self-righteous and unsympathetic."―Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Tom Engelhardt, for fifteen years a senior editor at Pantheon, is now consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, a Fellow of the Nation Institute, and a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He has helped bring a long list of prize-winning books into print. He is a regular book reviewer and essayist for numerous periodicals and newspapers, and author of The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. He is also creator and editor of the weblog TomDispatch.com.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Massachusetts Press (September 21, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1558495061
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1558495067
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches

Customer Reviews:
9 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Tom Engelhardt

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 star		17%
4 star		29%
3 star		36%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		17%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

A. colbert

Provocative and amusing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 17, 2007

Verified Purchase

This sweet gem of a book sets an ambitious goal of elucidating the means by which editors and publishing houses make the invisible decisions that put books in the hands of the reading public. As the title implies, this is a world on the precipice of several calamities: the growth of multimedia corporations that have plundered small publishing houses, as well as ensured the passing of independent book stores. Even more chilling are the emergent technologies that threaten the very idea of what we have come to think of as a book.If a book is not printed paper between two covers, what will it be, and who will write it and produce it? Will writers still be important to fostering provocative thought, or will other technologies eclipse them?

As a reader I want to read imaginative work of refinement and craft, not simply the dross that feeds the entertainment industry of movie, videogame, and retail spin offs that the megalith corporations want to develop. As diversity in the field shrinks to a few major players who control all aspects of our media, will society be well served? The Last Days of Publishing asks us to reflect on all these troubling notions and paints a rather grim landscape of the future terrain.

The tone of this book is sharp, witty and amusing. Rick Koppes, a veteran editor who knows his way around the New York Publishing scene, uses his instincts to stay one step ahead of the opportunistic underlings, and ambitious sharks circling his desk. He offers a tantalizing portrait of what great purpose there can and should be in the role of the editor.

Our beleaguered hero has brought his art to such a high luster, that alas, when it comes to love, he is more editor than scribe. He is dazzled and bemused by the women in his life, but clearly, not in charge of the plot.He is so appreciative of their splendor, so earnest about wanting to be supportive and nurturing to them, he is nearly emasculated."If I were a book", his ex laments, "You would have loved me!" When he finally picks up his pen and risks the act of creation, he finally gains an active part in his own narrative.

Who knows books better than an editor who has been in the trenches for years? He cannot change an entire industry, but can still be a voice of outrage, dissent and courage. This is a cautionary tale of an extremely likable charcter, from an extremely likable writer. The insider oeuvre is sometimes too smooth and glib for its own good; like an inside joke that can't be appreciated by all. But overall, the intelligence and smartness of the writing is sparkling and fresh enough to catch and hold even the most incognizant outsider.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

C. Morris

A confusing satire?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2013

Verified Purchase

Hard to follow... it assumed certain knowledge about the publishing industry I didn't have. One final scene of value... where the inheritors of the industry show their colors--as basically against the "book" in favor of "electroics" because it will allow for advertising!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 17, 2003

Although the main character isn't very likable, I enjoyed the inside view of a changing industry. As an author myself, of NEW PSALMS FOR NEW MOMS: A KEEPSAKE JOURNAL (Judson Press), I have some firsthand knowledge of publishing and just how difficult it is for a new voice to be heard. My worst fears of how capriciously some publishing decisions are made were confirmed! But there will always be those of us who have things we must say, and the readers who appreciate hearing them.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

lbbf

disappointing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 6, 2003

The publishing industry confounds us: through mysterious, unseen, processes it populates our bookstore shelves with works ranging from the profound to the utterly inane. It draws to itself the most idealistic and the crassest among us. And it is a world under pressure--it has always been a financially risky business. Word is that Gutenberg died bankrupt and penniless. Changing technologies and the general coporate move to conglomeration have added other uncertainties. Certainly this is a world ripe with novelistic possibilities.
And yet...The Last Days of Publishing skims lightly over these many tantalizing issues, leaving us instead with a thin gruel of solipsistic nostalgia. The characters are so vague, so unfleshed and unsympathetic, that the reader can only wonder where that nostalgia comes from. They seem to have landed in publishing for lack of any imagination. The plot moves from being choppy and confusing in the early vignettes to increasingly improbable, all with affected air of self-important inevitability. In the end we're left with a book that fails as a novel and as a source of reflection of the vagaries and important cultural and economic issues to be found in the world of publishing. Alas! Read something else!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

John Matlock

A Novel Providing Insight into the Publishing Scene

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 11, 2005

This book is a novel written at a time when the book publishing industry was in one of its continuing crisies. It is a novel where the message comes through the discussions and feelings of the anti-hero. His time, and his way of life are ending with the advance of technology and he hasn't/isn't/can't change with it. Everything that has happened in industry in general and publishing in particular has happened to this guy, corporate buyout, downsizing. I particularily like the point of his ex-wife becomming his boss -- that would be enough to drive anyone to severe depression.

With a long history in the publishing industry, Mr. Engelhardt knows the industry of which he writes. He has written a novel that explains better than a dry technical article possibly could about the characters that populate the New York publishing scene. I'd recommend it to anyone in the publishing industry, and to any prospective author that might get a better insight into the world he wants to submit his manuscript.

Of course, the industry has changed, but it hasn't ended. More new books were published last year than any year before. New technologies from print-on-demand to marketing through Amazon have come about and changed the industry.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Buy new: $27.10$27.10 FREE delivery: Dec 6 - 12 Ships from: Book Depository US Sold by: Book Depository US

Buy used:: $6.82

Follow the Author

The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel Paperback – September 21, 2005

Enhance your purchase

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Tom Engelhardt

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Buy new:

$27.10

FREE delivery: Dec 6 - 12

Ships from: Book Depository US

Sold by: Book Depository US

Buy used::

$6.82