On January 12, 2009, the Wikipedia website presented a front page with an account of King Arthur. Having a life-long interest in the subject–one of my several unfinished novels is based on the legends—I read it with some interest. The article was noteworthy, but mostly for what it lacked.

Following the article was an extensive field of footnotes and links. This was impressive in size, but not in content. Most of the links were to sources which were in fact drawn from other linked sources. In other words, if I wrote an article based on the sources cited, I too could become a source. This ingrown toenail of research is equivalent to using the same word to define itself.

And though I am not a scholar, only an interested party, I immediately noticed the absence of citations for original scholarly works which might contradict the thrust of the article. The Arthur legend was, by this account, a myth built on a lie–essentially that Arthur was merely a romantic legend.

One defender of the veracity of the legends, Geoffrey Ashe, is indeed there. Ashe is footnoted several times, mostly for his attempts to defend Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a work produced more than half a millennium after the fact. But Norma L. Goodrich, who has done much greater and more interesting work in the area of original sources, is missing. I do take Goodrich’s part in the argument, but my concern is more than that.

I use Wikipedia every day. I find it to be an invaluable research tool for everything from confirmation of spelling to finding other sources I had not yet seen. But this dependence is a great handicap as well. Good scholarly research begins at home. Scholarly research is born in taking pleasure in knowing, in discovery—in grasping a mere fact and combining it with others through comprehension and imagination. Reading. If the young potential scholar is clicking their way to competence in a term paper, what does the future hold?

I have taken a great concern myself in the inherent nature of the internet as a medium which can be abused by the powers-that-be to achieve political purpose. I obviously have no problem with opinion or the free expression thereof. What I fear for is the acceptance of unvetted sources and the use of the medium to direct popular opinion.

And worse–as books become artifacts, and scholarly work is kept in the ether alone, what will be the deterrent to altering facts to suit the political disposition of the moment.

For another example, I have recently been reading the work of Amity Shlaes, the author of a wonderful book, The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression. I took a peek at the Wikipedia entry on her. It was at best an adolescent slap and at worst a Paul Krugman type abuse of fact to achieve a political put-down. I use the example of Krugman in this instance as a well known and established figure, Nobel Prize winner, and all around shite, who has spent the last twelve years of his life wallowing in his own political bile for reasons I don’t care to know. The emphasis in the Wikipedia article was clearly on certain associations and comments made by Shlaes, taken out of context, which the Wikipedia author disapproved of. And who was this critic–perhaps Krugman himself? We cannot know.

The anonymity of the source of Wikipedia articles is the problem. Anyone can be mistaken. Prejudice is natural. H. L. Mencken made a good case for that. But the hidden agenda of ‘Anonymous’ is a clear danger and warning.

It is, of course, this very anonymity that made Wikipedia grow. ‘Everyman’ might pretend to be a scholar. Like a giant ‘Facebook’ for the intellectually timid. A home for pseudo-intellectual stalkers.

Wikipedia is a great common ground of information and one of the very best developments of the internet age, but that age is only just begun, and Wikipedia is at present a sort of Central Park. By day a playground, refuge, and leafy avenue, but by night, a place where truth might be mugged and facts stolen.

As might have been said in Arthurian times, beware, ye who venture there.

There is one element, and only one, in the publishing process which cannot be replaced—without which, publishing, per se, would cease to exist. Most people, when asked what that is, will answer quickly, “the author.” But they would be wrong. Most people don’t want to think about how things work. They simply want it to work and they want it now. Any attempt to explain the importance of knowing is met with indignation—as if the reality is a mistake and their wanting is the matter.

Virgil wrote his poetry with a quill. Herodotus wrote his histories in the same manner. Neither had any concept of publishing, and yet we are still reading them.

In publishing, a five hundred year old business, every single element but one has been changed over the last fifty years. From the submission of the manuscript to the selling of the book in the bookshop, there is little that resembles my first forays into Anderson’s Bookshop in Larchmont, New York. In fact, most of the processes which are commonly used in publishing today were not even envisioned fifty years ago.

People will still be reading fifty years from now, but with the current mentality in charge, publishing will be an artifact. The problems facing the industry today will certainly kill this five hundred year old profession, and the effect will be as great as if we were returned to a world lit by fire—the world of Gutenberg.

It is as if the Three Stooges were in an airplane and wanting to land. What do they do? Naturally. They hit the pilot over the head.

It may surprise some to know that publishing has grown over the past fifty years—by several times over–more publishers, more people employed by publishing, more books, more readers, more sales. Yet, through most of that time, it seems that the industry has complained. The complaints were heard because they came from two very visible and vocal parts of the business.

One was the independent bookseller. The number and the size of bookshops grew—but most were chain stores using the economies of modern corporate law. My own bookshop was a casualty of the problems that have plagued the business during that time.

But I have been railing about the diminishment of both endangered parts all my adult life.

Despite phenomenal growth, there is one key element which has been shrinking—and as you might expect, it is the same element without which the entire industry will come to an end.

In the beginning, the patron was the ‘editor.’ They chose the work to be published because there was no ‘publishing industry’ that yet existed. The middle class world of merchants and buyers was only just being born. The patron—be it the church, or the prince—was in command of the heights. ‘Private property’ was hardly imagined. Property was what was held by force or dispensed for favors. Books were tools, used to impart instruction by the prince or the church—presenting only the information they wanted known.

Gutenberg changed all that. Not coincidentally, he was born into a new age of business. People had income beyond the favors dispensed by the lords. Gutenberg was a business man. A goldsmith. And he saw a profit to be made in the mass production of the book most potential buyers wanted. And Gutenberg was not only the first printer as we know it, but the first publisher, and the first editor, and the first bookseller.

As that business grew, and several new professions were born from those first efforts in Mainz, one job became the key to the success of all the others. The editor.

Now, to skip forward for just a moment. There are some who will argue that the profession of editor has necessarily changed as well. Much of that responsibility is now in the hands of the literary agent and the marketing department. Well, yes it has and is. But that is the problem. An agent cannot fill this function and be a good agent as well—it is a conflict of interest which favors the agent and not the author or the work. And as for the marketing department, one word: Detroit.

The most visible remains of the once proud profession of ‘editor’ can be seen in the person of a Michael Korda. And Korda, as reported recently in the New York Times, when asked about recent belt tightening in the publishing industry, thinks hard times will pass and soon everybody will be “back to doing what they were doing before.” Certainly the icon of the ‘power lunch’ who dispensed his favors from the Grill room at the Four Seasons might think that. He has benefited greatly by being part of the problem.

The ‘power lunch’ with Michael Korda has everything to do with a profligate establishment of politics over principle and nothing in common with the small brick building on the corner of Washington and School streets in Boston, where James Fields and George Ticknor once prompted the art of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to name but a few.

(to be continued)

Link: New York Times; Puttin’ Off The Ritz: New Austerity in Publishing by Motoko Rich. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/books/05publ.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=puttin’%20on%20the%20ritz&st=cse