History Publishing and the NYTBR

A story of elite cultural centralization

The New York Times Book Review’s “100 Notable Books of 2022” list is a revealing document. No other American publication has anything like the Times’s cultural influence. For any author who cares about reaching a non-specialist audience, having a review in the Times matters greatly. At some universities, a professor getting a book reviewed there is big news. (Just to get this out of the way, only one of my books has ever been reviewed by the Times, somewhat snarkily, and that was in 2001).

So what history books did the Times Book Review this year consider not just worthy of review, but of inclusion in its all-star end-of-year list? By my count, sixteen of the 100 fiction and non-fiction titles on the list can be considered history. Not a bad total, considering that the field has to compete with memoirs, current affairs, science, art criticism, and other popular non-fiction subjects.

Perhaps not surprisingly, only six of the sixteen authors are full-time academics. Among them are prominent historians such as Yale’s Beverly Gage (G-Man), Harvard’s Caroline Elkins (Legacy of Violence) and Oxford’s Pekka Hämäläinen (Indigenous Continent), as well as younger stars like Tufts’s Kerri Greenidge (The Grimkes). The ten non-academics are mostly either journalists like James Kirchick (Secret City) or full-time freelance book writers.

I’m not particularly bothered by the low batting average for the professionals. The Times is not The American Historical Review. And history has always been a field to which talented writers without a formal position in the professoriate, indeed often without graduate training, can make superb contributions. Among the authors included this year on the list are Adam Hochschild (American Midnight), Mark Braude (Kiki Man Ray) and Stacy Schiff (The Revolutionary). They are all terrific, engaging, entertaining writers who do serious research and adhere to high professional standards. I’ve assigned Hochschild’s books in my courses.

Rather more surprising, and depressing, is the fact that none of the sixteen books were published by university presses. Nearly all major university presses today have “academic trade” lists to which they hope to attract a broad general readership. But they couldn’t get a single history title into the Times’s “100 Notable Books.” Is it simply that in our free market system, the most notable books attract the highest advances, and that commercial presses have much deeper pockets than university ones?

But here is a surprising, and very telling fact: Of the sixteen books, fully ten were published by just one firm, Penguin Random House. This includes four of the six books written by full-time academics (Gage, Greenidge, Bard’s Walter Russell Mead and Yale’s Jing Tsu). Has Penguin Random House become the ultimate gold standard in history publishing these days, the New York Times of the field, so to speak? Or might it be that the firm has an especially effective publicity department, and has developed especially close ties with The New York Times Book Review?

Twenty-four years ago, the journalist Jacob Weisberg published a blistering takedown of the Times Book Review in Slate, entitled A Hundred Years of Lassitude (slate.com). Among other things, he criticized the cozy relationship between the Times and major New York publishing houses, as well as the Book Review’s reluctance to publish sharply negative reviews. Since then, what could be called the centralization of American elite culture has proceeded apace. Until the recent revival of the Washington Post Book World, the Times was the only American newspaper that still ran a stand-alone book review section. American commercial book publishing is now utterly dominated by the big five of Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, and only a federal judge’s anti-monopoly ruling last month prevented a $2.2 billion merger of the first two. This centralization has only reinforced the situation that Weisberg described and brought the Times and Penguin Random House even closer together than the 1200-yard distance between their New York City headquarters would suggest.

I shouldn’t exaggerate. While notice by The New York Times Book Review matters a great deal, it is hardly the only measure of cultural prominence and success today, and by many measures, university presses are doing very well. But the story told by this year’s “100 Notable Books” list is still striking.