[ PW Home ] [ Bestsellers ] [ Subscribe ] [ Search ]
|
| |
 | News |
Arthur Wang Retires at 80
John F. Baker -- 7/6/98
Arthur Wang, who co-founded Hill &Wang in 1956 and saw it become a notable publisher of drama and American history titles before selling it to Farrar, Straus &Giroux in 1971, retired last month from the company, just short of his 80th birthday.
In an interview with PW, Wang described how, as an editor at A.A. Wyn, he got together with its sales director, Lawrence Hill, and agreed to buy Wyn's backlist of 88 titles for $60,000 to start the new company. It was helped on its way enormously by a decision to launch Dramabooks, a series of plays in the then-new trade paperback format, with Eric Bentley as an adviser. A further fillip came from the purchase of the Sagamore backlist, mostly American literature and history, and that helped shape the future list.
Another early emphasis was on books written or edited by black writers, including several works by Langston Hughes, and successful anthologies of black short stories and p try. Holocaust literature was also important, and in 1960 it published Elie Wiesel's Night, which sold slowly at first but has now sold millions in paperback. The p t and translator Richard Howard brought in Roland Barthes in 1964, and he became a very successful author for the house, with 19 books. By the end of the 1960s, Wang said, sales had risen from an initial $88,000 a year to more than $1.3 million.
At this point, needing to expand but unable to afford to do so on their own, the partners sold the company to FSG in late 1971. Hill left to form his own publishing company (he died 10 years ago), but Wang persisted, building a particularly strong college paperback history list through the succeeding 20 years with the aid of Columbia professor Eric Foner.
Later on there were some hard times, Wang said, when FSG "had to cut us back -- and I don't blame them." But, he said, "we always aimed to provide quality, and Farrar, Straus was the place to do it" -- citing particularly its "magnificent" copyediting department under Carmen Gomezplata.
Several people have served in recent years as publisher at Hill &Wang -- Steve Wasserman, Arthur Rosenthal, and now Elisabeth Sifton -- but Wang remained as keeper of its flame. He is not sentimental about the past, or about the sometimes idealized quality of small publishers: "Being small is no guarantee of quality or of a congenial environment," he noted. As for their role in an age of mega-publishers, "The little flies will get a little sugar, but not much."
Back To News
---> |
Search | Bestsellers | News | Features | Children's Books | Bookselling
Interview | Industry Update | International | Classifieds | Authors On the Highway
About PW | Subscribe
|
Copyright 2000. Publishers Weekly. All rights reserved.
|
