Should I tear up the business plan?
- Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, in 1967, in a scene from the documentary “Obscene.”
I’m working on my business plan to present to someone from my bank very soon. The outline encourages studying businesses one admires according to their marketing strategies. All the businesses I admire lead with their heart, provide something of substance and lasting value (not a sticker on the box that says “collectors item”). I suspect that if any of these risk takers, that have endured, had quanitified their insights and inspiration with a set of numbers and projections, a bank assessor would probably have said, “are you nuts?”. I admire Grove Press. I don’t know if they publish hardbacks. I’ve only ever seen monochromatically cool paperbacks, in that democratic deluxe model invented by Penguin. They’re cerebral books, sexy and brave. The New York Times today has a story about a new documentary about the Grove Press’s publishers.
“In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch,” writes the New York Times today. “The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.”
There’s a documentary about Grove Press, called “Obscene” that’s just been released: “The documentary has a literary rock score – songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith – and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage.”
“The greatest joy that came out of my life in publishing was when ‘Tropic of Cancer’ went on trial in Chicago,” Mr. Rosset said. “The judge was a friend of my father’s, and at one point when the prosecutor accused me of just trying to make money, I took out my Henry Miller term paper from Swarthmore College and read from it. I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home. It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ “
Mr. Rosset went on: “All my life I followed the things that I liked – people, things, books – and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn’t like. I had no set plan, but on the other hand we sometimes found ourselves on a trail. For example, out of Beckett came Pinter, and Pinter was responsible for Mamet. It was like a baseball team – Mamet to Pinter to Beckett.”
Mr. Rosset sipped from his drink and smiled. “Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”
