Asked if condolences or congratulations are in order on the occasion of his relinquishing control of Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, the publishing outfit he founded 20 years ago, Glenn Young insists it's the latter: "It's congratulations. I've had a long run and it was a great privilege to be in that position. But in recent years, I've been on automatic pilot."
Still, Young admits that a sense of loss is inevitable in the face of a contemporary publishing world that bears little resemblance to the industry that once drew him to it -- a man who loved books about theatre and film, wanted to publish works that would live on in posterity (whether or not they were hot sellers of the moment), and prayed, "Oh Lord, just let me break even."
He adds, "Being a publisher is not unlike being a cultural environmentalist: You're one in a long line of individuals to whom the baton is passed. A publisher has a certain public trust."
Under Young's tenure, Applause boasted a list of 400 titles, with an average of 20 new books published each year. Young has edited and published the works of such well-known theatre figures as John Houseman, John Gielgud, Michael Caine, Stephen Sondheim, Larry Gelbart, Michael Blakemore, Cy Coleman, Paddy Chayefsky, Simon Callow, John Cleese, and the list goes on and on.
But according to Young, the world of publishing has changed so radically that four years ago he was forced to bring in a partner, the Hal Leonard Corporation (a major music publisher headquartered in Milwaukee, to whom he has sold his shares of the operation), "for their financial clout and their clout in dealing with the mega-chains that now define the world of publishing. When I started in the business, there were independent bookstores and independent college bookstores. Now they have all been subsumed by the chains. You need corporate muscle in order to see your books ordered, distributed, or even to get paid. You need special stamina to deal with the behemoths.
"You can't imagine the amount of time I've spent in recent years staring at conveyor belts and watching the dust pile up on books in warehouse shelves," he continues. "The Hal Leonard Corporation had an infrastructure that made it possible for me to continue in the creative end of the business."
Nevertheless, the time has come to move on, notes Young, who will serve as a consultant for Applause for one more year. He will continue to run his Upper West Side bookstore on West 71st Street (named, appropriately enough, Applause and founded shortly before his publishing venture), and he will also publish books and instructional videotapes under his own imprints to be distributed by Applause and Hal Leonard. His newest title, "Hirschfeld's London," will make its debut in spring 2005.
Launching a Bookstore on a Whim
Looking back, Young talks about the trajectory of his career and how theatre book publishing has evolved. Clearly, the major shift is economic, he says. Years ago, everything was less expensive and there were altogether fewer risks.
Consider this: The Applause publishing company and bookstore were launched virtually on whims. Young had no experience in either books or business when "I passed a clouded window with a 'for rent' sign on a store on West 67th Street in 1979," he recalls. "I was peering in the window when a man with a fedora hat emerged from the next building and said, 'You interested, you talk to me.' As I followed him into a nearby bar, housed in another building he owned, I said to myself, I will call the bookstore 'Applause.'
"Before I signed the lease, I attended a meeting of the American Booksellers Association," Young continues. "When I told some of the people there that I was thinking of starting a bookstore with no background in either books or business, they thought I was insane. They strongly suggested that I work part-time in a bookstore, take some business courses, and then come back to them in a year to discuss the idea further. That's when I went back to the landlord with the fedora hat and signed the lease for the store on 67th Street. It had 225 square feet of space, tall ceilings, and narrow aisles."
The bookstore was a success from the outset. For starters, there was a market for theatre books. "When 'The Real Thing' came out, we sold 1,000 copies to people who may or may not have seen the play," Young says. "Now you may sell a handful of plays to audience members who have seen the performance and want souvenirs. 'Pillowman' by Martin McDonagh just recently sold a few copies. Years ago, it would have sold 50, at least."
Young was responding to a culture of literacy and was determined to acquire books that were not simply current, but valuable all the same: "I aggressively combed -- and continue to comb -- library and estate sales for theatre books that are out of print but may still be of interest."
And that determination to serve those with specialized interests has also been the hallmark of Young's publishing operation, which began when "Sam Shepard's attorney called to say that Sam's publisher had gone belly up. The works were now in escrow. He wanted to know who might publish them. I said, 'I'll call you back.' I thought about it, called him back, and said, 'Me. I'll publish them.' "
Applause Theatre & Cinema Books distinguished itself from other theatre book publishers by not specializing in any one type of book. "TCG published American plays, Faber published British works, Cambridge and Oxford printed the scholarly works. I felt we could do it all, including the classics," observes Young.
No doubt, Young was an imaginative publisher. "When I was offered Oliver Stone's screenplay 'JFK,' I said not unless Stone's notes and research are included," he recalls. "I said, 'The screenplay will be remaindered within a year. What I'm proposing will be in every library for years to come.' Then the articles started coming out in response to the movie. The articles were written by people like Gerald Ford and Arthur Schlesinger. I said to Stone that I wanted to include the articles in the book. I also said that some of these articles might not be flattering. He said, 'Go ahead.' The result is a one-of-a-kind book."
Young takes special pride in having published Shakespeare's First Folio, but in modern font "so that it could be readable," he says. "It was such an obvious idea, but no one had done it before." He was also, he says, the first publisher to print a "how to write a play" guide that acknowledged absurdist sensibilities. "Up until that point, the guides all talked about the well-made drama, but none even acknowledged the existence of Beckett or Pinter. Jean-Claude van Itallie wrote the first book, 'The Playwright's Workbook,' that talked about the art of tapping into absurdity, and we published it. We were also the first to include Roman drama along with Greek drama in a history-of-theatre text. I went to Robert Corrigan, a theatre scholar and first president of CalArts, and asked him to pull it all together and edit it."
Young stresses that unlike many other publishers, he never felt any obligation to publish a quota of anything -- say, a certain number of screenplays yearly. And he was always open to -- indeed, interested in -- the artistic impulse: "When a writer came to me and said, 'What kind of works are you looking for?,' I said, 'What you want to do. When you know what that is, come back and talk to me.'
"Publishing used to be like an art," he emphasizes. "It was peopled by eccentrics, for eccentrics, who addressed questions like 'What will people think of this book in 20 years?' I would go to my bank account and see if I could afford to publish a particular book, but the fact is I published by instinct. Now they talk about 'units' and things being up this quarter or down. I knew nothing about 'projections' and 'profit and loss' until Hal Leonard came into the business."
Young acknowledges that what he is experiencing is widespread throughout the publishing world in general and theatre publishing in particular, which has been forced to reinvent itself, assuming it has not gone under altogether. (The May 16, 2003 issue of Back Stage reported on the demise of Stage & Screen Book Club, which had been in operation since 1950 and during its heyday -- the 1970s -- boasted 40,000 readers on its mailing list. By the time it went out of business, its membership had plummeted to 15,000. A confluence of events contributed to its shuttering -- from a loss of interest in reading plays to the use of the Internet for buying books.)
"Years ago, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hill & Wang all routinely published plays -- not cheap throwaways but hardcovers," comments Young. "Random House still does it occasionally, but not nearly as much as it did 25 or 30 years ago. At that time, if a play was produced it was automatically published. That's no longer the case."
Young suggests that part of the problem is what's taught -- or, more precisely, not taught -- in colleges: "Outside of theatre departments, the works of contemporary playwrights are not being assigned at all, whereas at one time they were. And if intellectual interests are not spurred in college, the odds are it's not going to happen later. But I also feel there is a problem with the plays that are being written. With some exceptions -- notably the works of August Wilson and John Patrick Shanley -- the plays are so devoid of complexity, they just don't need the depth of attention, thought, and analysis that they once did. After you see some of these plays, the last thing you want to do is go and read them."
So what's in Young's future? Perhaps teaching; perhaps expanding his publishing domain to include works outside the parameters of the performing arts. If a novel turned him on, he says, he might very well consider publishing it. And then there is his Working Arts Library, which will debut this fall with a five-part DVD series, Cicely Berry's "Working Shakespeare," featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Emily Watson, Robert Sean Leonard, Helen Hunt, Cherry Jones, and Blythe Danner, among others.
Instructional DVDs may well be where the future lies. But Young makes it clear that he will never forsake his roots in the printed page.