Introduction: Film Book Crisis

"The selling of movie books needs more knowledge and discrimination than any other type of non-fiction." That was Jay Leyda writing in 1937, as reprinted in Film History's "Centennial of Cinema Literature" issue in 1998.

Leyda's main concern was the lack of discrimination he found among editors and publishers. "It's possible that every American publisher has had, at some time, a film book on his list", he wrote, though it seemed to him that subjects like "Spiritualism or Gardening" were more carefully vetted. The field was simply too young to have established the requisite degree of professional oversight. A year later he published a follow-up essay, "Film Books 1937–38", still complaining of "a disproportionately huge number of useless film books and mighty few serviceable ones". Surveying the film books published that season he praised a few specialist volumes (some of which are still useful today), but "for fear of a libel suit" resisted even mentioning the many "film books written for a general audience" that failed to meet his standards.

The situation had changed by 1998, and continues to change to this day, though not necessarily for the better.

As David Bordwell writes in this issue, today's most heavily vetted film books suffer from a very different set of problems. Because more and more are published every year (Bordwell calculates three to four hundred annually on film history and criticism alone), the impact that any specific volume might have is obviously diluted. This would not be so bad if the best of them were still receiving an appropriate level of attention from both specialized journals and the higher end of what was once referred to as "the popular press". Unfortunately, as the number of film books has gone up, the amount of space devoted to reviewing them has fallen precipitously. In 1983 Oxford University Press published my book on Erich von Stroheim, The Man You Loved to Hate. Checking my files as we prepared this issue, I was absolutely flabbergasted to see over fifty reviews, from local newspapers to TLS and the New York Times. I will not report the number of reviews garnered by my more recent books, but they seem to have shared the same fate accorded to almost everyone else in recent years, and for many of the same reasons.

Some journals, notably Film Quarterly, have devoted heroic amounts of space to their book review sections (albeit at the expense of space that might otherwise have been devoted to original material). Film History reviews far fewer titles, so for this issue we solicited the members of our Editorial Board to help fill the gap. We asked for "reviews of important new works which are not receiving appropriate exposure elsewhere", defining "new" as something published within the past four years. Nearly everyone was able to participate, some so enthusiastically that they rolled past the suggested 1000 word limit. The selection made by this group, obviously, reflects the tastes and interests of scholars concerned with the style of film history practiced on these pages. But while the collection does have a very Film History character to it, the specific concerns illustrated are remarkably diverse, as anyone who has been reading this journal over the years might have suspected.

In addition to those reviews, other essays here provide context, revision, and breaking news. Anthony Slide, the author or editor of more than seventy books on film and popular culture, provides a personal history of his experiences with Scarecrow Press and a number of other publishers who straddled the line between the trade and academic markets. In light of one of the more nagging problems afflicting this field today, I am especially glad that he mentions the position of Hayward Cirker and Dover Publications regarding the use of film stills as illustrations. As one who also worked on a few books for Dover, I still recall the clause in their boilerplate contract which assigned all legal liability for the use of film stills to the publisher, not the author. Any publishers reading this, please note.

The growth of special libraries and the...