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  • "Midnight in Princeton":Publishing in 3-D
  • Leslie Mitchner (bio)

As the clock struck twelve, I was sitting in a downtown café, sipping a cappuccino and reflecting on the fact that everyone around me was wired (or powered otherwise), not necessarily on caffeine. The place was packed. No eye contact was made. All faces were riveted on screens in a faux cinematic haze—cell phones, Kindles, Nooks, iPads, laptops. Conversation, if there had been any, was dead. One man read a paperback clutched tightly in his hands, an analog refugee traveling through time in Einstein's hometown. Sidney Bechet's sax played on as I stepped into the drizzly night. It was then, on a deserted sidestreet, that a 1920 Peugeot Landaulet 184 pulled up beside me. A mysterious woman in Spanish cloak and hat beckoned me to enter and I did.

"My name is Gillian Pender," I said, introducing myself as I stepped into the spacious leather-upholstered cream and black touring car. "I know you by your publishing alias," she said, adding that she had been visiting her papers in Princeton University's Firestone Library when she came across an article I had written for a special issue of Cinema Journal eight years ago. She had many questions, which tumbled from her lips with urgency. Had the crisis in scholarly publishing lessened since 2005? Would university presses survive? What about films? Had Woody Allen's movies improved? Then, with poignancy and clear concern, she asked about independent bookstores and how they were faring. As we drove toward Princeton Cemetery, where she had been buried in 1962, I suddenly recognized my companion from old photos as Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare & Company.

I wondered who I would meet next in this Woody Allen movie. Would my companion, like Gertrude Stein aiding my counterpart Gil Pender, give me advice on the novel I was writing about an acquisitions [End Page 122] editor and her publishing adventures over several decades? I began my response on a light note. Well, I said, Allen's career is miraculously looking up again. Midnight in Paris won an Oscar for best original screenplay, and many artists, composers, and famous writers of the 1920s are featured in the film, not to mention that your own store in its new location makes a cameo appearance. Her face brightened. I had to add in all honesty, however, that everyone had been reduced to clichés, as was the picture-postcard-perfect city of Paris itself. Your coming along right now is fitting, I stalled; this has been a good year for nostalgia and for the City of Light. There was also Hugo; it brings Georges Méliès's work to life and has lifted Martin Scorsese's reputation thanks to its perfection of 3-D technology. I was about to tell her about The Artist and how it fits the paradigm, when she pulled me back to that old article and pressed me to revisit it point by point. And so I did.

Eight years ago, independent stores were already in great jeopardy with the rise of the so-called chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble. At the time, the proliferation of these book warehouses was regarded as a major threat to serious publishers who depended primarily on smaller shops to sell their wares. University presses, which could sell fewer and fewer scholarly books, began to look for trade (general interest) and what were called crossover (from academic to trade) books in order to cover their overhead. Marketing departments more than ever were calling the shots, and desperate authors, with no understanding of publishing, pitched their narrow studies the way we had foolishly trained them to do. Sylvia seemed to be following what I was saying, and she chuckled when I mentioned the Ethan Hawke lookalike at an academic conference who tried to convince me to sign his crossover book on François Villon. Only if Johnny Depp is playing him in the biopic, was my reply.

A mere two years after Cinema Journal focused on the crisis in scholarly publishing, Amazon launched its first Kindle electronic reading device and burned down the publishing house as we had known...

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