Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs: A Festschrift to Honor Murlin Croucher

The Power and Peril of Ideas: Continuity and Change in Romanian Publishing

The Power and Peril of Ideas: Continuity and Change in Romanian Publishing Daniel M. Pennell Romanian literary historian Vasile Munteanu, writing in French as "Basil Munteano," observed: The last fifteen years have revealed some firm positions and, above the struggles of government, a battle of ideas to decide several questions: the definition of the Rumanian being; the placing of him in conditions most propitious to the creation of original values; the influencing of his future1 Munteanu raises issues that have driven Romanian politics and culture since 1989. That he recorded these thoughts in 1939 is quite revealing. Publishing in Romania since the early 1990s has actively revisited many of the same questions Romanian intellectuals first raised in the interwar period, but were frequently unable completely or unequivocally to answer. As the communist dictatorship circumscribed legitimate discourse under state socialism, the last decade and a half has marked for Romanians an exhilarating rediscovery both of their country's intellectual heritage and of its enduring relevance for the challenges the Romanian nation faces today as it stands at the threshold of the European Union and struggles to elaborate a meaningfully usable past. If any descriptors sum up the state of Romanian publishing over the past two decades, they are "collapse, explosion, and recovery." Between Elena Ceau~escu's accession to membership in the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party in 1973 and her gradual 1 Basil Munteano, Modern Rumanian Literature (Bucharest: Curentul Press, 1939), 166. Gregory C. Ference and Bradley L. Schaffner, eds. Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 145-5 7. (Indiana Slavic Studies, 16.) 146 DANIEL M. PENN ELL assumption of greater authority in the cultural sphere, the number of volumes published in Romania declined from an average of 60,00070 ,000 annually in the early 1970s, to a mere 1,800 by 19892 At the beginning of 1990, Romania had but twenty-seven official state publishers . Book production was governed by the usual bureaucratic processes characteristic of most of the East Central European communist states, whereby manuscripts first had to pass ideological muster with the Council for Socialist Culture and, only then, would be submitted to their assigned publishing houses for publication. The State Office for Book Distribution determined a title's number of copies and arranged for its distribution in bookstores3 By 1991, Romania had 10,000 registered publishing houses, some of which printed titles in hundreds of thousands of copies,4 especially in fields formerly taboo under the communist regime, including primary sources such as memoirs , diaries, and document collections. These genres had been prohibited because often they contested the state's official version of the national past. Popular fiction, such as thrillers and romance novels, also appeared in great quantities, having been generally rejected under communism for their socially deviant contents. By the early years of the new millennium, economic realities, including production costs, which have risen forty percent since 1998,5 along with a general decline in readership, began to contain the industry . Today, only about one hundred publishing houses are in continuous operation, and of those, approximately ten now dominate the market, with the former state publishers maintaining only a small presence6 In spite of constraints, the overall state of Romanian publishing remains vibrant. The number of published titles continues to 2 Author's interview with Horia C. Matei, former head of the Encyclopedic Publishing House (Editura enciclopedica) and current director of Meronia Publishers (Editura Meronia), conducted in Bucharest on September 9,2005. 3 Oana Radu and $tefania Ferchedau, eds., A Short Guide to the Romanian Cultural Sector Today: Mapping Opportunities for Cultural Cooperation (Bucharest: Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bucharest and ECUMEST Association, 2005), 140. 4Ibid. S Ibid. 6 Author's interview with Doina Marian, Managing Director of the Romanian Publishers' Association (AER), conducted in Bucharest on September 8, 2005. CONTI NUITY and CHANGE IN ROMANIAN PUBLI SHING 147 increase, from an average of just over 6,000 in 1993, to nearly 10,000 in 20037 The average print-run of books in recent years has also stabilized to between 2,000 and 2,500 copies.s One of the most urgent challenges is distribution, the privatization of which has still not benefited from substantial investment and has left many small and mediumsized cities, with populations in the 10,000-20,000 range, without any bookshops.9 Another issue is to formulate new ways to measure reader purchasing patterns...