Profits and Values in Publishing

Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings (“has left to pursue other interests”). Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs is a capitalist fact of life. It must have come as a surprise to many, then, that the firing last February of Andre Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon Books, became a minor cause célèbre in which book editors dueled in the New York Times, and authors walked a picket line and s...