Andre Schiffrin – författare

Brings together over 300 all-new cartoons from the WWII era, including over 100 by Dr Seuss, 50 by The New Yorker's Saul Steinberg and works by Al Hirschfeld, Carl Rose and Mischa Richter. The cartoons and commentary cover the five years of the war and are divided into five chapters exploring the years leading up to the war, Hitler and Germany, Hitler's Allies, The Home Front and Germany's defeat.

Ten years after the publication of The Business of Books, his groundbreaking critique of conglomeration in the book industry, Andr� Schiffrin turns his attention to the broader crisis in the media. Just as corporatization and the lowest-common-denominator pursuit of the bottom line have had a parlous effect on publishing, media consolidation has contributed to the ongoing demise of serious journalism in newspapers, magazines, serious broadcast news, and online journalism. Schiffrin compares the media crisis in the United States to the situation in Europe and across the globe, and he demonstrates how the American corporate model has extended its reach. But he also describes and considers a range of alternative policies culled from many countries that, if pursued, could help to save journalism and the media in the US. This is a superlative essay that will make everyone seriously interested in the media and publishing think again.

Post-war American publishing has been ruthlessly transformed since André Schiffrin joined its ranks in 1956. Gone is a plethora of small but prestigious houses that often put ideas before profit in their publishing decisions, sometimes even deliberately. Now six behemoths share 80% of the market and profit margin is all.André Schiffrin can write about these changes with authority because he witnessed them from inside a conglomerate, as head of Pantheon, co-founded by his father, bought (and sold) by Random House. And he can write about them with candor because he is no longer on the inside, having quit corporate publishing in disgust to set up a flourishing independent house, The New Press. Schiffrin's evident affection for his authors sparkles throughout a story woven around publishing the work of those such as Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Juliet Mitchell, R. D. Laing, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P.Thompson.Part-memoir, part-history, here is an account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing that is irascible, acute and passionate. An engaging counterpoint to recent, celebratory memoirs of the industry written by those with more stock options and fewer scruples than Schiffrin, The Business of Books warns of the danger to adventurous, intelligent publishing in the bullring of today's marketplace.

Las recientes transformaciones que han afectado la cadena de producción del libro se han analizado, en general, desde el punto de vista del proceso de racionalización y de concentración, como causantes de la aceleración del círculo de fusiones-adquisiciones de estos últimos años. Curiosamente, se ha prestado menos atención a las modificaciones sufridas por la configuración de las relaciones espaciales y de la estructura del espacio de la producción editorial. Ahora bien, el comercio del libro es, ante todo, un asunto de territorios, y estos determinan las formas de circulación: zonas lingüísticas, áreas geográficas de distribución, fronteras nacionales que circunscriben espacios jurídicos y políticas públicas, territorios imaginarios que asocian identidades con lugares y crean un horizonte de expectativa.