Now Barabbas Author:William Jovanovich The publishing of books is, in William Jovanovich's view and by the evidence of this book, "one of the most civilized of worldly pursuits." Here are eleven essays on the principal varieties of publishing, and on writing, reading, and learning, which reveal scholarship, practicality, wit, and a rigorous style. — The world of books has seldom been ... more »so informatively described as in "Now, Barabbas," and rarely explored with so little "shop talk" but with so much urbane reflection as in this delightful volume. It is hard to find a cliche in these pages, as it is hard to miss the penetrating phrasing of a serious mind at work. A sampler:
Intellectual freedom is not, in the long view, measured by readers, but by writers. An idea of value develops its own motive power and will move through many minds.
Progress is never absolute and most often it is not even relative: some things were done better before.
Style, after all, is not alone how one says things, but how one conceives them.
Editors try to please authors and so tend to accept dubious books but this is not a serious crime against readers, only against authors.
A book that is created from a writer's passion, from his search for reality, is a rare thing and ought to be valuable because it is uncommon and unrepeatable.
On the American writer: One of his characteristic moods is a haunting, brooding sense of disappointment. Few Europeans, with their history, have it.
Publishers, if they are first-rate, can afford to have short memories and high hopes.
Most governments have a political stake in public education and, by inference, in the books it employs.
On publishing "dirty books": In the view of some angry or aggrieved readers, we are guilty of what might be called literary peculation, a new kind of white-collar crime.
Freethinkers are on their own. And so, in the end, are publishers.« less