The Joy of Bad Books

One of my early jobs in New York was working as an assistant to a book editor. The position was at a venerable but fading imprint with offices in Rockefeller Center that was filled with characters—the kinds of bent personalities that you rarely find in the streamlined “workspaces” of today. There was a lot of free time. An editor could discover one or two authors and make a career out of it. The assistants could pay a lot of attention to horse racing and their personal zines. (This was the late nineties.) The editor of an extremely popular self-help book spent most of his time playing Windows solitaire and flirting with his assistant. Lunch was weirdly, dementedly important. Hours and hours of lunch. And then more phone calls afterward. 

While the editors were at lunch, the assistants would play solitaire or read the slush pile; typically, these were misguided projects that some book agent had accepted and would mass mail to editors to satisfy a client. The memoir that should have been left under the bed. The inscrutable sci-fi novel with its bespoke vocabulary. A long apocalyptic poem—that rhymed. But there were lots of projects that were interesting, but not something that you would want to acquire. I once read a twelve-hundred-page manuscript (courier font) about the rise of Boris Yeltsin that had an obsessive momentum, and, to this day, I still retain facts about Soviet construction directorates. 

In this way, I read a lot of bad manuscripts—bad in that they were not really fit for publication but good in that they could contain startling assertions, wild asides, and had a funky personal aura. This summer, I picked up a galley of The Accidental Life by Terry McDonnell (who had a long, distinguished editing career at Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, and similar) and his book is name-droppy and almost unbearably romantic about the golden age of magazine journalism. (Imagine a time when magazines could afford to send William T. Vollmann to Antarctica.) It’s the rare bad manuscript that made it to publication and became an excellent bad book. 

There are many choice details—Jann Wenner upstaging McDonnell by jumping off a higher cliff on a father-son river trip, George Plimpton referring to cocaine as “the chemicals”—and the stories are mostly set in the musky world of writing men. There is a chapter on the now incomprehensible cultural power of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. McDonnell also had a front-row seat to the missteps of the magazine giants (Esquire, Newsweek) as a generation of publishing executives missed what the Internet was going to do to their plush worlds. There is another astounding chapter about when everyone thought that the iPad was going to save the print magazine. McDonnell’s book is also shot through with an underlying melancholy that any editor will recognize. You hand out the candy, and then wait behind the desk.