WHEN SI NEWHOUSE JR—the former chairperson of Advance Publications, which owns titles such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker—sold the Random House group, in 1998, to the German media giant Bertelsmann AG, several editorials expressed shock and dismay at the seemingly abrupt decision. The handover had been code-named “Project Black” in emails and company memos, so that the deal remained under wraps.
The questions abounded. Why would you sell Random House and not, for instance, the fledgling Vogue, which was consistently second to Elle in the number of copies sold? Surely the behemoth that had published renowned authors such as James Joyce and William Faulkner could not be written off? Were the profits not reasonable? “I would hope that at this late stage in my career I won’t have to find a new home,” the Pulitzer-winning US novelist John Updike told The Observer, visibly perturbed. The fog around Project Black lifted only a few weeks later, when Random House revealed that it had made a profit of just 0.1 percent. In The Business of Words, André Schiffrin notes that when the New York Times reported this abysmal number, many believed it to be a typographical error.
In February 2022, when the Amazon-owned Indian company Westland Books decided that it would shut shop, authors stared at an uncertain future in which all their books would be pulped within a month. Many theories floated. Had Amazon given into the Modi government’s pressure because it had been publishing supposedly “antiestablishment” books under its Context imprint? Or, simpler still, had Amazon simply taken a hard-headed commercial decision, with Westland losing money?
In 1962, Westland began its journey as Affiliated East West Press, which represented the US publisher of scientific textbooks, D Van Nostrand. The years that followed proved to be rewarding: bookstores, wide distribution networks and a steady rise up the perilous slopes of Indian publishing. Westland had a steady hand backing it in KS Padmanabhan, revered to this day by publishers and industry experts for his vision and literary grit.
Padmanabhan diversified further in the 1970s, and later started publishing literary writing under the imprint Manas, including translations, alongside the editor S Muthiah. In the mid 1990s, Padmanabhan decided to start his own company, East West Books, in Madras. He subsequently entered a partnership deal with the bookstore chain Landmark and formed Westland. He retired at the age of 75 and died in 2013, handing over the reins of the passion project he had nurtured for over more than five decades to Gautam, his son, who subsequently led the company and commissioned some of the most profitable authors in Indian publishing. Padmanabhan remained rooted in the world of literature even after he retired through his Madras Book Club, and continued to indulge his literary interests. Sure, numbers mattered—how could they not? But his steady involvement with the Madras Book Club throughout his life showed that the survival of literature, in whatever form, was what ultimately mattered to him.
