NO THANKS, ANNE FRANK: when even the great publishers stumble

Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and the publishing house he built are among the great treasures of literary history.

Nevertheless, the immense trove of Knopf papers now housed at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center proves that Knopf rejected just as many future bestsellers, for just as many ridiculous reasons, as anybody else.

In a practice that still continues today, the piles of submissions sent to agents and, back in the day, publishers are often screened by anonymous readers, usually writers or critics desperatae for extra income. (Yes, Working Writer has been among these forgotten toilers. But only in poetry manuscripts, so don't blame her that Penguin turned your novel down.) Most of these readers are both bright and well-meaning, but as I said in my last post, no one is truly impartial, entirely open, or even eternally in a good mood.

Over the years, Knopfs's readers dismissed, among others, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. My favorite among their embarrassing errors is surely their rejection of The Diary of Anne Frank. As illustrious historian David Oshinsky wrote in a delightful article in the New York Times, "the work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

Here's what I love about this: this criticism is so totally wrong, but it's also so totally understandable. The book was being considered in 1950, not a year famous for its openness to honest, unguarded female stories, much less books by obscure teenagers. If I had been its reader then, would I have recognized the priceless human tale tucked within the diary's intimate, apparently trivial events?

I like to think I would have. But honestly, I'm not one hundred percent sure.

Doubleday's Everyman's Library has recently published a lovely hardcover edition of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.

And it seems fitting that the re-launch of Everyman's in the early 1990s, which made possible its republication of Anne Frank now, was supported in the U.S. by none other than the firm of Alfred A. Knopf.