Robert Gottlieb's visible labor

Robert Gottlieb, who died this week, was arguably the most visible worker in all of book publishing, his extraordinary labor highlighted in memoir and documentary and now, of course, in obituaries. I liked his book Avid Reader, and I liked many of the books he edited and published. As someone pursuing a career in the same field, I was glad there was a public figure making my job intelligible for nonspecialists—someone whose book about publishing helped my dad, for example, make sense of what I was doing (far less successfully) all day.

Given all of Gottlieb’s visible work, it’s funny that the Times obit concludes with Gottlieb saying “the editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one.” (It’s drawn from an interview with the Paris Review.) An editor’s relationship to an individual author’s book, obviously, is just one part of publishing, and Gottlieb is presumably talking specifically about making invisible his editorial interventions on the page. But the insistence on obscuring work that’s already treated, so widely, as invisible seems important and not surprising. Commemorating a publishing life, the paper of record concludes with a publisher erasing himself.

Today the meaning of publishing feels up for grabs (is posting to Facebook really publishing?), confusion about the field drives a lot of anger, and publishing workers are asserting themselves in new efforts to organize. I don’t think it detracts from Robert Gottlieb’s remarkable achievements to hope for a more urgent sense of political self-awareness on the part of publishing’s new generation of successful figures, and on the part of those summing up their careers.