William Jovanovich defines Publishing
I recently picked up a copy of In Art or Instruction, a limited duodecimo-sized edition published in 1969 as a greeting to friends of Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. on the occasion of its fiftieth year.
Here’s what then president William Jovanovich had to say in it about publishing:
"Publishing, too, is steady work, for there can be no end to the constant, perdurable need to instruct and to engage by art and entertainment the whole of society no less than every one. By its best humanistic definition, publishing is a major means by which we conceptualize ourselves, by which we find our what the world is and what it wants of us. Books and journals and films and other media that inform, that tell what is knwon and intimate what is not – these reveal the identity of the reader and viewer no less than that of the author or producer. Assuming that men will always be curous about themselves, publishing must be, like awaiting the millenium, the longest-lived of professions."
