Mediaboss Marketing

Zach Maher

Getting started can be difficult. When your name draws a blank, its unlikely that anyone will buy what youre selling. Luckily, the attention that worthy unknowns need in order to get noticed has a price. And for fifty years, publishers with books to sell and authors with a name to make have announced their arrival with an appearance in The New York Review: though not, at least initially, under a byline.

In the Reviews twenty-ninth issue, dated October 22, 1964, the third of more than thirty books written by the historian Howard Zinn was advertised on page 13. Zinn was a professor at Boston University when Beacon Press published SNCC: The New Abolitionists in 1964, and not completely unknown: five years earlier, his doctoral dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia had won a prestigious award from the American Historical Association. But Howard Zinns examination of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and their revolutionary spirit (whose implications, the ads copy promises, we have only begun to realize,) drew the attention of general readers, sympathetic and otherwise. Four months after the books ad appeared and in the same pages, Laura Carper considered SNCC: The New Abolitionists in an omnibus review focused on race relations.

The poet Seamus Heaney has contributed, among other pieces, a memoriam of Robert Lowell and an article on Thomas Flanagan to the Review. And when Heaneys acclaimed translation of Beowulf was published in 1999, a passage was excerpted in the NYRB with insightful critical and exegetic notes from the author. But the first time his name appeared, in a single-column ad that ran in the October 8, 1968 issue of the Review, Heaney, or more precisely his publisher, Oxford University Press, was a paying advertiser. An impressive and sensitive collection, this is the first volume of poems by a young poet who has already won an appreciative audience in his native Ireland, read the copy for his book Death of Naturalist. Almost thirty years later, the Nobel Prize committee would justify their selection of Heaney as laureate with less subdued praise for his works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.

The move Howard Zinn and Seamus Heaney made from the Reviews advertising margins to its editorial substance wasnt unique. Renata Adler, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Carson: before these names could dependably draw a crowd, marketers and copy-writers introduced them to readers of the Review.

A Year in the Dark (Random House) and Toward a Radical Middle (Random House), the first two books written by The New Yorker staffwriter, critic, journalist, and novelist Renata Adler, were advertised in the March 12, 1970 issue of the Review. Their titles appeared beneath a dramatic author photo (a novelty in a publication that, for several years, was almost exclusively illustrated by David Levine and Grandville.) Adlers name would move onto a New York Review byline in 1980, when she published her famously critical review of the film critic Pauline Kael; and then in 2013, NYRB Classics returned Adlers two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, to print.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy is famously publicity averse. Nevertheless, in the October 8, 1968 issue of the Review, the camera-shy southwesterner, flush with the success of his first novel, swallowed his pride and lent his likeness to Random Houses advertisements for his second, Outer Dark. I saw you blush! Oprah would accuse McCarthy, years later, when he joined her book club to chat about his novel The Road. In 1968, the author does no such thing: he grins toothily, like a rockabilly star, his hair slicked up into a modest pompadour.

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