SON OF BOOKMAN (via Ed Driscoll):

All Right Already: Alfred Regnery's Publishing House Goes for the Conservative Gusto, and Leaves The Left Behind (Linton Weeks, September 22, 2002, Washington Post)

[Ann] Coulter says that Regnery recognizes "what almost all mainstream publishers refuse to: That there is a wide swath of conservative intellectuals who read books and no comparable group of liberal intellectuals."

And Regnery is a leper to the left.

Eric Alterman, columnist for the Nation and author of the forthcoming "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News," says it's entirely possible that Regnery's company has published some worthwhile books, "but they have destroyed their reputation with the mainstream by publishing so much crap."

"They're not really interested in convincing people who don't already agree with them," Alterman says.

The company was founded in Chicago in 1947 by Henry Regnery, Al's father. "It is our purpose to publish good books, wherever we find them," Henry wrote in his first catalogue. He also maintained that the books he published would be in "direct opposition to the dominant current of the time."

Over the years, Henry Regnery published such bibles of American conservatism as "The Conservative Mind," by Russell Kirk; the autobiographical "Witness," by Whittaker Chambers, about the dark side of communism; and "God and Man at Yale," by William F. Buckley Jr.

Their reputation with the mainstream? The point is that mainstream publishers won't, or didn't, publish books like these now classics. One award-winning, best-selling author who we're friends with here has an excellent novel that his publishing friends have lauded but which they refuse to publish because its themes are too conservative. He ended up having to publish it himself. That's the kind of ideological strangehold that the Regenerys broke to the great benefit of the public conversation in this country.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2002 10:28 AM