LEAVING FANTASY ISLAND

New York publishers shift right in a drive for readers (Hillel Italie, 5/21/2003, Associated Press)

The operators of the Book-of-the-Month Club announced yesterday that they are forming a new club, as yet unnamed, devoted to works with a conservative point of view. Within the past month, Penguin Putnam and the Crown Publishing Group have started branches with a conservative bent.

''We don't think we've done enough in this area. We have featured conservative authors like Bill Bennett, but we've never presented them in a coherent way,'' says Mel Parker, senior vice president and editorial director of Bookspan, which runs the Book-of-the-Month Club and several other clubs.

Bookspan is co-owned by Bertelsmann AG and AOL Time Warner Inc., and its new club is scheduled to begin operations by early next year. Brad Miner, a former literary editor with the conservative National Review, will serve as editor.

Miner should have plenty of material. Penguin and Crown (a division of Random House Inc.) plan to publish about 15 books a year, each with conservative readers in mind. Regnery Publishing, a conservative press based in Washington, D.C., puts out 25 to 30 titles a year.

If you want to understand this phenomenon, here's all you have to do: read just about any liberal best-seller from the 50s/60s and a conservative text written around the same time. Even for a conservative it is shocking to see how badly the Left's ideas fared and how timeless the Right's have proven. President Bush could practically run his next campaign on the platform Barry Goldwater enunciated in Conscience of a Conservative while even the Communist Chinese no longer believe in the worldview that John Kenneth Galbraith laid out in The Affluent Society. The literature of the Left has been sideswiped by reality. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2003 12:36 PM