Reviews of Independent Press Books in Counterpoise and Other Publications

Juris Dilevko Keren Dali - sees its mission as providing a counter balance to mainstream and corporate media outlets. As Willett comments in the Editors Notes of the inaugural issue of Counterpoise, one of the journals found ing premises is, If we castigate the New York Times for its news bias, why trust its book reviews? And what about main stream library journalsar ent they wed ded to profit, fame and privilege. Re view journals, aping commerce and government, have chosen money as their first variable. 4 As a result, mainstream journals and newspapers have a tendency to review materials that are produced by large, corporate-controlled publishers who have significant marketing and ad vertising budgets. Such mainstream ven ues may not necessarily present alternaJuris Dilevko and Keren Dali are members of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto; e-mail: and . tive points of view encouraging social re sponsibility, liberty and dissent, as af firmed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the Library Bill of Rights, the Talloires Declaration (aca demic environmental stewardship), the Valdez Principles (corporate environmen tal responsibility), and related docu ments. 5 In fact, because six media con glomerates and the public relations industryoperating in close association with corporations, governments and uni versitiescontr ol the production and dis semination of most mainstream informa tion and entertainment, concerned librarians, educators and activists around the world look to Counterpoise for access to materials and ideas that liberate the mind and defend democracy, peace, so cial justice, and the environment. 6 This is especially true because [w]hat distin guishes Counterpoise from review journals that just mirror the global, profit-oriented, capitalist culture is its concern for posi tive social change; what distinguishes it from other alternative journals is the breadth, depth and reliability of its cov erage. 7 Invoking the names of Howard Zinn, author of A Peoples History of the United States, and Edward Herman, author of an essay entitled T oward a Democratic Media and coauthor with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Willett suggests that for-profit media follow an agenda that perpetuates historical bias by telling stories from the point of view of victors, not victims. On the other hand, the ideas and publications of the alterna tive press are often ignor ed, misrepre sented or suppressed by corporate and government media, 8 despite the fact that, taken collectively, the alternative press is an enormous body of books, pamphlets, magazines, zines, and audiovisual and electronic materials presenting socially responsible knowledge, points of view and choices. 9 In short, the alternative press is a democratic media or ganized and controlled by ordinary citizens and their grassroots organizations. 10 Given this background, Counterpoise describes, criticizes, defends and promotes these [al ternative] publications and products against this bias, 11 that is, the bias of be ing overlooked by mainstream reviewing publications. And, as Willett suggests at the conclusion of his editorial, fighting against the bias of money-oriented, mainstream review journals is a neverending struggle that calls for a steady infusion of monetary resources.12 Literature Review The mere existence of a publication such as Counterpoise testifies to the lively de bate within librarianship about the effi cacy of reviewing tools, especially with regard to what Willett identifies as the alternative press. The explosive growth of small presses (or alternative presses) in the 1960s and 1970s caused the library community to ask itself hard questions about the degree to which publications of these small presses (or alternative presses) were being collected by libraries. The views of scholars such as Ross Atkinson, who noted that a novel reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Re view would be purchased by libraries r e gardless of who wrote the novel, where it was published, what it is about, or even what the review says about it 13 and that academic titles reviewed in core journals will invariably be acquired, led others to ponder the responsibility of libraries in collecting small press titles that may not be reviewed at all, let alone in core jour nals. In 1984, Judith Serebnick and John Cullars observed that 47.2 percent of small press titles published in 1980 re ceived at least one review, with ten jour nals publishing 54.3 percent of those re views.14 In 1992, Serebnick reported that, of 450 small press titles published in 1986, only 38.9 percent received at least one re view and only twelve titles received six or more reviews each.15 As in her earlier study, a small number of journals (14) accounted for a majority of all reviews (53.4%).16 Journals most frequently re viewing small press titles were Booklist, Choice, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, each with more than twenty re views of such titles.17 In 2000, Juris Dilevko and Alison Hayman demon strated that both Library Journal and the New York Times Book Review consistently reviewed independently published fic tion titles at a rate of between 30% and 40% of all fiction titles r eviewed by each publication in 19941997 (Library Journal, 35.3%; New York Times Book Review, 37.2%).18 These two publications therefore reviewed corporately published books at a rate of 64.7 percent and 62.8 percent, re spectively, of all published booksa per centage that quite closely parallels the market share of the seven corporate pub lishers (66.2% in 1997), according to fig ures supplied by Book Publishing Report. 19 Given the fact that the presence or absence of reviews of small press titles is positively related to the number of libraries owning such titles,20 much energy has been de voted to making publications of all types more cognizant of small presses and thus more amenable to reviewing the books produced by them. Nevertheless, believ ing that these efforts were insufficient, Willett founded Counterpoise in 1997. Purpose Before outlining the purpose of this ar ticle, a word needs to be said about the use of the terms small pr ess or alter native press. First, the very concept of small press is problematic because it has undergone a major transformation from the BC era (before personal computers or prior to 1980) to the beginning of the twenty-first century.21 Indeed, the evolu tion has been such that Tom Person sug gests replacing small pr ess with the more pragmatic term independent pub lishing or independent pr ess, which he defines as a company that does not belong to another company or corpora tion. 22 From this point of view, then, the terms small pr ess, independent press, and alternative pr ess ar e syn onymous because these presses produce titles that present an alternative to main stream or corpor (...truncated)