I keep a shelf in my office that is separate from the main library. It is not organized alphabetically or by genre. The books on it are the ones I think every publisher, editor, or anyone working in the book business should own and return to regularly. Some of them are about publishing. Most of them are not. They are books about taste, judgment, attention, and the strange alchemy of putting words in front of people who need them.

This list is personal. It reflects my own biases and blind spots. Other publishers would assemble a completely different shelf, and that is fine. But these are the books that have shaped how I think about this work, and I think anyone starting or running a publishing operation would benefit from reading them.

The Books About the Business Itself

Let me start with the practical ones, the books that deal directly with what it means to publish and sell books in the modern world.

Jason Epstein’s “Book Business” is the single best overview of how American publishing evolved from a cottage industry into a corporate enterprise and what was lost along the way. Epstein was an editor at Random House for decades, and he writes with the authority of someone who watched the industry transform from the inside. His chapters on the economics of publishing are more honest than anything I have read before or since. He does not sentimentalize the old days, but he is clear-eyed about the costs of consolidation. I have re-read this book at least four times, and each time I find something new that applies to a problem I am currently facing.

Andre Schiffrin’s “The Business of Books” is a useful companion piece. Schiffrin ran The New Press and had strong opinions about the commercialization of publishing. He is more polemical than Epstein, and I do not agree with everything he argues, but his account of how profit margins crept up from the traditional 3-4% to the double digits demanded by corporate owners is essential reading. It explains so much about why the industry makes the decisions it does today.

For the mechanics of actually running a small press, I recommend Jonathan Galassi’s “Muse.” It is technically a novel, but it is so clearly based on Galassi’s decades at Farrar, Straus and Giroux that it reads as a roman a clef about literary publishing. The relationships between editors and authors, the politics of acquisitions meetings, the anxiety of waiting for reviews. It is all there, thinly veiled and very funny.

Michael Korda’s “Another Life” covers his years at Simon & Schuster and is both entertaining and instructive. Korda writes about the editorial process with more candor than most memoirists in the business. His accounts of working with authors on revisions, of navigating corporate politics while trying to maintain editorial standards, and of the sheer volume of reading required to do the job well are all useful for anyone considering this career.

The Books About Editing and Taste

A publisher’s most important skill is judgment. Knowing what is good. Knowing what will find an audience. Knowing when a manuscript needs another draft and when it is ready. These are not skills you can learn from a textbook, but there are books that sharpen your ability to think about quality.

William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” is the first book I give to new editors. Not because editing is the same as writing, but because Zinsser articulates principles of clarity and economy that apply to both. His chapters on simplicity and clutter have probably done more to improve my editorial eye than any formal training I received. I open it to a random page every few months and always find something worth underlining.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Steering the Craft” is my favorite book on prose style. Le Guin was a brilliant writer, obviously, but she was also a brilliant teacher. Her exercises in point of view, sentence rhythm, and voice are extraordinarily useful for editors who need to diagnose why a passage is not working. I have used her exercises in editorial meetings to help authors see problems in their own prose, and they work every single time.

For understanding narrative structure, I prefer John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” to any of the more popular alternatives. Gardner is rigorous and demanding. He does not offer shortcuts or formulas. Instead, he insists that fiction must create a “vivid and continuous dream” in the reader’s mind, and he explains, with precision and examples, what breaks that dream and what sustains it. This concept has become my primary criterion for evaluating manuscripts. Does the dream hold? If it does not, why not? Gardner usually has the answer.

I also keep a copy of Francine Prose’s “Reading Like a Writer” nearby at all times. Prose goes through classic works of fiction sentence by sentence, explaining why specific word choices work and how small decisions about syntax and rhythm create large effects in meaning. It is the closest thing to a masterclass in close reading that exists in book form. After reading it, you will never look at a paragraph the same way again.

The Books About the Reader

Publishers talk a lot about readers, but we do not always think carefully about what reading actually is, what it does to the brain, and why people do it. A few books have changed how I think about our audience.

Maryanne Wolf’s “Proust and the Squid” is a neuroscience book about reading. Wolf explains how the brain rewires itself to process written language, a task for which it was never evolutionarily designed. Her account of how reading develops in children and what happens when it goes wrong (in dyslexia, for instance) gave me a much deeper appreciation for how remarkable the act of reading is and how much we take it for granted. If you publish books, you should understand what happens in the mind of the person who opens them.

Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading” takes a different approach, tracing the cultural and social history of reading from antiquity to the present. Manguel writes about silent reading versus reading aloud, about private reading versus public performance, about the political implications of literacy. His book is a reminder that the way we read today is not the way people have always read, and it may not be the way they will read in the future. For a publisher, this historical perspective is invaluable. It prevents you from assuming that current reading habits are permanent.

Virginia Woolf’s essays on reading, especially “How Should One Read a Book?” and “The Common Reader,” are still the best articulations of why general readers matter and what they bring to literature that professional critics sometimes miss. Woolf argues for reading as a form of active collaboration between writer and reader, and her description of the “common reader” who reads for pleasure and personal meaning, rather than professional obligation, is one I think about every time we consider which books to acquire.

The Books About Design and Presentation

A book is a physical object, or at least a visual one even in digital formats, and how it looks affects how it is received. Publishers who ignore design are making a mistake.

Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style” is the typography bible. If you publish books and you have not read it, you should stop reading this blog post and order a copy right now. Bringhurst writes about typefaces, margins, line spacing, and page proportions with a care and precision that borders on the spiritual. His book will change how you look at every page of every book you encounter for the rest of your life. I am not exaggerating. My copy is heavily annotated and held together with tape.

Jan Tschichold’s “The Form of the Book” is a collection of essays by the Swiss typographer who standardized the design of Penguin Books in the late 1940s. Tschichold was opinionated to the point of dogmatism, but his opinions were grounded in centuries of typographic tradition and a genuine reverence for the reading experience. His essay on margins alone is worth the price of the book.

For cover design, I recommend Chip Kidd’s “Book One.” Kidd is the most famous book cover designer in America, and his work for Knopf over the past three decades has defined what literary fiction looks like on the shelf. His book is mostly visual, which makes sense, but his annotations about why he made specific design choices are instructive. He talks about the relationship between the cover image and the text, about how much to reveal and how much to withhold, and about the difference between a cover that is merely attractive and one that actually communicates something about the book inside.

The Books About Culture and Context

Publishing does not exist in a vacuum. The books we publish are shaped by and respond to the culture around them. Understanding that culture, its history and its pressures, makes you a better publisher.

Ted Gioia’s “The Gutenberg Parenthesis” argues that the era of print dominance, roughly 1450 to 2000, was a historical anomaly and that we are now returning to an oral, performative culture more similar to the pre-print world. I do not fully agree with his thesis, but it is a bracing challenge to the assumptions most publishers carry around. Even if you reject his conclusions, his framing forces you to think about what books uniquely offer that other media cannot replicate.

Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” is a book about the economics of creative work, arguing that art operates in a gift economy alongside (and sometimes in tension with) the market economy. Hyde’s ideas about how creative work circulates, about the relationship between generosity and commerce, and about the obligations that gifts create have profoundly influenced how I think about the relationship between publishers and authors. We are not just buying and selling a product. We are participating in a gift exchange that has its own rules and expectations.

For a more hard-nosed perspective on the economics of creative industries, I recommend Richard Caves’ “Creative Industries.” Caves was a Harvard economist who applied industrial organization theory to the arts, including publishing. His analysis of why creative industries work the way they do, why most products fail, why the “nobody knows” principle governs investment decisions, and why contracts take the forms they do, is dry but extraordinarily clarifying. It will not make you feel better about the economics of publishing, but it will help you understand why those economics are the way they are.

The Wild Cards

The last few books on my shelf are harder to categorize. They are not about publishing or books specifically, but they have shaped how I approach the work in ways I find difficult to articulate.

John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” changed how I think about images and visual communication. Since so much of publishing involves visual presentation (covers, layouts, marketing materials), Berger’s arguments about how context shapes perception are directly relevant. His chapter on publicity and advertising, where he argues that all publicity works by proposing that we will be transformed by buying something, applies disturbingly well to book marketing.

Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” is a slim book that I keep returning to for courage. Dillard writes about the daily struggle of sitting down to produce work that you know will probably fail, and her honesty about the emotional costs of creative labor helps me be a better editor and publisher. When an author tells me they are struggling, I think of Dillard, and it helps me respond with understanding rather than impatience.

Finally, I keep a copy of Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic” on the shelf. This may seem odd for a publishing office, but Seneca writes about time, priorities, and the difference between being busy and being productive in ways that feel eerily relevant to modern work life. His letter on the shortness of life, where he argues that life is long enough if we stop wasting it on trivial pursuits, is one I re-read every January. It helps me remember that every book we choose to publish is also a choice not to publish something else, and that our time and attention are the most finite resources we have.

At ScrollWorks, our editorial philosophy is shaped by many of these ideas. When we work on a project like Still Waters or The Cartographer’s Dilemma, the decisions we make about editing, design, and presentation draw on the accumulated wisdom of these books and the conversations they have provoked over the years.

You do not need to agree with everything on this shelf. I do not agree with everything on this shelf. What matters is that you have a shelf like it, a collection of books that challenge your assumptions, refine your taste, and remind you why this strange, unprofitable, irresistible business is worth doing at all. If you work in publishing and you do not have such a shelf, start building one today. Your future decisions will be better for it.