Publishing is an art, not a science

“Publishing is an art, not a science” is Signor Garamond’s compact credo for a trade in which editorial judgment, commercial calculation, and theatrical persuasion cannot be separated. In the novel, the phrase first sounds like a plea for flexibility; in the light of Garamond’s publishing methods, it also names the skill with which a publisher can shape manuscripts, authors’ expectations, and a market that does not yet exist.

Garamond’s editorial principle

At Garamond’s office, Casaubon questions the publisher about the careful production and impressive catalog of his books. Garamond explains that his colleague Diotallevi handles reference books and large projects, while he oversees university editions. Much of that work is deliberately low-risk: institutional publications and conference proceedings, with a beginner’s professor writing the preface, the author correcting proofs and checking citations, and no royalties. A few thousand copies sold over several years cover expenses. The arrangement prizes reliability over surprise, treating editorial work as the management of a predictable undertaking.

Garamond’s other tasks already complicate that orderly picture. Manutius publishes selected books at its own expense, often translations by prestigious authors that lend distinction to the catalog, and reads manuscripts left at the door even though few are publishable. The publisher cannot know in advance which submission might matter. His maxim that publishing is an art rather than a science thus fits a business built both on routine calculations and on judgments made under uncertainty.

Manutius and the author’s investment

The contrast becomes stark when the novel describes Manutius as a vanity press for self-financing authors. Its staff consists of four people: Garamond, Signora Grazia, a bookkeeper, and Luciano, a disabled shipping clerk who works in the half-basement storeroom. Unlike an ordinary publisher, Manutius sends books chiefly to their authors rather than to booksellers. Garamond’s priority, as Belbo describes it, is keeping those authors loyal; readers are not essential to the model.

The imagined negotiation with the poet De Gubernatis shows how that loyalty is cultivated. Garamond first tells the author that his work is sublime, that reports are favorable, and that he has spent a sleepless night reading the manuscript. The praise is followed by a limit: the book is supposedly ahead of its time and may sell only two thousand or twenty-five hundred copies. De Gubernatis, whose imagined audience is made up of people he knows—schoolmates, bank managers, fellow teachers, and others—then fears the embarrassment of having announced that a large Milan publisher is considering his work. He offers to pay part of the costs.

The contract turns that offer into the real business arrangement. Its ten pages, set in tiny type, cover foreign and subsidiary rights, adaptations, broadcasting, film, Braille editions, abridgments, and legal disputes. The author may fail to notice that the contract permits a print run of up to ten thousand without guaranteeing a minimum, makes his payment independent of the agreed print run, and allows Manutius to pulp unsold copies after a year unless he buys them at half the list price. What is presented as an opportunity for recognition transfers much of the financial risk to the aspiring author.

The launch supplies the appearance of a substantial publishing campaign: ten-page press releases, a biography, and critical essays. The actual production is far smaller than the spectacle suggests. Of one thousand printed copies, only three hundred and fifty are bound; two hundred go to the author, while small numbers are sent to minor bookshops, provincial magazines, and newspapers. Some are later donated to hospitals or prisons. The gap between promotional display and actual distribution makes Garamond’s maxim less a celebration of creative freedom than a description of practiced management: success depends on controlling impressions as much as producing books.

From editorial discretion to Project Hermes

Garamond’s approach also makes room for an enterprise more ambitious than vanity publishing. He notices that occult and Hermetic books appear to attract readers and proposes Project Hermes, a new branch devoted to that market. He presents it partly as a cultural duty, offering readers faith or a glimpse of the beyond, but recognizes its commercial potential as well. His phrase about publishing as an art accompanies a refusal to treat the project as a purely academic classification: Casaubon is told to include cabala in his research even though it does not fit neatly among metals, and Garamond insists that research requires a Spartan spirit, disallowing a couchette from the expense account.

The project is not left as a rough idea. Manutius prepares a series called “Isis Unveiled,” while Belbo, writing under the pseudonym Dr. Moebius, publishes an article announcing a modern occult revival. Garamond then sends letters under different names to reviews devoted to Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy, asking about the planned series. Their editors call Manutius for information; Garamond acts as though the first ten titles are under way but cannot yet be revealed. The campaign uses apparent outside interest to alert occult readers to the project. Its glossy four-page flier completes the staging with a black cover design, a golden seal, and language promising knowledge beyond what science can provide.

The maxim’s wider irony

The novel places Garamond’s publishing credo beside a wider problem of judgment: the boundary between disciplined inquiry and occult pattern-making begins to blur for Casaubon. He catches himself marveling at supposed measurements of the Great Pyramid and asking houses, shop signs, clouds, and library engravings to disclose a deeper story through mystical resemblances. In this context, the contrast between art and science acquires an unsettling resonance. A publisher’s ability to package claims and generate attention belongs to the same world in which suggestive correspondences can be made to look like proof.

That slippage is dramatized when Aglie takes a manuscript about the pyramids’ supposedly sacred measurements and repeats its numerical arguments. He then exposes their looseness: rounding changes the result, and the measurements can be made to yield impressive correspondences elsewhere, including in the dimensions of a street kiosk. Later, the proposed explanation of ancient engineering turns electricity or radioactivity into mere masks for an ancestral force identified as telluric currents. In each case, numerical or scientific language lends authority to a claim that exceeds what the evidence establishes.

The distinction matters because the novel also gives the occult system a grand explanatory reach. Its account of telluric currents imagines the Earth as a magnet whose changing forces are influenced by celestial cycles; finding the currents’ central point, the Omphalos or Navel of the World, would supposedly permit their direction and command. An account of hollow Earth theory then folds the hypothesis into a fabricated history of Nazi ambitions and the search for the Templars’ final map. Such passages show how a system can absorb disparate claims and convert them into apparent confirmation.

Against that expansive logic, Garamond’s maxim remains double-edged. His trade does require judgment rather than a formula, but his art also consists of recognizing desires, arranging appearances, and turning uncertainty into a saleable promise. The phrase therefore connects the practical machinery of publishing—from cautious university editions to self-financed books and Project Hermes—to the novel’s scrutiny of how persuasive form can make weak or speculative claims seem worthy of belief.