Last Thursday afternoon, Dennis Johnson sat at his desk at Melville House, the independent press in Dumbo of which he is the co-founder and co-publisher, contemplating blurb copy for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s Study of the C.I.A.’s Detention and Interrogation Program—the torture report, as it’s popularly known. “The New York Times called it ‘a portrait of depravity that’s hard to comprehend.’ Do I want to put that on the cover?” Johnson, a strong-chinned fifty-seven-year-old with a tiny gold hoop in his left ear and a genteel lisp, made a skeptical, take-it-or-leave-it noise. “It’ll sell it to some people.”
The text of the report, as released two days earlier by the Intelligence Committee, is a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page PDF with the slanted margins and blurred resolution of a Xerox made by a myopic high-school Latin teacher. It’s pocked with black redaction lines and crammed with footnotes of David Foster Wallace-ian scope. The report is in the public domain and freely available online, but, for reasons of form as well as of content, it’s hell to read. Johnson and his wife, Valerie Merians, started Melville House at their kitchen table in Hoboken in late 2001. At the time, Merians was working as a sculptor and Johnson as a freelance literary journalist, blogging under the name MobyLives. The press’s first book was a collection of poetry responding to 9/11; it soon became known for works of political reportage with a leftist streak, including, in 2006, “Torture Taxi,” an investigation of the C.I.A.’s extraordinary-rendition program. A tangible, legible edition of the torture report seemed exactly the kind of thing that the press exists to publish, but how to beat out the competition?
“I’ve always been envious of other publishers in the past who got previous reports,” Johnson said. “It made us ache. But the government gave special preference to certain publishers for these projects.” In 2004, the 9/11 Commission signed a contract with Norton that gave the publisher access to a formatted manuscript in time for the book’s printing to coincide with the report’s official release. Other presses put out their own editions; Norton’s was the only one to become a best-seller. Still, when PublicAffairs, which published the Starr Report and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s report on the 2008 crash, contacted the office of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Intelligence Committee, to ask for similar access to the torture report, it was rebuffed.
“I’m saying to myself, Jesus, they’re not going to do it if they don’t get preferential treatment,” Johnson said. “So we decided to step up and do it ourselves.” Melville House will publish the report in paperback and e-book editions on December 30th. Copies will go for $16.95, available everywhere books are sold, as they used to say when books were still sold in most places, “from Amazon down to the lowliest retailer—not that Amazon is the highliest retailer.” (Amazon, Johnson’s bête noir, is offering the book for $13.82.)
“There’s a lot of reasons why this is insane,” Johnson said. “We’ve basically shut down the company to do this at the busiest time of the year.” The cost of printing alone, he estimated, would run to six figures, a lot of money for such a small, if scrappy, operation to risk. There’s also the possibility that Americans may feel that a book detailing the chronic and grotesque abuses of its government is not in keeping with the Joy to the World spirit. As Johnson put it, “Torture isn’t something you want to carry over the holiday season.”
Still, Johnson has faith in the power of the book as a physical object—“You can still read the first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible. I’ve seen it. It still works! The binding has held up!”—and in the power of the written word to move the masses to action. “They really were reading that at Valley Forge,” he said, of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” “They really did sell a hundred thousand copies of that in what was then a tiny little country. That’s probably the equivalent of—” he paused to do a mental calculation. “Tens of millions of copies today. It really did inspire people to go into revolution!”
The manuscript of the torture report was due to the printer at nine the next morning, a start-to-finish turnaround of less than seventy-two hours. A dozen full-time employees, plus a smattering of freelance proofreaders, copy-editors, interns, and volunteers sat at computers, retyping the government PDF’s tangle of text into Microsoft Word files. Melville House’s office was once a warehouse, and a nose-to-the-grindstone atmosphere—part college library, part North Pole workshop—pervaded the space.
Mark Krotov, the senior editor in charge of managing the workflow, walked the floor, offering encouragement. “He tells us what to do and how to do it, and we follow his orders,” Julia Fleischaker, the press’s director of publicity, said. Krotov, who is reedy of build and light of beard, looked at his shoes. “The tasks are very limited,” he demurred. “Just, you know, copy, paste.”
When asked for his assessment of the report’s literary merit, Krotov hesitated. “Sleeplessness is producing some very odd readings,” he said. Riffling through a sheaf of pages, he pointed to the phrase “This information was inaccurate,” which runs through the report with a frequency that Beckett would not have found displeasing. “The more you read it, the more you see that there’s a literary intentionality to this,” he observed. Style-wise, the 9/11 Commission Report exerts a certain anxiety of influence over other government reports. It is written with a pulsing, novelistic vividness, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction, an honor that Krotov didn’t foresee for the torture report. “This is dense, and the stuff is repetitive,” he said, adding, diplomatically, “But it’s not written without great care.”
Back in Johnson’s corner, talk had turned to the future of the press beyond the impending deadline. The office’s lease had recently expired and the rent doubled, the usual story of hip New York neighborhoods purging the places that made them hip. Overhead, a metal heater rattled like a plane at takeoff. “We didn’t have heat for the first part of the day,” Johnson explained. Behind him hung a photograph from Merians’s last art show, an abstract image that, given the hour, seemed to the metaphorically inclined to show a sun sinking from a purple sky into a purple sea.
On Sunday night, Johnson e-mailed to announce that the deadline had been extended by “an apparently sympathetic and similarly patriotic printer” to the following morning. Conditions weren’t ideal: “The heat cut out in the building at about 7 or 8 P.M., as it does every night, so it’s starting to get cold.” Provisions would need to be conserved when the neighborhood’s delis shut for the night. A Chicago bookstore had sent a case of beer, and Twitter fans brought over cookies. “Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery,” George Washington wrote to Governor George Clinton from Valley Forge, in the winter of 1778. There he is, finishing his letter and opening his copy of “Common Sense” to read by tallow candle, the same man who had his officers read Paine’s “The American Crisis” to their troops before crossing the Delaware. You have to be a little crazy to get into book publishing, particularly book publishing of the independent variety. You have to be a little zealous, a little idealistic, a little overheated. You have to feel the thing deeply. Sometimes, a project comes along that stirs the soldiery. Johnson and his team sent the formatted manuscript to the presses at nine-thirty on Monday morning. This weekend, they’ll get some sleep.
