This may be more detail on North Atlantic Books than people will be interested in. If so, skip this interview. It is the last I will do on the topic. Philip wrote afterwards: “Hope we can both get some closure.”
I have generated an approximate transcript using Whisper. It has flaws and I edited it lightly. What I gathered in the process of the interview and the transcription is that Philip is much more interesting than I am in this exchange. He uses more creative thinking, fresher language (“siloing,” “pharisaical,” “rotting from the head down,” “wind sock,” “sock puppet,” “unfunky,” “heat death,” “Cassandra complex,” “semiotics of NAB,” etc.) more complex contextualizing “I wouldn't even give him 1919,” “the BTK killer in Kansas”), and makes more of the political and ideological bridges implicit in the topic (“not diverse in terms of diversity that serves the ideological interests of the insincere”). In fact, my own flaws that led to the crisis and debacle in the first place get replayed in the interview, as I am narcissistically stuck in my own process and continuing to miss the big picture again and again. Thank you, Philip for the retrospective journey through the hell realm of Thing Two.
Richard
I wanted to interview you because I've talked a lot about what happened at North Atlantic books but it's always been my account. And I wanted to have somebody else describe it without really knowing exactly what they were going to say. But before I got to that, I wanted to indicate that you and I knew each other well before I got you messed up in that whole scene.
Philip
A few years.
Richard
Yeah, I think we met over your archiving of material and I was cleaning out. We were closing our warehouse because we were moving to Random House, which would then warehouse all our books. So I was trying to figure out where to put stuff and you were helping me organize it and collecting stuff for your own archive.
Philip
Well, I was a bookseller and am a bookseller and was selling periodicals in particular kind of post-war literary and small press things. And so I knew about Io from that way. I can't recall exactly who put me in touch with you, but it might have been Jeff Maser, the bookseller, because possibly you had approached him when you were downsizing the archive a bit.
Richard
You and I shared magical interests as well.
Philip
Yes.
Although you are much more of a scholar than I was.
Philip
I helped with getting the books packed to go to Random House because it had all been warehoused at the old NAB down by the Bay in Berkeley .
Richard
And then you got hired; we hired you soon after that .
Philip
At the end of 2007
Richard
And how long did you work there?
Philip
10 years
Richad
Yeah, longer than i remembered
Philip
10 years and two months i think
Richard
And during that stretch we were there a while and then we left Berkeley and moved to Maine.
Philip
Yes. at the time i started soon after the NAB office had been moved to MLK by Blake in Berkeley, so it was a unified office and then you came and went; you guys started living in Maine part of the year
RIchard
And one of the things I thought about and you can verify this or nuance it is that what ultimately happened was not entirely the outcome of super-woke people during the first Trump administration deciding to ostracize me for my politics; it was also the fact that what North Atlantic Books was in Lindy's and my vision, going back to the early days of Io, was a combination of literary and esoteric interests converging. The people who shared that view didn't stay. So we basically had a staff of people who didn't understand or have much sympathy for the topics that lay at the basis of the publishing.
Philip
I would agree. And I would say that was largely the case the entire time I was there, that the people you're referring to had left prior to my arriving at the end of 2007. So I think the Random House distribution era can be kind of considered its own thing in terms of the company.
Richard
Yeah, although that I'm not sure that one thing had that much to do with the other but no—
Philip
it's just a container that's easy to understand or to think of
Richard
Yeah, it's always the difference of looking backward and looking forward. Looking forward I didn't think it mattered because I felt as though the authors were what held the press together.
Philip
And personally, even extrapolating the kind of issues you had contended with prior to my being there, I only saw it as positive in the sense that it would remove a lot of busy work and complication and just exterior world concerns onto a kind of reliable professional outsource that could be handled with less constant effort.
RIchard
I'm not sure I follow. You mean your role?
Philip
What I mean in terms of the company's overall self-consciousness. I felt that there was a transition that was necessary between the initial phase of NAB as founded by you and Lindy and started you know in the 70s to being a more multi-person kind of company. I feel that what was needed was somebody like Irving Thalberg, you know, Irving Thalberg, the film executive; he kind of revolutionized film. He came in as a young guy in the early twenties to Universal, and then he moved to MGM and basically set up MGM. And so he personally established the movie studios, we think of it now, or as it was. But he was kind of somebody who could both understand the entirety of the business end of it, but also have input into doing creative things within a business context that made sense and that did not get derailed and go off the tracks.
Richard
Yeah, and I think I imagined that we had accomplished that. Right?
Philip
Right? I was going to just suggest for my purposes, I think that since we have to refer to executives, I thought calling them “Thing One” and “Thing Two,” which is the term from Cat in the Hat where the things come in and cause more problems than they solve, was useful. And it also is helpful because people don't need to know who these people are exactly, but one precedes the other and they're distinct.
Richard
Okay. Well, I thought Thing One solved that problem.
Philip
If Thing One had been Irving Thalberg, that problem would have been solved. The problem was, Thing One was not Irving Thalberg.
Richard
Although Thing One did share a lot of our philosophy and viewpoint, he was interested in shamanism and ethnobotany, and he brought in relevant authors, and it created the illusion that we did have—I don't know Irving Thalberg, but I accept your view of him—it created the illusion that Thing One was that.
Philip
Yes, although I think that, see, I had fairly early on, although I started as an editor, I went into production. So I was doing the reprints, which was kind of a low end job because of the vast back catalog that required constant reprints, especially when we got to Random House where they would charge for inventory that's stayed in inventory for more than two years. So we're always trying to have as many books in print as possible because we're a nonprofit and that's what we like to do. But we also have to have no more than ideally a two-year supply of any given book. Some of these books had extremely anemic, you know, sales in their later life. So we had to specialize in small-run printing. The problem was I felt that Thing One was very weak on that kind of business mechanics of allocating resources and setting print runs and just prioritizing that I felt that there was a real kind of cognitive fallacy with the way the company was set up in terms of—some departments had a lot of employees like editorial and there was a fair number of publicity staff—the production department per se was like myself and one other person, the production manager. So we had less of a voice, even though if you looked at the entirety of the production process, just in terms of producing a product, we were very important, and certainly per the economic outcome. So there was a constant scrimmage for attention at which the editorial side was always privileged. And without somebody who really thought of things in an abstract way as a business model in production, which Thing One was not really good at, in my opinion, things got unnecessarily drawn into drama and kind of conflict about stuff that was should have been much more empirical and determined by reasonable objective standards, which then furthered a dynamic of subjective personal authority, which while good when you guys started the company, became cumbersome later on when we're trying to do all these things in a complex way. And it also had ramifications for things like going into e-books and audio books, which should have been done in a much more aggressive uniform and well, you know, staffed way. but it was always kind of done on the side as this extra thing. And as a result of that, for instance, as the person who was doing the reprints, but who was then later doing e-books and audio books, I had a great deal of difficulty trying to dialogue with, say, the editorial staff on the kind of ways you would have to rethink the editing process and so forth in terms of the production requirements of these multiple streams, each of which required very specific things. They subsequently, years later, tried to fix that by bringing in kind of an exterior system from some vendor. But even that became was both expensive, cumbersome and didn't really make the people doing the work understand what they were doing. In my opinion, they tended to just be subscribing to a rubric or following orders, so to speak.
Richard
Yeah, with Thing One, where he and I collided, was not over his acquisitions, which I thought were—
Philip
He was certainly, if he had just been the acquisitions manager or something, it would have been fine.
Richrad
One of the things that always astonished me, and you may remember this, is that he increased print runs absurdly to get the unit cost he wanted. because the more books you printed, the less each one was. But he went absurdly beyond the sales potential of books. So the book had, with our nonprofit situation, if we're doing a book that had a potential sale of 500 to 1,000, best, he would print 5,000.
Philip
Right. And sometimes for political reasons related, in my recollection, related to the acquisition—so if he had advocated for a certain title, he would tend, it would be privileged in a way like that. Say we're going to print 3,000 copies of a 1,000-copy book because I'm advocating for it. I'm not saying he was the only person that did that, but I kind of felt there was a dynamic like that at play when he was running things.
Richard
Well, I didn't. I wanted to print to the possible market,
Philip
You always seemed to have a much stronger business sense, even if it was not temperamentally your passion per se.
Richard
Well, he also was political in the sense that he, when it was my book, he also overprinted as if that would mollify me and make me happy.
Philip
Right.
Richard
So that's how much he misunderstood the principle .
Philip
Right. He just wasn't objective about it buti i felt that he always and again I’m not trying to just criticize somebody, but i felt that there was a problem where there was kind of an executive which was you know on the second floor this building being like 80 percent the first floor and then a 20 or 25 let's say you know So 75% was a ground floor, and then one-third of that had a second floor. On the second floor were all the executive offices, so there was kind of a physicalized dyad. And it seemed to me that also in terms of the way that salaries were allocated, there was a tendency for a few people to make a decent wage, and then a lot of people were making lesser wages. And it was set up in a way that kind of took out the middle class. So what you really needed was a middle class of managers who could do objective things that were very empirically definable, so you would know whether or not what they were doing was helping the company and making revenue and stuff. And I feel that also related to the kind of identity crisis over the nonprofit status. But since we didn't have nonprofit sources of revenue, but we had kind of nonprofit obligations, it became very difficult to keep the business afloat without a miracle or without kind of funny business. Because, you know, if it hadn't been Walter and some raw-food books paying for a lot of other stuff, the whole thing was not really could not have gone on. I don't think, you know, that's my recollection.
Richard
But that may have been kind of true at that time. It wasn't always true because there was the martial arts and the bodywork for me.
Philip
The martial arts was withering on the vine by the time I got there. There was not a dedicated editor. The editor who was later dedicated was not driving the car, so to speak. You know, he was stoking the furnace, perhaps.
Richard
Yeah, the editor left.
Philip
Right, and no one replaced him who was advocating that in the same way. And I think there was just kind of a tendency to see it as vestigial in terms of the, unless a few titles brought in money, there was no energy really put into furthering Blue Snake, the martial arts imprint.
Richard
I'm trying to sort of grasp what I want, because what happens is you going through it reminds me of stuff that I don't know if I repressed it because it was so uncomfortable or I simply forgot it because I moved into a whole different arena. But among the things I would say are that when I went to Inner Traditions, I realized how strict you have to be to maintain an esoteric publishing company. And Inner Traditions is just esoteric. It's not literary at all. But just the esoteric part requires that everybody working there has to buy into it.
Philip
Right.
Richard
But they do or not. And there has to be a hierarchy that sustains that. Without that—
Philip
And the hierarchy cannot be clouded in phony, egalitarian pretenses, which generally are being dangled by the higher-ups to convince people in a hierarchy that there isn't a hierarchy.
Richard
Yeah.
Philip
Let me let me just back up a second. I started in publishing in 1990 and was working for Dover Publications in New York in the first half of the 90s. And they were, to my mind, an excellent model for a company that could do a vast amount of stuff but had kind of very siloed or particularized areas like sticker books and clip art and stuff that were just money-making stuff. There was no illusion this was literary or it was just very functional, but it was good. It served the market and it helped bring in a lot of revenue. And then we also did literary things that were privileged by the other, you know, kind of workhorse things to work or be, you know, part of the line to be focused on. And very high standards were maintained in doing the literary material because there was kind of a collective ethos among everyone there that we were trying to make things as good as possible. and we weren't just cutting corners and begrudging our paychecks. I always felt that Thing One, for instance, was too self -engaged and kind of just maintaining his position so that when I first initially came on, I thought I was going to have more input and there was going to be more of a back and forth. And instead, I would feel like I was walled out from sort of the management group, which included people who I did not think thought in managerial terms. Now, I'm not saying I don't care about their job title or their pay. I'm just saying some people understand how to manage things, which is an abstract thinking exercise, and other people do not and will just engage in endless drama or everything becomes personalized. And then you end up wasting a huge amount of effort and resources and just cognitive bandwidth on stuff that does not serve the purpose at all.
So when you're going to do the esoteric stuff, yes, everybody needs to be bought into that, at least to the extent of not inhibiting it or engaging in inappropriate drama or something.
I mean, when I look at the, for instance, when I look at, I don't really think about NAB a lot now because I, it was painful to leave and it was unpleasant. And I felt a great injustice had done to myself and shortly thereafter you.
Oh when I look at the NAB website now I see a company call I couldn't I mean I'm grateful that I am not there because I couldn't handle the level of fraudulent kind of ostentation that seems to be the organizing principle now so and okay maybe it isn't fraudulent ostentation; I certainly think it is. But the point being, I hope I look at the staff list. I don't recognize two-thirds of the people so I cannot speak to their anything about them. But when I was there in the time, there were very few kind of key people who were really engaged in driving the thing and other people were, to different degrees, passengers. Sometimes the people who were passengers were, had positions of high authority and certainly they were included in the management thing which just lent itself to a lack of organized overall planning and kind of strat-strategic level business running and i feel that if Thing One had been irving thalberg that would not have been the case that it would have been a much more you know results-oriented thing this sounds kind of more businessy maybe than a non-profit is supposed to be but as you're saying with with Inner Traditions you have to have the business functions taken care of in order to, and you have to have buy-in. in order to allow for the possibility of this kind of cultural thing to bloom out of it which is does not just happen miraculously you know by parthenogenesis or whatever the term is.
Richard
Well, Lindy and I moved out of Berkeley in 2014 and we moved to Maine. And so we're only back there periodically, which gave us a very skewed view of what was happening. And also, Thing One and Lindy got into such conflict, yelling screaming conflict right, that that she said either he had to go or she had to go right and she would prefer to go because she wanted to retire anyway and focus on her writing and in retrospect that was something i regretted because it's—
Philip
He should been put more in check because he was given too much of a carte blanche, in my opinion.
Richard
Yeah, especially after that.
Speaker 3
Right. But there was—
Speaker 1
I've often thought about, Lindy, something I've remarked about to other people, and our son has noted, that oftentimes she doesn't articulate exactly what is happening, but has exactly the right emotional response.
So her response to Thing One was very negative to the point of, I don't know, it was like over the top. We had screaming arguments about it at home because she was so convinced that he was dangerous and competent and so forth. And she was right. And I more reacted to what seemed like her irrational reaction.
Philip
Right. Although I just going to say it's sort of related, not exactly to that, but there is a separate dynamic of necessary reform that needed to go on. For instance, the art director, who was a long time, the earliest hire, as I recall, was at the end of her career. And so that's fine. And all, you know, respect to her. But there was a need to change like kind of procedural things. And because she was exemplifying an earlier paradigm from, say, the eighties when you had a very limited staff and a lot of freelancers, right?, certainly for the design work. And unfortunately, when you get into the print e-book and audio formats simultaneously, and also just the nature of electronic print production, which was in Quark when I started, and we switched it to InDesign eventually, but that took a very long time. There was just like a lack of production uniformity that needed to be addressed which somewhat related to generational staffing but unfortunately Thing One did not—he was—I mean I I sympathize with his position in that he felt like he had to adjudicate you know complex needs of people who had rights but also there was a lack of reform like—there was no—there was more of a hanging on and kind of waiting things out attitude than reform. Similarly, I would say the production manager, who was a dear person, needed to have a different role or some assistance that would have helped make things less kind of loosey-goosey, because I think it was still kind of mired in an earlier paradigm, which was much—well, with Random House particularly, we had to work like a year in advance, right? You had to do all of these early preliminary things. You couldn't just wait up to the deadline and then throw something out the door to the printer, you had to really get stuff nailed down early in, I think, a different way than it had been previously. And that also related to things like databases and searchability. Metadata was a huge issue. All of this stuff, the metadata things should have been coordinated with the editorial department and the publicity department. We should have had more uniform standards, in my opinion. And instead, it kind of didn't work as well as it should have because of a tendency of Thing One to kind of be engaged in this struggle you know which i think would not have been there if he had not been taking up too much—holding a larger position than he was suited for and which i think anyone but irving Thalberg would be—you need a unique be i couldn't have done it certainly um you need a unique person to do that and barring that you need to have a different company culture and there was no mechanism in place to evolve the company culture because it tended to go from one power holder to another power holder and i think that's why the viral advent of Thing Two the dreaded nightmare person was almost inevitable because it was a weakness in the company. Like i think of it in terms of like the shadow also it's kind of like the shadow kind of caught up with this in and ate us in a sense there was you know what i'm saying uh i don't know what the mechanics are but uh but but i'm glad i'm not in the position of Thing Two now because boy is he rocking a shadow
Richard
I’d put in a few things here i want to make the transition from Thing One to Thing Two. Ffrom the day I terminated my relationship with the press that Lindy and I founded and grew and my office key was taken away. I've never looked at their website.
Phillip
Did they cut you off from your email?
Richard
I think that they put in a forwarding for my email.
Philip
Ah, but see, I'd been there 10 years, so they just cut me off from my professional email with like 24 hours’ notice.
Richard
Well, I was cut off, but I had to get a new email because I didn't realize, being naïve in this regard, that my emails between me and my attorney that I had to hire could be read by them off the server.
Philip
Right.
Richard
So he demanded I get a new email instantaneously. And before I got one at Inner Traditions, I got my own.
Lindy's not the same, although she doesn't peruse the website, she is on the mailing list and notes what they're doing and isn't fazed by it. She has the capacity. She never identified as much as I did, so she doesn't identify now. I just broke off all connection with it. Very soon after I got invited by Inner Traditions to bring my authors there and start a new line. But in dealing with the transition from Thing One to Thing Two, there are two pieces about Thing One that I want to note in the transition, one of which has to do with you and one of which doesn't. The one that doesn't is the Thing One decided that we needed to be more diverse in our board. So to him, that meant putting putting black people on the board.
Philip
He took the most racist possible approach to the situation
Richard
Right. But Lindy and I were raised, you know, in the 60s civil rights tradition. We had gone on marches and stuff. And we didn't catch it in time what the implications would be of putting people on the board solely for diversity and without any more than nominal interest at best. in our topic.
Philip
Because then diversity becomes the entire point of the exercise. So all they're going to do is make it about diversity in any exchange because they have no interest in, you know, t’ai chi or whatever.
Richard
Yeah, or their interest might be in Black people doing t’ai chi.
Philip
Well, worst case, but regardless, it just foregrounds something that while it might be part of the equation, if it becomes the sole and obsessive focus, it does not serve a good purpose. One thing I was just briefly thinking about the company as it is now is I feel like there's almost a thermodynamics at play of everything entropically becoming lukewarm. So when I go to the website, I can only gather from a superficial glance at the website and the way the covers look and the nature of the books and how they're marketed or presented. It seems much more like everything is leveled out into this kind of uniform soup.
Richard
And you live only a block away from what i guess the office.
Philip
Maybe they're a pillar of the berkeley community but i don't get that impression. it just seems pretty hermetic i mean oddly given that they're not interested in esotericism it seems oddly hermetic, or you know, walled off siloed
Richard
Well, the world is filled with—the occult is filled with ironies.
Philip
Right. Paradox is the coin of the realm. I just wonder, one thing I wondered about, I can't see their sales. I have a good sense to the extent that I recall of the sales figures when I was there up to the end of 2017. And so I know what sold and what didn't sell and exactly how much things sold, which was frequently surprisingly few.
I just can't imagine what's keeping them afloat now, although without seeing their sales figures, I can only infer their business health. I remember hearing that they were doing well a few years ago, and that's fine. I mean, more power to them. But part of that was put on the audiobooks doing well. And certainly I was as the sole kind of creator of the audiobooks for a period, I had a very low output. So obviously, if they ratcheted up the production, they could get more revenue out of that. But I also wondered when the USAID funding was yanked recently and they started just kind of uncovering the level of soft money influence in various kind of nonprofits and things, I began to wonder, like, well, I wonder how the changing economy might affect their ability to just kind of have ambient sales of certain categories of books.
Richard
One thing i'm going back a hair in the conversation
Philip
Yeah yeah i don't want to—
Richard
This is funny to me one of the board members one of the new board members who came on was asking me what i was writing and i described the book Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, which was my main undertaking then, which includes in it a history of sexuality. And she said to me, what have you written about the sexuality of Black people? And I said, nothing.
Philip
Right
She said, why not? And I said, well, because I don't have any experience, I only write from experience. And I don't remember what she said to that, but I remember the conversation to that point.
Philip
Now, to me, you're expressing a high standard of ethics because you're understanding it's not solipsistic, but it's based in kind of a humanistic foregrounding of the individual and individualism and individuality and experience over theory and ostentation and representation. So, yeah, there's a definite deep disjunct between two contending and irreconcilable worldviews here.
Richard
Yeah. And at a more working class level, it helped give rise to Donald Trump. And because that the insincerity of the woke worldview was something that he was able to capitalize on.
Philip
Right. And also it represented genuine problems. You know, it's not just that he's opportunistically exploiting things or weaknesses. It's that these weaknesses are creating weakness. You know, you can't run up the deficits that have been run up and things. And anyways, I don't want to get into a political discussion, but I was interested in some of your writings to see how much you focus on Trump as an individual actor. And to me, he seems much more of a kind of inevitable outcome of badly maintained circumstances.
Richard
Yeah, well, I mean, you can agree with both.
Philip
Yeah.
Richard
I do think that that's the case. By himself, he wouldn't have the power he does. As he himself indicates, he was elected by popular—
Philip
Yeah, he's a pragmatic, you know, I would say he's pragmatic. I mean, there's certainly a large narcissism and so forth, but I think largely he's a mechanical person. He's not a Hegelian. He's not a young Hegelian, let's say. You know, he's not a idealist. Idealism is no longer even idealistic. This kind of pharisaical or fraudulent exteriorized idealism has taken over and is, to me, it's all Puritanism, actually. I think of Puritanism as this wave form that kind of promulgates itself through time and is still with us, perhaps amplified by circumstances in recent years.
Richard
In moving to Thing Two, I wanted to note that you were the whistleblower who basically said Thing One is not getting it done and is making a mess out of things and it will spiral down.
Philip
Right
Richard
At the same time, you somewhat unintentionally popped yourself from the frying pan into the fire.
Philip
Yes.
Richard
And the company.
Philip
Yes. Although Thing Two, to his, at one point, I remember soon after the Thing Two transition, my just having some kind of conversation with him, which we rarely did. And I was saying, well, you know, I was instrumental in like the mechanism by which Thing One was de-thinged. And he, he refused to acknowledge that I had any role in it whatsoever, which is a classic thing to move. Like he's a, I don't know, hard shell narcissist or something. I mean, it's a sociopath. I think we agree on. Yeah.
Richard
We agree that he's a sociopath. My, my fellow publishing friend in, in Berkeley called Thing Two the most consummate sociopath you'd ever met
Philip
Right, and it takes it's such sociopathy that it's of a sort that takes years to even internalize recognize and internalize because it's a deeply alien and and also one i think both of us have enough of a “puer” kind of attribute that we want things to be the way they appear you know that duplicity and guile and things are not really our native element um and we i think we also have a collective in our weird ways we have collectivist instincts like we were genuinely communitarian and now you've got the most communitarian jackass of all time who's anything but you know, but he's this strange Claggart figure
Philip
Yeah, and i think i'm pretty good at reading character having grown up in a psychoanalytic framework as well as an esoteric one. But that doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. And my Berkeley friend, who called him a consummate sociopath, also is a psychotherapist and missed it too. So I did miss it. I was charmed. And I thought that I had come up with the ideal figure to take over.
Philip
Well, similarly, although this is a tangent we don't need to go into very far, but we had some problems with after Lindy departure, settling on an editor in chief figure. And we went through some people who weren't suitable. And there was a similar thing when in which I'd also had an earlier job I won't go into. But when you have an executive who's a problem, getting any alternative, you know, if the problem gets acute enough, any alternative seems like a paradisical, you know, ideal. So you tend to not really be as shrewd about scrutinizing the replacement because you think that the problem is so acute you have to just use anything. and unfortunately i definitely underestimated that guy
Also there was kind of a terminal problem with the — i don't i don't want to go into it too deeply but there was i think a lack of general gneral culture in the rank-and-file of the company. You know it was very like when i worked for Dover there was a lot of very brilliant people who knew all sorts of things about really complex subjects and were autodidacts and had a lot of interior grit and metal and sand. And now I felt that there was a much more of a consensus environment. I felt, well, for one thing, you know, I would be in it. And what we should have done is like the astrological charts of everybody and sorted it out that way because i constantly felt that i was unable to express what to me were perfectly objective serious issues for some characterological or temperamental disjunct but also because of the kind of Cassandra complex whereby if you have nine editors who agree everything's hunky-dory the one outlier who's saying you know here come the Greeks is not going to get very far with them because it it it awakes them from their stupor and i felt there was a certain kind of stuporous affect amongst the rank-and-file generally, which may sound like a nasty thing to say, but you've got jobs.
Richard
That's what was said about you. Obviously, because Thing One had loaded the board up with diversity, Thing 2 was in a position to make that the guiding principle of the company. And as you indicated, you were the victim first, and then I was the victim. You were the victim. I remember fighting for you, saying you were the person who held the most complete view, you're the person left who held the most complete view of what the publishing represented. And I felt I was in a position to say that since I created what the publishing, with Lindy, created what the publishing represented. And he vociferously denied that, said you were, in his whole professional life, you were the worst person he had ever dealt with, which probably meant that you were a rival and that he didn't appreciate that.
Philip
I was his shadow
Richard
Yeah.
Philip
Or at least I was in the shadow area the large shadow area that he was not wanting to deal with I just remember some aston—anyways i don't want to get into the weeds with personal anecdote about Thing Two, but i always felt even from the beginning that his very foregrounded social conscience quote-unquote was not sincere.
Richard
Right. well that's what i was just going to say. i wanted you to to verify whether you you agreed with this from your own experience, that Thing 2, from the moment he came on, was trying to figure out how to kind of manipulate himself into a position of ultimate power and take over, and that his politics were an ideal kind of cover for him to claim that other people were failing the racial diversity or woke test.
Philip
It was a very cultic mentality.
Richard
But I feel that his real goal was to get a hold of the money himself. He saw money and he was going to use any means possible to get control of it. And if, in fact, the IRS under the new administration decides to look into nonprofits, I think that they would find that the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, the nonprofit name for North Atlantic Books, is not a nonprofit.
Philip
It never really was in my experience. I mean, we tried to conform to, I mean, we weren't like openly flaunting the law, but there was always a very clear and frank sense that there was a issue there. And I think that's why, you know, at times we proposed having nonprofit funding of things and getting grants to do projects and stuff, which was never really developed while I was there. I don't know if they do that now. But that would be, I think that if they don't, that the nonprofit thing would be highly dubious, except to somebody who was so besotten with the ideological, you know, claims that they weren't capable of critical thinking.
RIchard
So the weeds are kind of what remain and I don't want to get sucked into them. So I'll just kind of leave it to you to say what else you can think of. Leave the space open.
Philip
Okay. Yeah, I mean, to me also, there's a larger, there's NAB as a microcosm, but there's a macrocosm of the difficulty of extending, you know, for want of a better term, I'll call like kind of sixties-era idealism, you know, whatever that spirit was that was informing things at the time you started Io and then NAB, somehow, perhaps in the Clinton era or otherwise, if not earlier, And that failed to institutionalize itself or continue itself in a way that permitted institutional, you know, manifestation. And so as a result of that, there's a deep cynicism now that I think in the old days, a company like Dover, which I worked for, which had been founded in the forties and was a mom and pop operation still at the time I worked for it.
Nonetheless, there was a, everything seemed ethical on a way that the Thing Two era of NAB does not seem ethical to me, because there's some kind of just the, the foregrounding the business, which was not entirely mercenary, made it empirical and have to have an exterior frame of responsibility. And I feel that now when I look at the website and things, I just see a lot of weird jargon, weirdly used, that seems deeply fearful, but also deeply insincere. Now, I assume that the insincerity is from the top down, like a fish that's rotting from the head. And I know that there are a lot of sincere people out there, or at least I hypothesize that such people exist. But in fact, it seems, as I was saying, very cultic and lacking in life. It's pharisaical in the sense of the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. And probably the power dynamic, I would assume, is very constrained still. It's just camouflaged in elaborate ways that make it less obvious to people who are intoxicated with the ideological claims of virtue that Thing Two seems to specialize in.
Richard
Yeah, it's, I mean, what strikes me is that as the years pass, you look back on what you did, but you just change. You change from your 20s to 30s to 40s to 50s. And Lindy and I now are at the beginning of our 80s. So it's quite a far view. When we started Io, which was how we started our publishing business, it was so fresh and new and with such great enthusiasm. In a way, it came out of the Halloween ceremony I had in college at Amherst in 1964.
Philip
Right
Richard
That led to Robert Kelly. Robert Kelly godfathered Io into being and then North Atlantic Books arose out of a way.
Philip
And I specifically remember that I first encountered Io, a copy of Io/4, the alchemy issue, in a used bookstore in probably 1999, if not a little earlier. That was my introduction. And that had a deep funkiness, you know, like in a good, that had an excellent funkiness that seemed unostentatious, sincere and embracing. Whereas now things are deeply unfunky. I mean, there's nothing less funky than the current kind of semiotics of NAB, at least as I perceive them. It's the antithesis of funkiness. And instead, it's this kind of, as I was saying, thermodynamic heat death of the universe where everything is lukewarm at best. And it lacks the spark of spirit or dynamism or the ability to produce offspring, you know.
Richard
Well, we were completely driven by enthusiasm and by the awakenings around us and to a certain degree by our children during a period when Io and North Atlantic books were like a household item. When we got, when Lindy and I got married, her oldest sister was married to a businessman and her next oldest sister, she's the third, was married to a psychiatrist who had been a naval flight officer in Vietnam. So they qualified for, you know, like suitable spouses who would support them. They both abandoned them at some point pretty early on. And I was looked on and Lindy and I as a kind of couple were looked on as sort of her mother's worst nightmare.
Philip
Right.
RIchard
Nothing also of my legal father who turned out not to be my father, but I didn't know that then.
Philip
Right.
Richard
And it was, we didn't know exactly how we were going to earn a living. In fact, just by going from the alchemy issue to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing, lo and behold, we created something which not only supported us, but got our kids through prep school in Berkeley and enabled us to feel as though we succeeded.
I remember Lindy's mother being very upset at us at one point. And because she said, that's not real money you're making. That's just that publishing of yours. And it didn't occur to me that there were different kinds of money. And nowadays, nobody would even think that.
Philip
Right.
Richard
But it's diagnostic of a time of transition when you could think that. It was just the publishing company of us. But it did pay the bills and make us self-sufficient and launch our kids into really interesting careers.
Philip
Right.
Richard
And that that energy seems so vital to me that I missed the shadow completely. Until
it was finally embodied by Thing Two, who was like the undertaker who finally came and said, to my mind anyway, said, there's money here and I'd like it for myself. And these people are too old and too out of it to protect the dragon's lair. So I'm just going to steal it. And that's how that's how it felt to me at the time.
Philip
See i didn't see him as motivated but I'm a real “babe in the woods” when it comes to money so Ididn't think about money as his motivation his thing to his motivation although it may well have been. I think there's also just kind of a bourgeois—I don't know how to express this off the top of my head—it's kind of a bourgeois entitlement, opportunism, narcissism that he exemplifies to my mind. And to me, it was an extension of the bourgeois entitlement. So I thought probably I'm more able to understand power as a motivation than money per se. So to me, it was a question of dominance and self-regard and being able to inflict punishment because i there was a strong punitive aspect to his person i think to his personality although it was weirdly shadowed so I'm sure Thing Two thinks he's the crown of creation and the most benevolent person whoever you know foregrounded a land acknowledgement inappropriately in some business meeting. But again, to him, I may, it's hard to hypothesize because it sounds like it's a highly superficial feeling. And I remember not being able to really have conversations with him because it seemed completely that we were just had warring, if not metaphysics, then warring ethics to the extent that ethics were at play. And I think it goes deeper than money, though. I mean, I think money is a convenient way of thinking about it, but I think that there's a more elemental drive involved. I was going to say, relating to what you were saying before, that I started at NAB when I was 40 and I was expelled when I was 50. So I kind of threw away my 40s on this shit. And I'm rather unhappy about that, although I blame myself. And in a sense, I kept thinking that there was going to be that a reform was inevitable, that it was a generational thing. And not simply that the older hands would go away, but that somehow we would change something that was grounded in a 70s paradigm, 60s, 70s, which extended to the way the things were actually manufactured, the typesetting everything into something that could be extended into the new era and could do good in that climate and in different new technological ways. And instead, it seemed like the whole thing was kind of taken over by a coronavirus or, you know, some sort of it's more of a viral model than a revolution. Like, I'm sure that they that Thing Two thinks of himself as a revolutionary in the 1789 mold. And to me, I wouldn't even give him 1919. You know, it's much more of an unconscious thing.
Richard
Well, you know, there's another element that talking about it brings to mind. And that is that in 20, at the very end of 2016, was when my sister committed suicide. And that sort of completed my natal family, my mother, at least my blood relatives, my mother, then my brother, then my sister. And I wasn't close to my sister for most of her life. That was—she chose not to be. And that happens. But I was for the last two years of her life because she didn't really have anybody else to turn to. So I basically talked to her every day on the phone. And like my mother, she jumped out the window, killed herself. Now, the impact of that was not direct. I wasn't close enough to her to feel a sense of personal loss, as sort of sad as that is. On a deep level, I did, but I didn't otherwise. She was very close to people in the apartment building she lived in New York. And in my discussion with Kelly, we talked about dybbuks. There was a dybbuk phenomenon afterwards whereby energy moved through that building and objects began moving. People had senses of her presence. I had a definite response to it, but it took a really different course. So for the next two and a half years roughly, not right away, but from approximately mid 2018 until the end of 2020 during the pandemic, I was kind of a lost soul and could not find myself.
So when the NAB thing came to a head, it was in 2019, 2020, when I was back in Berkeley. You were gone before that. Yes. I forget which year.
Philip
January 18.
RIchard
January of 18, 2018. So it wasn't much before that, but it was before that. and I was kind of alone there without realizing it, but I was also so totally depressed.—
Philip
Right, I remember talking to you during that period. I remember that.
Richard
That I had no energy to do anything and I wasn't sleeping. I was going five, six, seven nights in a row just lying awake, which was a kind of unbelievable phenomenon to me. if you've never been depressed before in that way, it takes a while even to grasp what you're, what you're feeling.
Philip
Right.
Richard And I think the Thing Two, instinctively saw that. Right. Now, when he collaborated with the board to kick me out of the company, um, and take my key and all the rest and put my books out of print, I also hired an attorney, this guy in downtown Oakland, Michael Foster. I only hired him because, not because he was black, though he happened to be, but because he was the only other attorney I knew, besides from my own attorney, who sided with them and was on the board and participated in removing me. So he wasn't an option.
Philip
They actually had your attorney present when I was terminated, which I think should, if I wasn't a dumbass, I would have known that that meant that I should seek legal representation. Because they were clearly doing something that was not above board if they're having an attorney present when I'm fired, at least in my—
Richard
Yeah, well, I think that's true.
Philip
They gave me a crap severance and did insulting things like making me sign a document saying that I would never apply for another job there. It's just gratuitously insulting. And that's why I think that Thing Two has this deep psychic desire to cause injury, you know, because he's sadistic in a way that he is completely, maybe interiorly. I actually listening to a podcast about the BTK, you know, the killer in Kansas or wherever, who had a similar thing where he's completely compartmentalized, like half of him is this psychotic, sexual sadist family annihilator. And the other half is like the guy who's like the church deacon who's, you know, so forth. I feel like that level of sociopathy allowed me to more clearly integrate my perceptions of thing to which otherwise were wildly divergent. They just didn't make any sense.
Richard
Well, you know, one of my first authors at Inner Traditions who came through Jeff Kripal was Luke Lafitte, who's an attorney in Texas.
Philip
Yes.
Richard
And Luke looked at the situation and evaluated it and felt that we could go after my attorney. But the statute of limitations for attorney malpractice was one year in California. And so the statute of limitations had passed.
Philip
Right.
Richard
However, at the time, I did hire this Michael Foster as an attorney. And he said, they can't kick you out. You have a contract. There were all sorts of reasons that they couldn't but i i did have a contract and one of their claims was i was too old so it was ageist he said
Philip
Right
Richard
And he met with them i remember his comments when they when he came back he um i had thought that Thing Two at that point was my ally. And that it was the board that was against me, mainly instituted by Thing One. And he came back and his first line was, that guy is not your friend.
Philip
Right. The board was always a sock puppet, as far as I could tell. I mean, there were a few sincere people involved who seemed to want to be doing things, but the rest of them, I had a few. during the transition between the things there were some board attempts to engage the staff with the board and they at least acknowledged me to the point of allowing me to attend some of these kind of limited staff with board discussions and i definitely got the impression that the board was not engaged was very manipulable and was only had a couple of people who even had to be dealt with it to any depth; otherwise it was just a windsock
Richard
Well, when Michael Foster was my attorney, he basically said, well, you could win this. If you want to fight them, you can win this because they can't do any of this. And he said, but you have to be willing to commit the next few years to it because if they fight you in court, that's what it's going to take, and you're going to have to stay in California.
Philip
Plus they have advantages, like they have access to all of your emails. You might not have access to your own emails and you don't know what, so it's kind of like playing a poker game where they can see your hand, but you can't see theirs.
Richard
Well, not entirely, because the moment he pointed out that I needed to get my own email, I copied my entire email file.
Philip
Wow, okay.
Richard
And I still have it on my computer and keep those emails just in case, I mean, keep their emails just in case it ever comes up. But it's way past normal statutes of limitations. So it probably won't. It's just become part of my archive. But he gave me that choice and I thought about it and COVID hadn't come yet, but it was about to come. And I wasn't prescient. I didn't expect it. But—
Philip
You've also had a very low point, as you've acknowledged, just energetically. I mean, this is a kind of an ordeal for you, and it's blessed that it turned out so well for you at Inner Traditions, but, you know, I think we're both kind of indignant in different ways, or feel something's unresolved because of the injustices that we were subject to, and also the sense that our best intentions were not able to prevail, but instead somebody of notably ill will and character was allowed to somehow prevail. And I feel guilty about that myself, although I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I certainly feel like I should have done. I should have thought of things differently than I did or been just more mercilessly self-interested and bailed early on.
Well, I mean, it was clear by the early teens that things were bogged down. We went through these farcical editor-in-chiefs, and sales were starting to slump. For a few years, up through around 2010, as I recall, sales were pretty strong. The raw-food thing was a craze, and we had some authors that sold well. But then we kind of got mired into a situation where things were looking dicey at times, and the economic outlook was uncertain. There was also, I think, kind of a malaise of, I mean, I don't want to credit Thing Two with anything, but I do feel like the company has an identity now that it did not have as strongly as it did in the late teens, to my perception, because of the interior conflicts that were manifesting themselves in a lack of cohesion or coherence.
Richard
Well, Thing Two had as his initial virtue, which also disguised his shadow effect, that he reversed the mistakes of Thing One, overprinting.
Philip
Right. There were some costly acquisitions that just didn't make sense. Ridiculous acquisitions. It didn't make any sense.
Richard
You have ridiculous acquisitions as well as good ones, but also Thing One's belief that the era of the book was at an end and that we needed all sorts of other ways to generate revenue, none of which did generate revenue but took a lot of money to set up. I can't even remember what all of them were, but webinars, I remember, was one of them, or doing publishing services for other nonprofits.
Philip
Right. There was a tendency to go, and that parallels experiences I had with a previous unsuitable executive in a different job I had, where rather than reform the core functions you were already doing, there was a tendency to look for escapist alternatives to somehow solve your problems without the burden of introspection or reform. That was certainly present.
Richard
Yeah, I also thought in retrospect that that once we moved North Atlantic Books out of our house into an office where it had to pay rent, that that we also began hiring. I don't know. I was still the publisher and Lindy was still co-publisher with me, but we hired managers, several of whom tried in one way or another to take over the company and push us out. As we got older, it became more dicey to hold on. And I remember Michael Foster saying he had defended us in the early 2000s against a staff member who tried to take over. That's how I met him. And because he was a labor lawyer, labor attorney. But when I reconnected with him after this incident, like almost 20 years later, he pointed out that he had warned us, you know, like two decades ago, to stop acting like hippies. When with a, you know, $6 million, $7 million business acting like hippies.
Philip
Right.
Richard
And we never did see the repeating archetype of what is the, I mean, it seems it should come from Julius Caesar or somewhere, the archetype of trying to overthrow the people, overthrow the king. I feel as though unintentionally from being the 19-year-old doing a Halloween ceremony, I had become the king of the business, which had been necessary. And that was the path.
Philip
It was more like literal materiality overcoming archetypal patterns. There was no archetypal patterning. It was just a power grab. So you can't think of it in larger terms that have like death and rebirth. It wasn't death and rebirth. It was just a grotesque strangling by the BTK killer.
Richard
No, it wasn't just—
Philip
Thinking about the esoteric, both in terms of your own position as the chief ordeal sufferer, but also the esoteric dynamics of the company. Like I always felt there was a yin-yang imbalance that was really messed up because, you know, just to state the matter flatly, the editorial department might be nine or ten females, and they were all geared to consensus and to, you know, positive reinforcement and things. And I felt that there should have been a much more diverse staffing, but not diverse in terms of diversity that serves the ideological interests of the insincere, but that actually had an energetic balance that would allow these complex functions to arise out of the human staff in a way that was natural but also greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, there tended to be an avoidance of real issues, an avoidance of conflict, even as conflict was kind of reified into the main subject of everything, right? Like, there was just a toxic dynamic that prevented the resolution of things except through disease or, you know, if that makes sense.
Richard
Yeah, too bad. I think that we'll have ended up covering this territory so thoroughly that I'm not going to go back to it again.
Philip
Well, I hope so. I mean, and you've got better things to do. I've got better things to do.
Richard
Right. I think maybe this interview can, can sort of, can sort of purge it.
Philip
And you're so much brighter than you were five years ago, you know, I mean, cause when you're talking about the depression you went through after the death of your sister. And I remember that now that you talk about it, cause I remember talking to you, you know, every few months after I was gone and it was clear you were going through like a real dark and kind of clouded, phase.
RIchard
Yeah. Well, I, in, in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, I have tried multiple times to characterize that, that period, because it was much more complex than just the death of my sister. And I think, I think I've done it, but it's been the hardest part of the book to write. And when the designer sent it to me in a design format, I had to take out 60 pages and just completely rewrite them for her to drop back in because it's just so subtle and so hard to catch.
Philip
Right.
Philip
But then that's what makes it interesting to write.
Philip
Right. And just to clarify, you know, when I'm talking about the sexual makeup of departments, I'm not trying to be just a sexist pig. It's that this actually does have real consequences of the way people interact and also just the expectations. And there was always a sense of collective reality, not mirroring the actual reality of, you know, the actual functions were not properly mirrored in the people's general conception of what was going on, because those were very consensus oriented. And the consensus tended to be pooled around the people involved. And that didn't, for whatever reason, did not tend to involve as many protagonistic figures. And unfortunately, the protagonists that came on board were toxic.
Richard
Yeah. And of course, it's a metaphor for much of the stuff that's happening in the world at large.
Philip
Yes.
Richard
Then as above, so below.
Philip
Indeed.
Richard
All right. Thank you, Philip.
Philip
Sure. Thank you. See you soon.
I see that in taking a picture of Philip’s and my Zoom session, I inadvertently included the bottom of a collage by Nick Dean that was the cover of one of the Earth Geography Booklets of Io. It is highway 40 in North Carolina in blue stoneprint. Above it are an early photo of Mars (pink) and strip mines in West Virginia (green).
Note from Phillip:
“I just listened to the playback and I am happy with it. We go back and forth at a good clip, and things are I think clearly articulated in a way that is grounded in empirical reality.
“However, wish this could be the image!”
Share this post