Office Opened

The publisher Hachette is, for the moment, perhaps best known by dedicated readers of the New York Times business and technology sections less as the book house responsible for last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Goldfinch, than as the stuffy old print empire whose pulp Amazon will not ship in a timely fashion. So it would be perhaps too perfect a tale that a legacy book publisher has embraced an open office plan, the epitome of technology startup office design, in like, the aughts, just as the tide has begun to turn against them in earnest because it turns out that they are terrible in every measurable way.

But it’s even better than that. It’s clear, in the Times’ telling, that Hachette didn’t move to an open office because it was under the increasingly outmoded delusion that a cubicle farm would be more conducive to a new kind of collaborative publishing work, boldly pushing past the outdated model of an editor locked in his private office with his leather chair and his lamp and piles books and stacks of weathered pages, endlessly tinkering with manuscripts in absolute privacy and silence. It’s just trying to not go broke:

But with their profit margins being squeezed by Amazon and electronic books, publishers are facing a different reality, one in which private offices may be a luxury that are not worth paying for. The trend started several years ago in London, where prime office space in desirable neighborhoods is typically even more expensive than in Manhattan. Penguin U.K. and Little, Brown U.K. are among the British publishers that have recently moved into fully open spaces.

This year, HarperCollins relocated to a largely open space in Manhattan. (Executive editors and above retained their offices, though most lost their windows.) But Hachette has become the first major American publishing house to abandon private offices altogether.

“I looked into the future and thought, ‘Are profits going to be easier to come by or harder?’ ” Mr. Pietsch said. “I think they’re going to be harder. We need to save as much money as we can and still have a nice office.”

…

The open plan may be the future of publishing, but for a lot of editors in this genteel, old-fashioned business, it’s going to take some getting used to.

“Having a door and a window is starting to feel like having a car and driver,” said Tim Duggan, who has his own imprint — and, for the time being, office — at Crown. “It’s almost too good to be true, and probably too good to last.”

It is all too good to be true: The window, the vast cityscape filled with millions of people going about their temporary lives that it looks out on, the endless sky above it all, the burning chunk of stuff shining down on everything to light our way in the infinite void of the universe. Everything is too good to be true and one day it will all be gone. Even you. Especially you.

Photo by John