Country doesnt work in another. They have to really invest themselves in it. Do you speak any french . I speak just enough to get myself in trouble. I can ask a question that can be under stood but i can understand the answer because they speak much too fast for me. When you have a staff meeting here in the United States, whose around the table . There are monthly board meetings and the board is composed of all publishers of all seven divisions in the heads of each of the major functions, chief operating officer, chief counsel, marketing director, Communications Director hr director. Im probably leaving somebody out and i apologize in advance but people around all the major functions are there. We talk about how we are doing against our budget and strategic initiatives. Thank you. s Book Publishing a modern business . It is a 19thcentury business. It has changed more in the past ten years than it did the past hundred years before. It is not a leadingedge business because its really an ancient unchanged experience. Reading a book is a 12 or 15 hour experience. It takes time and books were portable the day they were invented. I could say they are incredibly modern because the rest of medias just catching up with books. Digitization, movies, tv, all these other forms you had to be in one place to hear them before those businesses were radically transformed because they became more like books. Books are premodern. Were not the earliest adoption but we make books available in every kind of format. The relationship with the author and publisher and reseller, not much has changed because its a business of hundreds of thousands of products. The number of books published each year is gigantic. They all need individual attention. The focus of acquiring a lot of books and developing them and getting them out to all the millions of readers around the country, that really hasnt changed much. Digitization changed wonderfully in that anybody can buy a book the second they think of it. They dont have to go to a bookstore if you dont want to. If someone says they love a book you can have it on your ipad the next minute. It is modern and instantaneous in that way. But that subversive experience is still unchanged. Thats why books havent changed as much in the past decade as these other Media Industries that i talked about because the experience of reading a book, people people like the physical incarnation of a book. The journey thats in your head is the book. It has taken about 20 of the business but 80 is still print. Ebooks grew really rapidly over the last several years and thats a sign of a really healthy roots of our industry. People who really talk about books, thats the sign of a great success. Has digital revolution been painful or a disruptor . The digital revolution has brought a lot of change but i wouldnt say its been as disruptive as its bedded magazines and movies and television and music. That was much more radically transformed. We have been transformed but digitization is the rise of ebook sales have led to conglomeration. Weve had to get bigger because the market has grown. Thats why you see the bigger publishers. Its not a radical transformation like youve seen it many other businesses. 2016 the health of the publishing industry. The health is very strong. That is a very Stable Foundation because the demand of books is timeless and enormous. The biggest challenge is the quality on that device. It used to be that the book was the only thing you could have in your hand all the time. Now you have a device and your games are on their two and your social media and the number of things that are competing for peoples time in the same channel, thats a big challenge we have to make sure that books stand out. We have to sharpen the messaging and come up with some new formats. Games are narrative base and thats expanding and i think theres a place where games and books could meet and new things would be really exciting. The foundation of publishing, reading, writing is really, really strong. Where you spend the majority of your day doing . I spend the majority of my day, thats a tough question because each day is different. I think i spend the majority of my time working with publishers on publishing their book, on what books were bringing in, maybe half my time goes there and the rest of the time im thinking about strategy and finances and all the things we need to think about to run a healthy company. I spend as much of my time there as i possibly can. I love it and its fun. Give us a sense, and i dont know know how to do this, how many books did you sell last year or whats your revenues or how many employees, give give us a sense of how big. Out to be a sense of scale. There are five publishers that are pretty big the biggest is random and then harpercollins and then Simon Schuster followed by us and mcmillan. There are two really, really Big Companies and three that are about the same size. A unique feature of us within the landscape is that among the big five we are the smallest title count. We are still small in numbers and the next biggest would be Simon Schuster. They publish many more books than we do and the reason i like that is attention to the writer. We are being selective in making sure we have time to partner with the writer on the editing and the marketing and communicating about the whole experience of the partnership. Its just something that is a unique strength of ours that we want to keep that way. What are your revenues for year . Our revenues were 600 million in 2015. We just acquired perseus which was a 90 milliondollar company. That sounds like a lot of money but when you compare it to a car company or a google or facebook, its pretty small. We are much smaller than most major media and Industrial Companies that you are thinking of. Its an industry that is built up out of all these different products. Every book is something that one person created and there are hundreds of thousands of them. Thats different than anything else out there. Thank you very much. Youre watching tv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Book tv, television for seous readers. Good evening, thanks for attending tonights bookmark with Mark Zwonitzer, author of the statesman and the storyteller. Facilitating tonights discussion is a friend and former education director, you will notice a camera in the back of the room. Tonights program is being filmed by cspan. We will be offering a q a at the end. Please, if you want to ask a question wait for the microphone to come to you. You want to be heard as well as scene. Finally on the way out, if you could please pick up a listing of our Upcoming Events and information on the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Program we encourage you to take a look at those opportunities. Thank you for coming tonight. Double thank you if you are a twain house member. With that i turn it over to begin the program. Thank you. Thank you. Its my pleasure to introduce our author, Mark Zwonitzer who wrote the statesman and the storyteller, john hay, mark twain and the rise of american imperialism. Its on sale in the books or which will be open at the end of the program and he will be happy to sign them for you at the conclusion of the remarks this evening. Let me say little bit about him, from 1986 until 1992 he reported the book what it takes, the way to the white house which was named one of the 100 best works of nonfiction and the 20th century. He also worked with ben cramer on joe dimaggio. The wife published in 2000. Since 2000 he has produced, directed and or written many programs for pbs. Theres a rich variety of subjects, mount rushmore, Transcontinental Railroad robert e lee and jesse james. He has received the dupont columbia award the riders guild award and many others. In 2007 he was a writer for the four hour pbs history of the United StatesSupreme Court which was awarded the International Documentary associations award for Outstanding Limited series. In 2008 he was nominated for a prime time emmy in the category of Outstanding Achievement in outstanding filmmaking and achievement in writing for his pbs program on walt whitman. Hes also the author of will you miss me when im gone, the Carter Carter family and their legacy in American Music which came out in 2002. It was one of New York Times notable books of the year. It was an American LibraryAssociation Editors choice and a finalist for the National Book critic award. This evening, we will delve into his second book the statesman and the storyteller and thats what brings us here tonight and id like to thank you very much for being with us and sharing this book on the day of its release to the public. Thank you very much thank you for having me. [applause] i would like to start by asking you to give the audience how you came to pair these two individuals, john hay and mark twain together, particularly since your work is so wide ranging. How did you strike on these two individuals and the thought of pairing them together in a book. I will you a long threepart answer on this. The idea for this book happened in stages. The first stage was i was working with joe biden on a separate editorial project in senator biden was the Ranking Member and later the chairman of the foreign relations. In the three years i was working with him he was trying to make a better outcome in iraq. This was 2004 2007 he was handed in by history. I was talking to him a little bit about when the country got this idea they could have good outcomes anywhere in the world. It led me back to the period around the spanish american war. I wanted a character just tell that story and the first one i struck on was john hayes. John hay had been lincolns to private secretaries when he was a young man. He was the ambassador at the court of st. James in london and later secretary of state to both mckinley and roosevelt. He was at the center of events leading up to and just after the spanish morning american war. The research i did on him, sam clemens as he does keeps popping up. He was always on the other side of the issue, not always but often and it may be realized i could tell the events from a couple different perspectives. I thought the whole had become bigger than the sum of the part. When i really decided to pair them was actually when i read about a Birthday Party that mark twain had in 1902. Pay was secretary of state and if you know anything about what sam clemens was talking about in those days, he was very much opposed to what they were doing. I think there are many people in the audience that thought sam clemens might take the hide off john hay that night. He did not. I was curious about why he didnt do that. Why he held back and why he tempered himself. I think his story has a lot to do with the difficulty. Thats a long answer to how i ended up with those two guys. Together. Theyre not intimate Close Friends but they were good friends that had respect and admiration for each other. You point out in your book, theres an Important Foundation between them, they come from the same region of the country, central and Mississippi River valley. I was wondering if you could take a minute or two to comment on those influence that may have forged that friendship from that common experience, that cultural heritage. They grew up about 50 miles apart on that river so of course they would have never seen or known each other but they had common experiences. By the time they met in the late 60s they were both already Fairly Famous young men. Clemens actually, when clemens moved to buffalo after he got married, he asked hay to be his partner in that paper. A few years later when clemens was doing his research for the trip down the mississippi, life on the mississippi, he asked hayes to come along. So he was unable to do that at that time. So while they werent together, they had very common experiences and when hay wrote his early poems, clemens was the first out to congratulate him on those poems. He was the first to recognize that hey was in the front, these people had written in the in that way before. He was always quick to credit hay ahead of him as the man who popularized the western. He was happy to give him a little nudge anytime he could. So while clemens, we have the civil war and thats going to change everything for both men, he has out west seeking his fortune in mining but he cultivates a writing career there. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what takes him out of his home town and eventually they both converge and meet each other in new york city, post civil war new york city, the Media Capital of the print revolution in america. If you could just flush out a little bit about those young bachelor journalists enjoying their days together in new york and how that wouldve contributed to their friendship. John hay had the good fortune of reading law and his uncles law office just down the hall from an attorney named Abraham Lincoln and hay ended up in lincolns white house. He was then briefly in europe as a young diplomat. He came back to the states and landed at the new york tribune about the time clemens came to new york. He was very much on the make. He was really out to make a name for himself and out to make some money. The new york city media was full of young men like john hay and sam clemens. They were all around the city together having as much fun as they had worked. When booth used to hang out with them, it was almost a nightly round of fun and good cheer and it was like early networking you would say and they became pretty fast friends. That was probably the most time they ever spent together in the early 60s and 70s when he would come into new york and try to dustup a little interest in his own self. So clemens has out and takes his tour of europe and hay does some interesting things as well but that leads us to marriage for both men and from your book its clear they both married well in a number of ways but also those marriages were pretty influential in both of their lives and the relationship between the two of them. Could you talk a little bit about that. They both married up as we all know. Libby clemens came from a welloff family but john hay married a woman, clara stone whose father was spectacularly wealthy. Hes one of the big cleveland industrialist so by the time, hay made his money and the good oldfashioned american way. He married it. He never had to worry about working for money again. Clemens did well for himself but he was always worried about making more money and he was always working very hard. After hay married and clemens married they grew apart a little bit part of the reason was to mrs. Hay was a little apprehensive of having sam clemens in the house. He was not the easiest guy to have around the house and mrs. Hay didnt altogether trust him. I think it could be saved at he possibly viewed her as being out for himself but through the 1870s and 1880s they wrote to one another and cap contact through mutual friends but they were never much in one anothers company. I think it door gets closed when she catches the two of them in their parlor on a sunday cutting up, yukking it up on the sabbath and that marked the end game for mrs. Hay. She made it clear. Clemens described the scene and it shut it both up. Talk a little bit more about the two personalities of the men. You talk about how clem was always on the make, one of the great lines in your book was unlike sam clemens, he never appeared to be selling and if you talk a little bit about their personas, perhaps privately versus publicly, maybe give the audience a sense for the two mens compatibility but as you say also, a friendship that is going to be conducted at arms length. So in some ways the two men were opposites and personality. John hay, as a young boy was plucked out as the special kid in the family. He had an older brother but it was john hay that was sent to a special school. He was set to Brown University by his uncle melton. He never really had to do anything but be himself and show himself and there were people willing to help push him down stream. Hes an incredibly talented and gifted man. He was great with languages and very funny, he was easy to be around and he never seemed to be making any effort. It came effortlessly to john hay kleiman always seem to be thrashing for the next thing. He had to paddle his own canoe and he paddled very hard. They were in that way very different. There were also different in terms of their politics. Hay was a very old line republican in the sense that he believed the best government was well bred, wellrespected, intelligent, and clemens was a little bit more of a democrat with a little bit more, a good bit more confidence in the general decency of the wider American People. So the other thing that i found really fascinating is how different they were in terms of how they treated the people who worked for them. I didnt write a lot about this in the book, but in reading almost every letter and diary that both those men wrote in this ten year period, i know john hay never once mentioned to the servant staff that worked for them. Nobody by name. Occasionally it would pop up in a note to his wife. The best we can expect for a butler is another drunk. Whereas kleiman, the people who served him they were basically family. Katie leary, they would be in europe and they would say you have to take katie to switzerland, shes never been there. Katie was libbys mate. George griffin who worked in the house was obviously a great, great friend of sam clemens and he wrote good bit about him and after he died, especially the loss of george was very difficult for him. An africanamerican butler. That was one of the biggest differences i noticed in them and sort of surprising and interesting. As you develop the characters t