Saturday, November 04, 2006
(10:04 AM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
Yet another misstep
Once again this holiday season, The New York Review of Books continues its desperate ploys for increased market share. This year's pathetic gimmick is a David Levine calendar, featuring light-hearted caricatures of the intellectual luminaries whose books are reviewed in the New York Review's incredibly awkwardly-sized pages. What remains unclear is why anyone wants to spend an entire month staring at a pencil sketch of K. Anthony Appiah.My inside sources tell me that this calendar idea was an attempt to take off on the popularity of New Yorker-cartoon-based calendrical products. New Yorker cartoons, with their wry yet enigmatic humor, are perfectly suited for the monthly wall-calendar format -- market research studies indicate that customers enjoy having a full month to make sure that they have indeed understood the punchline. Clearly, a pencil sketch of Gore Vidal, even a hilarious caricature, lacks the element of mystery that makes the New Yorker such an important player in the calendar industry.
The most that the marketing department of the New York Review could hope for was that the connection to New York would produce confusion and generate accidental sales. This strategy was rendered much more workable when an agreement was reached with Borders and Barnes and Noble to prohibit returns of New York Review calendars by customers who had been looking for New Yorker calendars. Yet sales predictably lagged, leaving the New York Review with a huge backlog of calendars.
Such a mistake is, in retrospect, completely predictable for an operation whose main marketing "message" is that they have really long articles and whose main source of income aside from subscriptions is the sale of personal ads for retired academics seeking "sensible companionship." I once responded to such an ad, thinking that a retired academic may have been making some kind of pun on the word "sensible." Unfortunately such was not the case. After dinner, we went up to her apartment to "discuss Wordsworth's later poetry" over white wine -- I claimed to have memorized long tracts of The Prelude, by which I intended to gesture toward certain well-known properties of my member -- but I sadly found that the wine was not the only thing that had been chilled. I had a brief opportunity to palpate her withered dugs shortly before I was asked to leave, but the encounter was, on the whole, quite unsatisfying.
In any case, I wish nothing but good luck to the New York Review of Books and hope that this calendar debacle will be a "teachable moment" for them. I must, however, cut this "blog post" short, as my ear appears to be bleeding.
