Robert Caro is obsessed with paper. He’s spent decades meticulously combing through the pages of archives. He writes his books on legal pads, then types them up on an electric Smith-Corona typewriter, making paper carbon copies as he goes. His mantra — cribbed from advice he received as a young investigative reporter — is “turn every page.”
Caro is such a staunch partisan of print that for years, he has refused to publish an e-book edition of “The Power Broker,” his revered 1974 book about the urban planner Robert Moses, whose bridges and expressways reshaped New York City, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and devastating entire communities along the way. An electronic screen would diminish the reading experience, Caro felt, and mar the precision of his line spaces and paragraph breaks.
But about a year ago, Caro, 88, relented. After prodding from his publisher, Knopf, he approved a digital edition of “The Power Broker,” which will be released on Sept. 16 to mark the 50th anniversary of the book’s release.
Caro conceded that the e-book might appeal to a new generation of readers, and perhaps to people who have been put off by the sheer mass of the book — which spans 1,286 pages and weighs in at more than four pounds — or to those who might prefer to cradle “The Power Broker” in the palm of their hand, on their phone.
“If you think that you’ve learned things about political power that would help people’s understanding about its nature and its dangers, you don’t want just one generation to know those things,” Caro said during a recent interview at the New-York Historical Society, where he visited an installation with material from his archives that celebrates the 50th anniversary of “The Power Broker.”
“I realized more and more people will do their reading on electronic books, so you want those generations to learn about it also,” he continued. “That’s what changed my mind.”
After e-books became ubiquitous with the arrival of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader in 2007, Caro looked at a few, and was appalled by their poor quality, he said.
“They had an unfortunate amount of typos,” he said.
“If you’re reading along and there’s a typo, it ruins the mood,” he added. “It’s not just typos. Spacing between paragraphs or sections is very important to my rhythm, and the spaces were so insignificant in the old e-books that they didn’t stop you. I wanted the space to stop the reader, that’s why I put it there.”
Caro’s other books, including his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and “Working,” his memoir about reporting and writing, are all available digitally. But he stubbornly held out with “The Power Broker,” his first book, and the one that cemented his reputation as a towering talent whose meticulous research and exquisite prose brought forgotten or unknown chapters of American history to life.
Sometime last year, Caro was persuaded by Katherine Hourigan, a longtime editor at Knopf, to give e-books another try. He read digital editions of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, and was less put off, if not entirely satisfied.
“It’s much better now,” he said, adding, “It’s not perfect.”
Hourigan, who retired from Knopf last year, said they used the book’s upcoming anniversary to nudge Caro.
“He never wanted us to do it, and we said to him, ‘Listen, 50th anniversary, it’s time,’” Hourigan said. “Is he happy about it? No, he keeps going back and forth. He thinks ‘The Power Broker’ experience is perfect, why spoil it?”
Fans of “The Power Broker” have long clamored for an e-book. Through his website, Caro has received messages from readers who have trouble reading small print, or who struggled to carry the book because they had physical disabilities or were recovering from surgery, his publicist said.
Some readers have resorted to carving the book into more manageable sections. “Power Broker” fans have sought advice on Reddit about where to score a PDF; some commenters even suggested scanning a hard copy. Until now, the only digital option has been the audiobook, which runs to 66 hours.
Once Knopf had Caro’s blessing to release an e-book, the process was hardly simple.
The original book was set in linotype, and the only digital files were static images of the typeset pages, said Andy Hughes, formerly the senior vice president of production and design at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, who retired in December.
The entire manuscript had to be retyped — a process that was outsourced to a word processing vendor in Chennai, India. Then the new digital text had to be proofread against the print edition to make sure no errors had been introduced.
“Bob is extraordinarily scrupulous,” Hughes said, noting that Caro is “infatuated with the artifact of the book.”
Another challenge was rendering Caro’s copious endnotes — which run to nearly 70 pages, and are organized by chapter but not by page number — into a linkable digital format. It took Knopf’s production department nearly a year to go through the notes and make sure that each one linked back to the right passage from the book, said Austin O’Malley, who oversees e-book quality at Penguin Random House, Knopf’s parent company. Now, in the e-book, toggling between the end notes and relevant passages should be a seamless reading experience.
“The notes section is going to be a tremendous resource for people,” O’Malley said.
Caro is currently working on the highly anticipated fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, which still doesn’t have a release date, but can’t come quickly enough for readers who have been waiting for it since the fourth volume came out in 2012.
His writing process remains much the same as it was when he wrote “The Power Broker” more than 50 years ago, Caro said. He still prefers writing by hand, on paper, because it forces him to write more slowly and weigh every word.
“With everything in the world today, speed is supposed to be a desirable thing,” he said. “I happen to think there’s something good about going slow.”
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