Obligatory "Charles Kessler" Mention in City Journal; Charles Kesler Mention in The Corner

C-Span 2 wins this round of the spelling bee. Better luck next time, City Journal.

City Journal has a new piece this week entitled, "The Future of Conservative Books," about the rise of conservative presses and how the liberal publishing industry tries to keep 'em down, though a few of them are big time money makers.

Basically, it's the story of what happens with every group that is discriminated against: they form their own clubs, which kick butt, and then gain gradual acceptance in the mainstream culture.

Alas. What's a conservative/libertarian/Straussian/classical liberal to do?

Off to the blogosphere, children!

Here's the paragraph that mentions our man, Dr. Charles Kesler, but they misspell his name.

Even mainstream houses produced the occasional conservative title. In 1988, to take the most famous example, Simon and Schuster paid little-known University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom a modest $10,000 advance and got a surprise monster bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. “Dick Snyder was running S. and S. back then, and he really did believe in the free market of ideas,” remembers Bob Asahina, who edited the book. “I was pretty much free to acquire anyone I wanted.” Brad Miner, who would go on to work at National Review and run the conservative book club American Compass, says that Harper and Row hired him in 1984 in part because he was a conservative. “I brought them books by Bill Buckley and Charles Kessler,” he recalls, “and also Sidney Hook, who was hardly a conservative but felt like one to the lefties at Harper. But of course they were names. Every time I brought up someone they hadn’t heard of, they would say, ‘No, Brad, we want to do conservative books, just not this one.’ There really was no conception of the size of the potential market, or what the country was like. It was like the famous Steinberg drawing with New York as the center of the world, that odd liberal version of reality.”

Anyone else want to comment on how City Journal of all places misspelled Dr. Kesler's name? Sigh.

Fortunately, our friends at The Corner spelled Dr. Kesler's name right when they published a review of Keeping the Tablets. I quote their awesomeness here.

We've Been Keeping the Tablets For You [NR Staff]

This big (469 pages), beautiful 1988 hardcover collection - edited by Bill Buckley and Charles Kesler - is as important now as when it was first published. Brimming with seminal essays on conservatism, freedom, tradition, government, spirituality, and much more, and featuring contributions by giants such as Frank Meyer, Harry Jaffa, Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, James Burnham, George Will, and Gerhart Niemeyer, Keeping the Tablets should be in every conservative’s library. As with other recent book sales here, we have several boxes that were once part of Bill Buckley’s private collection, and are now making their contents available. The hardcover edition of Keeping the Tablets sells in used-book stores for up to $100 - our copies are in excellent shape and available for $30 (which includes shipping and handling). Order here.

By the way, you should find of interest what George Nash had to say about Keeping the Tablets in 1988 in National Review:

At this critical juncture in the nation's political and intellectual journey, it is singularly fitting that William F. Buckley Jr. has compiled an anthology of modern American conservative thought, with the able assistance of Charles R. Kesler, a frequent contributor to National Review. Although officially a revised edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (published in 1970), the volume at hand is essentially new. Less than one-third of the material appearing in the 1970 edition is reprinted here, enabling the editors to assemble a fresh, updated, and, in Kesler's words, "representative selection of the best of American conservative thought."

Usually, when one inspects an anthology, a few of its components seem marginal. Not here: every one of this hefty volume's 26 selections truly belongs. Here one finds seminal essays and excerpts from books by such luminaries of the post-1945 conservative renaissance as Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, and Russell Kirk. Here, too, are generous samplings from some of the Right's leading political philosophers (Strauss, Voegelin, Kendall, and Jaffa, among others), as well as such influential younger thinkers as Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and George Will. The neoconservative impulse is represented by Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick. . . . And topping off the confection are sublime and moving contributions by Whittaker Chambers and Albert Jay Nock.

Reading this impressive collection prompts many thoughts. First, one is struck anew by the philosophic introspection, literary breadth, and historical learning of most of the contributors. As their frequent and unforced allusions to ancient and modern figures attest, these are individuals who are genuinely at home in Western civilization. For them our heritage matters; it can teach. One wonders whether an anthology of modern liberal thought would disclose the same attributes in such abundance.