Sourcebooks, or: How We Survive the Extinction Event (An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 8)

This is a business parable, and psst: if you're a Big 5 executive, I wrote it specifically for 🎶yoo-ooooou.🎶

Hi everyone! I’m back—and back with a boom microphone. (It was a Christmas present from my father, a retired broadcast engineer.)

Starting this week, I’m going to record audio editions of this newsletter and see how that goes. No more robot narrators for you, king.

If you’ve always wondered what I sound like, NOW’S YOUR CHANCE TO FIND OUT. Just open this newsletter in the app and hit “listen.”

Anyway, onto the story.

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Stand with me in the obliterated world. It’s 65 million years before Sourcebooks will become the fifth largest book publisher in America,¹ and most of the dinosaurs are dead.

In cindered forests, the bumbling giants bumble no more. Their littlest cousins—tree-dwelling birds—have long since tumbled to extinction, bereft of their perches.

Now close your eyes and listen. Taptaptap: hear that faint noise? It might as well be evolution itself, which is forever scurrying around in such unpromising places, tapping on rock-solid hopelessness, testing for seams.

Open again and you’ll see it’s actually a survivor: a medium-sized bird running toward us, pecking at charred seeds. She’s alive because she never needed trees in the first place; she’s always made her home on the ground.

As she runs past, trailing her improbable line through ash, the scene shudders and time gives way. Eons pass in an instant. We watch as our bird branches off in a million directions, most of which come to nothing, but that which endures adapts exquisitely.

Her feathers lengthen; her bones lighten; she flies. She develops a taste for small mammals, and her body molds itself to the hunt: her eyes wide and forward, accustomed to darkness; her ears flush against a satellite-dish head, attuned to every whisper in the grass.

Her aerodynamics are perhaps most breathtaking of all. With serrated wings, she glides in total silence. By the time humans arrive, therefore, she has little trouble moving unnoticed into the margins of their world, feasting on their mice and nesting in their barns.

It takes a while, but men eventually recognize her as their metaphor for wisdom.

Watch now as she glides into the 20th century, landing in Paris from Sousse, a city on the Tunisian coast. Nearby—at least in my imagination—sleeps a little girl named Dominique Raccah, future founder of Sourcebooks.

Dominique will go on to become one of the most important figures in twenty-first century book publishing.

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I believed, like many who don’t have a lot of money and who are outsiders, I believed that real people, people like me, could not get jobs in publishing. That was an inherent belief. And in fact, when I told my father that that was my dream, he said, that’s like wanting to be a movie star. Real people need real jobs. And my dad, by the way, was deeply intelligent and highly educated. And so I believed him. —Dominique Raccah to David Steinberger on the Open Book Podcast, December 4, 2025

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By the mid-1970s, Dominique has flunked out of college.

Throughout her peripatetic, perpetual-outsider childhood—living with her parents in Paris, then back in Tunisia, then Paris again, then finally on the East Coast, where her superstar dad taught physics—school was always her ballast. She read voraciously and excelled, skipping not one but two grades and enrolling in college when she was just 16.

Now she’s drowning in shame. Turns out she wasn’t ready for college. Instead of doing her homework, she read library books. Her ballast drifted away.

Just as she’s ready to stop fighting the tide, however, her father throws her a life ring. He’s gotten a new job running the physics department at the University of Illinois-Chicago; perhaps she could take classes there. She’ll have to pay her own way, but with his employee discount, at least it’ll be cheap.

She says okay. She moves to Illinois.

Her line holds, and in time, it begins to adapt.

*

Fifty years later—over Zoom, indirectly—Dominique teaches me the rules of evolution.

I ask her whether this early setback—the flunking out of college—might have been key to her future success. Is this where she began developing her resilience, her equanimity, her gleefully experimental leadership style? I ask: might the whole experience have inoculated her against—

“Oh, NO,” she hoots. “It never inoculates you. It does not. What inoculation are you talking about?”

I laugh, strangely relieved, as though she’s just revoked some private disqualification from my own body.

Rule one: Evolution is not the extinction of grief; it’s actually kind of the opposite.

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