In dropping Linda Fairstein, the book industry reveals its cowardice

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When Galileo Galilei finished writing his last work, “Two New Sciences,” he had trouble finding a publisher.

Galileo had been branded a heretic, and his work was prohibited by the Inquisition. A patron arranged for the book to be published in Venice and then chickened out. The House of Elzevir (whose name lives on in the modern publisher Elsevier) arranged for the manuscript to be smuggled out of Italy and published in the Netherlands, then as now a stronghold of free thinking.

That defiance could very well have brought a death sentence. But a few publishers once had the grit to stand up to the Inquisition.

In our time, most of them cannot even stand up to Twitter, a measly and miserable inquisition of another kind.

The tales are familiar: Natasha Tynes, just before publishing her first novel, “They Called Me Wyatt,” tweeted a picture of a black transit worker apparently violating subway rules by eating on the train. She was denounced as a racist on Twitter; her novel’s distributor, Rare Bird Books, blockaded the work and then publicly bullied her publisher, California Coldblood, into dropping the author. Linda Fairstein, author of 16 bestselling crime novels, is a former New York prosecutor who worked on the Central Park Five case. She was just dropped by her publisher, Dutton, after the premiere of “When They See Us,” a miniseries about the trial that blamed her for the men’s convictions. Of course, Dutton knew about Fairstein’s professional history — it is how she launched her career as a crime novelist in the first place. And, earlier this year, Kosoko Jackson was bullied into pulling his debut young-adult novel, “A Place for Wolves,” because it “ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege,” according to The New York Times.

Thank goodness none of these little cretins was around when “Brideshead Revisited” was in galleys, or “The Satanic Verses”: The former is almost entirely focused on people of privilege, the latter famously offended Muslim sensibilities. Tehran issued a death sentence against its author Salman Rushdie in 1989.

Not all ayatollahs wear robes. Some of them tweet.

Moralistic suppression isn’t entirely new in modern times. In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis and his book “American Psycho” were abandoned by Simon & Schuster after a cancellation crusade led by the Times, where Roger Rosenblatt demanded that the publisher “Snuff This Book!” as the headline read. The campaign against that book was, like the current ones, a moral campaign.

Rosenblatt demanded that the publishers “assert moral judgment,” in part because within the pages of the book the author did not make it clear whether “Mr. Ellis disapproves” of the antics of his imaginary serial killer. “Bateman is never brought to justice,” Rosenblatt complains. “Nor is Mr. Ellis.”

Then as now, it wasn’t just the book that was wicked — it was the author.

Ellis eventually found a home for his novel, which made a great deal of money, in spite of Rosenblatt’s call for a boycott. “American Psycho” inspired a film and a musical and is now properly regarded as a satirical document of its times.

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But would Ellis find a publisher today? Who would have the guts to publish “The Bell Curve” in 2019 and be branded a racist, or “Ulysses,” which was banned after a campaign by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”? John Milton’s “Areopagitica,” an argument against censorship, was — surprise! — censored. Linda Fairstein is no John Milton, but you don’t get the one without the other.

Beyond Galileo, the House of Elzevir published controversial writers ranging from the devout Christian René Descartes to the atheist Christiaan Huygens. As a publisher, it was of no party except ideas and free inquiry.

The only possible way to stand up to the social-media mob is for contemporary institutions to follow that example, to hold on to their missions and to their values — and their balls, if they have any.

The list of those doing without grows daily.

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