Publishing turns right.

Tenured Radicals by Roger Kimball was one of the first big books to take a serious swing at political correctness. Literary agents Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley loved it. They were young graduates of the University of Chicago, where political correctness was religion and reading lists were sprinkled with Marx. They were fascinated by the rise of anti-PC intellectualism and knew Kimball's book was cutting-edge. They pitched it around town and found an editor at Henry Holt who wanted to buy it. But when the editor pitched it to his colleagues, he was stopped by the publisher, who stood up and declared, "This is a dangerous book!"

Another publisher eventually picked it up. Chu and Hartley and some authors they represented through their firm, Writers? Representatives, Inc., weren't so lucky with other books that challenged the leftist politics of New York's publishing industry. When Marvin Olasky wanted to do a book on welfare reform in the early 1990s, everyone in town turned it down. It wasn't that people in publishing didn't believe there was a market for books like this, says Chu, "They willfully ignored it."

Within a year or two Olasky was a big-name conservative intellectual, heralded by Newt Gingrich for The Tragedy of American Compassion. The publisher? Regnery-the lone outpost of conservative book publishing. Regnery has been the only game in town for years. No, not this town. In the country. Regnery Publishing, based in Washington, DC, is now the only major publisher in America that makes it their business to bring conservative books to market. Lucky for them. The last few years they've had more bestsellers than you can shake a stick at. Dereliction of Duty by Robert Patterson is #3 on the New York Times bestseller list at this writing. Some other recent sparklers include Invasion, by Michelle Malkin, Betrayal by Bill Gertz and High Crimes and Misdemeanors by Ann Coulter.

Regnery's recent success is thanks in part to the market-driven rise of Fox News, talk radio and the internet. Regnery doesn't need the New York Times to review their books. In fact, it doesn't matter what anybody in New York thinks about them. They sell books through National Review's website or they try to get the author on to Sean Hannity's afternoon radio show. They can send a direct mail letter to NewsMax subscribers or bring it to Rush's attention. If Rush likes it, he'll tell his 20 million listeners about it. New York publishers just may wake up one day and realize they're no longer the tastemaker, at least in "Bush country."

Before that happens, some New York publishers are going to try to steal some of Regnery's business away. Crown Publishing announced in April they're starting a new conservative imprint called Crown Forum. They've hired one of Regnery's editors to show them how it's done and plan to publish 15 books each year, starting with Ann Coulter's next title. Penguin followed soon after, announcing they'll also do an imprint dedicated to conservative books. Then at the end of May, Bookspan, a company jointly owned by Bertelsmann and AOL Time Warner, jumped in announcing a conservative Book-of-the-Month Club. Now four of the big six New York publishing conglomerates publish conservative books.

"I think it's interesting that they're starting conservative imprints, but not liberal imprints," says Marji Ross, Regnery's publisher. "Does that mean all the other imprints are liberal?" It does seem an admission of guilt, either way you slice it, though Crown insists their other imprints that are not conservative are for all books. But if the "regular" or liberal imprints are doing poorly and the conservative ones are making scads of money, won't the conservative imprints get bigger and liberal imprints get smaller until the whole industry is split down the middle? We now have CNN and Fox. Liberals watch one, conservatives watch the other. In every market there's NPR, and there's a talk radio station that carries Rush, Hannity, Savage, etc. Some cities in this country, like Madison, WI, still have two newspapers. One for each side. Politics is war by other means. The two sides have staked out their media. Is New York publishing also going to split between liberal and conservative? Twenty years from now, will half of all imprints be conservative and the other half liberal?

It depends on whether you think liberals can edit and publish conservative books, or whether you think anyone can effectively promote something that he or she disagrees with or even despises. One long-time New York book editor insists that she would have no problem publishing conservative books, as long as they were well-written and well-argued. She then says in the next breath that she considers the kinds of books Regnery publishes to be "wildly conservative" and authors like Bill Gertz, a journalist for the Washington Times some consider to be the top national security reporter in the country, to be "outrageous and extreme." The market is saying just the opposite. Readers are telling the New York publishing industry that books like Gertz's Betrayal and Ann Coulter's Slander and Bernie Goldberg's Bias are not extreme. The fact that these have been best sellers means that they represent a current of thought that occupies a very large part of the country. Which is to say, they're mainstream.

Tom Lipscomb, formerly president of Times Books, doesn't think New York publishers really understand that it's their own politics that are far from the center. "They don't know they're left because fish don't know they're wet," he says. How long have they been left? Since the book industry became politicized during the 1920s and 30s, when being literary and avant garde became connected to socialism, he says. So publishers have been ignoring the conservative market for books for about 70 years. Publishing CEOs and shareholders shouldn't get too disconcerted, because lost business opportunities are like lost paper clips. They're too numerous for any one of them to matter.