Tucker Carlson Wants to Be a Publisher Now

"Most people don't read books anymore," Tucker Carlson told reporters, announcing his new book imprint. He said this as a man who was launching a book imprint. The irony, if he noticed it, did not appear to trouble him.

Tucker Carlson Books, a joint venture with Skyhorse Publishing, arrives with its launch list already in place. The titles include a memoir by Russell Brand — who faces rape and sexual assault charges in the United Kingdom — a conversion therapy manifesto by Milo Yiannopoulos, and a cancer treatment book by the owner of the Los Angeles Times. The unifying editorial principle, according to Skyhorse publisher Tony Lyons, is "giving a platform to things that would, in many cases, be shut down, be censored." This is publishing as grievance, which is not, in fairness, an entirely original editorial philosophy. Plenty of imprints have been built on the conviction that the establishment is afraid of them.

What makes Tucker Carlson Books worth examining — beyond simply noting its existence alongside other cultural artifacts of this moment — is what it reveals about how the word "censorship" functions as a marketing category. The books being published here are not, in most cases, being suppressed. They are being sold. The framing of defiant counter-publishing becomes, on closer inspection, ordinary commercial publishing with a louder soundtrack.

There is a long history of imprints founded as correctives to perceived mainstream bias. Some have produced genuinely important work; others have produced books that confirmed precisely what critics suspected about them. Whether Tucker Carlson Books will do either requires, at minimum, readers — which brings us back, with some neatness, to Carlson's opening observation about their existence. One waits, with moderate patience, to see.