Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Which is why, I suppose, today we have imprints from the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the rapper 50 Cent (Handler’s erstwhile beau, but I wouldn’t read too much into it), the chef Anthony Bourdain, and actors Viggo Mortensen and Johnny Depp, not to mention mystery writer Dennis Lehane and former Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko.

All these are small imprints, usually folded into publishing conglomerates and producing only a few books each year—and always announcing the celebrity affiliation with unabashed pride of the sort that must make the wise old men of the publishing world, the two or three still left, cringe. All were founded in recent years, as the publishing industry has searched ever more desperately for a solution to its chronic, worsening woes. They suggest, to me at least, that the business of discovering, editing, publishing, and promoting a book has become little more than that—a business, on par with hawking energy drinks or endorsing restaurant chains. Yes, publishing has always been about making money. The rise of the celebrity imprint indicates that it is now about little more than that.

That the publishing world—buffeted by the forces of Amazon and apathy—has turned to celebrities for salvation is not surprising. Considering how much of a premium our society places on fame—independent of how that fame is achieved, regardless of whether it is deserving—it makes perfect sense that at HarperCollins someone said, “Hey, we should have that guy from Pirates of the Caribbean edit some books.”

The business of discovering, editing, publishing, and promoting a book has become little more than that—a business.

That guy—Depp—is apparently serious about his imprint, Infinitum Nihil, having recently published a long-lost novel by Woody Guthrie, House of Earth, with an introduction by the historian Douglas Brinkley, who is also publishing The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan with Depp. And Mortensen founded Perceval Press on his own—in some degree to publish his own works of photographs, but also as an outlet for what is all-too-readily dismissed by bigger publishing houses as "literary fiction," as well as works on history and art. Not too shabby, I think, for two guys who work in a town where anything more ponderous than a Rotten Tomatoes review is considered longform.

But I don’t want to give the impression of being an optimist. The landscape of celebrity publishing is a dreary one. I mean, can you imagine Bourdain—who has an imprint at Ecco—editing a book? I don’t want to get overly romantic, but editing and publishing were once the domain of men like Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who staked their reputations and livelihoods on the authors they published (in Rosset’s case, the supposedly pornographic works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller). This takes not only guts and brains but, very simply, a lot of time. Meanwhile, can you even imagine Bourdain sitting still for ten minutes before realizing that there is a shack in rural Maryland where he must absolutely try the spiced crab cakes? I imagine putting his name on a book—like Marilyn Hagerty’s Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 100 Reviews—is probably tantamount to endorsing a line of no-stick cookware. His name is his traction. He knows it, as does his marketing tribe.