I was afraid of that. Among the present senior editors at the Book Review is a man I have known since I first came to New York. I have learned to keep my eyes peeled for him on the Upper West Side and rush, on his approach, to the other side of the street. Failing that is to be trapped in the most torporous conversation available in the city.

I asked McGrath what he thought TBR's mission was. He answered in the negative, saying he didn't think the Book Review should be a consumer guide. He accented the words consumer and guide as though they were particular modern ills.

I mentioned that as I had been leafing through a few months' worth of issues, I had been struck by the great number of books reviewed in the TBR that have probably sold fewer than 15,000 copies; many have most likely sold just a few thousand.

He shrugged: "It makes not a whit of difference to me what a book sells." I believed him.

I said, "But if you don't sell books, or create an environment in which to sell books, publishers won't advertise with you."

"I don't feel the book industry is my constituency."

"The reader, then," I said. "The things that appeal to readers: What happened to the essays, the controversies, the interviews, the author photographs?" Indeed, the present graphic style of the Book Review mimics nineteenth-century line drawings, and the newly introduced color, instead of being used for vividness and immediacy, seems to have been employed for its sobering effect.

This was the only time he set his lips. "I wanted to devote more, not less, space to reviews."

I brought up TBR's reviewer policy. In the Book Review, books tend to be reviewed not by journalists with the stylistic sense to make a review entertaining and readable but by people in the "field" of the book being reviewed, who tend to be as flat-footed as the "co-author of three textbooks in psychology" whose prose I had recently endured.

We talked about the books he thought the TBR had "made" during his tenure. There were only two he could think of, My Old Man and the Sea ("I forget the author") and Dreams of My Russian Summers. Neither, he acknowledged, was what you would think of as a big book. I steered the conversation back toward advertising and the publishing business. He seemed genuinely unconcerned about the Book Review's steep falloff in advertising pages.

I asked a trick question: "What's a page cost these days?"

He looked at me blankly: "I have no idea." Which, I thought, rather summed things up.

As I left the interview and took a last look at the office, trying to memorize the details of the squalor, I felt at once guilty about my own clear bias toward commercial realities and deeply annoyed that these people, who had at their disposal one of the most powerful tools ever created to promote good books, were squandering it.

But is he to blame? It is, after all, Chip McGrath's fate to be presiding over the Book Review during one of the most transforming periods in the book business -- the rise of superstores (and the near-death of the independents), the emergence of online book sales, and the consolidation of publishing houses.

The heart of the Book Review's commercial function has been to serve the nation's thousands of independent bookstores as a catalogue and a guide. Advertisements in the Book Review are never principally targeted at the reader or the "end user" but at bookstores that make their own ordering decisions. In less than a decade, however, the independent bookstore's position as the outlet for the great majority of the trade books sold in the U.S. has been reversed. Now the chains -- Barnes & Noble, Borders, various regional chains, and other nonbook retail outlets like Target or Sam's -- account for the majority of trade-book sales. The chains tend to order on the basis of computer models: How many copies of an author's last book did we sell? How many books have we sold in the past on this or that subject? What kind of promotional allowances are we getting from the publisher?