Moving from interesting to post-interesting is just the latest turn for a man who, about once every decade, reinvents himself. Or, as Brockman likes to put it, "Every 10 years I have an idea." His best idea, by far, has been to become a literary agent, as well known for his list of prominent clients—writers and thinkers like Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence), Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow), and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)—as for the sometimes astounding advances he extracts from publishers. When a client asks Brockman how much he can get for a manuscript, he has a standard, not entirely ironic response: "For you, a million."

 

Being an agent satisfies Brockman's three essential needs: It makes money. ("I don't like having money—I like getting it," he says.) It generates publicity. And it facilitates Brockman's seemingly compulsive desire to annoy people. "John likes to run needles into people's nostrils just to see what they'll do about it," says writer Stewart Brand, a longtime friend and client who nevertheless characterizes this post-interesting business as "just another line of bullshit." According to Brand, Brockman is also "intensely curious and easily bored."

 

Indeed, it wasn't long before Brockman got bored with conventional agenting—the deals, the authors, the press, even the dough. So he came up with another new idea, and it may be his most annoying yet. For the last couple of   years, Brockman has waged a partly serious, partly wiseass campaign to force the technophobic tweeds in the New York publishing world to do away with the familiar rituals and props of their industry—the transfer by messenger and express mail of carefully typed cover letters, neatly paper clipped proposals, and bulky manuscripts—and to go digital.

  

"They're behind," Brockman says of his peers. "A lot of them are stuck in the second culture." He wants to yank them into the "third culture," by which he means, broadly, the realm of the technologically literate.

 

The first salvo was Brockman's declaration in 1997 that he would thenceforth operate a paperless office.   Brockman  put his entire offering of proposals and manuscripts on a password-protected site. Publishers who wanted access would be given a URL and a secret word—usually "bestseller"—to view the materials online or to print out the pages themselves. Manhattan cohorts thought the scheme was fallout from what one agent calls Brockman's "high-concept fog cloud." His customers haven't been wild about it, either.

 

"The problem is that if I want to read a proposal I have to print the damn thing out," says William Thomas, editor in chief of Doubleday. "It's annoying."

 

"I told him at the time that this was the end of our relationship, because I was damned if I was going to use email," says Donald Lamm, chair of W. W. Norton & Company, one of the tweediest outfits in publishing. No fan of Brockman's, Lamm is now a reluctant email recipient whose company eventually submitted to the tormentor's system.

 

What the industry may find truly irresistible, though, is Brockman's cost cutting results. Brockman has saved a lot by decreasing his paper load—printing and postage costs for shopping a single proposal can exceed $1,200 if the book is overnighted to European and Asian publishers. And the digital setup has allowed him to distribute his book proposals instantly to a global buying audience. He sold a novel by former Spy editor Bruno Maddox in nine countries in less than a week, all without mailing a thing and without giving a cut to foreign "subagents."

 

Brockman has recently invested in a Silicon Valley startup called the RightsCenter, which he hopes will become "the killer app for the publishing world." The RightsCenter will be a souped-up version of Brockman's site, one that can be used by publishers, agents, editors, and writers around the world—bankrolled by those willing to pay a couple hundred bucks to post their material online. As Brockman sees it, the RightsCenter could evolve into a giant online literary marketplace, an eBay for the written word. If it catches on, Brockman will have it all: more money, more attention, and—here's the real beauty of it—an enhanced ability to irritate people. Everyone in publishing will have to use it, even people who don't want to.

 

For all his advocacy of the third culture, Brockman is not one to miss out on a deal. If a publisher insists, he will still dutifully print out a manuscript and send it the old fashioned way.

 

Still, for Brockman, the RightsCenter is about much heavier stuff than just making money and bugging people. It's about progress. "What's new is not what was," he says, as if anyone who thinks otherwise is an imbecile. "Progress is the negation of 'was,' not 'what's next.' We're at the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological. I want to be floating on that edge."

 

Actually, we're at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, across the way from the Plaza Hotel and in front of the building that houses the offices of Brockman Inc. Upstairs, in Brockman's penthouse lair, he escorts me to a terrace with grand views along Central Park South. The space itself is decorated with a Bauhaus vibe—austere wooden desks and tables surrounded by black leather chairs and sofas.

 

The first thing you notice about a paper-less office is that it looks a lot like an abandoned office. Against one wall, a computer sits on a desk, and that's about it. Brockman takes his hat off, plops into a leather chair, and rants on a favorite theme: the corporatization of book publishing. At 58, he is broad shouldered, with slightly equine features and a permanent scowl that belies his impish personality.

 

"Simon & Schuster is a lie, Knopf is a lie, William Morrow is a lie," he growls. "All these are comfort words." Given that most major publishing houses are now owned by indistinct media conglomerates and that most editors are "popcorn salesmen," he says, why bother with chitchat, literary lunches, and the like? Why not just sell books like pork bellies or derivatives? It really pisses Brockman off that so few people in his industry understand. 

 

"Publishers are scratching their heads right now," he says. "Nothing has shown me they get it. It's a real battle dragging these people into this era."

 

Long before he was post-interest, back when he was what you might call "pre-successful," Brockman was a below-average student in Boston who worked for his father, a flower salesman known around town as the Carnation King.

 

"My father used to say to me, "Johnny, get your flowers out of the fridge and pack them, or they're going to die,' Brockman says. "That's what I try to do with ideas."

 

Brockman did so poorly in high school he was rejected by 17 colleges. So he enrolled at the only school that would have him—the Babson Institute of Business Administration, then a kind of financial finishing school. Brockman earned his bachelor's degree at Babson and did well to gain admission to the Columbia Business School. He got his MBA, did "an investment banking thing," hated it, and then decided to try art. In 1965, he organized an avant-garde film festival in Manhattan and eventually began putting on some of his own "environmental intermedia events"—loud, pot-banging affairs with slide shows, lights, and freaky soundtracks. The events attracted press attention, and when Brockman was asked to explain the meaning of his work, he issued replies like, man is dead. What exists is the transaction. And the transaction is invisible. Man is a relic of the instantaneous past!"

 

Brockman's antics prompted a fateful call from a business-school pal who was an executive at Scott Paper. He asked Brockman to produce a multimedia presentation to motivate the lethargic sales force of Scott's Confidets, a sanitary napkin. Brockman responded, "My fee is $15,000," a amount for a directionless hippie, consulting experience. Scott Paper him despite the fee, or perhaps because of it—a moment that taught Brockman the value of playing hard to get.

 

It's amazing how tough people will think you are just for saying no," he says.

 

The Confidets performance—a grating event that featured, among other things, a partial striptease by a woman wearing a dress made of Scott tissue—motivated, or perhaps just terrified, the Scott team into action, prompting an upward spike in sanitary-napkin sales. Brockman was seen as a boy wonder; he was profiled in The New York Times, and pretty soon he became one of the most in-demand twentysomethings in corporate America. Companies like General Electric and Gulf Western hired him to do his intermedia thing.

 

Brockman didn't become an outright celebrity until 1968. That's when he got a call from the producers of the Monkees movie, Head. They wanted Brockman's help marketing their corny psychedelic flick, and his idea was wonderfully simple: Blanket the city with posters of someone's head. The producers told him, "Your idea, your head" so in short order Brockman's mug was plastered in every subway station and on every bus in Manhattan. He became one of the most recognizable people in town, even if no one knew why, a circumstance New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael pronounced "depressing."