"I've got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let's call it Random House." So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House's first decades.
Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and '30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing's golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on "What's My Line?") helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades' worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, "At Random" is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who's ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.
"From the Trade Paperback edition."
Industry Reviews
Editors Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Albert Erskine have knitted up a pale, nononsense substitute for the book-about-books that the late publisher-celebrity intended to build from diaries, taped interviews, assorted memorabilia, memory, and wit. Would canny Cerf have begun chronologically - with a brisk, unapologetic self-portrait of the cocky, moneyed comer who bought a publishing vicepresidency (benefiting from the profligacies of doomed Horace Liveright), snatched up the profitable Modern Library line, cornered the limited editions biz, and started the RH snowball rolling - and then settled into disconnected musings on Random House authors, editors, and mergers? Probably not. And he certainly wouldn't have allowed such flaccid phrasings as ". . . The Tides of Mont-Saint-Michel... a novel having as its background Mont-Saint-Michel and its great tides" to escape his desk. Unsatisfying shape, thin tone. . . but the books and bookmen - just try and stop him. Reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes before anyone else, recoiling from Dreiser's gaucheries, knuckling under to Shaw's hubristic self-pricing, supervising the gambit that took Ulysses to trial and out of brown paper covers, trying to protect O'Neill from the taunts of Carlotta ("You're in pain, remember?"), telling FDR that his Public Papers were going to be remaindered, being summed up by Gertrude Stein on national radio ("a very nice boy but you're rather stupid"), squabbling with William Saroyan and Irwin Shaw - inky gold. The dullish surrounding ore includes Cerf's eulogies for George Gershwin and Moss Hart (eloquent he wasn't), but What's My Line and such are happily absent. His line was books, the rest was incidental, and book-lovers will be eager to repress wistfulness for the book that isn't and browse at random through the book that is. (Kirkus Reviews)
