Remembering a Vanished World

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Excellent review/essay about a new documentary on the photography and the life of Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), the foremost chronicler of Eastern European Jewry. Vishniac’s major book A Vanished World (FSG, 1983) is a touchstone volume; though it was an oversized hardcover, coffee-table style book—with dozens of richly printed full-page images which sold for at least $50 when it came out—in my Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books, we ordered lots of copies, stacked it  up, and sold dozens. The essay is by Mark Athitakis, a critic whose reviews I alway enjoy. He explains that Vishniac, who was born in Russia, not Eastern Europe, had scientific training, and after narrowly saving himself and his family from the Nazis, and coming to America in 1940, “he taught biology and photography at New York colleges and, in the ’50s and ’60s gained fame for his microphotography—high-resolution shots of live insects and colorful images of amoebas and protozoa and human tissue filled the pages of magazines such as Life and Boys’ Life.”

The film also reveals that during WWII, while the Holocaust was raging, Vishniac tried to use his pictures to influence policy, including inside the Roosevelt administration. Athitakis also explores something the film touches on—a tendency of Vishniac to write captions for his photographs that were not, shall we say, journalistically rigorous, and may have romanticized or idealized some of his subjects.

A connection to Roman Vishniac through Isaac Bashevis Singer

I worked with my siblings Joel and Pamela, and our parents, Earl and Sylvia, at Undercover Books from 1978-85. In 1979 I had an opportunity to take some books from our store inventory to a personal appearance in Akron by Isaac Bashevis Singer—who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before. I brought copies of some books of Singer’s from our inventory for him to autograph after a talk he gave. Among the books I brought were his then-current book of short stories Old Love (FSG, 1979), and another book we had in stock, A Day of Pleasure, a personal portrait by Singer of the lives of Jewish children in Poland before WWII, a small volume which was illustrated with photos by, you guessed it, Roman Vishniac. The latter is classified among Singer’s books as a book for children. It was of course published before the magnum opus collection that would be published to great acclaim just four years later.

It strikes me that when Vishniac took his pictures of a population so soon to vanish, while he surely must have feared the loss of the people, he could not have foreseen that those pictures would one day illustrate a book of childhood remembrances by a Jewish Nobelist writing about the pre-war period. Not to employ a colloquialism that would in any way trivialize the loss of millions of Eastern European Jews that occurred after Vishniac photographed them, and after Singer came to America, but an observer might be tempted to invoke the Yiddish word, beshert, meaning something that was “destined, or meant to be.” I don’t want to want to ascribe destiny to anything associated with the Holocaust, but I’ll just say I think it was mete and right that FSG thought to use Vishniac’s photos in Singer’s book, even before they published his big collection.

It seems that Roman Vishniac may have been a sort of house photographer for FSG, and that maybe when they used his photos in Singer’s book, the publisher and Vishniac were already anticipating the big book to come. The editor of A Vanished World, Michael di Capua, a long-timer in publishing, is interviewed in the documentary. di Capua was well known for doing children’s books, so maybe there is something to that idea of mine.

For a last word here on Roman Vishniac, I’ll just say that for him to have worked so brilliantly in the medium of human portraiture, and then later in life to embark on the scientific subject matter, highlights an amazing career with an aesthetic range that is kind of astonishing. His daughter Mara, who died in 2018, was interviewed by the documentarian Laura Bilias, the director of Vishniac. I hope to see her film. Until you get the chance to see it, I recommend Mark Athitakis’s essay, which is published on the site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), titled “Photographer Roman Vishniac Explored the Shtetl and the Scientific.” And check out the trailer of the documentary: https://vimeo.com/332316939

I don’t own a copy of A Vanished World, but I do still have copies of two books that were signed by I.B. Singer that day in Akron almost 45 years ago.

 

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Listening to and Learning from the Publishing Greats—”A Constant Education”

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June 17 update: The organization that sponsored the event below, NY Book Forum, has posted a video of the May 24th program on youtube, linked to here.
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Listening to tales of the career experiences of successful professionals in publishing is always inspiring, and I felt that in spades about last night’s event put on by the New York Book Forum, held in Hachette’s sleek offices in Midtown Manhattan. The event was a shared conversation between two major figures in the book business, Victoria Wilson, an editor at Knopf for five decades, and Jane Friedman, publishing and marketing maestra who was with Knopf for twenty-nine years, then CEO of HarperCollins, and was more recently the founder of Open Road Media. Between them, they embody a combined century of publishing experience.

The evening got off to a convivial start with an unexpectedly lengthy cocktail hour that nearly stretched to an hour. I had taken a chair, but took part and made the rounds, too. Post-pandemic, I think people are so pleased to be in social settings that no one was in a hurry to start the program, even though we were also all eager for it to begin.

Vicky Wilson (l.) and Jane Friedman

Once everyone was settled, Vicky Wilson began by talking about her father, who was a writer, and she said among her family’s circle of acquaintances were family names like Boni and Liveright who operated the Boni & Liveright company, a publisher of some distinction. She was hired at Knopf in 1972 or ’73, in the editorial department, soon became a full-fledged editor, and never went elsewhere. At one point, she sought permission from her boss, Bob Gottlieb, to attend a writer’s conference out west in Squaw Valley, Idaho. Gottlieb agreed, though he told her he doubted she’d find any writers there to publish. In fact, that’s where she met Anne Rice, whose debut novel, Interview With A Vampire, she would then edit and publish. Among other things, the book became a bestseller in hardcover, and the paperback rights were sold in an auction among mass-market publishers for more money than any novel to that point. Wilson recounted sitting on a couch in Gottlieb’s office as the paperback bids ascended, astonished at all that was happening. Among Wilson’s authors is one we have in common, humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber  (1911-2016). Wilson described her career as “a constant education” in life and in business. Life, because as an editor you’re always encountering some new thing you were not apt to have known about before, and business, because you need to have at least a modicum of business sense, even though you may be more passionately interested in content and writing than the nuts & bolts of the operation.

Jane Friedman related how she came to Random House for an interview with the personnel director where, without blushing, she stated that she wanted to be in charge of something at the company.  She started working with the longtime head of Publicity, Bill Loverd, and not too long after that became head of what was then known as the Promotion department. In that role, she inaugurated—with Julia Child as the author—the first city-to-city author tour to promote a new book. The tour for Mastering the Art of French Cooking visited many major cities, supported by local morning show TV spots and well-attended signings in the book departments of major department stores, where the inimitable Julia would do a cooking demonstration. Friedman later started Random House Audio, the first audio division at a major book publisher.

Their personal monologues very quickly evolved into a stimulating back & forth, with some ribbing and joking about each other’s exploits, achievements, and work styles. It made for a delightful conversation. And everyone who came to see and hear them had a chance to engage and ask questions. I was especially pleased that many Knopf veterans were on hand, including Kathy Hourigan, Martha Kaplan, Andy Hughes, Vicky Wilson’s assistant Melinda, and Nicholas Latimer, who is Knopf’s head of publicity.

During the extended cocktail hour that kicked off the event, I was excited to learn from Latimer that Knopf is bringing out a memoir by Rose Styron, pub date June 13. Nodding toward the front of the conference room, he added that in fact Jane introduced Rose Styron to Vicky, who acquired the rights and edited the manuscript. I am eager to read it, as she has been involved throughout her life with many important humanitarian causes and human rights issues, advocating for social justice with her husband the late novelist William Styron (1925-2006). I see now that the new book is titled Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart. Almost twenty-five years ago, I had a meaningful professional encounter with her husband, and later had occasion to meet Rose, too.

It all began when I read in a biography of William Styron that the first piece of nonfiction he ever published was a critique of capitol punishment in Esquire magazine. I was working as an editor at Times Books/Random House, where I had just acquired a powerful nonfiction book about an innocent man on Death Row in Virginia. With that in mind I contacted him through his editor at Random House, and asked if he would write an Introduction to the book. It was titled Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row. As a son of Virginia himself, it roused him to write a powerful essay that opened the book. After his death, I attended the public memorial held for him at a Manhattan cathedral. Afterward, I introduced myself to Rose Styron, expressed my condolences, and explained my connection to her husband, whereupon she embraced me spontaneously and said, “Oh, Bill loved that Death Row book!” I write more about Dead Run and William Styron in an essay that ran in the BN Review some years ago.

For readers of this blog who may be interested, Bob Gottlieb, head of Knopf for many of the years that Wilson and Friedman, is the author of a delightful memoir chronicling his years in publishing, a Avid Reader. Last fall, before Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary Turn Every Page was released, about her father and Robert Caro, I wrote an appreciative essay about the memoir, published here on The Great Gray Bridge, “Avidly Reading Bob Gottlieb’s Avid Reader.”

I’ll watch for other events put on by New York Book Forum, whose president, Peggy Samedi, spoke at the beginning of the program. She said they want to bring back events like this for publishing people to take part in, now that we’ve finally all emerged from Covid isolation. I say, three cheers for that!

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“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

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There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

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David Lynch: Archaeologist of the American Unconscious by M. G. Turner

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I became fascinated by David Lynch roughly eight years ago, during a difficult and crucial period of my life. I was lucky though, for while I was garnering an appreciation for the artist I now consider the leading archaeologist of the American unconscious, I also acquired the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which David Lynch is among the world’s foremost proponents.

It came to me almost magically. I had been thinking about adopting a meditation practice, and had dabbled in several forms, until a good friend—whose family happened to be acquainted with Lynch himself—learned the practice and I subsequently joined the party. This experience in meditation was followed by an appreciation of the filmmaker-turned-meditation-advocate: I watched all his movies.

First I saw “Blue Velvet” which represented for me the ending of my childhood and the beginning of what came next. Then I went back to his earlier work, the beautifully absurd “Eraserhead” and the quintessentially humanist “The Elephant Man” which may in posterity’s light be seen as his greatest achievement. Later, “Mulholland Drive” revealed the depravity of an alternate, or perhaps not so alternate, Los Angeles while nodding humbly at Hitchcock and other suspense icons; he has also cited Edward Hopper as an influence. “The Straight Story” is a surprise in and of itself, and adds a touching element to Lynch’s oeuvre and doing much of what the title implies without sacrificing his innate artistic vision. “Twin Peaks” changed the calculus of what American television can accomplish and fashioned a bizarre and complex world that pulsed with reality and intricacy.

It has taken me a few years to really grasp what Lynch’s output means for the larger culture. Not to mention his meditation foundation which these days seems to be his main mission and is doing important work. Its positive impact is well-established and the results it’s achieving in the areas of PTSD and relief of trauma among vulnerable populations deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—if only that institution were more forward thinking, and more open to alternative modalities. However, I want to focus on his artistic output and its importance to contemporary culture. The truth is, America has never felt like more of a Lynchian hellscape. On the surface, as in “Blue Velvet,” there is wealth and beauty, green lawns and bright sunshine—but below the surface, if one simply peers down, there is corruption, degradation, and a deep moral failing at the root of our materialism.

And yet, I have never felt that Lynch was preachy. To the contrary, his view is objective. He is simply presenting reality as he sees it—no matter how bizarre, depraved, or alien. This is where the absolutism of meditation comes in. I use the word “absolutism” to demonstrate the totality of the unified field, the field we reach in Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch himself is a perennially committed diver. This field feeds the artist’s creativity; in Lynch’s own words it “serves the work and serves the life.” But through Lynch we are also being served a meal of oddities and profundities, which he has dived within to capture and present. For there is something almost incidental about Lynch’s own role in the artistic process. I’m not sure if he would describe it this way, but his language surrounding “catching fish,” which he likens to ideas, seems a unique endeavor in an industry where being a go-getter is praised and people supposedly make their own luck.

The ideas themselves, these fish which he has so patiently waited for and watched swimming under the surface of the mind, and which he has then skillfully fished out—these ideas, in sum, say something vital about our culture. It would be reductive to suggest they say only one thing, but every great artist may only be able to tackle one great idea over the length of a career. In Lynch’s case, with respect to his reluctance to give voice to his reasons and motivations, the question is, how with all we have, with every rolling hill, with every shining sea, with every great thoroughfare to drive down, with every beautiful house that has out front a rich, green lawn, how is it that we are all at base so desperately unhappy? Why do we distrust our neighbors? Why do we hate each other? Yet the corruption Lynch points to is not seen by him as ubiquitous; instead he seems to suggest that these dangerous impulses only control us when we have no conscious knowledge of them. We cannot see them, because most don’t bother to go to the place from which all matter springs; or in other words strive for something deeper.

This brings me back to meditation. It is impossible to look honestly at Lynch’s work without seeing it in the context of a committed meditator, and a man who has faced his personal darkness every day and put it into his art, rather than into the world. There is a moving anecdote in the probing documentary film “David Lynch: The Art Life” in which he describes taking his father down to the basement of his home to show him his “experiments,” which included the carcasses of dead animals, rotting fruit, and similar earthy paraphernalia. Later, as they are climbing back up the stairs Lynch’s father says “David, I don’t think you should ever have children.”

Naturally, Lynch is devastated by this. But in his narration he seems more devastated by the fact that his father misunderstood a pursuit he was deeply excited about, rather than his insensitive command to refrain from procreating. He wants to be understood—but for Lynch the type of understanding he traffics in is not of the conscious understanding that can be easily categorized. His movies enter you at a different, more subliminal level than most movies being made today—perhaps ever. It stands to reason that would be the case, given his almost fifty-year meditation practice and the wisdom he has gathered from it, the wisdom he has sought to infuse, perhaps furtively, into the movies we have all enjoyed and embraced.

All this meant a lot to me eight years ago and still does; given the few degrees of separation between us I could very well have met him, though never have. But I don’t have to meet him to appreciate his work, nor feel personally connected. Truly great artists make us feel as if we know them; they consciously lower the barriers of morality and good taste so that we can have an experience that is free of judgment. These days when most of what is being peddled smacks of 16th century morality plays, where good always wins and the bad are always punished, it is refreshing to have someone stepping in to say “Not so fast. The world is much more complicated, and much more nuanced than anything you can reduce into a simple catchphrase.” Maybe a more concise statement is what the character named Donna Hayward says in “Twin Peaks”—“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.”

If that doesn’t describe America today, I don’t know what does. All I know is I’m glad David Lynch is around to illuminate us. It’s nice to know someone is meditating for our sins. Maybe one day soon the world will join him.

M. G. Turner

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Peat Bogs and Iron Age Humans

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One of my most treasured books from my college days was The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by Danish scholar P.V. Glob (a real name), chronicling the custom of people burying dead bodies in boggy ground. Such burials are found throughout Northern Europe. It is believed the practice began around 5000 BCE and diminished around 700 CE.  Bogs are made of damp peaty soil, high in tannic acid and largely anaerobic, which had the affect of preserving the flesh, hair, clothing, fingernails, and even personal effects on the bodies. I had a mass-market Ballantine paperback published in 1973 (left with a cover photo of what became known as Tollund Man). I lost track of that copy some years ago, and have replaced it with a newer edition of the book, published by the NY Review of Books imprint (right).The new edition has prefatory material by the scholars Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, author of Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.

On January 30th, the NY Times published a fascinating update about the burial practice, reporting on a database maintained by scholars with more than 1000 known bog burials in such countries as Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Archaeologists who’ve studied the sites and the bodies say some of them show evidence of violent treatment or even execution, perhaps incurred in the course of ritual or even sacrificial practice.

Despite what scholars in the Times article are describing, I don’t accept that all bog burials would’ve followed executions; it strikes me that at times a burial in a bog would have solved a challenge confronting mourners: how to inter or process the dead. Consider that if these 1000 burials have been found, these fifty centuries later, imagine how many multiples of that number there might have been bog burials down through the ages?

The images of the remains shown here cast my mind back uncounted generations when grieving families would’ve pondered how to inter their dead:

  • How do we dig several feet into hard-packed earth?
  • Who has a shovel, especially one that’s made from stout enough lumber and iron-forged steel so it won’t just snap in two?
  • Best not leave the grave too shallow, lest the remains be found and torn by animals, as was invoked in the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers.

In some instances, placing the dead in swampy ground would have been the simplest option, one that offered mourners the greater likelihood that the body of their loved one would be undisturbed.
In addition, survivors feared the violation of a grave. Corpse robbery—theft of keepsakes like jewelry, or the skeleton itself in the case of a body snatcher (see Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Body Snatcher) is something that occurred. I know some people must find the study of funerary practice lugubrious, but I never have.

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The Legacy of the Late Ruth Gruber Lives On

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I keep a Google Alert on for my old friend and longtime author, the humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), as I still enjoy seeing mentions of her and her many accomplishments when they appear in media, as they still do with some frequency. One such item popped up yesterday.

I was tickled to see that one of the refugees Ruth helped rescue and escort to America on the Henry Gibbons ship in 1944—as related in her book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WW II Refugees and How They Came to America, and in the 2000 CBS mini-series “Haven,” with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s role—has celebrated her 101st birthday. As reported by journalist John Benson in this Cleveland[.]com article,:

“Liberated by the British in 1944, Musafia, her mother and sister were one of 1,000 women and children selected by Ruth Gruber, per instructions from President Roosevelt, to be relocated to the United States.

They arrived with $17 at Fort Ontario camp in upstate New York, where Musafia finished high school and learned how to type.
‘My mother and sister, we were always together,’ Musafia said. ‘In that respect, we were very lucky. My father was a different story.’

Sadly, while her father escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Hungary to live with his sister, he eventually died in a Russian prison.

After spending two years at Fort Ontario, the family relocated to Cleveland. Eventually, Musafia moved to New York City, where she married a fellow Holocaust refugee.
They were married for 36 years; Musafia said he died 36 years ago.
She lived in Florida for a while before deciding to move closer to her niece, who lives in Northeast Ohio.
‘In my old age, I figured it was time to come here, so I bought a condo,’ Musafia said. ‘I don’t particularly like the weather, but what can you do.’
As a Holocaust survivor who sees fascism once again rearing its head, Musafia offers sage advice.
‘Believe what they tell you,’ Musafia said. ‘People can do very good and people can do very, very bad. What’s going on now, some people can’t believe it. But I believe it because I know what I went through.’”
In Haven, there is a census printed at the back of the book listing the names of the refugee passengers on the Henry Gibbins. I took a photo of the census and include it here for the record. On the fourth line down from the top left, it shows that Gordona (spelled Gordana in Benson’s article) Milinovic (Musafia being her married name) was born Jan 2, 1922 in Yugoslavia, thus confirming the content of the story.

In 2000, “Haven” was adapted for a TV movie with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth Gruber. That year, I published a trade paperback edition of Haven with a Foreword by Ruth’s niece Dava Sobel, author of the bestseller Longitude.

A hearty happy birthday to Gordana Musafia, who’s lived her long life thanks to Ruth Gruber, and the USA who brought her out of war-torn Europe.

If Ruth Gruber is a new name to you, I invite you to read some of the other posts on this blog about her, and view some of her photographs, like the ones below, of refugees embracing, and a photo of Ruth from a different period in the 1940s when she worked for the FDR administration in Alaska.

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Looking Back on 2022, Another Good Year in Editing and Agenting

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Yesterday I began totaling up the volume of business for Philip Turner Book Productions in 2022, to prepare to send agency clients full accounting of monies we received from publishers for them in 2022, and to write an annual year-end blog post. I’m pleased to note the figures confirm how it felt while we working at it—2022 was a very productive year for the company I founded in 2009, which I began operating with my adult son Ewan three years ago.

It’s fun and rewarding to have such a knowledgeable colleague and partner whose instincts and judgment I trust completely. When the year began he was our Managing Editor, and then mid-year I promoted him to Executive Editor and Literary Agent, which was announced in the Publishing Trends newsletter in July. The dual role is emblematic of our makeup as a joint editorial services consultancy and literary agency. He’s heading our New Stories division, devoted to cultivating new work in fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir.

Looking back on the year that ends this week, I see that

• On the editorial side, we edited manuscripts and book proposals from 15 different authors;
• On the agency side, we made seven new deals with book publishers and audiobook publishers for titles that will be published in 2023 and beyond;
• With a backlist of author clients and their books that have now been published and selling for a decade or more, we also paid out advances and royalties from various publishers to seventeen different authors and rights holders.

Some of our sales in 2022:

• PUBLIC/PRIVATE: My Years with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp to Applause Theater and Cinema Books; audiobook rights sold to Audible who is working with the author to recruit an A-list actor to provide the narration. Told in an entertaining way, the book blends an affecting memoir of the author’s life and work alongside the founder of the Public Theater, Joe Papp, with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. News of the book deal appeared first in Publishers Weekly’s Deals column. The book will be published in October 2023.

• MOLYVOS: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis by educator and humanitarian John Webb, sold to Potomac Books, for publication in 2023. Webb’s book tells the little-known story of the intrepid Greek villagers, who in the early months of 2015-16 bootstrapped an effective humanitarian response to aid the tens of thousands of Syrians, Afghans, Ethiopians who’d launched themselves in flimsy vessels across the Mediterranean and the Adriatic seeking safety and succor in Europe, before well-known NGOs were on the ground, months before those vaunted organizations mounted no response at all, while people of Molyvos did heroic work.

• In the popular POT THIEF mystery series—whose author J. Michael Orenduff we’ve been representing since 2010—we placed his tenth title, THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED CALVIN, to be published by Open Road Media in coming months. Orenduff will also be publishing a nonfiction book with Open Road in coming months, details to come.

• We arranged for the writing of a history of a regional American theater by a prominent arts critic whom I represent, and engaged the participation of a theater benefactor in the project, details to come.

Books we had sold in earlier years, set to be published in 2023:

• THE NEEDLE AND THE LENS, on the interplay between music and storytelling in movies, by Nate Patrin, author of Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, University of Minnesota Press, May 2020; Nate’s second book will also be published by UMP.

• CINEMA OF SWORDS: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers) by Lawrence Ellsworth, translator of four Alexandre Dumas novels we’ve sold to Pegasus Books; we sold Lawrence’s new book to Applause Theater and Cinema Books.

• THE ULTIMATE PROTEST: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World by Ray E. Boomhower (author of Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, University of New Mexico Press, 2022); Ray’s new book on Malcolm Browne will also be published by UNMP.

• THE KREMLIN’S NOOSE: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight, author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017). We sold Knight’s new book to Northern Illinois University Press distributed by Cornell University Press. Amy’s new book is a dual portrait that documents the rise of Putin and the mogul Boris Berezovsky, who helped make Putin ruler, then feuded with him till his death in London, which like so many Kremlin critics, occurred under unexplained circumstances.

Books we had sold in earlier years, published in 2022:

THE BARRENS: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson (Arcade Publishing, May 2022), sold under our New Stories rubric. Chosen by the Women’s National Book Association for their annual Great Group Reads program, attesting to its suitability as a novel for book clubs. “Two young college women embark on a canoe trip down the Thelon River in Canada’s Barren Lands when a tragic accident turns a wilderness adventure into a battle for survival in this debut novel…A poignant and engaging thriller with a formidable lead character.”—Kirkus

ROOSEVELT SWEEPS NATION: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza (Diversion Books, August 2022; Blackstone Audio). “Historian Pietrusza creates a brisk, spirited narrative, abundantly populated and bursting with anecdotes, revealing the president’s trials and turmoil as he faced reelection….Prodigiously researched and exuberantly told.”—Kirkus, starred review

HEROES ARE HUMAN: Lessons in Resiliency, Courage and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber (City Point Press, September 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Offers insights into life on the front lines during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic…An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.”—Kirkus

LURKING UNDER THE SURFACE: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us by Brandon Grafius (Broadleaf Books, October 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Grafius teaches us how to welcome horror as a constant companion in a world plagued by real evil.”—Sojourners

LAST CIRCLE OF LOVE, a novel by Lorna Landvik (Lake Union, Amazon Publishing, December 2022; audiobook narrated by the author, Brilliance). “This warm and funny book is vintage Landvik, with an ensemble cast of salt-of-the-earth women with names like Marlys and Charlene who tiptoe into the world of lust and examine what, as they say, turns them on. None of it is really erotica, of course, but more practical things like gallantry, compliments, understanding and forgiveness.”—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

After 2023, we eagerly anticipate publication of DEVOURING TIME: Jim Harrison, a Life by Todd Goddard, the first biography of the acclaimed master of the novella, gourmand, ardent friend, hunter and fisher, which will be published by Blackstone Publishing.

Major thanks to all the authors who entrusted us with editing and representing their work in the past year. We really appreciate it.

Also doing our own creative work in 2022:

Under Ewan’s pen name, M.G. Turner, he published essays on this website about Ernest Hemingway; photojournalist Ruth Gruber; and special effects film pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and continued developing his fiction, with a completed short story collection and novel which we’ll be circulating in 2023. He also assisted children’s book scholar Michael Patrick  Hearn in lectures for the Grolier Club.

I published a review/essay on a formidable nonfiction trilogy about Canadian indie rock n’ roll by Michael Barclay and other authors, highlighted by Barclay’s book, HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 (ECW Press, 2022), and a review/essay on Robert Gottlieb’s enjoyable publishing memoir, AVID READER. I also contributed an essay, “The Education of a Bookselling Editor,” to AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of 20th Century Publishing and Bookselling, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

We’re each looking forward to a great year in 2023. As always, please get in touch if you or someone you know is seeking guidance about publishing. Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com. Our company email is ptbookproductions [@] gmail [.] com.

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Avidly Reading Robert Gottlieb’s Memoir “Avid Reader”/with a 2024 update

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Update, October 28, 2024

I want to first note here that Robert Gottlieb, whom I lionized in the essay below in 2022, died about six months after I published the essay, at age 92, on June 14, 2023.

Though one is always loathe to speak ill of the dead, I also want to reflect here on the revelations about Gottlieb in Sara Franklin’s superb biography The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. (Atria Books, May 2024). I had referred to Jones in the 2022 essay, but knew relatively little about her until I read the recent biography. I appreciated Franklin’s perspective on how, before Judith’s decades-long career at Knopf, where she published Judith Child and a legion of other important cooks—cookbooks had been relegated to a lesser status, as somehow being merely “women’s books.” It was remarkable to read how Jones contributed to what became the elevation of food writing to a status in the culture where it properly belonged.

Alas, however, in later passages in the biography Franklin interviewed Gottlieb, Jones’s boss at Knopf. It was sobering to read passages about the relationship between Gottlieb and Jones, and read his own words acknowledging that Jones wasn’t equitably paid or fully respected at the company, even while she made monumental contributions to the company, including editing novelists John Updike and Anne Tyler for virtually all the books they published at Knopf. Gottlieb admits all this to Franklin, but seems to only faintly regret the inequity.

With all that said, I have re-read the essay, and stand by most of what I wrote almost two years ago, though am distinctly less comfortable now with what I dubbed his “likable demeanor,” as I am disappointed that he could also exhibit a waspish stinginess toward a woman who worked alongside him and contributed so much to the company and its bottom line for so many years.

I greatly enjoyed reading Robert Gottlieb’s publishing memoir Avid Reader (FSG, 2016; Picador Books, 2017), so was excited to recommend it to friends on Twitter recently as my offering under the popular #FridayReads rubric. Now, I’ll back that up with a recommendation to visitors of my blog The Great Gray Bridge.

With a confident but not cocky voice, the longtime editor and publisher chronicles the six-plus decades he’s been in the book trade working with authors, editing and publishing hundreds of books, dozens of them bestsellers, and many, many imperative books of our time. His long run began at Simon & Schuster in 1955, when the publisher was still run by its founders, Dick Simon and Max Schuster. Gottlieb recalls how a third leader emerged at the helm, Leon Shimkin, who had a dominating personality and took charge of many things. After Schuster died in 1957, as well as top editor Jack Goodman, Gottlieb recalls that one wag “rechristened the firm Simon and Schuster, but Shimkin.” (pg. 50)

In this era, up till the mid-60s, close-held or family-held publishing companies in America were still common.

At S&S, Gottlieb formed a troika of teamwork and powerfully productive publishing with two co-workers who would become longtime colleagues, and book business legends in their own right:

  • Nina Bourne (1916-2010), advertising maven and copywriting wizard
    and
  • Tony Schulte (1930-2012), jack of many trades with a good head for business known widely for his likable demeanor.

S&S had a raffish character to its book list, more so than was then the case with other, longer established publishers. S&S published calorie counters, diet books, self-help (Dale Carnegie was an S&S author), puzzle books, collections of S.J. Perelman’s pun-filled essays, and other very commercial titles. In fiction, for women readers, the trio engineered a smash with Rona Jaffe’s breakthrough novel, a debut, The Best of Everything. Joseph Heller came along in 1957. Gottlieb relates how Catch-22 came to be the forever name of Heller’s hugely consequential anti-war war novel—also his debut—after its draft title was abruptly coopted by another novel coming from an established bestselling author. This story is a treat and highlights that an iconic title may look obvious only in hindsight.

The next job Gottlieb took would highlight the rise of corporate ownership.

Moving onto Knopf

In 1967, in a move that might’ve foreshadowed professional sports leagues’ high-profile trades of athletic superstars—though S&S didn’t end up with any star players in return—Gottlieb, Bourne, and Schulte announced they would be decamping as a trio to go work at Alfred A. Knopf, a more prestigious and established house. It was such a seismic event that they arranged to leave at three-week intervals, to minimize the disruptions to the old firm and to their authors with upcoming books who were staying behind. A friend of mine who worked at S&S then, Mildred Marmur—who would later become the first woman to be the chief executive of a major publishing house—recalls that even after Gottlieb left S&S he helped her. She was newly responsible for selling paperback reprint and book club rights, and he schooled her in the job of subsidiary rights director, such that some years later when she was named President and Publisher of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the NY Times reported that she was “considered the dean of subsidiary rights directors.”

Alfred A. Knopf (1892-1984) had founded his company in 1915, and it gained renown for publishing the best foreign language authors in translation, Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, and Andre Gide, and the Japanese masters Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, and Abe, among many others. Blanche Knopf, his wife, also played a key role in the company, bringing Albert Camus onto the list. In American letters, Willa Cather was “probably the writer Alfred was proudest of having captured” (pg 106) for their list. In later years Knopf editor Judith Jones began working with John Updike, who continued with the house his entire career. To show the editorial talent, consider that Jones’s reach and ambit took in Julia Child, who only ever published with Knopf. The instantly indentifiable Borzoi colophon also could be found on the spines of the crime novels by the first generation of hardboiled detective writers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, and then those writers’ notable heir, Ross MacDonald, creator of the Lew Archer novels.

The Knopfs’ son Pat* (officially “Alfred, Jr.”) worked at the family firm for a time, but the bullying ways of the elder Knopf had soured the younger man on taking over the firm someday. In the mid-60s, Alfred chose his succession plan: he sold the company to Random House, which itself had earlier been bought by RCA.**

Though no longer running Alfred A. Knopf, Alfred and Blanche still worked there, while Gottlieb, Bourne, and Schulte began livening up the place. Their infusion of new ideas sometimes clashed with Alfred’s former ways. Gottlieb tells a scalding tale of how Nina Bourne became the target of a “furious memo” from Alfred. This occurred after a book ad ran in the NY Times that in its design played with the sacrosanct Borzoi logo. Amid the tempest, Gottlieb was “itching to storm into Alfred’s office to tell him to fuck off. No, Nina said; she wanted to deal with him in her own way.” The details of how she did so are delicious.

Gottlieb added much high profile nonfiction to the list, including in 1974 most famously The Power Broker by Robert Caro, who later undertook his multi-volume enterprise chronicling the life and career of LBJ with Gottlieb editing. Memoirs came from Gloria Vanderbilt (Once Upon a Time), Lauren Bacall (By Myself) and Liv Ullman (Changing). His accounts of working with these authors is consistently entertaining. With Bacall, he reports, “We had only one difficult moment. There was a gorgeous picture of her on the front cover, and on the back I showed her with Bogart. Absolutely not, she exploded; this was her book, not his. That really pushed my buttons. ‘Listen…’ I said, ‘people want to know about you and him, and you’ve written hundreds of pages about him. It’s my job to sell your book.’… ‘Fine,’ she said.” (pg. 105)

Noting the show business books and fizzy celebrity titles, it must also be said that Gottlieb showed wide range and consistently good taste with books that ran from the commercial to the literary; consider that not only did he edit a number of Michael Crichton’s science-y medical thrillers, like his debut The Andromeda Strain, he also worked with Doris Lessing on several of her major novels, and many of Toni Morrison’s books.

During this period, the house also hired and retained many stellar editors who over decades acquired great books for the house of Knopf, such as Ashbel Green and Victoria Wilson, to name only two. In other departments, they hired people who would go on to be major contributors in the overall growth of the book business in the twentieth century, and now twenty-first, like Jane Friedman. As head of what was then known as the Promotion department, she minted—with Julia Child as the author—the first city-to-city author tour to promote a new book. The book tour for Mastering the Art of French Cooking visited many major cities, supported by local morning show TV spots and well-attended signings in the book departments of major department stores, where the inimitable Julia would do a cooking demonstration. Friedman later started Random House Audio, the first audio division at a major book publisher.

A Bookseller’s Perspective

I was a retail bookseller during much of this time, with Undercover Books in Cleveland, the indie bookstore chain I started in 1978 with my two siblings and our parents, and I can attest to the appeal and sheer salability of Knopf titles, and books from the whole Random House domain at the time. During a visit to New York City in the 1980s, my brother Joel (1951-2009) and I paid a call at the Random House building in Manhattan, where the director of sales Dennis Hadley welcomed us. He was grateful to our stores for having helped the company make Martin Cruz-Smith’s thriller Gorky Park (Random House, 1983) into a bestseller. (Knopf and Random House were sold by the same sales reps.) We’d received a galley of the Cold War suspenser from our rep, and loved it, and were excitedly talking it up to our customers prior to the arrival of finished books. Hadley knew about this and, through the publisher’s adroit sales and publicity channels, word got to Edwin McDowell, publishing reporter at the NY Times, that he could contact our store for a bookseller’s take on why we were so confident we would do very well with the book, having already placed a seventy-five copy opening order for the upcoming hardcover. When McDowell phoned I answered and was quoted in his “Behind the Bestsellers” column about how engrossed we had all been by the book, passing around what became an increasingly bedraggled galley among all five of us. I related to McDowell that at one point, the contents of a bottle of shampoo had been spilled on the galley, but we dried it out and continued passing it on to the next one of us in line, a colorful detail he included in his story.

At one point during the conversation in Hadley’s office, he stood up, briefly excusing himself. Upon returning he announced he wanted to give us each a gift. In his hands he held the celebratory two-volume slipcased set pictured below. Surely, one set would have been dayenu (enough), for the two of us, but instead we each left with one, deeply grateful for the gesture. The commemorative set was privately published for “friends of Alfred A. Knopf” in 1965, the company’s 50th anniversary year. Knopf’s stylish Borzoi colophon, and the stunning design and typography of their books were marks of excellence, so evident in the package shown here in photos. That milestone year also led to a special volume edited by Clifton Fadiman—this one was offered for sale to the reading public—and which I later added to my library (pictured at the bottom of this post).
After more than twenty years at Knopf, Gottlieb writes that “the amusement was draining out of things. I was doing more and more, and our profits were consistent, but the personal cost was mounting. When a book hit the bestseller list, when an important author joined us, when a major award was won, it had always been a moment for celebration. Now it was just a relief—okay, this worked, so onto the next. It wasn’t being jaded, it was exhaustion.”

With that, Gottlieb became editor of The New Yorker in 1987, a job he held for about five years.

Significantly for Gottlieb, it was also around this time that he began publishing written work of his own, with a number of books focused on dance, jazz, the American songbook, literary classics, and this memoir. In Avid Reader it’s exciting to see him recount taking these steps in his own writing. I too hope and expect to begin publishing written work of my own in book form at some point. Meantime, I publish essays like this one, as well one about a professional encounter I had with William Styron, and essays about bi-nationalism on my other website Honourary Canadian.

Gottlieb writes that he is sometimes asked to address college students who are considering a career in publishing or journalism. His advice is pragmatic and sensible. To illustrate his central idea that publishing is a service business, and that editors work for the book and the author, he relates a memory from his years at S&S:

“My love affair with readers was ignited…by the message that Richard L Simon expressed to the entire staff [with] bronze paperweights on which were etched these words:

GIVE THE READER A BREAK (pg. 318)

That succinct philosophy can be adhered to in many ways. For me: Keep the price of a book as low as possible. Make sure the type is legible—when possible, generous; readability is all. Don’t talk about an important photograph or portrait and then not show it. Deploy useful running heads—the name of a particular story or essay rather than the name of the author….Don’t over-design.”

Now in his nineties, Gottlieb and his longtime author Robert Caro are the subjects of a new documentary by Lizzie Gottlieb, daughter of Robert Gottlieb and his wife, actress Maria Tucci. The film is titled Turn Every Page—The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. I’m excited I’ll have a chance to see the editor and author at the NY Public Library on December 12. More info on tickets for that event here, which will be viewable in-person and virtually.

As an editor for almost thirty-seven years myself, I am always excited when I have an opportunity to work on books that I know readers will find engrossing, and which I believe they will be apt to read avidly. Among the books I’ve edited that display this quality are The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge by Michael Punke, the historical novel about the American frontiersman Hugh Glass, and The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War by Ralph Wetterhahn, on the hijacking of an American merchant vessel in Southeast Asia during the waning days of the Vietnam War. In fact, it strikes me that the attribute of avidity is the most valuable coin of the realm in book publishing. I would devise a formula to mint more of it if I could. At the time of Gottlieb’s move to Knopf in 1967, one newspaper headline trumpeted “Avid Reader to Head Knopf.” Robert Gottlieb’s own writing in this book displays that quality in abundance, making the title he chose for his memoir—such a pleasure to read—supremely apt.

Lest I seem to be idealizing Gottlieb unduly, I’ll add that just like anyone who’s worked in publishing alongside other people, with ambitious people striving to do good and important work, I don’t doubt that he didn’t get along with everybody, nor all with him. Few people in any field get along with everyone. In a discussion of the fact that authors sometimes moved on from Knopf (pg 176), and that he was sometimes the beneficiary of a writer leaving another house, Gottlieb writes that he “disliked” Don Delillo’s “agent, and no doubt she reciprocated.” But he doesn’t name the agent, perhaps not wanting to needlessly stir up old acrimony, though people in the book business will readily know who Delillo’s agent of longstanding was. Though not a saint, Robert Gottlieb comes off as genuinely likable, certainly to me.

If I have the opportunity to meet Gottlieb someday, I’ll be eager to tell him that back in the day I worked for the US outpost of Kodansha, the large Japanese publisher, around the time he was a judge for a translation prize they sponsored. We share an affinity for modern Japanese cultural arts. I would also tell him that in my bookselling career I personally sold many of the books that he edited and published, including the bestsellers mentioned above, and others, such as David O. Selznick’s Hollywood by Ron Haver. I would add that in 2006 I edited and published a notable memoir by the under-appreciated writer, and one-time Hollywood talent agent, Clancy Sigal (1926-2017), which included much about his life with Doris Lessing in London in the 1960s, and the couple’s engagement with a social and literary circle that included the gadfly psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

Gottlieb describes an annual celebration that longtime Knopf co-workers still enjoy, and the day I was reading that passage in Avid Reader, I came upon this item in the book industry newsletter Shelf Awareness, marking the 50th anniversary at the company of the aforementioned editor Victoria Wilson, shown here in the photo are former and current Knopf colleagues, Alice Quinn (started at the company in 1972), Martha Kaplan (1970), Wilson (1972), Andy Hughes (1979), Jane Friedman (1968), Kathy Zuckerman (1988), and Kathy Hourigan (1963). The photo is credited to Nicholas Latimer, another erstwhile Knopf colleague (1983).

A penultimate note on reading Avid Reader, and writing about it: The nearly two dozen authors and books I’ve mentioned in this essay, books that Gottlieb was responsible for editing and publishing, are only a bare fraction of the dozens of books about which he tells stories in his enjoyable memoir. In fact, the book’s index is devoted only to names of people who come up in the book, but I noticed, not to book titles—doing so would have probably made the index much longer for FSG to print!

Reading this book stirred up a lot of good memories. The experience of it was like eating a big sundae, a totally enjoyable treat.

—

Endnotes

*In 1959 Pat Knopf (1918-2009) was among the founders of Atheneum Publishers. Atheneum later merged with Scribner, and that combined entity was acquired by Macmillan in 1984. My second editorial job was with Collier Macmillan from 1986-89, and Pat still worked there then. My office was next door to his, and I found him a friendly work neighbor. Though I’m glad to have had that brush with a figure connected to so much distinguished publishing history, I regret I never engaged him in a full conversation about the business and his time in it. At the time, I was unaware of most of the backstory involving him and his parents’ company. Some of that backstory can be gleaned from this NY Times obit of the younger Knopf.

**The Radio Corporation of America, RCA’s full name, was the first major corporation I know of to own a US book publisher, when that new owner had no prior interest, financial or intellectual, in books.

***A note on terminology: I use “publisher,” “publishing company,” and I’m partial to the expression, “publishing house.” In fact, publishing companies have long been known as ‘houses’ because they (are supposed to) offer hospitality to writers.

 

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