Eight titles that go behind the scenes of publishing

Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker and The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018.

At Electric Lit Reading tagged "eight nonfiction books that tell stories of the behind-the-scenes relationships that have resulted in some of our most beloved books and magazines." One title on the list:

Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

The late Robert Gottlieb indulged in a bit of self-mythologizing of his long editorial career at Knopf and The New Yorker, and here the editor is not gray and nondescript but a nerdy, quirky genius. There he is, in the photo insert, intensely conversing with Joseph Heller across his messy desk, brandishing a copy of The Power Broker next to a very young Robert Caro, laughing with Toni Morrison at the National Book Awards, leaning over a stack of pages with Bill Clinton at Chappaqua. He gleefully quotes a long passage from a review of The Journals of John Cheever which praises Gottlieb’s heroic editorial scalpel by way of a comparison to Max Perkins.

This fleet, gossipy memoir proves that the author found his métier in publishing—like Blanche Knopf, he was both a book- and a people-person. He chronicles his friendships among fellow staffers as well as his growing stable of authors, though there are gaps. He has little to say of his colleague Judith Jones, for instance, calling her only “a calm and steady presence in the Knopf mix, unassertive except when pushed to the wall.” Nor does he provide much insight into the work of publishing, writing at one point, “I don’t keep track of my editorial interventions.” He does not add anything of substance to the much-chronicled story of his controversial—indeed, heavily protested—assumption of the editorship of The New Yorker after William Shawn retired or was forced out. But there are thumbnail portraits aplenty and lots of behind-the-scenes stories that make vaunted authors into real people. This is an important supplement to more staid accounts of the business of publishing. It was here that I learned, for instance, that Knopf as a literary powerhouse was fueled for decades by the runaway success of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which sold as many as four hundred thousand copies a year without need of advertising, thus subsidizing the highbrow stuff and paying Gottlieb’s salary—which he spent on ballet tickets and an enormous collection of plastic handbags.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue