My boss, Max Schuster, had launched Simon & Schuster with the first book of crossword puzzles, back in 1924-he had attached a pencil to each copy-but as a publisher he sought to load the S. & S. Bennett Cerf: the co-owner of Random House, might flutter around the edges of show business as a Broadway groupie, a joke anthologist, and a panel member on the TV quiz show “What’s My Line?,” but when it came to his publishing persona he expected to be taken seriously: he worried about books “in bad taste,” with the result that he failed to buy “Lolita” when it was offered to him. Of course, it was a façade, paper-thin and getting thinner, but it was how book publishers wanted to be perceived, and mostly were. The business was being run, for the most part, by men in suits or in donnish tweeds, with pipes, who were either Ivy League Wasps or Jews whose highest ambition was to be mistaken for Wasps. When I joined Simon & Schuster, in the late summer of 1958, book publishing still thought of itself as a respectable profession. Photograph by Tom Caffery / Globe Photos / ZUMAPRESS
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