At Random, page 26
When Truman comes to the house, I am always delighted to see him, although he sometimes annoys me by throwing his arms around me and calling me “Great White Father” and “Big Daddy” and such. I say, “For Pete’s sake, cut that out.” But I don’t mind it somehow when Truman does it.
In 1945 a manuscript was submitted to Random House by a girl in Illinois. It was an extremely well-written first novel—but it was about incest, and she wasn’t quite skillful enough to handle so tricky a subject. Back then—not so long ago either—incest was one of the forbidden subjects unless it was handled with great delicacy. I believe it was Bob Linscott who wrote her a detailed letter, telling her what was good in the book and what was wrong, and suggesting that she tackle something safer for a start and put this one away for later revision, because much of it was very good indeed.
She sent back a letter which had obviously taken a long time to write, saying that she never would have believed she would get from a well-known New York publishing house a detailed letter about a book it was rejecting. She said she would never forget it and that it had changed her whole opinion of the publishing industry. She said she would like to show her gratitude, then added, “As a matter of fact, I might be able to do you a favor right now. There’s a girl in my block” (in Evanston this was, a suburb of Chicago) “who has written a book that I think is extraordinary. It’s been turned down by one publisher, and the agent told her there was no sense sending it anyplace else, since nobody would publish it, so she’s very discouraged. But I was fascinated by it. If you like, I’ll send it to you.”
So in came The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward. We published it the following year and I don’t think ten changes were made in the manuscript—it was so nearly perfect. I always use that book as an example of why the publishing business is so exciting. It doesn’t take genius to make a best seller out of books by John O’Hara or James Michener. But much of the fun of publishing is discovering somebody brand-new and bringing the book out and publicizing it properly and then seeing it possibly chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, and then selling to the movies and watching overnight some unknown become famous. Then, of course, the author probably leaves for Hollywood and is never seen by you again. But while it’s going on, it’s mighty thrilling.
The Snake Pit is the story of an intelligent girl of medium circumstances whose mind suddenly snaps and she has to be committed—which is what had happened to the author. I called up Mary Jane Ward in Evanston and told her we wanted to do her book. I told her very gently, because I was worried about her, and I asked her to come to New York at our expense. She was an absolutely lovely young woman. I spent about an hour and a half trying to get her to change the title. I said, “Novels are bought to a great extent by women. Women hate snakes. If you call a book The Snake Pit, you’re losing a big part of your audience just by using the wrong title. Women won’t go near it.” Well, thank the Lord, Mary Jane told me to go to hell. The title was absolutely perfect. To this very day asylums are called snake pits, which they were. They were horrible; great reforms were effected in New York and Chicago, among other places, but they’re still terrible.
Things began to happen to the book right away. First of all, it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Second, every movie company got interested in it. Many producers who inquired about the movie rights to The Snake Pit backed away at the last minute because a couple of big scenes involved shock treatment, and they thought the whole background of an insane asylum was too gruesome. But I finally sold the rights to Anatole Litvak, a close friend of ours and one of the most charming men in the world. “Tola” had become famous overnight when he directed a foreign picture called Mayerling, which was the story of the mysterious death of Archduke Rudolf and his mistress in Austria—a famous historical episode. It created a sensation, and Tola was immediately brought to Hollywood, where he became one of the leading directors and producers, with such outstanding successes as Tovarich, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, This Above All and Sorry, Wrong Number.
I sold The Snake Pit to Tola one night while we were having dinner at the St. Regis Hotel. He bought it on his own, but finally had to get backing from Twentieth Century-Fox. He made the picture, which was a knockout and won a string of prizes. I remember the price: it was forty-five thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, especially for Mary Jane Ward.
I’ve been very careful about telling authors they’ve bagged such big prizes ever since we published Junior Miss by Sally Benson—a difficult character in spades! The book was made up of stories she wrote for The New Yorker, about callow kids going out for dates for the first time—the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds of yesteryear. The stories were delightful and so was the book, which we published in 1941, but nobody ever dreamed it would be taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Sally was always broke, and when I called up to tell her about the book club, she let out a squeal and said, “How much does that mean for me?” I said, “I would say you’ll probably make an extra twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars.” Twenty minutes later the Buick agency called me up and said that a Miss Sally Benson was there and had given me as a reference—it hadn’t taken her ten minutes to get her hat and coat on and go out and buy herself a car. I approved heartily.
The following year Sally had a new group of stories about her own girlhood in St. Louis, which she called 35 Kensington Street. I persuaded her to change the title to Meet Me in St. Louis, from the name of an old fair song, “Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie,” and to add another story to justify its use. She did, and the book was a runaway; in 1944 it was made into one of Judy Garland’s most successful pictures. They still do it on the Late Show, and I watch it every time—it’s such a heartwarming picture!
The events that led to our publishing The American College Dictionary started in the very carefully thought-out way I do many things in my life. I arrived at the office one day and cheerily announced, “Let’s do a dictionary.” To show how incredibly little I knew—we had two erudite editors, Saxe Commins and Bob Linscott, and I said that they could compile this new dictionary in their spare time. That was my brilliant, original plan!
When we started to discuss the project, I realized what a fool I was. When you do a dictionary, I discovered, you have to get experts in special fields to concentrate on various subjects, and the bigger and more ambitious the dictionary is, the more subjects there are. But I got more and more interested in the idea. Then we found out that Clarence Barnhart, who was considered one of the best lexicographers in the United States, had just finished the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary and luckily was available. I sent for him and told him I thought it would be great to do a new college dictionary—a desk dictionary, not an unabridged. He said there was need, that there hadn’t been a new one in years and that he would love to edit one for us. I asked him how much he thought it would cost, and he said it could be done for about a hundred thousand dollars—at which point I fell under the table. I had no such fancy notions!
We began to look into costs, and we found out that Barnhart’s was a modest estimate. The project was bound to involve a lot of people and would take two years to do, but by this time I was determined that we were going to go ahead with it. We felt that we could get the money, since we weren’t in debt to the banks for a penny. Bob Haas, the conservative member of the firm, was opposed; he said we weren’t big enough and he didn’t like the idea of borrowing funds, but we plunged ahead anyhow.
Then came a period of great dejection, because Barnhart turned out to be more or less of a visionary, and every time he came in, I said to myself, “Oh God, he wants another fifty thousand dollars.” I was always right, too—unless he needed even more. Also, time was slipping by, but we found out that was more or less the normal procedure with a dictionary or a big reference book. At one time we were so discouraged by the way the costs were mounting, it almost became the greatest college dictionary from A to M that was ever put together. It finally turned out that Barnhart had been way off in his estimate of time and money, and the project cost pretty close to a million dollars and took over three years to finish.
Since publishing is a very seasonal business, we’d been in and out of the banks. We had often borrowed money to tide us over the fall season—our customers usually don’t pay until the turn of the year—but we’d always been in the clear by February. But by the time the dictionary was published in 1947, we were in debt to the bank.
One wonderful thing about dictionaries, though, is that a good one always makes money. Once it’s completed, it’s the publisher’s property, and if it starts selling in quantity, the costs are recovered rather quickly because there is no royalty to pay. The American College Dictionary won great critical acclaim and was a huge success. It was the first brand-new dictionary in a long time. Once again the old Cerf luck prevailed; and we soon got out of that pickle. It wasn’t really a pickle: we were doing what is done by twenty businesses out of twenty-two in America. We were borrowing money from a bank, which we weren’t in the habit of doing, but some people say that a good business should always use bank money to expand. Most of the big corporations borrow by the millions. Our debt was only about half a million before we were through, but it worried Bob Haas so much that he thought we ought to sell the whole project to Simon and Schuster.
One of the great things that came out of the venture was Jess Stein, who had studied under Sir William Craigie, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and had also previously worked with Barnhart. We greatly admired Jess, and he became the head of our reference department and later of our whole college textbook department, which made him one of the most important people at Random House.
Curiously enough, some of the best customers for our American College Dictionary have been banks that offer giveaways to people opening new accounts or adding to old deposits. When we first thought of trying to get them to use dictionaries as premiums, we ran into some difficulty: because of rising costs, to sell The American College Dictionary for what they were willing to pay and for us to still make a profit was very tough. But we discovered that with a few economies here and there, we could—if we printed enough copies at a time and shipped them all together to the same address, thus saving in handling—make about fifty cents a copy at their price.
So we went out to sell the big banks on using our dictionary as one of their premiums. And if they gave a big enough order—five thousand, but preferably ten—I went with the packet for a day. That was a personal deal, and they had to pay me a good fee for it. I was happy to work for Random House, but I wasn’t going to sit in a bank all day for nothing!
Usually I’d have to go the night before to a place like Minneapolis or Memphis or Houston or Denver. Almost always there’d be a party the night before. They’d meet me at the plane and give a dinner for the bank trustees and their wives and some important depositors. I was the guest of honor and it was great fun. Then they started off early the next morning, or even that same evening, with radio and television shows on every local station.
Often the morning television show started at seven-thirty, so I had to get up at the crack of dawn. I’d do the television interview and then there’d be a breakfast for the press so they could catch the evening papers. I would be there too late for the morning editions, but there were full-page ads in them, with a picture of the dictionary and a great big picture of me. Ham that I am, I loved it. In Houston they even used big billboards: BENNETT CERF IN PERSON. I’d stop and look at the signs with a lot of appreciation, and I liked the full-page ads—I like being a celebrity. At breakfast with the press, sometimes college kids were invited, and governors and senators who happened to be in town.
So we had the breakfast and then maybe another radio show was squeezed in, and then I spent the day at the bank, signing dictionaries. I think in Minneapolis—which was the most successful promotion we ever had because it was with the prestigious First National Bank—they used over thirty thousand dictionaries, and made it the big feature of their fall campaign. The pitch was: Open an account of one hundred dollars or more and get a free dictionary for your child going back to school.
For lunch, I’d usually go with the bank officers, and late in the afternoon they would squeeze in a meeting for all the employees after the doors of the bank had closed. So by the time I finished, I’d worked for twenty-four hours—and we had sold thousands of dictionaries and gotten thousands of dollars’ worth of free advertising.
The wonderful thing about dictionaries is that no one is ever going to have too many. With any other book, you sell one copy for a home, and that’s that. But some houses will have as many as ten dictionaries—one in every room. Every kid has his own desk dictionary, especially when his parents have gotten it for nothing! People walk out of the bank sometimes with as many as four or five dictionaries in their arms, because every time they open an account with a hundred dollars they get one, so they start an account for every blessed kid they have. It’s wonderful; you see the books going into the hands of the consumer! Between the TV and the radio and the newspapers, what an ad all this is for the ACD.
At first the bookstores raised hell with us, until they suddenly discovered that with all the tremendous free advertising, they were selling ten times as many copies of The American College Dictionary as they had before. After all, a lot of people didn’t bother going to the bank. They saw the ads and sometimes came in to gape at me—and then went to buy a dictionary at their favorite bookstore.
After The American College Dictionary was launched, a gleam began to come into our eyes: an unabridged American dictionary. The main competition was the big Merriam-Webster, and their third edition, which they brought out in 1961, was received with hostility by many critics. In fact, a great many college people prefer the old second edition to the third. So we figured the field was wide open.
Of course, this was a tremendous undertaking. For the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language, we had at one time almost four hundred people working on it, top authorities in every field. For each subject we had an important man as consulting editor, so our new dictionary is superb. Jess Stein was editor in chief. The cost, I would say, was between three and four million dollars, and it took about four years to do; but we were able to swing it, especially since we got help from two sources. The Book-of-the-Month Club bought the book-club rights the year before publication for a very handsome advance. Then we made an arrangement with Time-Life whereby they could make a prepublication mail-order offer of the dictionary below our own retail price, and they sold almost a quarter of a million copies before the official release date. Thus the two together paid us back a good portion of our original outlay before the dictionary even came out.
A few years after Bob Linscott joined our editorial department, it was again enlarged, though at that particular moment we had no great need or any such plan. It came about because two young men—Frank Taylor and Albert Erskine—both experienced editors and officers of the firm of Reynal and Hitchcock, became discontented and resigned. Taylor came to see me and offered their services; since they had performed well together, they wanted to continue to work as a team.
Hiring two senior editors at the same time was a rather big order, and we were hesitant. Since I knew Taylor and thought well of him, I felt he would be a valuable addition, but I didn’t even know Erskine. So Taylor brought him to our house to meet me, and by the end of the evening I knew I wanted Erskine too, and both of them came to Random House in 1947. Immediately they started adding authors to our list, and among the first were two who had been under contract at Reynal and Hitchcock and whom we have published ever since—Pulitzer Prize poet Karl Shapiro and Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man would win the National Book Award in 1953 and become a classic, in constant and increasing demand.
About a year after he came, Taylor was offered a great job as producer at MGM and left for Hollywood; Erskine, who was made to order for Random House, stayed with us and became one of my very best friends. I love Albert Erskine. Albert is a Southerner, and he won’t overwork. When he thinks he’s slaving, other people don’t think so, but he has his own pace. Nobody would dream of telling him what to do. I wanted him to be editor in chief, but he didn’t want to be bothered with all the details involved; he already had his hands full working with a long list of authors, including some of our most famous.
One of these is Robert Penn Warren, whom Albert signed up almost as soon as he came to Random House. Warren’s All the King’s Men had already won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His first book for us, the novel World Enough and Time, was a Literary Guild selection, and so were Band of Angels, Wilderness and Flood. These were great sellers, and I think there’s a great deal more to come from him, because his talents are numerous and varied. Warren is one of the country’s leading poets, and we have published many volumes of his poetry, including Promises: Poems 1954–1956, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award 1957. He is the only writer to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry. He is also a brilliant critic and teacher, and his textbooks have been broadly influential. A liberal Southerner, he has written two important books on race relations; Who Speaks for the Negro? was an outstanding success.
When “Red” Warren came to Random House, he and Albert had been friends for a long time; they were practically like brothers. He soon became a close friend of mine, too. Talk about authors it’s a pleasure to do business with, Red is the greatest, the nicest, the most agreeable, the most willing to listen. If you want to see Southern charm—he is irresistible. He knows how good he is as a writer, but he is reticent about it, doesn’t throw it in your face. When he comes to our office, everybody is happy to see him. No wonder his students at Yale absolutely fell at his feet.
In 1945 a manuscript was submitted to Random House by a girl in Illinois. It was an extremely well-written first novel—but it was about incest, and she wasn’t quite skillful enough to handle so tricky a subject. Back then—not so long ago either—incest was one of the forbidden subjects unless it was handled with great delicacy. I believe it was Bob Linscott who wrote her a detailed letter, telling her what was good in the book and what was wrong, and suggesting that she tackle something safer for a start and put this one away for later revision, because much of it was very good indeed.
She sent back a letter which had obviously taken a long time to write, saying that she never would have believed she would get from a well-known New York publishing house a detailed letter about a book it was rejecting. She said she would never forget it and that it had changed her whole opinion of the publishing industry. She said she would like to show her gratitude, then added, “As a matter of fact, I might be able to do you a favor right now. There’s a girl in my block” (in Evanston this was, a suburb of Chicago) “who has written a book that I think is extraordinary. It’s been turned down by one publisher, and the agent told her there was no sense sending it anyplace else, since nobody would publish it, so she’s very discouraged. But I was fascinated by it. If you like, I’ll send it to you.”
So in came The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward. We published it the following year and I don’t think ten changes were made in the manuscript—it was so nearly perfect. I always use that book as an example of why the publishing business is so exciting. It doesn’t take genius to make a best seller out of books by John O’Hara or James Michener. But much of the fun of publishing is discovering somebody brand-new and bringing the book out and publicizing it properly and then seeing it possibly chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, and then selling to the movies and watching overnight some unknown become famous. Then, of course, the author probably leaves for Hollywood and is never seen by you again. But while it’s going on, it’s mighty thrilling.
The Snake Pit is the story of an intelligent girl of medium circumstances whose mind suddenly snaps and she has to be committed—which is what had happened to the author. I called up Mary Jane Ward in Evanston and told her we wanted to do her book. I told her very gently, because I was worried about her, and I asked her to come to New York at our expense. She was an absolutely lovely young woman. I spent about an hour and a half trying to get her to change the title. I said, “Novels are bought to a great extent by women. Women hate snakes. If you call a book The Snake Pit, you’re losing a big part of your audience just by using the wrong title. Women won’t go near it.” Well, thank the Lord, Mary Jane told me to go to hell. The title was absolutely perfect. To this very day asylums are called snake pits, which they were. They were horrible; great reforms were effected in New York and Chicago, among other places, but they’re still terrible.
Things began to happen to the book right away. First of all, it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Second, every movie company got interested in it. Many producers who inquired about the movie rights to The Snake Pit backed away at the last minute because a couple of big scenes involved shock treatment, and they thought the whole background of an insane asylum was too gruesome. But I finally sold the rights to Anatole Litvak, a close friend of ours and one of the most charming men in the world. “Tola” had become famous overnight when he directed a foreign picture called Mayerling, which was the story of the mysterious death of Archduke Rudolf and his mistress in Austria—a famous historical episode. It created a sensation, and Tola was immediately brought to Hollywood, where he became one of the leading directors and producers, with such outstanding successes as Tovarich, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, This Above All and Sorry, Wrong Number.
I sold The Snake Pit to Tola one night while we were having dinner at the St. Regis Hotel. He bought it on his own, but finally had to get backing from Twentieth Century-Fox. He made the picture, which was a knockout and won a string of prizes. I remember the price: it was forty-five thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, especially for Mary Jane Ward.
I’ve been very careful about telling authors they’ve bagged such big prizes ever since we published Junior Miss by Sally Benson—a difficult character in spades! The book was made up of stories she wrote for The New Yorker, about callow kids going out for dates for the first time—the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds of yesteryear. The stories were delightful and so was the book, which we published in 1941, but nobody ever dreamed it would be taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Sally was always broke, and when I called up to tell her about the book club, she let out a squeal and said, “How much does that mean for me?” I said, “I would say you’ll probably make an extra twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars.” Twenty minutes later the Buick agency called me up and said that a Miss Sally Benson was there and had given me as a reference—it hadn’t taken her ten minutes to get her hat and coat on and go out and buy herself a car. I approved heartily.
The following year Sally had a new group of stories about her own girlhood in St. Louis, which she called 35 Kensington Street. I persuaded her to change the title to Meet Me in St. Louis, from the name of an old fair song, “Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie,” and to add another story to justify its use. She did, and the book was a runaway; in 1944 it was made into one of Judy Garland’s most successful pictures. They still do it on the Late Show, and I watch it every time—it’s such a heartwarming picture!
The events that led to our publishing The American College Dictionary started in the very carefully thought-out way I do many things in my life. I arrived at the office one day and cheerily announced, “Let’s do a dictionary.” To show how incredibly little I knew—we had two erudite editors, Saxe Commins and Bob Linscott, and I said that they could compile this new dictionary in their spare time. That was my brilliant, original plan!
When we started to discuss the project, I realized what a fool I was. When you do a dictionary, I discovered, you have to get experts in special fields to concentrate on various subjects, and the bigger and more ambitious the dictionary is, the more subjects there are. But I got more and more interested in the idea. Then we found out that Clarence Barnhart, who was considered one of the best lexicographers in the United States, had just finished the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary and luckily was available. I sent for him and told him I thought it would be great to do a new college dictionary—a desk dictionary, not an unabridged. He said there was need, that there hadn’t been a new one in years and that he would love to edit one for us. I asked him how much he thought it would cost, and he said it could be done for about a hundred thousand dollars—at which point I fell under the table. I had no such fancy notions!
We began to look into costs, and we found out that Barnhart’s was a modest estimate. The project was bound to involve a lot of people and would take two years to do, but by this time I was determined that we were going to go ahead with it. We felt that we could get the money, since we weren’t in debt to the banks for a penny. Bob Haas, the conservative member of the firm, was opposed; he said we weren’t big enough and he didn’t like the idea of borrowing funds, but we plunged ahead anyhow.
Then came a period of great dejection, because Barnhart turned out to be more or less of a visionary, and every time he came in, I said to myself, “Oh God, he wants another fifty thousand dollars.” I was always right, too—unless he needed even more. Also, time was slipping by, but we found out that was more or less the normal procedure with a dictionary or a big reference book. At one time we were so discouraged by the way the costs were mounting, it almost became the greatest college dictionary from A to M that was ever put together. It finally turned out that Barnhart had been way off in his estimate of time and money, and the project cost pretty close to a million dollars and took over three years to finish.
Since publishing is a very seasonal business, we’d been in and out of the banks. We had often borrowed money to tide us over the fall season—our customers usually don’t pay until the turn of the year—but we’d always been in the clear by February. But by the time the dictionary was published in 1947, we were in debt to the bank.
One wonderful thing about dictionaries, though, is that a good one always makes money. Once it’s completed, it’s the publisher’s property, and if it starts selling in quantity, the costs are recovered rather quickly because there is no royalty to pay. The American College Dictionary won great critical acclaim and was a huge success. It was the first brand-new dictionary in a long time. Once again the old Cerf luck prevailed; and we soon got out of that pickle. It wasn’t really a pickle: we were doing what is done by twenty businesses out of twenty-two in America. We were borrowing money from a bank, which we weren’t in the habit of doing, but some people say that a good business should always use bank money to expand. Most of the big corporations borrow by the millions. Our debt was only about half a million before we were through, but it worried Bob Haas so much that he thought we ought to sell the whole project to Simon and Schuster.
One of the great things that came out of the venture was Jess Stein, who had studied under Sir William Craigie, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and had also previously worked with Barnhart. We greatly admired Jess, and he became the head of our reference department and later of our whole college textbook department, which made him one of the most important people at Random House.
Curiously enough, some of the best customers for our American College Dictionary have been banks that offer giveaways to people opening new accounts or adding to old deposits. When we first thought of trying to get them to use dictionaries as premiums, we ran into some difficulty: because of rising costs, to sell The American College Dictionary for what they were willing to pay and for us to still make a profit was very tough. But we discovered that with a few economies here and there, we could—if we printed enough copies at a time and shipped them all together to the same address, thus saving in handling—make about fifty cents a copy at their price.
So we went out to sell the big banks on using our dictionary as one of their premiums. And if they gave a big enough order—five thousand, but preferably ten—I went with the packet for a day. That was a personal deal, and they had to pay me a good fee for it. I was happy to work for Random House, but I wasn’t going to sit in a bank all day for nothing!
Usually I’d have to go the night before to a place like Minneapolis or Memphis or Houston or Denver. Almost always there’d be a party the night before. They’d meet me at the plane and give a dinner for the bank trustees and their wives and some important depositors. I was the guest of honor and it was great fun. Then they started off early the next morning, or even that same evening, with radio and television shows on every local station.
Often the morning television show started at seven-thirty, so I had to get up at the crack of dawn. I’d do the television interview and then there’d be a breakfast for the press so they could catch the evening papers. I would be there too late for the morning editions, but there were full-page ads in them, with a picture of the dictionary and a great big picture of me. Ham that I am, I loved it. In Houston they even used big billboards: BENNETT CERF IN PERSON. I’d stop and look at the signs with a lot of appreciation, and I liked the full-page ads—I like being a celebrity. At breakfast with the press, sometimes college kids were invited, and governors and senators who happened to be in town.
So we had the breakfast and then maybe another radio show was squeezed in, and then I spent the day at the bank, signing dictionaries. I think in Minneapolis—which was the most successful promotion we ever had because it was with the prestigious First National Bank—they used over thirty thousand dictionaries, and made it the big feature of their fall campaign. The pitch was: Open an account of one hundred dollars or more and get a free dictionary for your child going back to school.
For lunch, I’d usually go with the bank officers, and late in the afternoon they would squeeze in a meeting for all the employees after the doors of the bank had closed. So by the time I finished, I’d worked for twenty-four hours—and we had sold thousands of dictionaries and gotten thousands of dollars’ worth of free advertising.
The wonderful thing about dictionaries is that no one is ever going to have too many. With any other book, you sell one copy for a home, and that’s that. But some houses will have as many as ten dictionaries—one in every room. Every kid has his own desk dictionary, especially when his parents have gotten it for nothing! People walk out of the bank sometimes with as many as four or five dictionaries in their arms, because every time they open an account with a hundred dollars they get one, so they start an account for every blessed kid they have. It’s wonderful; you see the books going into the hands of the consumer! Between the TV and the radio and the newspapers, what an ad all this is for the ACD.
At first the bookstores raised hell with us, until they suddenly discovered that with all the tremendous free advertising, they were selling ten times as many copies of The American College Dictionary as they had before. After all, a lot of people didn’t bother going to the bank. They saw the ads and sometimes came in to gape at me—and then went to buy a dictionary at their favorite bookstore.
After The American College Dictionary was launched, a gleam began to come into our eyes: an unabridged American dictionary. The main competition was the big Merriam-Webster, and their third edition, which they brought out in 1961, was received with hostility by many critics. In fact, a great many college people prefer the old second edition to the third. So we figured the field was wide open.
Of course, this was a tremendous undertaking. For the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language, we had at one time almost four hundred people working on it, top authorities in every field. For each subject we had an important man as consulting editor, so our new dictionary is superb. Jess Stein was editor in chief. The cost, I would say, was between three and four million dollars, and it took about four years to do; but we were able to swing it, especially since we got help from two sources. The Book-of-the-Month Club bought the book-club rights the year before publication for a very handsome advance. Then we made an arrangement with Time-Life whereby they could make a prepublication mail-order offer of the dictionary below our own retail price, and they sold almost a quarter of a million copies before the official release date. Thus the two together paid us back a good portion of our original outlay before the dictionary even came out.
A few years after Bob Linscott joined our editorial department, it was again enlarged, though at that particular moment we had no great need or any such plan. It came about because two young men—Frank Taylor and Albert Erskine—both experienced editors and officers of the firm of Reynal and Hitchcock, became discontented and resigned. Taylor came to see me and offered their services; since they had performed well together, they wanted to continue to work as a team.
Hiring two senior editors at the same time was a rather big order, and we were hesitant. Since I knew Taylor and thought well of him, I felt he would be a valuable addition, but I didn’t even know Erskine. So Taylor brought him to our house to meet me, and by the end of the evening I knew I wanted Erskine too, and both of them came to Random House in 1947. Immediately they started adding authors to our list, and among the first were two who had been under contract at Reynal and Hitchcock and whom we have published ever since—Pulitzer Prize poet Karl Shapiro and Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man would win the National Book Award in 1953 and become a classic, in constant and increasing demand.
About a year after he came, Taylor was offered a great job as producer at MGM and left for Hollywood; Erskine, who was made to order for Random House, stayed with us and became one of my very best friends. I love Albert Erskine. Albert is a Southerner, and he won’t overwork. When he thinks he’s slaving, other people don’t think so, but he has his own pace. Nobody would dream of telling him what to do. I wanted him to be editor in chief, but he didn’t want to be bothered with all the details involved; he already had his hands full working with a long list of authors, including some of our most famous.
One of these is Robert Penn Warren, whom Albert signed up almost as soon as he came to Random House. Warren’s All the King’s Men had already won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His first book for us, the novel World Enough and Time, was a Literary Guild selection, and so were Band of Angels, Wilderness and Flood. These were great sellers, and I think there’s a great deal more to come from him, because his talents are numerous and varied. Warren is one of the country’s leading poets, and we have published many volumes of his poetry, including Promises: Poems 1954–1956, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award 1957. He is the only writer to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry. He is also a brilliant critic and teacher, and his textbooks have been broadly influential. A liberal Southerner, he has written two important books on race relations; Who Speaks for the Negro? was an outstanding success.
When “Red” Warren came to Random House, he and Albert had been friends for a long time; they were practically like brothers. He soon became a close friend of mine, too. Talk about authors it’s a pleasure to do business with, Red is the greatest, the nicest, the most agreeable, the most willing to listen. If you want to see Southern charm—he is irresistible. He knows how good he is as a writer, but he is reticent about it, doesn’t throw it in your face. When he comes to our office, everybody is happy to see him. No wonder his students at Yale absolutely fell at his feet.
