An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 1: Simon and Schuster, or: A Song of Puzzles and Profit
Also ft. a cameo from Warren Beatty.
Welcome to the first episode of a new “Glow” miniseries:
ANNA’S UNHINGED HISTORY OF AMERICA’S MAJOR PUBLISHING COMPANIES!
As you can probably guess, it’s going to take me many, many newsletters to get through all of them. I’m not going to do them all in a row. But let it be known that I do plan to do histories of them all in the coming year-ish: the big 5 plus a handful of tony indies. Starting with Simon and Schuster today. Why S and S? Because I said so.
How much do you know about the history of major publishing companies?
I’m guessing the answer is Not Much—or at least it is for most of you. Maybe not the two of you who are legendary early-aughts publishing industry bloggers. But, you know. The rest of you.
For fuck’s sake, I don’t know that much about publishing history, and I’m me! An indefatigably curious person who loves going down Wikipedia wormholes and also works in the publishing industry full time!
It’s just that as an agent, I’m generally focused on the kind of publishing intel relevant to my job performance: who’s working where; who’s great and who’s an asshole; which editors are buying what; what buzzy titles are clicking with readers and which aren’t; and—more tenuously, because this one’s in perpetual flux—what imprints are under whose supervision at which houses. This is horizontal, present-day info, not the vertical of history.
There’s no real reason any of us agents need to be conversant in, say, publishing companies’ legendary founders, distant-past escapades, and foundational mythologies.
But I want to be conversant in them just the same.
Among other things, I want that because the stray bits of history I have managed to pick up over the years have all been AMAZING.
I’m thinking in particular of a time I visited Farrar, Straus, & Giroux many years ago. Devon Mazzone, FSG’s subrights manager, pointed to a decrepit fainting couch in his office.
“This was Roger Straus’s fainting couch,” he said.
I maybe screamed. Then I made Devon take a picture of me sitting on the couch—or more accurately pretending to sit, because having presumably caught sixty years’ worth of fainting Nobel laureates, that couch was in a bad, bad way. One could tell at a glance that Roger Straus’s fainting couch was no longer up to bearing the load of humanity. Which felt like a metaphor.
Back then, did I know anything about Roger Straus, the “S” in FSG and the couch’s deceased owner? Er, no, not really. I sort of knew he had been a glamorous BFD in publishing and had hosted a lot of parties back in the day. But that’s it. (In my defense, Straus died in 2004; my first undergraduate publishing internship started in 2005.)
I sure did look him up after, though, because…well, because I had sat on his fainting couch! (Did YOU know he was one of the Macy’s Strauses?! Like the older couple that died on the Titanic? I didn’t.) And reading his obituary helped me understand a lot more about the tangle of a corporate culture—good and bad—he handed to his successors, who to this day are still untangling it as they grow.
(Roger Straus’s couch, by the way, has since Died with a Capital D—a casualty of FSG’s move downtown into Macmillan’s current digs near Ground Zero. Which also feels like a metaphor. I’ll save further thoughts on why for Macmillan Week.)
Be forewarned: while everything I include in this post and my whole publishing-history series will be true—at least to the best of my knowledge—it’ll also be far from comprehensive.
They’re newsletters, Denise, not Robert Caro biographies. I’m going to cobble my facts together from a combination of Wikipedia, corporate web pages, personal knowledge, and old obituaries and newspaper articles. (I’m also probably going to cite only the last of these, unless I’m quoting one of the first two directly. Just assume the obvious sources are where I got my facts otherwise.) I’ll supplement all this with personal storytelling and—where appropriate—gossip.
Tonally, I’m going to relate all this as if we were at a party and I was a little drunk. To be clear, I won’t really be drunk, unless I’m in Nantucket. Just spiritually. Think: WTF trivia yes, tact no, gossip about dead people yes, gossip about living colleagues I still need to work productively with every day no (AND WHO WOULD DO THAT, BECAUSE I LOVE YOU ALL), euphemisms no, dramatic hand gestures yes.
Anyway.
Without further ado: