An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Part 3.1: The Random House Publishing Group, or: Cerf's Up (in the form of a ghost)

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "about what you'd expect" and 10 being "unimaginably bizarre," the Random House origin story is a solid, oh, 206--and an elegiacally haunting 206 at that.

[Editor’s note, January 2026: Bennett Cerf’s biographer recently let me know that she’d read this post in my back catalogue, and alas, a lot of it is factually incorrect. She correctly deduced that I’d used Cerf’s memoir At Random as my primary source, and that book apparently contains a lot of exaggerations and fabrications. Who knew! I’m not sure exac…