To the Editor:

Joseph Epstein may trace the transformation of book publishing to the decision by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer to take Random House public in 1959 [“Among the Gentlemen-Publishers,” May], but it really began when Random House was sold to RCA in 1966.

As long as Cerf and Klopfer were at the helm, Random House (including its subsidiaries, Knopf and Pantheon) remained a proud home for writers and a place for editors to have fun while earning a living. Its editor-in-chief, Albert Erskine, was one of the last of the great editors in the Maxwell Perkins tradition, nurturing writers like William Faulkner, W.H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, John O’Hara, and James Michener, discovering new ones like Cormac McCarthy, and developing young editors with similar literary awareness to follow. Faulkner once told Bennett Cerf, “I think Albert is the best editor I know.”

It was when RCA took over that things changed—and whatever André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein (top editors at Random House and Pantheon respectively) may now say in their memoirs, they were part of that change, though not perhaps the worst of it. That came from the new corporate management.

An example: RCA sent in an efficiency expert who was on the verge of trashing the Random House back files—a lot of old paper taking up storage space in a closet, she said. When Erskine’s assistant, Suzanne Baskin, informed the powers-that-be at RCA that those “dusty old papers” contained letters from James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, and other renowned literary figures, they decided to cut off the valuable signatures and sell them before dumping the rest of the documents as clutter.

At the last moment, the archives were saved by Baskin herself, who, one evening, pulled out the most important files, stuffed them into shopping bags, and (with my help) transported them to her home. The next morning she told Cerf the whole story. Appalled, he immediately stepped in. The Random House archives—a unique record of the mid-century literary scene—went intact to his alma mater, Columbia University.

Cerf was by nature an optimist, but a few days before Random House left its longtime home in the elegant Villard Houses for a shiny new (and more efficient) tower built by RCA, he remarked to me that it was the dumbest thing he had ever let himself get talked into. From then on, his was a finger in the dike as more and more of the old Random House leaked away around him. After he died in 1971, Erskine and others were pushed aside for less literary types who were willing to adapt. Throughout the publishing world, as Mr. Epstein records, the corporate moguls who saw publishing as a cash cow and books as merely a product were taking over. Those who went along, like Schiffrin and Jason Epstein, did well; it ill-behooves them to complain now.

Albert Erskine once told me, “You know, it took ten years to sell the first 2,500 copies of [Faulkner’s] The Sound and the Fury.” What publisher today would keep such a flop by a clearly unsalable writer in print for ten years—or even ten months—let alone ever give him a contract for another book? If perchance there is another Faulkner out there somewhere, putting words on paper, we are unlikely ever to read him.

Rosanne Klass
New York City

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