[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 66 (Thursday, May 21, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5354-S5355]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              RANDOM HOUSE

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, some while ago it was announced 
that the German publishing firm of Bertelsmann had purchased Random 
House, the legendary New York publisher founded in the 1920s by Bennett 
Cerf and Donald Klopfer. The brilliance of the authors published over 
the years was exceeded only by that of the young editors that gave 
their works such superb attention. One of these was Jason Epstein. It 
was my great fortune to have him as an editor of three books which 
Random House published--``Coping: On the Practice of Government,'' 
``The Politics of A Guaranteed Income,'' and, with Frederick Mosteller, 
``On the Equality of Educational Opportunity.'' These were wonderfully 
produced, no less wonderfully edited--500 or more pages each. 
Thereafter, they were marketed with what I can only think of as loving 
care. The subjects were anything but reader friendly, as you might say, 
but Random House was author friendly and American letters are 
profoundly in its debt. Recently, in the April 6 issue of the New 
Yorker, The Talk of the Town began with a wonderful reminiscence by 
Jason Epstein of his early years at Random House. I ask that it be 
printed in the Record.

                  [From the New Yorker, Apr. 6, 1998]

                           (By Jason Epstein)

    Ink--Can the Bertelsmann Deal Take Publishing Back to Its Roots?

       On the morning last week that the purchase of Random House 
     by Bertelsmann was announced, I happened to pass the office 
     of my colleague Bob Loomis and noticed the framed copy of the 
     Random House interoffice phone directory for 1958 that Bob 
     keeps on his bookshelf. The directory is about the size of a 
     postal card and lists some ninety names, including Bob's and 
     mine along with those of Bennett Cerf and his partner Donald 
     Klopfer, the founders of Random House, whose offices were 
     then on the parlor floor of the old Villard mansion, on 
     Madison and Fiftieth. We occupied the north wing. The 
     Archdiocese owned the central portion, which is now the 
     entrance of the Palace Hotel, as well as the south wing, 
     which now houses Le Cirque 2000.
       Loomis and I joined Random House in the late nineteen-
     fifties. Though we took our publishing responsibilities 
     seriously, we did not think of ourselves as businessmen but 
     as caretakers of a tradition, like London tailors or 
     collectors of Chinese porcelain. Bennett Cerf set the tone, 
     and it was his habit to run from office to office sharing the 
     jokes he had just heard over the phone from his Hollywood 
     friends. Several times a day Bennett interrupted meetings 
     between editors and authors in this fashion. Some authors 
     were delighted. But I remember an afternoon when a baffled 
     W.H. Auden asked if we could finish our conversation at 
     Schrafft's across the street. This was, I believe, the last 
     time he set foot in the Random House offices.
       For me in those years, book publishing seemed more a sport 
     than a business--a sport that required skill and strict 
     attention to the rules, especially the rule that we had to 
     make enough money to stay in the game. But if we wanted to 
     make real money in a real business we knew that we should 
     forget about afternoons with Auden, Faulkner, and Dr. Seuss 
     and go down to Wall Street. But

[[Page S5355]]

     this was unthinkable. It was always a pleasure when one of 
     our books became a best-seller, but what counted more was a 
     book that promised to become a permanent part of the culture. 
     Random House published many books that became both.
       The editor's job was different then from what it is now. 
     Now layer upon layer of marketing specialists, sales 
     executives, and business managers separate the editor from 
     the bookseller. At the Villard mansion, we made these 
     publishing decisions ourselves. For years, I would begin my 
     day in the mailroom opening orders from booksellers, so that 
     I had the feel of the marketplace literally at my fingertips.
       That time was magical and we never expected it to end, even 
     after Bennett and Donald took the company public, acquired 
     Knopf, and, in 1966, sold out to RCA. By the mid-seventies 
     the publishing industry had changed profoundly. The old 
     downtown neighborhoods where booksellers had once rented 
     inexpensive space and knew their customers by name had 
     largely vanished. Readers now bought their books in mall 
     chain stores. The bookseller in Pittsburgh or Portland whom 
     Loomis or I might once have called to recommend a first novel 
     had been out of business for years. Publishers now spoke to 
     their customers through marketing specialists doing their 
     best to fit the increasingly undifferentiated product 
     supplied by the editors into the still less differentiated 
     slots provided by the retail chains. Many worthy titles 
     couldn't be fitted to these new circumstances at all and 
     disappeared. In recent years the mall shops specializing in 
     best-sellers have been largely replaced by so-called 
     superstores, with much larger inventories of books. But the 
     link between writer and marketplace which had once been the 
     editor's function has all but vanished.
       The Random House phone book is now the size of a small city 
     directory. Loomis and I are still listed, but after forty 
     years nearly everything else about book publishing has 
     changed. What had been a craft is now an irrational accretion 
     of improvisational adjustments to historic accidents, a 
     largely fossilized organism that can no longer be 
     deconstructed. Its future depends on how well its remaining 
     energies can be directed toward new technological 
     possibilities.
       I am delighted to say that these possibilities already 
     exist. The widespread distribution of printed books via the 
     Internet is a reality a mere two and a half years after the 
     appearance of Amazon.com. The eventual shape of Internet 
     bookselling is not yet fully evident, but it is evident 
     enough to foreshadow a much more direct--and economical--link 
     between writer and reader than has existed in modern times. 
     The choice of a career in book publishing may seem bleak at 
     the moment, but if I were starting out today I might give it 
     a try. To publish a book that may make the world a little 
     more intelligible or decent can be almost as satisfying as 
     writing one. And soon it might just be possible to carry on 
     this work with even greater confidence than Loomis and I 
     shared forty years ago.

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