Word: cerfs
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That, after all, is Cerf's line. In all its divisions, Random House, publishes books for adults and books for children, writers living (Capote) and dead (Thu-cydides), textbooks, dictionaries and paperbacks. Its list of authors includes William Faulkner and W. H. Auden...
James Joyce and Richard Condon, John O'Hara and James Michener, Philip Roth, Budd Schulberg, Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren. In 1960, when Cerf acquired the house of Knopf, the names of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Hersey and John Updike joined the parade. Cerf's biggest book of the year is the 2,059-page Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which took a decade and $3,000,000 to put together. Amazingly, for a reference book, it has been on the bestseller list for six weeks, and the first printing...
...Print Explosion. The success of the Dictionary is indicative of the prosperity-and of the desire for education and information-that has helped transform the relatively fusty little American book business into a major industry. Within Cerf's own professional lifetime, which spans four decades, U.S. book publishing has grown nearly 600%. In just nine years, 1952-61, business increased 150%, and since then has doubled again. This year, alone, Americans will have spent $2.5 billion for 2.2 billion books, from 350 paperback mysteries and $2 third-grade geographies to $200 encyclopaedias...
...Great Bunch. Cerf agrees that there is a malaise in fiction today. "Novelists are still saying things," he declares, "but they are no longer saying them exclusively. To say anything startlingly new in a novel is difficult-it's being said so often by real life, and in the world of reporting and commentary. Most novels today represent the fears rather than the hopes of man. Maybe that's one trouble: the mood is too pessimistic. But it's a gloomy world. We're not in a happy period of our history...
...Cerf is keenly, folksily optimistic. He feels that there are positive forces at work too. "The trash market is always with us, but the thrill of dirty words and explicit sex episodes is a very evanescent one, and as the taboos drop, it is already beginning to pall. Today's writers are a great bunch. Out of that group will emerge the next Hemingway and Faulkner. You can't rush...