Word: cerfs
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...Swamped the small, clannish, secretive book industry, with its 274 firms and 4,000 highly organized, well-informed employes. Said Random House's President Bennett Cerf: "It's unbelievable. It's frightening." Pocket Books, which at 25? apiece sold 5,000,000 copies in 1940, 10,000,000 in 1941, 20,000,000 in 1942, sold 38,000,000 in 1943. Even the ponderous university presses reported sales up 20-30%; in one month (October), sales of the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia jumped...
Random House's Bennett Cerf gave Lawson and Considine an advance of $7,500. (Considine asked for $5,000.) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid $100,000 for movie rights. Except for the $12,000 from Collier's, which was entirely Captain Lawson's (the magazine paid Considine $4,500), the flyer and the newspaperman divided the book's earnings-two-thirds to Lawson, one-third to Considine...
From Gertrude Stein, doggedly pursuing her own literary life in France, came a manuscript, Mrs. Reynolds, to Manhattan Publisher Bennett Cerf. She had mailed it to a friend in Sweden, who got it to the U.S. by mysterious means-perhaps by diplomatic pouch, hinted Cerf, to spare suspicious censors the task of trying to decode it. The publisher said .he looked at the manuscript, could make nothing of it, thought it could probably be read from either end, decided to publish...
Addams, whom Publisher Bennett Cerf describes as "the gentlest and the kindliest old schizophrene," and for whose work Boris Karloff (who contributes a foreword) has a "whole-souled admiration," is not preoccupied only with married life. From the specialized madnesses of the bedroom and boudoir it is only a stroke of the Addams' hand to universal madness. Drawn and Quartered includes his drawings of and that haunting simile of the mind's disintegration: ski tracks divided by a large tree...
Publisher Cerf had no such hopes. Smart Random House had caught on to the Donne boom as soon as it began, promptly ordered 1,500 sheets of its Nonesuch edition from England. Just as promptly the Nazis bombed them out of existence. Says Publisher Cerf: "I know for sure that no sheets of the Nonesuch Donne exist in England." Whether the plates also had been destroyed, he was not sore...