Word: randomization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Actually, there is no mystery here. Bennett Alfred Cerf, 68, is an open book. Board chairman of Random House, he is the nation's best-known book publisher-better known than many of the authors he serves. He is also perpetrator of a syndicated joke column and author of 21 joke and riddle books that have sold more than 5,000,000 copies, and a longtime panelist on that somewhat tiresome but seemingly indestructible TV parlor game, What's My Line? Wherever he goes, autograph hounds bark at his heels. Little ol|i ladies leap out of dark...
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...
...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 of 325,000 has already been sold out. Bigger than a breadbox...
...this were not enough to make publishers blush from what the Random House chairman might call a cerfit of riches, the U.S. Government has stepped in to boost business even higher. Over the next five years, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 will provide $500 million to school libraries for the purchase of printed materials and trade books-the term that differentiates general books from texts and reference works...
Dependable Losers. The major houses produce titles in the hundreds; their bosses can scarcely remember the authors' names, let alone find time to read their books. McGraw-Hill turned out 662 last year, Doubleday & Co. 650, Harper & Row 633, Prentice-Hall 449, Holt, Rinehart & Winston 345 and Random House 421. They all print text-and reference books, as well as children's books, which are dependable moneymakers. Their profitable textbook and paperback operations enable them to gamble on adult trade books-which as a rule lose money. Random House President Robert Bernstein estimates that 60% of adult trade...