Word: randomness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Total sales to date: 10 million copies, an alltime record for U.S. fiction. In 1945, a Random House editor read A Lion Is in the Streets, by Adria Langley. He rejected it, reporting that "40 pages of this magnolia-laden junk was all I could stand." Lion, published later by Whittlesey House, sold 250,000 copies. A more recent example is the history of Attorney Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, a shotgun attack on the Warren Commission. "We commissioned him to write it," says Publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press, which is known chiefly for its back list...
...persistent snow of manuscripts descends on Random House's midtown Manhattan headquarters-one wing of a Florentine stone mansion, shared with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The manuscripts usually come from agents-grey cartons from William Morris, orange from Curtis Brown. It is here that the vagaries of book publishing can get stickier than a freshly glued spine at a book bindery. Established authors are apt to be stubborn, demanding, supersensitive, uneven in their production, and extremely difficult to hold on to. For example, Cerf did not want to publish Author Robert Crichton's second book...
Both Erskine and Epstein, as well as most of the 22-man editorial staff, get complete freedom from Cerf in the choice of titles that Random House buys and in their dealings with authors. Cerf takes charge of important advertising campaigns-he even writes a few ads himself-and usually directs all important financial negotiations for his top authors. "In one month," he said recently, "I sold the paperback rights on three books for $1.7 million-Michen-er's The Source for $700,000, Capote's In Cold Blood for $500,000, and Kathleen Winsor's Wanderers...
...Hara. Whenever O'Hara telephones him from his Princeton, N.J., home and says, "Hello, Cerfie," Bennett knows that he has some kind of complaint. Often O'Hara calls only to ask Cerf to get him a hotel room. Cerf always complies, and also makes certain that the Random House parking lot will save a spot for O'Hara's Rolls-Royce. O'Hara is equally fond of Cerf. "He just needs a lot of love," says he. Besides, "85% of the time he knows how to handle me, and 85% of the time I know...
...pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important he feels it is to have Philip Roth and William Styron on the list. Some other publisher would know a thousand ways to get rich...