(from both the editor and the author), Bob was always happy to let you take a risk and never complained if it failed. Without perhaps intending to become one, he was a great publisher—a rare feat for an editor, for most editors are only interested in their own books to the exclusion of everyone else’s. With some exceptions, the better the editor, the less likely he or she is to succeed as a publisher—indeed, one of the major problems in book publishing for years has been that the only way an editor could be promoted and rewarded beyond a certain limit is to make him or her a publisher, a perfect example of the Peter Principle in operation, in which a person with a certain set of skills is promoted to a job in which a totally different and contradictory set of skills are required (and usually lacking). Most good editors fail as publishers because they find it hard to be objective about books, tend to take the author’s side in any dispute, and usually despise other editors. Bob was an exception. He made no secret of his contempt for certain editors, but he was generally objective about the books of even those editors he most disliked. Once, years later, when he had reached the status of a publishing god at Knopf, I bumped into him at the annual American Booksellers Association convention in Washington, where he was cruising the stands and coolly examining the competition. It had been a long time since we had seen each other, and I suddenly realized, seeing him there, carrying a shopping bag full of catalogs and freebie reading copies, how much I missed him—and owed him, too. He gave the S&S display a careful appraisal and sighed. “Yes, well,” he said dismissively, “but how are you, Miki?” (Bob was the only person in publishing who called me Miki, which, as he knew, was what my parents always called me.) Busy, I replied. I had been working hard on a book that seemed to me to have the makings of a best-seller. Bob nodded. “Do you love it?” he asked. I said I didn’t exactly love it, no, but I thought it might sell a lot of copies. Bob looked at me darkly and shook his head. “Shame on you,” he said, and vanished into the crowded aisle.
IT WAS not to be expected, in the normal order of things, that two men as different as Bob Gottlieb and Dick Snyder would get along well under one roof, but in fact they developed a certain distant, wary respect for each other. Dick had a clear-cut picture of the future—he would run S&S and Bob would be one of his major assets—but it almost goes without saying that Bob did not share this vision. In Bob’s view of the future, he would be running S&S, leaving the things that didn’t interest him to Schulte, Snyder, or both. He recognized Snyder’s extraordinary combination of energy and sheer competence—these were traits he shared himself—but he thought of him mostly as “Leon’s man,” somebody to be kept at arm’s length from the faithful friends and the decisions that mattered about books. In later years, when Dick had become something of a publishing god in his own right (an angry one, many people said), he would affect a kind of gruff comradeship with Bob, as if they had been close at S&S, and Bob, with a certain noblesse oblige, allowed him to do so without, however, joining in. Dick, revealingly, always referred to Gottlieb as “Bobby” and was the only person to do so. A Snyder-Gottlieb alliance would have been a formidable combination of publishing talents, and Dick knew it, but there was never a prayer of it happening. For all his dedication to his “loved ones,” Bob was an autocrat at heart, albeit one with a genuinely sincere belief that he was a benevolent autocrat; it was not in his nature to share power with anyone. Bob had no difficulty in recognizing a wolf when he saw one, and much as he admired Dick’s sharp intelligence he was not about to put himself in the service of another person’s ambition. Nor was he eager to see Schwed, a relatively benign figure, replaced as publisher by somebody with real teeth and his own agenda, as was clearly Dick’s ambition.
All of this, of course, was passing