Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [16]
“By the way,” Morris added, as he was about to hang up, a note of warning in his voice. “Herb is a real down-to-earth guy.”
I said that I would bear that in mind, wondering just exactly what Morris meant.
“His bark is worse than his bite, just remember that. Don’t let him bully you, that’s all.”
Oh God! I said to myself and put down the telephone receiver with a sense of dread.
SO FAR book publishing had seemed to me a pretty staid business, so I was not prepared to find Herbert M. Alexander, vice president of Pocket Books, lying back in a barber’s chair while being shaved. Beside him, an attractive young woman in a smock was buffing his nails. At his feet, an elderly black man was on his knees, shining Alexander’s shoes.
The shoes, like Alexander himself, were outsize, resembling shiny black rowboats turned upside down on the beach. He was apparently a big man, with the build of a wrestler, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a full belly. He had a big head, too, crowned with a crew cut, and wore tinted aviator goggles. He looked, in fact, just like the Americans in Gilles’s famous cartoons in the London Daily Express, an Englishman’s idea of what an American ought to be, right down to the button-down shirt, the narrow bow tie, and the massive class ring of God only knew what school or college. He had a big man’s voice, too, low and rumbling, though rendered somewhat indistinct by the fact that he was speaking through a thick layer of shaving cream.
He waved me over to sit down next to him and reached out to shake my hand hard. “Call me Herb, kid,” he growled brusquely, and immediately launched into convoluted narrative having to do, I dimly perceived, with the genesis of the mass-market paperback industry, in which Pocket Books had played a decisive role. Unfamiliar names rumbled by—Leon Shimkin, Jimmy Jacobson, Ian Ballantine, “Doc” Lewis, Robert De Graff—as Herb talked on and on about paperback publishing as if I were familiar with every moment of its history and everyone of consequence in it. As if to justify Morris Helprin’s warning about his bark, Herb’s theme seemed to be that I thought I was too good for the mass-market business. He did not say how he had reached that opinion, since he had not given me an opportunity to open my mouth.
For a big, tough-looking man, his speech was precise and even slightly academic in tone, like that of a college lecturer, though laced with the occasional profanity, presumably to show that he was a down-to-earth man at heart and not some bleeding-heart intellectual like me. From time to time he veered off into startling non sequiturs, weaving strange theories about the effect of history or economics or politics on book publishing. When he was off on a tangent, he sounded, in truth, a lot like one of those harmless cranks who believe that the Welsh are the lost tribe of Israel, or that the earth is flat, or that all world history is controlled by a secret cabal of Masons; at other times he sounded fairly sane. He had a fondness for baseball and football metaphors, which, since I didn’t play or follow either game, were entirely meaningless to me.
Through the torrent of his words I discerned, however dimly, the outlines of a story: In the beginning, all books had been published in hardcover form, at a relatively high price, until, in the mid-thirties, Robert De Graff conceived of selling paperback reprints in a small or “pocket” size for a quarter, thereby bringing culture to the many instead of only the few. De Graff got nowhere with his idea, since every book publisher pooh-poohed it. Besides, it was a well-known fact that bookstores wouldn’t stock cheap paperback books, hardcover publishers wouldn’t sell the right to reprint their titles at any price, and anyway there was no unfilled demand for books out there in the marketplace. Books were a luxury item, and book buyers represented a small, educated