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By Root 762 0

with me—of becoming snappish and withdrawn, and in his own way he could be as difficult and imperious as Snyder. A gifted publisher, rather than an editor, Mayer rather perversely prided himself on his skills as a businessman, about which Dick, who regarded him, in this area, at least, as an amateur, was cautiously skeptical. “He falls in loves with books,” Dick would say. “That’s OK for editors, but not for publishers.” In the long run, Dick would be proven right, when Mayer went on to become a major figure in world publishing as the CEO of Viking/Penguin, after a short and deeply unhappy stint as the head of Pocket Books with Dick as his boss, but at the time of Shardik it seemed to a lot of people that Mayer was emerging as the Renaissance man of book publishing, equally adept at high culture and low culture, at home with foreign literature to a degree remarkable in American publishing, and with a remarkable flair for both promotion and, as some pointed out enviously, self-promotion. Few other publishers would have spent their spare time running a small private press of their own, as Mayer did, or done it as well, come to that.

Egged on by Mayer—an active partner if ever there was one—we drew up an enormously ambitious plan for publishing the book, not just because we wanted to earn our money back but because it had been a high-profile purchase. The fact that Adams had moved to S&S for his eagerly awaited second book was major news, and not just in publishing circles. We would look, not to put too fine a point on it, like putzes if it didn’t succeed. A big American tour was planned for Adams, specially bound reading copies, stamped with a gold-foil emblem of Shardik’s head, were prepared (that had not yet become a staple of book PR), and every effort was made to whip up the enthusiasm of the S&S sales force.

• • •

IN THOSE days, sales conferences were still relatively modest events, and the sales reps were mostly middle-aged men, schooled in a certain weary cynicism about “the product” they were called upon to sell. They had heard it all before, and their eyes showed it—novels that were supposed to be number-one best-sellers that went down the drain, books that were hailed by the editor as if they were the Second Coming incarnate that were ignored or reviled by the critics; in short, theirs was not a happy lot.

In those days, the editor presented his or her own books, and there was therefore a premium on being a “good presenter.” Bob Gottlieb’s presentations had been justly famous—he was capable of making even the dreariest and least promising of first novels sound like potential best-sellers and Nobel Prize winners. While the sales reps knew better than to believe more than 50 percent of what he said, they admired his performances and were willing to follow his lead. The truth was that they were always more than willing to be seduced. Besides, Bob was right just often enough to have gained some credit in their eyes. He had been right about Catch-22, he had been right about Charles Portis’s True Grit, right about Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria, right about Chaim Potok, Jessica Mitford, and James Leo Herlihy, so they could forgive the number of times he had been wrong. Track record counted with the reps, and they had an infallible nose for bullshit.

I had inherited Bob’s mantle as the star performer at sales conference. I had learned from him to rise to my feet to present a book that was particularly important, to speak extemporaneously (very important, since most editors spoke from notes and droned on interminably, boring the sales reps to death with details they didn’t need to know or the plots of novels), to convey as much enthusiasm and sincerity as possible, even at the risk of being thought corny, and to elicit the maximum audience participation. That is not to say that the reps actually believed me any more than they had Bob—the only person they truly believed was Dick, because he told them the hard, basic facts of life, such as that anybody who failed to get so many copies of this or that