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By Root 731 0

thought they posed some tricky moral problems, so he gave them to Max Schuster, who took them home and returned the next day badly shaken and in a state of high indignation. This was emphatically not the kind of book that he wanted his name on, he told Henry. Schuster had shown a few pages to his wife, Ray, and she had been deeply shocked. Was this, she had asked Max, the kind of dreck—Mrs. Schuster, I gathered, was not above the use of Yiddish where it hurt—that he wanted to publish at S&S? What would their friends think? What would people say? What was Henry thinking of? If Leon Shimkin wanted to grovel in the dirt, let him do it at Pocket Books, where nobody would be surprised.

Shimkin was not about to give up on the prospect of publishing Harold Robbins, whatever Max and Ray Schuster might think, and came up with the then-novel idea that Pocket Books would create a separate company, Trident Press, just to publish Robbins in hardcover. Robbins would then receive 100 percent of the paperback royalties instead of sharing them with his hardcover publisher in the usual way. This was unheard of, as well as an enormous amount of money spread over several as yet unwritten books. Thus was the “hard/soft” multi-book contract born, ensuring that the face of book publishing was about to be changed in a very dramatic way. It was soon to be a case of après nous le déluge, as agents sought to emulate Robbins’s coup and New American Library, Bantam, and Dell woke up to the notion that they didn’t really need to play second fiddle to the hardcover publishers or bid themselves silly over the rights to “major” fiction from them.

Although neither Henry Simon nor Max Schuster were aware of it at the time, they had deprived S&S of a major source of income—for Harold Robbins’s novel was to become The Carpetbaggers and was to be followed by several more enormous best-sellers—while the decision to let Pocket Books publish the novel in hardcover was to haunt every hardcover publisher, as the paperback houses one after another went into the hardcover business. Shimkin had doubled the number of competitors in a relatively small pond, with the inevitable result that the big ones would be obliged to eat the smaller ones until there were only a few giants left, warily eyeing each other.

None of this was clear at the time, least of all to me, though everybody except Henry had already guessed that Shimkin would use Trident Press as his Trojan horse in his war for complete ownership of S&S. Unfortunately for Shimkin, Trident Press boomeranged in the end. In order to give Trident some measure of respectability, Shimkin decided that it would also have to publish books by other authors. Even Harold Robbins could see that a publishing house with only one author lacked cachet—he wanted to be surrounded by other writers, albeit less successful than himself. Trident therefore went out and bought a lot of manuscripts in a hurry to give the imprint plausibility, and—no surprise—lost almost as much money on these acquisitions as was made from publishing Robbins.

In the meantime, quite unfairly, poor Henry soon became known as the man who turned down The Carpetbaggers. In the end, even Max Schuster couldn’t forgive Henry for letting such a hugely profitable book go, and Ray Schuster was heard to say that her husband was too softhearted for keeping on Dick Simon’s nebbish brother, who had been unable to recognize a gold mine when it was right before his eyes.

IT IS amazing how much one can learn from somebody who is not generally thought of as successful. In the first place, Henry looked down on what he thought of as “the popular taste” and despised himself for pandering to it. Nothing is more doomed in book publishing than an editor who tries to publish “popular” books without really enjoying them himself. Then, too, everybody who mattered at S&S had been under the sway of one or two magnetic personalities: Dick Simon, who had retired, and Jack Goodman, his editor in chief, who had died recently of a heart attack. Henry had been promoted to editor in chief