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By Root 707 0

roll. Gulf + Western (which had changed its name to Paramount, after its most famous asset) was no longer in the synergy business—that word had died along with Bluhdorn. The company was now firmly in the entertainment and educational business; the zinc, the valves, the replacement bumpers, the gloves, the mattresses, all the chazerei that Bluhdorn had acquired over the years on his demented shopping spree had been sold off, without sentimentality or regret, by Martin Davis, with the result that Paramount was awash in cash and looking for companies to buy. Needless to say, they had to be companies with some kind of coherence—Davis was not about to follow down Bluhdorn’s path. What Wall Street wanted now was companies that made sense (or appeared to make sense, anyway), with some kind of rational plan for the future. Books, education, and movies looked like a sensible enough combination on paper to satisfy investors.

There were two key factors involved, both of which worked to Dick’s benefit. The first was that education became a hot issue in the 1980s, partly spurred by the beginnings of the computer revolution, which seemed to demonstrate that if American kids were going to grow up and compete with Japanese, they would be better off learning mathematics and science than welding and home economics. The second was that book publishing as an industry was entering into the second stage of mergers and acquisitions that was to eventually lead to the creation of a small number of publishing behemoths, themselves eventually swallowed up by even larger corporations.

Once again, the pace was set by Random House, which had been acquired from RCA by S. I. Newhouse (together with Knopf, Vintage, and Pantheon)—a plus for all concerned, it seemed, since Newhouse, whose family-owned Advance Publications had a huge stake in the newspaper and magazine business, was at least interested in the book business. Newhouse, whose ambitious acquisition of magazines was to bring him, among many others, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, set out to acquire publishing houses in much the same spirit. Random House was launched on a long period of growth by acquisition. Before the decade was out, it even became the dominant publisher in the United Kingdom, including among its imprints such old and respected houses as Jonathan Cape, Chatto and Windus, and the Bodley Head.

Snyder was not about to let S&S take a backseat to Random House. Much as Dick and Martin Davis disliked each other (a fact they scarcely even bothered to hide in public and in interviews), Davis was smart enough to rely on Dick’s shrewdness and acquisitive skills, so long as his ambitious and assertive subordinate stayed within the area of educational publishing. They might quarrel, Dick might brood and curse about Davis, but Dick still managed to bring off deal after successful deal, as if he was determined to extract a word of praise from Davis, who was grimly determined not to give him one. Dick first sold Silhouette (a paperback romance publisher) to Harlequin, its chief competitor, taking home a lucrative twenty-seven-year distribution agreement, then bought the moribund Stratemeyer Syndicate (which included Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and the Hardy Boys), and acquired Prentice-Hall for $700 million, thus turning S&S overnight into a major educational, informational, and reference publisher and something of an industry giant.

If Random House had moved decisively in an attempt to dominate the trade book business throughout the English-speaking world, S&S had set out to become the world’s largest publisher of educational books and material. The rest of publishing jogged behind, in a protracted spasm of smaller-scale mergers and acquisitions that were mirrored in the book-selling business: Chains forced the independent stores out of business by deep discounting, then proceeded to gobble each other up and open new stores throughout the country at a dizzying rate, mostly in the shopping malls that were coming to dominate the retail world. In short, a new world