Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [40]
Still, whatever it was that Max knew, he didn’t see it as his task to teach it to me. It was from Henry that I was to learn the most valuable lesson about book publishing, though at second hand. One evening, as I was heading for home, burdened down with several manuscripts and a sizable chunk of the Durants’, Henry told me that years ago he had once met his brother Dick in the elevator, going home. Henry was carrying a heavy briefcase, buckled straps and handle straining with the weight of manuscripts, while Dick was nonchalantly carrying a thin leather portfolio under one arm. Dick stared at Henry’s load and chuckled. Pointing to Henry, he said, in mock Indian, “You, editor.” Then, pointing to his thin portfolio, he said: “Me, publisher.”
* This probably explains why Billy Rose gave me a fishy look when I was introduced to him as an S&S editor and also why June Havoc, Gypsy’s younger sister and rival, chose S&S to be her publisher when, in a successful attempt to outshine Gypsy, she wrote her autobiography, Early Havoc.
* Department SM was, in fact, a charming gentleman named Sam Meyerson, who was hired as the office boy when S&S was founded and who eventually rose to head the mail-order department. When well into his eighties, he still personally picked up the mail from the post office early every morning. The one thing that Max and Leon Shimkin shared was that the first thing each of them wanted to know each morning was how many orders Meyerson had received and for which books.
CHAPTER 6
Almost the first thing I learned about being an editor was that it was hard work. To be sure, ditchdiggers and miners have it worse, but for sheer, numbing, endless (I do not, deliberately, say mindless) work, editing books is hard to beat.
First of all there’s the sheer quantity of reading. From behind an editor’s desk, it sometimes seems as if the entire population of the United States is writing a book or sending in long, cramped, single-spaced letters, eccentrically typed, proposing to write one. Every mail delivery brings a fresh load of bulky, shapeless, poorly wrapped packages, many of them leaking that unpleasant gray stuffing that is impossible to get off your clothes, not to speak of rubber-banded piles of letter proposals, ranging from the insulting to the heartbreaking, and outlines for improbable books.
Many people in book publishing ignore this tide of flotsam and jetsam or return most of it unopened (a chore in itself), but it goes almost without saying that Max Schuster had devised a complicated and difficult procedure for numbering and tracking each of these unwelcome submissions. No matter how dog-eared, tatty, or unpromising the manuscript, it had to be logged in, a reader’s report form (“R.R.F.”) had to be attached to it, after which it was read, rejected, logged out, and the report filed. A very pleasant though much harassed elderly lady, Molly Singer, was responsible for this vast overload of paperwork, which was one of Max’s favorite management achievements and which absorbed a good deal of his attention.
Editors senior to myself (which was almost everybody) were always arriving back from lunch with a “hot” manuscript they had received directly from an agent, which they then took home and read without bothering to log it in. If these made their way to the editorial board for further readings without the proper form, they were sent back again to be entered properly into the system. As for the unsolicited manuscripts, the infamous