Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [56]
At the time, however, the book was not only several years late but was called Hitler’s Nightmare Empire, planned for a first printing of five thousand copies and treated pretty much as a relief project for Shirer, whom most people correctly saw as having been spinelessly abandoned by CBS. The jacket for Hitler’s Nightmare Empire had already been designed and appeared in the catalog while Shirer was still trying to finish the book. It was dark bloodred, with the title spelled out in spiky letters of barbed wire. The subtitle, appearing in small letters at the bottom, was “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
Being something of a student of German history and of World War Two, I was one of the very few people at S&S apart from Barnes himself who had actually read Shirer’s book. Barnes had loaned me the galleys, painstakingly corrected by him in his small, tidy hand. He had apparently decided to act as his own copy editor and fact checker, perhaps as some kind of penance. Unlike Bob, Barnes did not exactly communicate enthusiasm. He was obviously aware that Shirer’s book was something special, but he seemed to have erected an invisible wall of reserve, self-imposed, between himself and strangers. I thought he was, to use Graham Greene’s phrase, “a burnt-out case,” determined to maintain his dignity despite the aura of betrayal, failure, and disappointment that surrounded him. He was not a man to blow his own horn or call attention to one of his books, and he gave the impression of being above commerce or possibly unaware of it.
I mentioned the book to Bob, who was inclined to view the books of other editors as impediments to his own, but he had a certain respect for Joe Barnes, perhaps because Barnes was so clearly not a threat to him and perhaps also because he was a man of old-fashioned culture, integrity, and learning, whose taste in literature, though very different from Bob’s own, Bob respected. Bob came back the next morning with the galleys in a paper shopping bag, aglow with enthusiasm, certain that he was carrying a major best-seller. “Of course, the jacket has to go,” he said. “And the title.”
Despite a volcanic eruption on the part of Frank Metz, the art director, the jacket was scrapped. Nina Bourne, challenged to come up with a new title, took one look at the old jacket and said, “Why not use the subtitle for the title?” Shortly afterward, with a black jacket bearing a swastika, a stroke of genius on Metz’s part, and the title The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the book was relaunched and went on to become one of the greatest (and longest-running) successes in publishing history. A last-minute problem arose when bookstores all over the country protested displaying the swastika and threatened not to stock the book. The problem had to be taken all the way up to Max Schuster, whose dislike of the swastika was outweighed by his reluctance to be told what to do by booksellers.*
Like so many of the crises that occur between publishers and booksellers, this one proved to be a tempest in a teacup and soon died down—indeed, the swastika, which had hitherto been deemed unusable on book jackets soon became so popular, particularly on the covers of mass-market fiction, that the sight of the average mass-market display would have pleased Goebbels.
“It’s better to be lucky than smart,” a future president of S&S was to take as his motto, and it’s true enough, though it is probably better still to be lucky and smart. Certainly, it’s typical of the publishing industry that a book that was long overdue and that might easily have been canceled for lateness—and that was rescued from obscurity only by luck and Bob Gottlieb’s shrewd, last-minute repackaging—should have brought S&S a huge profit, enviable publicity, and every possible award and honor. Everybody was delighted by this enormous and unexpected success, except, ironically, Shirer, who in order