Eating - Jason Epstein [23]
This unexpected vocation explains why Barbara and I were speeding, after our wedding, down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, beside the sparkling Hudson, under a brilliant windswept sky, to the pier where the stately Ile de France, its old-fashioned perpendicular bows towering over the highway, was preparing to sail at noon. We had booked a first-class cabin. Neither of us had money, but two years previously I had suggested to the publishing company where I worked that, with the market for books bound to expand as a result of the GI Bill, the kinds of books my classmates were reading would sell many more copies as inexpensive but well-made paperbacks than as expensive hardcovers, which students could not afford. There was nothing new about my idea. European publishers had been publishing serious books in paperback, the kind I had in mind, for years. But in the United States at that time, paperback books, except for a few imported Penguins, were mostly ephemera sold in drugstores and at newsstands and removed at the end of each month along with that month’s magazines, to be replaced with next month’s thrillers, mysteries, and westerns. My plan to publish important books on good paper, slightly larger than drugstore paperbacks, and stock them permanently in bookstores, succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, including my own, and this voyage was my reward for having precipitated what came to be called the paperback revolution.
In those pre-jet days, when all but the most intrepid transatlantic travelers sailed to Europe, book publishers went first-class. Book publishing has never been a very profitable business. To make money, you went to work in a bank. Book publishing was a vocation. Without money you might go hungry. Without books you would not know who you are or where you came from or where you might be going. For me and many others, the work we did in those years was its own reward. The annual three-week scouting trip to England and the Continent by sea was a traditional perquisite. First-class passage was compensation for monastic wages. Barbara and I were going to meet the important postwar European writers. We were twenty-five and fearless. We would be gone not for the prescribed three weeks but for three months.
First-class passengers took an elevator to the upper level of a covered West Side pier and crossed a broad, red-carpeted gangplank onto the ship. There were confetti and streamers; bellboys in pillbox hats with chin straps, delivering bouquets; porters in berets and the insignia “CGT” in red concentric circles on their blue sweaters; pages shouting names and waving telegrams; chimes warning visitors that they would soon have to go ashore. Did I imagine it or did I see Van Johnson, the actor, a camel’s-hair coat over his shoulders, retreating down the gangplank backward, waving? I remember the buttery aroma of fresh croissants, which I have ever since associated with that voyage. The Ile de France would prove to be a seagoing patisserie.
Our cabin was not large, but spacious enough not to be overwhelmed by its walls of silk brocade, the Louis XV chairs, or the pink silk lampshades. I have a photograph of Barbara in a gray suit, hat, and veil sitting on the arm of one of these chairs. I’m standing behind her. Barbara seems stunned. I’m smiling. My confidence was not ill-founded. Our generation of Americans had every reason to trust