Word: bookmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Some bookmen feel that all that lettuce is not good for writers-besides being a lot of trouble for publishers. "Novelists are subsidized," says President Edward E. Booher of McGraw-Hill. "My trade editors have to run around constantly just to keep up with the big writers-getting big movie deals, big paperback deals. We pay them big money, and then we don't know whether their books are going to sell...
Nobody yet knows how mergers of this kind will affect trade-book publishing, though many bookmen are pessimistic. Roger Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, envisions huge factories that will turn out books like sausages. Big publishers "are through as serious influences in literature," he says. William Jovanovitch of Harcourt, Brace disagrees. He believes, with many other experts, that television, for instance, "has increased the use of books by contributing to an ambiance of information, art and instruction. Greater assimilation of information means greater literacy, and greater literacy means greater use of the language. And that's good...
Jotting in London's Books and Bookmen on "How to Write a Thriller," Ian Fleming, 54, James Bond's creator and Jack Kennedy's favorite author, says unashamedly that he does it for pleasure and money. His thrillers are aimed "somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals. I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these harrowing personal experiences...
Manhattan's Grove Press marshaled Critics Alfred Kazin and Malcolm Cowley to defend the book at a preliminary hearing. Both bookmen discussed Lawrence's somewhat tedious and dated story of a gamekeeper who played round games with the lady of the manor, pointed out its philosophical overtones (nature v. civilization), granted its explicit language on sex (mild by the standards of many a modern bestseller), but professed to see not even a quiver of prurience in the book. As for the Postmaster General, he sat down to read the novel himself, concluded: "The book is replete with descriptions...
...board chairman and his mother president. But he still knows some rich people, and he still wants to make it on his own. Last week Publishers' Row was startled by the news that a major new publishing firm was being founded by Pat Knopf and two big bookmen-Hiram Haydn, 51, for the past three years editor in chief of Random House, and Simon Michael Bessie, 43, one of the top editors of Harper...