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Authors: Michael Korda
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even after he had been diagnosed with heart disease and ordered to slow down by his doctor, a friend saw him running back to his house as fast as he could after a brisk tennis game. “What’s your hurry, Dick?” he asked. Panting heavily, Dick shouted an explanation over his shoulder. “My doctor told me to take an afternoon nap,” he gasped, “and I’m late for it.”
He liked to be surrounded with men like himself, congenial spirits who knew how to sell books (without necessarily having any inclination to read them), and gradually built up a group of loyalists who came to be known as “Dick’s men,” among them his editor in chief, Jack A. Goodman; Albert R. Leventhal, his sales chief; and Richard L. Grossman, his assistant. Like him, they were men who worked hard and played hard, stayed late at the office, and hired as their assistants and secretaries attractive young women who didn’t want to go home at five-thirty. Like him, they tended to view Shimkin as the enemy, if for no other reason than he was so unlike them. This group did not include Dick Simon’s brother, Henry, who was “too serious” for them, neither congenial nor cut in their swashbuckling, reckless mode—in addition to which he had the misfortune of having married, in his former secretary, a woman with a notoriously sharp tongue.
Yet at the core, something was missing in Dick Simon. He was simply unable to recover the intensity of enthusiasm, the exuberant love of life, and the sure touch for best-sellers that had distinguished his career before he sold out to Marshall Field. Although he was only in his mid-fifties, he was already running on dry; his health was breaking down—the cigarettes, the booze, the stress were taking their toll. A failing heartand severe episodes of depression made it necessary for him to retire in 1957, at the early age of fifty-eight. *
Simon and Schuster was therefore a house divided. Marketing and promotion were controlled by Dick Simon’s loyalists, the editorial department was more or less controlled by Max Schuster, with the help of Henry Simon and Peter Schwed, the former rights director (the two were like cheese and chalk), while the financial side was firmly in the hands of Leon Shimkin, who like the Prince of Darkness ruled from the floor below, at Pocket Books, and never came upstairs.
Perhaps more important, Simon and Schuster, so often the leader and innovator, was a precursor of the troubles that were soon to face the rest of the book-publishing industry, most of which had to do with the fact that the era of private ownership was drawing to an end.
B OOK PUBLISHERS in those days liked to refer to themselves with a certain pride as “a cottage industry,” by which they meant that most publishing houses were privately owned, many by the men who had founded them, others by a single family.
They also meant that it was a business that didn’t require much in the way of capital. New publishing houses were easy to found, even in the 1950s—all you needed was an office somewhere, a telephone, somebody with a sharp eye for a book that would sell, and a rudimentary sense of marketing. One big best-seller and you were on your way. After all, S&S had been launched when Max Schuster, editor of an automotive trade magazine, and Dick Simon, a piano salesman, pooled their $8,000 savings and published the world’s first book of crossword puzzles. (Henry Simon’s first job in publishing was buying the pencils that were attached to each book by a string.) This Horatio Alger formula was perhaps the core myth that drew people into the business. After all, Atheneum, Ticknor and Fields, and Clarkson N. Potter were all founded in 1959—proof, it seemed to some, that a book-publishing company could be started with not much more capital than it would take to buy a new car.
But the age of the cottage industry was already coming to an end. The Wall Street wolf was already at the door, impressed by the growth of
He liked to be surrounded with men like himself, congenial spirits who knew how to sell books (without necessarily having any inclination to read them), and gradually built up a group of loyalists who came to be known as “Dick’s men,” among them his editor in chief, Jack A. Goodman; Albert R. Leventhal, his sales chief; and Richard L. Grossman, his assistant. Like him, they were men who worked hard and played hard, stayed late at the office, and hired as their assistants and secretaries attractive young women who didn’t want to go home at five-thirty. Like him, they tended to view Shimkin as the enemy, if for no other reason than he was so unlike them. This group did not include Dick Simon’s brother, Henry, who was “too serious” for them, neither congenial nor cut in their swashbuckling, reckless mode—in addition to which he had the misfortune of having married, in his former secretary, a woman with a notoriously sharp tongue.
Yet at the core, something was missing in Dick Simon. He was simply unable to recover the intensity of enthusiasm, the exuberant love of life, and the sure touch for best-sellers that had distinguished his career before he sold out to Marshall Field. Although he was only in his mid-fifties, he was already running on dry; his health was breaking down—the cigarettes, the booze, the stress were taking their toll. A failing heartand severe episodes of depression made it necessary for him to retire in 1957, at the early age of fifty-eight. *
Simon and Schuster was therefore a house divided. Marketing and promotion were controlled by Dick Simon’s loyalists, the editorial department was more or less controlled by Max Schuster, with the help of Henry Simon and Peter Schwed, the former rights director (the two were like cheese and chalk), while the financial side was firmly in the hands of Leon Shimkin, who like the Prince of Darkness ruled from the floor below, at Pocket Books, and never came upstairs.
Perhaps more important, Simon and Schuster, so often the leader and innovator, was a precursor of the troubles that were soon to face the rest of the book-publishing industry, most of which had to do with the fact that the era of private ownership was drawing to an end.
B OOK PUBLISHERS in those days liked to refer to themselves with a certain pride as “a cottage industry,” by which they meant that most publishing houses were privately owned, many by the men who had founded them, others by a single family.
They also meant that it was a business that didn’t require much in the way of capital. New publishing houses were easy to found, even in the 1950s—all you needed was an office somewhere, a telephone, somebody with a sharp eye for a book that would sell, and a rudimentary sense of marketing. One big best-seller and you were on your way. After all, S&S had been launched when Max Schuster, editor of an automotive trade magazine, and Dick Simon, a piano salesman, pooled their $8,000 savings and published the world’s first book of crossword puzzles. (Henry Simon’s first job in publishing was buying the pencils that were attached to each book by a string.) This Horatio Alger formula was perhaps the core myth that drew people into the business. After all, Atheneum, Ticknor and Fields, and Clarkson N. Potter were all founded in 1959—proof, it seemed to some, that a book-publishing company could be started with not much more capital than it would take to buy a new car.
But the age of the cottage industry was already coming to an end. The Wall Street wolf was already at the door, impressed by the growth of
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