Sarah Gold

The Good Old Days of Publishing

What’s in My Bookbag: Al Silverman’s The Time of Our Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors (Truman Talley, Aug.). From his perch at the once-mighty Book-of-the-Month Club, where he spent 16 years as editorial director and then president, and later as publisher at Viking/Penguin, Silverman had an unparalleled view of the publishing industry during the second half of the 20th century.

Happily, this book is not just his own memoir (“Too many people are writing memoirs,” he says)—it is the collective memoir of the many editors and authors Silverman interviewed. Each chapter is devoted to one house: they are big and small, hardcover and paperback, and one defunct—remember Atheneum?

Whether the years from 1946 to the early 1980s were indeed a “golden age,” and whether today’s publishing industry is “ossified,” as Silverman avers, will be debated.

But anyone who can recall the days before Harper married Collins, when Book-of-the-Month Club was still a mighty force in publishing (courted as assiduously as Oprah is today) may well enjoy sharing the memories of Silverman and his peers. And anyone who wasn’t around then will learn about some of the great publishers and editors (Betty Prashker, Robert Giroux, Jim Silberman—whom I worked for at Summit Books).

I only wish the folks at St. Martin’s and Truman Talley Books had given The Time of Our Lives a more attractive cover, and one that conveyed at a glance that this is a book for book lovers.

Posted by Sarah Gold on May 23, 2008 | Comments (1)