In 1925, two young men, Bennett A. Cerf and his lifelong business partner Donald S. Klopfer, bought the Modern Library reprint series from Horace Liveright and set up shop. At the end of 1926, they incorporated an imprint to begin publishing new books and named it Random House. In 1936—by then, they’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and had fought a landmark court case to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses—they merged with Smith & Haas, a small literary house, and welcomed Robert K. Haas as a third partner. Cerf had determined to be a great publisher; he was well on his way. Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built straddles 20th-century American cultural history, using Cerf’s life as a throughline, linking books, Broadway, Hollywood, and television. The following excerpt, from a chapter about World War II, focuses on changes that would transform publishing and Cerf’s life.
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Early in 1942, 40-year-old Don went down to D.C. to lobby for a commission in the Army Air Forces, and on Bennett’s 44th birthday, the last Monday in May, a wire from Uncle Sam arrived, appointing Donald Simon Klopfer a captain, and ordering him to leave for California on Saturday. “STUNNED,” Bennett wrote in his diary, but after he saw Captain Klopfer for the first time in uniform, added: “LOOKS GREAT.” The office staged a tearful farewell on Friday, and in between the goodbyes, Bennett kept very, very busy. Midafternoon Saturday, he drove his best friend to the plane. By 4:30 p.m., Donald was gone.
On a small slip of letterhead paper Bennett noted in a very clear hand, “BAC bet Donald that Klopfer is back at Random House Jan. 1, 1945. $25 even,” the kind of cocky wartime wager used to keep hope close and fear at bay. The two would refer to it many times as a kind of talisman: Donald must return—one of them had to pay up! But back at work Monday, the office was lonely, the chair across the desk empty, while the smell of Don’s tobacco hovered faintly.
[Klopfer would spend more than a year stationed in the U.S., but in the autumn of 1943, was posted overseas, to a base at Tibenham, in rural England.]In January 1944, the captain became Major Klopfer, and Bennett’s telegram told him: “Sales conference halted to cheer the promotion.” The major, however, thought the sales and profit figures that Bennett had quoted him were “too good to be true,” and felt unnerved that the business was growing so quickly without him. When weather got bad enough to ground all flights, he moped around like an old, lost dog with nothing to do. At such moments, despite the steady stream of letters from Bennett and others, melancholy took hold and he feared he’d gotten stale. “Jesus, I’ll have to learn the whole list over again, when, as, and if I get back,” he wrote, and besides, Don knew his partner. With so much excitement, was Bennett neglecting other priorities they’d promised to get to when the cash came in—like resetting Modern Library volumes that were still reprinted using old, mistake-ridden plates?... But Bennett kept ignoring his suggestions.
“I’ve got to have something to come back to, Cerfie,” Don finally wrote. “I expect to be flat broke.” He was going to have to sell what stocks he had to pay income tax, which he’d owe “for ’42, ’43, ’44, ’45.”
Reading about so many initiatives from three thousand miles and an entirely different life away, Don was confounded and concerned. “That’s quite an organization you and RKH are building up,” he wrote in early March. “I wonder about two things: (1) will there be any reason for me in it at the end of all this horrible mess and will I be any asset to the business; (2) will Random House be any fun at all as a ‘big business’ instead of our very personal venture?” A week later, he repeated those fears, reckoning he’d always been a “small-time operator.”
With overseas mail so unpredictable, both letters arrived in New York on the same day, and Bennett, terribly anxious to reassure Don quickly, made three carbons of his reply to send at two-day intervals. At least one would reach Britain. First, he reminded him that the military had introduced the Modern Library to millions of new readers, multiplying its potential market five times over pre-war. Prospects for juveniles were good, and he had every confidence that a recent editorial hire would bring in fine new authors for the adult list. Further, new distribution channels would provide a whole new market. The beautiful thing was that they could remain simple, with “no possibility” of ever developing into “an unmanageable menagerie” like Doubleday. He shared that abhorrence for “impersonal ‘big business,’ ” and didn’t think RH would ever take that form. “You are part of [its]… very fibre and bloodstream, you blithering idiot,” he almost shouted. Even without a nickel outside the firm, Don would be “sitting pretty,” he promised.
The original and carbons arrived on the same day, a joy to their recipient, but knowing the ambition that fueled Bennett, Don replied with continued concern. “Please don’t let the damned thing get so big that we can’t run it ourselves and get some fun out of it and still think we’re contributing a little something to the future of America,” he reiterated. “Sounds mighty pompous, but I like to kid myself that we can contribute something if we’re intelligent about it.” And yet, when fall 1944 arrived, an opportunity arose, so fantastic that Bennett could hardly believe it. Don’s cautions were cast aside as the same instinct that had inspired Bennett to buy the Modern Library led to a second great coup.
It all began with Marshall Field, scion of the Chicago department store family, who also owned the Chicago Sun, radio stations, a reference book company, and the left-leaning New York newspaper PM. About to catch a train at Grand Central, Field bought a few Pocket Books; by the time he arrived in Chicago, he’d decided to buy the firm. When he phoned Pocket president Bob de Graff, he learned the company wasn’t for sale, but Field offered to buy a share of the business, and recruited a key Doubleday executive, “Doc” Lewis, as his publishing right-hand man. As soon as Lewis informed his new boss that de Graff’s other partners in Pocket were Richard Simon, Max Schuster, and “the third S,” Leon Shimkin, Field offered to buy S&S; they were willing to talk, not sell. Field was soon told of another possibility: Grosset & Dunlap. A leading publisher of hardcover reprints, G&D was for sale.
The inexpensive reprint business, hardcover and paperbound, was dominated by Doubleday, G&D, Pocket, and World. If Pocket combined with G&D, it would rival Doubleday for supremacy and make Field one of two or three men who could determine the future of the trade book industry, dictating terms that others would have to accept. Bennett heard about Field’s plan. Random’s partners didn’t have enough money to mount a rival bid, but maybe they could join with others to buy G&D. It had been a cash cow but needed new pastures on which to feed, and energy and ideas from men who understood the potential of new markets. G&D hadn’t gone after bestselling authors, nor had it sold titles into the chain and drug stores that Bennett knew were the future for cheap books.
Teaming up with Book-of-the-Month Club founder Harry Scherman, the RH partners invited G&D owner Donald Grosset to meet over several days in late September. Grosset agreed to a purchase price of about $4.25 million. With so much capital involved, RH and BOMC extended an invitation to Harper to join them. It was old-line, but its head, Cass Canfield, was savvy and a man they trusted. Soon enough, they invited Little, Brown and Scribner as well, making it much harder for any other group to mount a challenge.
The news rocked the publishing world. The wonderful part was, Bennett wrote Don, that they’d snatched G&D from Marshall Field and the “smarty pantses” at S&S at the very last minute. Don would have been happier with a smaller group, but expressed “utmost confidence” in what Bennett and Bob were doing. He was “so damned interested” but frustrated: there wasn’t anybody on base who could really appreciate the publishing part of his life and what this meant. Not many days passed before a B-24 made an emergency landing at Tibenham. Being the intelligence officer on duty, he cycled out to interview the pilot. As the flyboy exited the cockpit, Don was amazed to recognize the Knopfs’ son “Pat,” who was equally taken aback when the bicyclist turned out to be Donald. Alfred A. Knopf Jr. had known Don since he was a kid.
As they walked the bicycle back to HQ, Don suddenly grew excited. “Guess what we did yesterday?” he asked, and Pat worried what he would hear.
“We bought Grosset!” Don whooped, at last able to share the big news.
G&D’s new owners would be an unusual mix: three old-money firms, a pair of entrepreneurial Jewish firms, and Don Grosset and his original shareholders. Yet they still required a general manager to run the day-to-day. Ironically, John O’Connor, the VP in charge of Marshall Field’s reference book company, took the job, and in less than a year, Ian Ballantine, the nephew of Random’s senior editor, left his job piloting a small U.S. outpost for Penguin to join O’Connor in starting a Grosset subsidiary to compete toe-to-toe with Pocket. They named it Bantam Books.
Simon, Schuster, and Shimkin continued to talk with Marshall Field. Early in November, Field bought an interest in S&S and Pocket, enough to bring them into Field Enterprises, though he promised not to interfere editorially or replace management. In a New York Post article, Bennett noted this development, and saw book publishing edging into the realm of “real ‘Big Business.’ ” He predicted golden days but drew a line in the sand: “Original publishing of new, good books will not become involved in any of this frenzied finance. Big business and literature definitely do not mix,” since the relations between creative writers and publishers were far too personal. To Don, he wondered why Dick and Max wanted to sell part of their business, concluding that they were “drunk with dreams of empire and… led blindly by Shimkin.”
However, at the same time, he had reason to feel grateful toward S&S—very grateful. Sitting on top of the world in the swanky Rainbow Room, perched high up in Rockefeller Center’s RCA building, he’d been one of four Pocket authors feted at an October luncheon, the first members of an exclusive club—the “Silver Gertrudes”—whose books [in Bennett’s case, an anthology of war humor and one of cartoons] had sold at least a million copies (“Gertrude” being Pocket’s kangaroo colophon).
The previous December, Bennett had begun collecting stories for a third compendium, this one of anecdotes, and fancied publishing the new book as an RH hardcover. There was a problem: the firm didn’t have enough paper in its wartime quota. A $1,000 advance and 15% royalty had made it easy to agree over lunch with Dick and Max back in June that S&S would do the original, and Pocket reprint in paper. Between mouthfuls, Bennett as usual reeled off jokes, pausing only to say: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.” Whereupon Dick, knowing well how hard it was to interrupt Bennett in full flow, suggested that Try and Stop Me would be a perfect title.
The work went well, and after delivering the final draft in July, Bennett began gathering material for a second anecdote book as well as an American short story collection. He’d also begun working with an editor at a Doubleday subsidiary to co-edit a huge anthology of the most successful plays in American theater, this time for Random.
In November, a month after welcoming him into the Silver Gertrude club, S&S launched Bennett’s Try and Stop Me, with a full-page ad full of clever cartoons in the New York Times Book Review and even cleverer copy by one of S&S’s resident geniuses, Jack Goodman. “This is NOT an advertisement for a picture book,” it began.
These pictures appear… because it goes against our grain to quote one word of Bennett Cerf’s prose. He’s the president of Random House….
We’re Simon and Schuster…. We’re publishing this book because Mr. Cerf, a modest man, doesn’t feel he can rightly give his own book the sort of tremendous promotion he feels it deserves. Like this….
It’s the sort of book that grabs you by the shoulder, pushes you into a chair, and keeps you in a condition of helpless merriment for hours. Even if its author is president of Random House.
Nothing like a little “helpless merriment” to cheer a weary nation at war. Bennett had decanted the best stories he knew into sections on Hollywood, Broadway, the literary life, etc., mixing tales from the lives of friends and authors like the Marx Brothers, Gertrude Stein, even Don, with borrowings from RH books and newspaper columns. S&S salesmen had placed more than 40,000 copies of TASM—as Bennett referred to it—in stores. By the end of the first month, it had sold 60,000 copies. The second week in February, it was number one on the Tribune bestseller list and number two in the Times.
From shy high school boys needing icebreakers to ease into social situations, to Judge Woolsey, liberator of Ulysses, the book found an extraordinarily wide range of fans. “I… must tell you,” Woolsey wrote Bennett, “how much it delights me. I have been ill lately, and it has been a great source of pleasure.” By the end of July, TASM had also been turned into a yellow-covered Armed Services Edition for the soldiers overseas, and BOMC had nearly 400,000 of its version in print. In November 1945, on the first anniversary of publication, S&S could boast 321,000 copies in print of its edition; the book remained on the Times list; and an inexpensive hardcover reprint was forthcoming from Doubleday.
Magazines were dangling paychecks for Bennett’s byline, and forums paid him to speak. But he also spoke unpaid on War Bond Drives, sharing a podium with famous novelists, and addressed wounded soldiers recovering in the hospital. Once, his audience was a thousand military “mental cases.” Early in 1945, King Features had phoned to ask him to write a daily column for syndication. The arrangement began with eighteen papers, but the number grew and grew. Naturally, it ran under the rubric “Try and Stop Me.” He’d become the subject of profiles and features, pieces like “The Thief of Badgags” in the Chicago Sun, and “Try and Stop Bennett Cerf,” a huge profile in Marshall Field’s PM. In December, Life devoted five pages to “Bennett Cerf: Publisher of Classics and Best Sellers, He Is Now the Nation’s No. 1 Peddler of Jokes.”
The war ended in August 1945, with two bombs and a personal bombshell. Just after devastation was visited upon hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Phyllis Cerf, who’d been fearful about a second pregnancy after the difficult caesarean of her first, announced that she was carrying a new baby. Bennett pointedly referred to this second as “Finale.”
Donald had returned to America in June and to Random later in the summer, one of four officers in his division—and the only intelligence officer—to have been awarded a Croix de Guerre. He’d also merited a Bronze Star, a ribbon with four battle stars, and a distinguished unit citation. A year earlier, Bennett had said that the first day Don was back at his desk would be “the happiest of my entire life.” Donald had told him in turn: “You know full well how much you mean to me. I haven’t many close friends!” Yet Don, along with many who’d worn the nation’s uniform so well, came home to a changed world where, despite Bennett’s assurances, he was uncertain of his place, and where heart-rending experiences he’d had would have to be stowed away. His friend had been one of those responsible for changing that world: same old Bennett, but not the same. He’d moved to a different plane of fame, money, influence, and had established a rhythm with a wife who had her own ideas about the future. Bennett had experienced nothing of the soldier’s life, but the final piece in Try and Stop Me alluded to that life nonetheless:
An officer, home from… overseas, was assigned to a desk job in the Pentagon…. Each day… he shifted the location of his desk—next to the window, away from the window, into a corridor, and finally into the men’s washroom. “He must be shell-shocked,” the authorities figured, but the officer… [explained] grimly: “It’s the only place around here… where people seem to know what they’re doing.”
At war’s close, Bennett Cerf stood triumphant. He thought he knew exactly what he was doing. Everything was in place: wife, child, another on the way, house, social life, business, columns, books, lectures, broadcasting career, a horizon of unlimited prospects. He’d lost his bet with Donald, but Don was home, and in place, too. There was also the matter of money…. He’d earned well over $100,000 from the S&S edition of Try and Stop Me alone.
There would be no stopping him now.
Excerpted from Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman, to be published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Gayle Feldman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.
