{"id":267526,"date":"2009-01-07T15:05:44","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T15:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/01\/07\/robert-giroux-and-publishing\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:27:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:27:25","slug":"robert-giroux-and-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/01\/07\/robert-giroux-and-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Giroux and Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recent issue of New York<\/em> magazine has a great article<\/a> by Boris Kachka about Robert Giroux that includes these choice bits:<\/p>\n

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Consider what brought Giroux to FSG<\/span> in the first place: The same frustration with bottom-line publishing that drives literary editors to drink today. Giroux had spent the decade after World War II at Harcourt, Brace, where his taste and exacting attention helped build a sterling list of authors. But in the late forties, his boss was replaced by Eugene Reynal, a man who just didn\u2019t get good books. When Giroux wanted to acquire The Catcher in the Rye, Reynal objected, \u201cThe guy\u2019s crazy,\u201d meaning Holden Caulfield. In 1955, Giroux angrily resigned and accepted an offer from Roger Straus, the flamboyant publisher of Farrar, Straus & Co. He never asked any of his authors to follow, but seventeen of them did, including Eliot, Robert Lowell, Flannery O\u2019Connor, Bernard Malamud, and one of his best friends, poet John Berryman. Straus\u2014who died in 2004\u2014considered Giroux\u2019s arrival \u201cthe single most important thing to happen to this company.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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What Straus and Giroux did share were very similar tastes and a genuine love of authors, and they both tended, as old age and corporate consolidation advanced, toward cranky proclamations. Each in his own way, of course: Straus compared conglomerate publishers to spaghetti salesmen, publicly feuded with Simon & Schuster, and turned down offers to buy the house (before relenting in 1994). Giroux, conceding \u201cI\u2019m just an old fogey,\u201d asked, \u201cWho the hell would read a book by Nixon?\u201d (What did he make of O.J., you wonder.) He railed against \u201cooks\u201d\u2014gimmicks that weren\u2019t quite books\u2014which account for the majority of what\u2019s now published. He often said, \u201cIt is the publisher\u2019s job, if he cannot find a masterpiece to print, at least to avoid publishing junk.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Junk is not a modern development, any more than layoffs or bankruptcies. Galassi made this clear at the memorial, calling out the titles on the 1952 Farrar list\u2014before Giroux came onboard. These included an autobiography by bandleader Artie Shaw and books on traveling and hunting in Florida. \u201cThe most sobering of all publishing lessons,\u201d Giroux once said, is that \u201ca great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it.\u201d The times will never catch up with those schlocky books from \u201952, but one or two of them may have helped the company hold on long enough for Giroux to get there. In the early years, it was Straus\u2019s canniness and connections that kept the company going. Giroux was the one who made it worth salvaging. Galassi will have to keep doing both. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent issue of New York magazine has a great article by Boris Kachka about Robert Giroux that includes these choice bits: Consider what brought Giroux to FSG in the first place: The same frustration with bottom-line publishing that drives literary editors to drink today. Giroux had spent the decade after World War II at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[18176,1836,18186,18166],"class_list":["post-267526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-boris-kachka","tag-cwp","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-robert-giroux"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":355066,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267526\/revisions\/355066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}