44. The Time of Their Lives

The Time of Their Lives, Al Silverman
St. Martin's Press, 467 pages, 2008

This history of all the major American publishing houses in the years between World War II and the early 1980s was an impulse buy on Amazon, on a day in L.A. when I had gotten one too many rejection emails from public relations firms I didn't really want to work for anyway, and needed to let myself dream big. (That day I also bought Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, a biography of the legendary Scribner editor.) At the time I had just started to think about book publishing as a career, and didn't really think about the differences between the huge, mostly New York-based mega-publishers covered in the book and the small, independent, boutique San Francisco houses I'd probably be applying to.

The Time of Their Lives is heavily focused on the business of publishing--sales figures, advances, and description after breathless description of bidding wars into the millions for novels by the next Stephen King. (There were a few anecdotes about editors shaping manuscripts into the novels they would become, and even some about publicity tactics, but they were few and far between.) Although I doubt megamillion-dollar auctions figure much into the day-to-day operations at Heyday Books or Seal Press, the book did give me a feel for what publishing is about in a big-picture sense. As someone who can't even name the Big Six (there are six, right?) publishers, much less give an editorial overview, I did spend a lot of the time confused--most of the chapters (each focusing on one company) were non-chronological, jumping back and forth through time, and the author had a maddening tendency to refer to each person sometimes by their first name, sometimes by their last name, and sometimes by a nickname. This probably works if you're already familiar with all the major figures in the New York publishing world, but I constantly had to page back to see who we were talking about. Still, it's a solid (if not 100% applicable to my situation) and engagingly written overview of publishing in America in the 20th century.