We asked industry veterans to reflect on memorable events from their early days in publishing—most of which could never happen today.

George Nicholson, senior agent, Sterling Lord Literistic

I arrived for my first job in New York City in 1959 with a small steamer trunk filled with all my literature textbooks, a few (I thought) first-rate term papers to show I could write, and a wardrobe largely consisting of three three-piece tweed suits from Brooks Brothers, which I thought would set me up as a working editor just fine. I hauled that trunk up three flights of stairs to an apartment at 151 West 48th Street, two blocks from Rockefeller Center where I was to work. I soon found that I needed only what we then called “wash pants” and sports coat and tie for my daily rounds. But I was so besotted by the glamour of my surroundings that I only gradually became aware of the uniforms that we wore. My women colleagues wore hats and gloves to the office but only bankers and IBM types wore suits with white, not colored or striped, shirts. Those were the uniforms of the day and they rarely varied. I wear a coat and tie to this day probably because I remember having to be dressed properly, for one could not go to restaurants, bars, and various other haunts without them. And I had to be prepared to go anywhere if an invitation came for “drinks at the Plaza” or any other hot spot. There was an assumption that we all had private incomes, a distinction that was flattering but which had to be squashed early.

Inadequate salaries hampered our search for glamour and excitement in the Manhattan of the late fifties. We soon turned to second jobs to make ends meet. I was a crack typist and managed to parlay that into a three-day night and Saturday job at Newsweek magazine in the typing pool. Together with other young editors and friends, we moved about the city in packs, reveling in 25-cent shots of rye from the many Irish bars then along Sixth Avenue in the 40s, all called we thought The Shamrock. When the work day was done we often gathered in hotel lobbies, checked the listing for professional organization cocktail parties upstairs and found that we could easily, with our fine wardrobes, pass for members of the Westchester Medical Association or the Plumbers Union or whoever was serving free drink and food. When discovered and politely asked to leave, we thanked our hosts and said we must have gotten the wrong ballroom. After a time, lives regularized, the joys and understanding of our real work took hold, and we were launched in the world, sometimes sadder, but always a lot smarter.

Rosemary Brosnan, editorial director, HarperCollins Children’s Books

My first job in publishing was as editorial assistant to Virginia Buckley, the editorial director of Lodestar Books, a former imprint of Penguin Putnam. Occasionally, an author would come in to visit Virginia and would present an idea for a book. We didn’t have editorial meetings or acquisitions meetings or P&L’s or an approval process. Virginia would just make an offer to the author on the spot, and would ask me to type up the contract. I would type in the specifics—name, address, advance, royalty rates—onto the boilerplate form. And I would have to do this twice, so there would be a copy for us and a copy for the author. We didn’t have computers or photocopiers. And many children’s authors at the time didn’t use agents. The author would just walk away from the meeting with a contract. Things are just a bit different today!

Christopher Franceschelli, president and publisher, Handprint Books

I cut my baby teeth as an assistant in the foreign rights department at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The company’s temporary worker requisition form concisely noted exactly four possible types of duties: typing, filing, dictation, and coffee-making (the reading of manuscripts to be done strictly on our time). We were all bound in a love-hate relationship to the telex machine clattering in the corner: a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption which somehow strapped a manual typewriter to a confetti-making machine, producing long punched-paper ribbons which then generated terse telegram-like international messages. Compared to your average telex, tweets are long-winded: after all, international connection time was vastly expensive. We were enchanted by rumors of the nascent technology that promised to liberate us from the telex’s shackles—and transfixed by the not one but two salesmen who appeared together to demonstrate this blazing new equipment the size of an ottoman: the fax machine. Its thermographic output faded so quickly that it was sometimes hard to read messages on a Monday morning after a particularly sunny weekend. And before these quite indelible memories consign me to the heaps of geezerdom, it’s remarkable to realize that this history is separated from the present by no more than a generation.

David Gale, v-p and editorial director, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

In the old days when I worked at Dell/Delacorte, sales conferences were very different from the webcast presentations we do today. While hardcover presentations were rather straightforward, on the paperback side, we would create elaborate musical extravaganzas to present our books. I remember one year as a young editor, I presented revised editions of Wardell Pomeroy’s books Boys and Sex and Girls and Sex. At the time, Bob Miller was in our adult editorial department, and he helped with the presentation. He sang, to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T, a song called S-A-F-E-S-E-X. His back-up singers, young women who worked in his department, were squatting on the floor as the song began, in costumes made of some sort of trash bags or dry-cleaning bags. As Bob sang they arose, becoming fully erect by song’s end. I don’t think that sort of presentation goes on at any sales conference these days.

Emily Easton, publishing director, Walker Books for Young Readers

On my first day of a summer job at Condé Nast magazines back in the ’80s, I was assigned to fill in for a vacationing assistant at Vogue. Since it was my first day at the company, I had to report to Human Resources first and fill out all the usual paperwork before reporting to the department. When I arrived to meet my new colleagues, an editor (who will remain nameless) slapped me across the face and told me never to be late to work again! No wonder I decided the world of book publishing was more to my liking.

Howard W. Reeves, editor-at-large, Abrams Books for Young Readers

Fresh out of school, I landed a job as editorial assistant/receptionist at Knopf. One day an elevator door opened and out stepped a fashionably dressed woman with long hair. She stopped before my desk, held up her hand to silence me, then whipped a brush from her purse. Bending at the waist, she flung her hair like a waterfall over her head to cascade almost to the floor. In this position she brushed out her hair (it was a windy day). Standing up, she swung her hair back into place, and informed me, “You may tell Bob I am here.” In my most charming voice, I asked: “And you are?” Silence. “Gloria Vanderbilt.” I pretended to call [editor-in-chief] Bob Gottlieb’s office, then said, “Their line is busy, I’ll step back to tell them you’re here.” I calmly left the lobby, and ran to [editor] Martha Kaplan’s office. “I just asked Gloria Vanderbilt who she was,” I said. Martha rolled her eyes and dropped her head in her hands. “I was expecting someone much older.” She lifted her head slightly. “Perfect.” Martha came and fetched Ms. Vanderbilt. Before they disappeared down the hall, I heard Martha say, “Of course he knew you were coming, but he says he was expecting a much older woman.” I swear Ms. Vanderbilt’s lips twitched ever so slightly.

Linda Magram, v-p marketing, children’s books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I am sure I am one of just a few people who actually enjoyed the 1993 ABA trade show in Miami Beach. It rained for three solid days; the humidity made everyone soggy and cranky, and the highly charged murder trial of a police officer was creating great tension in the city and among conference-goers with talk that riots might break out. I was working as children’s publicity manager at Little, Brown, and we were promoting The Fannie Farmer Junior Cookbook. Every day, we donned tall, white chef hats and walked around the booth with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that we’d paid a lot of money to haul into the convention center. I met the baker each day at a set time at the outside door to sneak the cookies in (couldn’t get away with that today).

The promotion was working—the booth was crowded, and the cookies were going fast. One guy had been hanging around the booth a lot. It turned out he was a commission rep from Montreal who sold our books in Canada. He must’ve circled around 10 times for cookies, and eventually we started to talk. He made a funny remark about being forced to do stupid things for our jobs—like me wearing the dumb-looking chef’s hat. “That was my idea,” I said.

I saw that guy, Michael Watson, several times throughout the conference, including running into each other at Ingram’s lavish party at Vizcaya—an enormous museum and gardens built in 1910, inspired by the palaces of Europe. There were at least five mariachi bands playing, multiple bars with drinks flowing, tables of elaborate food, and hundreds of guests milling around (wouldn’t happen now).

One year later, in May 1994, we were married. Thank you, Fannie Farmer.

Sandra Jordan, author (with Jan Greenberg) of The Mad Potter: George E. Ohr, Eccentric Genius (Roaring Brook/Porter, fall 2013)

When I went to Farrar, Straus and Giroux as editor-in-chief of children’s books in the mid-’70s, Union Square was fairly sketchy after dark. Roger Straus closed the offices at seven o’clock, so if you had extra work to do it was best to come in early. (And besides, after 7 p.m. the earnest stamping of the evening folk-dancing classes upstairs reverberated through the building.) One morning as I sat talking to an author on the phone I watched the police take a body bag out of the park and load it into a van.

Adult and children’s editorial, sales, marketing, production, promotion, publicity, and contracts all crowded cozily together on one notoriously shabby (and bug-ridden) floor. The sagging curtains in Roger Straus’s office put Miss Havisham’s to shame and put us on notice that requests for new furniture were pointless, though money was forthcoming for a new translation, art proofs pulled on four different kinds of paper to see which best suited the book, or a full cloth binding and headbands. Roger and Simon & Schuster’s Dick Snyder lobbed literary insults at each other via the New York Times. At Farrar, Straus, literary matters were taken more seriously than money, though Roger certainly had no objection to a profit and kept an eye on the bottom line. If I wanted to buy a book I went down the hall to his office and asked. I can’t ever remember his saying no. There were no estimates necessary, though if a book looked expensive there would be discussions with the production department. Roger put his head into every office every morning, and while he said that to buy a book he only wanted to know that I loved a manuscript or thought it would make money, not much escaped his notice.

Perhaps because our offices were on top of each other, children’s books were not separated from adult editorial the way they are at most companies. We shared the same editorial meeting full of publishing and literary gossip. Roger and his assistant Peggy would sweep a group off to lunch with John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, or Arthur Miller and his wife Inge Morath. We’d crowd around a table at a local restaurant or the Players Club and celebrate a new book. Looking back, I feel very lucky to have experienced, however briefly, that moment in publishing.

Neal Porter, editorial director, Neal Porter Books, Roaring Brook Press

Of the four times I’ve worked for companies named Macmillan—St. Martin’s Press (part of Macmillan UK), Macmillan Publishing Co., Maxwell Macmillan, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group—the most eventful was my two years under Robert (Captain Bob) Maxwell. A bully and a lout, Maxwell was fond of theatrical gestures. But nothing could have prepared us for the day in 1991 when we got back from lunch to find a memo on our desks saying that the trading of shares in Maxwell Communications had been suspended due to the fact that “the chairman had been lost at sea.”

We subsequently learned that he had either fallen off, or had jumped off, or was pushed off, his yacht near the Canary Islands. A few days later we were summoned to a lunch in the executive dining room (yes, the company had one, and very grand it was) where Bob’s soon-to-be-indicted sons Kevin and Ian addressed the troops and told us to “carry on as Bob would have wanted us to.”

A few days after that we were at sales conference near Sarasota, Fla., when news began to break about Maxwell’s financial improprieties, his raiding of corporate pension funds, his possible connections to Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. The guests at the resort couldn’t get a copy of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal because Macmillan employees had snapped them all up by 7 a.m. to see what that morning’s revelations were. The climax of the weeklong conference was a yacht cruise around Sarasota Harbor, arranged long before Maxwell’s untimely demise and never canceled. The event became the (extremely boozy) Robert Maxwell Memorial Cruise, with many toasts offered up in memory of our not-very-dearly-departed chairman.

Dinah Stevenson, v-p and publisher, Clarion Books

In the 1970s, full-color reproduction was prohibitively expensive. It was considered a great coup for an illustrator to “get full color” and create the artwork in color, to be separated photographically before printing. Most picture book art was pre-separated—prepared as overlays in tones of gray, each overlay representing a color to be applied on press.

For a four-color book, the artist had to make four overlays for each illustration. Some pre-separated artwork was three-color, some even two-color. There was an elaborate book of color charts showing combinations of different percentages of colors that artists used for reference. Some artists (Margot Tomes, for example) could conjure a whole palette using three process colors.

Considerable suspense surrounded the printing of pre-separated art: would those gray blobs translate to the lovely full-color illustrations the artist was striving for? (They didn’t always.) On press, registration (lining up the areas of color precisely on top of each other) was crucial and tricky. The artist had to have done it right in the first place.

Old-fashioned crafts like spinning and blacksmithing are being revived. I bet pre-separating artwork won’t be among them.

Susan van Metre, senior v-p and publisher, Abrams Books for Young Readers and Amulet Books

Fresh out of the Radcliffe Publishing Course (when there was a Radcliffe), I applied for an editorial assistant position at Dutton Children’s Books. It was my dream job, at the publishers of Ellen Raskin, Lloyd Alexander, William Sleator, and A.A. Milne. So I should have been thrilled when then editor-in-chief Lucia Monfried called me in for an interview. But I had a terrible secret: I couldn’t type. And in those days, to be an editorial assistant, you had to pass a typing test with a rate of at least 40 wpm. I couldn’t crack 28. Dressed in my best Liz Claiborne suit, I headed, knock-kneed, into Dutton for my interview. Well, the gods of children’s literature smiled that day because Lucia and I became so caught up in discussing our mutual love of Natalie Babbitt and Rumer Godden that she forgot to take me for my typing test. And I “forgot” to remind her. I got the job and spent 12 happy years at Dutton, pecking away with two fingers until they finally replaced my Selectric with a computer.

Kathy Dawson, v-p and publisher, Kathy Dawson Books, Penguin Young Readers Group

I remember when I was the assistant to the managing editor at Putnam, and being absolutely terrified when the managing editor went on vacation in my first six months. I felt like I knew nothing, and she was totally unreachable. Nowadays, no one takes a “blackout” vacation so there’s nothing to fear. But I will say after successfully holding down the fort, my confidence level went up 100%, so I’m grateful.

All the assistant lunches and vacations were staggered, and no assistant could leave her desk for more than a bathroom break without telling someone where she’d be and when she’d be back (I got in trouble for this all the time). But back then, the great thing was that we could share the responsibility – across the whole department – of showing the outside world that we were always available. Now, every employee has to do that by herself.

Russell Gordon, executive art director, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

Smoking in the office would be one of the major differences between 20-plus years ago and today. I started in adult trade publishing in the mid to late 1980s. Many of the execs smoked in their offices. It bothered most of the nonsmokers, of course, but most people, certainly assistants and junior staffers, were afraid to say anything. I can remember it being a big enough deal that an HR person would be the one to call a smoker and ask him/her to close the door while smoking. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even legal to forbid smoking in the office, back then. Bad language and overall unprofessional behavior was much more permissible. “Crazy bosses” were not the exception, by far. Screaming, cursing, belittling underlings – and even in the presence of others – was not uncommon at all. This was true well into the ’90s.

David Levithan, v-p, publisher, and editorial director, Scholastic

There were many things that intimidated me about my first summer as an intern at Scholastic, in 1992, but one of the things that freaked me out the most was the phone system. There was no such thing as voicemail. There weren’t even answering machines, like we had in the dorm. No. When someone called, the phone would ring three times... and then the call would bounce to the next phone, and keep bouncing from phone to phone until someone picked up. There was no logic to the progression – sometimes the call would jump three cubicles, or roll back closer to its origin. If I was having lunch in the cubicle I shared with my boss, I would hear a phone ringing in the distance... and then the ring would come closer... then farther... then even closer. Think: the theme to Jaws.

Worst of all, our cubicle was the first stop from the desk of the editorial director’s assistant. She was a veteran of the publishing world who spoke with a mellifluous Irish brogue. I was a sputtering teenager who still wasn’t entirely sure what an agent did. Needless to say, my “while you were out” notes were not models of either brevity or accuracy. More often than not, I would just stare at the phone, self-consciously paralyzed as I counted down the rings – one... two... three – until the call passed on to the next cube. I told all my friends: If you call me at work, you have to hang up after the third ring.

Betsy Groban, senior v-p and publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Book Group

When I was at Little, Brown in the mid 1980s, I got a call from a friend in publishing, extolling the wonders of a breakthrough technology called the facsimile machine. I had never heard of such a thing, but she swore there must be one around the office somewhere. After a great deal of searching, I found our brand-new machine, in the mail room in another building, and, with curiosity and trepidation, awaited my first “fax.” Sure enough, mere minutes later, by prearrangement, her handwritten note came rolling off the machine, all fuzzy letters on shiny paper. We squealed with delight over the phone, and a new era was born.

Fast-forward 30 years and I can’t remember the last time I received a fax!

Jean Feiwel, senior v-p and publishing director, Feiwel and Friends

My first job interview in publishing was for the assistant to the managing editor at Avon Books. I was just out of college from Sarah Lawrence which had pretty much prepared me to follow my bliss. I really had no office experience since I was planning to be an art curator and had spent a lot of time through high school and college unpacking catalogues and selling postcards at the front desk of the Whitney Museum. I had a good interview with the managing editor at Avon even though I had a sinking feeling I had no aptitude for the job. It sounded like it required a lot of attention to detail and some copyediting/proofreading interest if not skill. Then I had to take a typing test. I was supposed to type a business letter in some abbreviated amount of time – was it two minutes? Needless to say I really had no idea what a business letter meant. And although I could type I couldn’t really type fast. I typed the letter in probably 10 minutes, double-spaced. So that was wrong and I was told to type it again, single-spaced. It probably took me longer the second time by which time I had sweated through my lovely silk blouse and wanted to go home and throw up. I did go home and wrote a thank-you letter, which I figured would be the end of my publishing career.

But I was hired at Avon and spent the next seven years there. Thank you, Judith Riven, for giving me a chance.

Ginee Seo, Children’s Publishing Director, Chronicle Books

I was lucky to have grown up in what I now think of as the Paper Era, when manuscripts were actually physical things and arrived from agents in boxes. Each agency had its own kind of box, some more substantial than others. Curtis Brown’s boxes always stood out because they were bright orange. I would sometimes curse the day I told any agent I liked fantasy because those manuscripts were always long, and carrying them plus other submissions for weekend reading made for an incredibly heavy haul.

This was also the time when you could still buy paperback rights for hardcover books from certain houses. I was then at Trophy, and I always found myself bidding against Michelle Poploff at Dell and Sharyn November at Puffin for books that were more often as not edited by Dick Jackson, although we also fought over books from Houghton, FSG, and Front Street. I got to know them by their bidding styles. As I recall, Michelle would usually go up by some weird number (I liked to go up by fives and tens myself) and Sharyn would annoy everyone by suddenly coming in with a big number and taking the project off the table. Of course we were all incredibly competitive and none of us liked losing. I think I was especially outraged by one pre-empt and said as much, in unprintable language, to the auctioneer, who might have been Barry Goldblatt. There might also have been an expensive lunch involved, as recompense.

Naturally, I never overpaid for a thing!

Joe Campbell, business and operations manager, Albert Whitman & Company

In the early 1990s, Albert Whitman & Company was publishing eight new Boxcar Children titles a year... staggered over eight months. The chains were selling them hand over fist. But none of the chains had distribution centers – so we shipped to each individual store. Perhaps more important, there was no EDI – so we received POs for each individual store as well. On monthly basis, we would receive a large shipping box (probably 24” x 16” x 12”!) from each bookstore chain (Barnes & Noble, Borders, Walden) with thousands of POs. Each of these orders had to be manually entered into a computer and individual packing slips printed for each location. Each were manually picked and shipped. And then there were still the invoices to be created and mailed by USPS. Of course, the bosses would buy pizza and the entire staff – from the top down – would pitch in and ‘knock them out.’ Now, most of those processes are automated, and yet, I’m sure most of us still complain about how complicated it all is.

John Mason, director of library and educational marketing, trade books, Scholastic

The process of relaying the news about awards received at ALA Midwinter was a lot different before the era of cellphones and e-mail. Then, as now, I would be wide awake in my hotel room at 6:00 a.m. waiting for the phone to ring. If I received a thrilling call, after divulging the author’s or illustrator’s phone number to the committee, the question then was, how to let my colleagues back at the office know? In order to be prepared for this, we would set up elaborate “phone trees” in advance. I would call the publisher of the appropriate imprint, who would in turn call others in management, publicity, and sales. If that person didn’t answer the phone, there was always an agreed-upon Plan B, and even a Plan C.

Talking of the author’s or illustrator’s phone number – it damn well better be on the list I had prepared in advance – and the list had better be accurate. I remember one time a phone number was incorrectly listed and after trying the number unsuccessfully, the committee called back – horrors! – more frantic phone calls had to be immediately instigated – but what if I was tying up the phone and preventing another call from coming in? (there was no such thing as voice mail) – I might miss a “big one” – panic!

On my way to the press conference (which was much smaller and less “techy” than today, positively rustic by today’s standards), I noticed which publishers were using the pay phones nearby. If they were, what might that mean? Afterwards, as soon as the last award was read out, there was a stampede for the limited number of pay phones. I can remember on some occasions arranging for a colleague to stake out a pay phone in advance so that we wouldn’t have to stand in line to use the phone. But all the other publishers were doing the same thing. The competition for phones was second only to the competition for the awards themselves.

Charles Kochman, editorial director, Abrams ComicArts

In 1987 I was an editorial assistant at Bantam Books, the latest editor of Choose Your Own Adventure, a successful series created by Ed Packard and Ray Montgomery. These were interactive fiction, and “you, the reader” determined the outcome of the story depending on the choices you made. Before computers, our designer would create mechanicals – pasting all of the text and art to layout boards with wax. For the first book I edited solo, I mistakenly took these home instead of a Xerox. When I sat down to proofread, I realized I had failed to secure the mechanicals so the pages didn’t shift in my bag. When I pulled them out, hundreds of folios and tiny pieces of directional type fell to the floor or were all stuck together in a clump at the bottom of my bag. To make matters worse, I placed the pages on top of a pile of books, and they immediately slid to the floor and scattered, so there was no way to tell what order they were in because the page numbers were everywhere but on the boards. In a panic I headed to the office, working all night to glue back each and every bit of type. Finishing up that morning, I practically crawled into my art director’s office and sheepishly handed over my sorry-looking pile of mechanical boards. Let’s just say it’s a lot harder to do paste-ups than it may seem, and I developed a newfound respect for designers and my art director in particular, who reacted like a pro and never said a word to anyone.

Theresa M. Borzumato-Greenberg, v-p, marketing, Holiday House

My very first job in publishing began in October 1980 as the secretary to the director of production at Macmillan Children’s Books, Lottie Gooding. Every day I would finish my work by 3:00 p.m., but I couldn’t very well pick up and go home. And sitting around leisurely flipping through one of the many journals I needed to read, such as PW, SLJ, or Booklist, in the office wasn’t going to cut it either – that had to be done on the subway. My boss didn’t have any extra work for me, and I wanted to do something productive, so... I went through the book files and found two sets of long galleys, one marked and one unmarked, for a novel that had been published long before I started. I read through the unmarked set to find the errors and then I’d check the marked set and copy the proofreading symbols I found there. Voila – I taught myself what all those funny little squiggles and symbols meant! I kept busy, read a lot of the backlist, and the skills prepared me for my first promotion into the editorial department after only nine months on the job. I’ve been using what I learned ever since, and I’ve never, ever finished all my work by 3:00 p.m. any day in the 30-plus years since then!

Bill LeBlond, editorial director, food and drink, Chronicle Books

Back in the day, we used bike messengers constantly. Several times a day, we’d get a messenger to take a manuscript to a copyeditor, later it would go to a designer, and later still to a typesetter. Remember typesetters? After the book was in galleys, we’d call a messenger to take it to a proofreader, who would read those long galley proofs. The next messenger would take the galleys to a paste-up artist. Remember paste-up artists?

Needless to say, we had an account with the bike-messenger service. One day, I looked out of our office window to see the editor-in-chief scrambling around in the street trying to pick up pages and pages that were scattering in the wind, because the bike messenger had dropped a fully edited and marked-up manuscript on his way out of the building.

Mary Lee Donovan, executive editor, Candlewick Press

I worked at Houghton Mifflin in the children’s trade division in the mid-to-late-1980s, when it was still located at 2 Park Street in Boston. To get to the fifth floor, where the children’s division was located, one had two choices: take the stairs or take the elevator. I often took the stairs for the sake of healthy habits, which should have made me feel virtuous. On the contrary: it often made me feel like a cold-hearted heel. Taking the stairs in that venerable old building meant depriving the elevator operator of the one task that they were hired to perform. The job was already pretty barebones: the building was small, the floors few (the fifth floor was the top floor), and the volume of passengers minimal. So not taking the elevator likely had a direct impact on the operator’s job satisfaction. I came late enough to HMCo to have missed the very long career of Miss Williams, but had the pleasure of getting to know the incredibly gentle and friendly new operator, Gerard, who seemed downright crestfallen and wounded whenever I chose to climb rather than ride. When I learned that Houghton would leave 2 Park and move to 222 Berkeley Street, I was immediately awash with nostalgia for that old elevator with its hinged gates, and for the two ambassadors who’d lovingly delivered countless authors, illustrators, and publishing luminaries to their appointments with publishing history.