A crowd of about 100 attended a memorial for Robert Giroux last week, held at St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University. The event featured six remembrances of the famously quiet publisher by friends and colleagues, including FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi; Janna Malamud Smith, who read from her father Bernard Malamud's work; and editors Alice Quinn and Pat Strachan. Galassi praised Giroux's “deep and shrewd assessment of what great writing was and what great publishing could be,” while Paul Elie, a longtime FSG editor, cited Giroux's “particularly American contempt for phonies.” Elie, who read a passage from Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, added that Giroux “was as rare in his own time as he would be now.”