Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

This cinematic biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf from longtime PW writer Feldman (You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother) teems with a star-studded cast including Truman Capote, James Joyce, Alfred Knopf, Ayn Rand, and Dick Simon. After studying journalism at Columbia University in the 1910s, Cerf joined the publisher Boni & Liveright, declaring after just three weeks that he hoped to “become one of the greatest publishers of the country.” Armed with an inheritance, he and his friend Donald Klopfer took the first step toward this goal in 1925, purchasing the Modern Library imprint from Liveright. Two years later, they founded Random House, which, by the 1960s, became the preeminent book publisher in America. Feldman chronicles the duo’s championing of Joyce’s Ulysses, which helped put the house on the map, and Cerf’s hiring of editors who would go on to make their own storied contributions to the field—Jason Epstein, Nan Talese, Albert Erskine, and Saxe Commins— to show Cerf was “a cultural force beloved by many” who shaped 20th-century publishing. Drawing on Cerf’s personal archive, as well those of writers he worked with, and more than 200 interviews, Feldman paints a candid portrait of one of the giants of modern publishing, who emerges as a charming, humorous man who was open to “many worlds, high and low, mass and class” and committed to his authors. This is monumental. (Jan.)