The House That Bennett Cerf Built: PW Talks with Gayle Feldman

In Nothing Random, the former PW contributing editor chronicles the life of Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf.

What drew you to Bennett Cerf?

I discovered that there was this huge Random House archive and the Cerf archive at Columbia University. I remembered Cerf from when I was a kid and watched him on TV, on the show What’s My Line? I thought you could tell the story of 20th-century publishing through Cerf’s life. I did a proposal and sent it to Bob Loomis at Random House, whom Cerf had hired, and asked if he could tell me if I was on the right track. A couple of days later, he phoned me and told me he had sent my proposal to one of Bennett’s sons, Christopher Cerf, who liked it. But I had no idea what I had taken on: I signed the contract in the autumn of 2002, 23 years ago.

What are some of Cerf’s most memorable qualities?

He had incredible energy, and he used it to do good things. Most of the money that he made from Random House until the company went public in 1959, he put back into the company. For the most part, he treated the people who worked for him well. He cared about them. He had tremendous instincts about books. He was not an intellectual, but he was a great, great reader. He was in awe of many authors, and he intuited what many authors needed. Gertrude Stein famously said he was the only publisher she would ever love.

What’s something surprising you found while researching?

I think people who’ve seen What’s My Line? are kind of surprised by how witty and civilized it was. People see this man who appeared very slick, very sure of himself. But he wasn’t sure of himself, and that surprised me. He didn’t want to dig far into himself. That was a problem for me: How do I figure out this guy whose diaries are all about doing and not about feeling? So, it took a long time to figure things out.

What do you hope readers take from your book?

I hope that people in publishing today read this book. I think especially in the postpandemic world, people need to know what publishing was. It was not perfect. But there was apprenticeship. There was a kind of humane quality. The way that editors like Albert Erskine, say, worked with people as different as Cormac McCarthy and James Michener. I hope this book will make people think that while corporatization supposedly has great efficiencies, there are also great inefficiencies.