After a long and distinguished career that began in the 1930s, legendary independent publisher George Braziller recently decided to write a book of his own. In July, George Braziller Inc., the publishing house now run by its founder’s sons, will release Encounters: My Life in Publishing, a memoir by Braziller about his career in the book business.
“I feel good about the book,” the 99-year-old said about his memoir, speaking in a book-lined room in his Upper East Side apartment in New York City. “I’m not a writer. This book took me five years, sitting in this room, to write. Since I’m no longer a publisher, now I think like a writer. I’m always complaining to my publisher [my sons], ‘Why are you rushing me?’ ” Braziller said, smiling at the irony. He said after he retired in 2011, at age 95, he had no idea what he would do with his time, apart from “reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” But his friends encouraged him to write a memoir; “They said, ‘You have such a good story you should tell it.’ ”
And what a story. The book is a series of short vignettes (with photographs) that tell Braziller’s life and career through his recollections of the people he worked with and the writers and artists he published.
Braziller was born in Brooklyn in 1916 to Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants; his father died months before he was born, and his mother sold old clothes from a pushcart to support the family of eight. At 20, he got his first job in publishing, hired as a shipping clerk for the Remainder Company, an overstock-book firm.
“I packed books, saw how the company worked, and learned a great deal,” he said. After leaving the overstock company (he asked for a $1 raise, was turned down, and quit), he founded the Book Find Club in 1941—“low prices for low-income readers,” he said. “I’d buy a remainder for 25¢ and sell it for 50¢.”
Drafted in 1943, he served for two-and-a half years in Europe. While stationed in Germany in 1945, Braziller oversaw the publication of a book about his unit—the first original book he ever produced—for the Army. Returning after the war, he went back to work at the Book Find Club, run by his wife, Marsha Braziller, during his absence. Braziller turned it into a lucrative business with more than 70 employees, eventually growing the club to more than 100,000 members by the time he sold it to Time Life in 1969 for $1 million.
Until he sold the club, Braziller said it was key to the survival of the publishing house he founded in 1955. “Once I published a book, the club would buy it and that covered my costs,” he explained. But he became bored with the club and wanted to do more original publishing. Beginning in 1955, Braziller published a wave of acclaimed postwar European and international writers, including Jean Paul Sartre, Claude Simone, and Orhan Pamuk; all three eventually won a Nobel prize.
From the late 1950s onward, Braziller’s list was a who’s who of international literary stars—novelists Nathalie Sarraute, Buchi Emechetta, and Janet Frame among them—acquired through trips abroad and a network of European scouts paid to keep him informed on big books. “It was hard to acquire books in the States, we were so small,” he said. “So I would go to Frankfurt, and I began to get a reputation for quality publishing.”
Facing growing competition from larger houses “who were buying up all the small publishers,” Braziller moved into art book publishing, using academic specialists to acquire and edit books by art historians.
Today, his son Michael Braziller runs George Braziller Inc. (another son, Joel, is house legal counsel) as well as Persea Books, a 40-year-old independent house owned by Michael and his former wife. “We run both houses out of the same office,” Michael Braziller said in a phone interview. Both Braziller and Persea each release eight to 10 books a year. Braziller’s big book for spring is a book of short stories, The Guilty, by Juan Villoro, a critically acclaimed Mexican novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist; it is Villoro’s first book released in English. Both houses are distributed by W.W. Norton. Currently Michael Braziller said the house is reissuing and revising much of the Braziller 60-year backlist, commissioning new introductions and covers for many titles in an effort to refresh an acclaimed backlist.
“My two sons took over the house from me, and I leave them alone,” said the elder Braziller, who smiled and added, “That’s why our relationship continues.” Asked what he thought of contemporary publishing, he said he was amazed at today’s technology. “E-books are great; if I wasn’t so vain—I wanted a hardcover and trade reviews—I would have published my book that way.”
Braziller said that while his book “is not a how-to about publishing,” it does “talk about what goes into publishing. The steps that go into finding an audience for a book and finding subjects that can grow into new books.” But after working on the book for five years, he said he was thrilled to finish it. “I started it and I finished it. Whether I sell 50 copies or 50,000, I finished what I started out to do, and I was as honest as I could be. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”
