Quotes from Al Silverman

It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.

the golden age had to be the years from 1946, as the harrowing savagery of World War II was washing away, to the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the era of publishing ossification had fully set in. Ossification had begun in the 1960s when the great old-line book people began to be replaced by bottom-line businessmen.

The patron saint of Viking could not stand editors who claimed to have discovered an author. "The author is not a discovery," Huebsch always insisted. "The author is the discoverer." Maybe so, but I still maintain that it is the editor who has to dig out the pearl in the sand pile and clean it up.)

ONE THING I almost forgot about the rise and fall of the golden age described here. It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors began cutting back on their drinking.