Another Life by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online Page B

an outsize chip on his shoulder, were beginning to appear in Herb’s lecture. Hardcover publishers, he went on, had accepted the mass-market paperback book grudgingly but still looked down their noses at those who worked in that end of the business. This was bound to change, he believed, and soon. Paperback people were just as cultured and well educatedas hardcover people but had their feet planted more firmly on the ground. There was a lot more to publishing than bringing out a whole lot of unreadable first novels or new translations of the complete works of Gide or Proust.
    I should not misunderstand him, he added hastily—there was a place for Gide, for Proust, even for the kind of snot-nosed little first novels your typically effete hardcover editor bought and that nobody else ever read, but mass-market publishing was attuned first and foremost to the needs of the marketplace, to what people really wanted to read. Pocket Books gave them what they wanted, even if that was Harold Robbins. What was so fucking bad about reading a Harold Robbins novel, anyway, he wanted to know? If they wanted to read Shakespeare, well, by Christ, Pocket Books did Shakespeare; if they wanted to read Pearl S. Buck, well, God damn it, Pocket Books did Pearl S. Buck too—in fact The Good Earth was Pocket Books’ all-time, number-one best-seller. What did I think of them apples?
    I wasn’t sure what I thought of them apples, since I had never read Pearl S. Buck, nor, for that matter, Harold Robbins, but I kept my mouth zipped on the subject, rightly guessing that the question was rhetorical. Herb had me typed, I realized, as an effete snob, but before I could find a polite way to tell him that I wasn’t the Gide/Proust type, he was off and running with a long list, recited from memory, of all the distinguished books and classics that Pocket Books had published over the years.
    He seemed to be under the mistaken impression, thanks to Morris Helprin I felt sure, that I was a person of a scholarly nature, prodigious learning, and refined taste. He paused frequently to roll his head sideways so he could see me and say, about whatever arcane point he had reached in his narrative, “Of course, being an Oxford man, you already know all that,” or, “Being an Oxford man, you’ve already guessed what I’m getting at.”
    It seemed best to nod wisely rather than argue, in the hope that silence would be taken for wisdom. In any case, Herb took care not to give me a chance to interrupt his flow of words—he apparently intended to talk until hoarseness or sheer exhaustion silenced him. In the event, the barber eventually silenced him with a hot towel, though not before Herb had explained to me that he was the kind of guy who needed to shave at least twice a day, hence the barber’s chair. I felt my own cheeks, for which one shave a day was sufficient, and wondered ifI was cut out for the mass-market business. Apparently it was a manly undertaking, on the order of lumberjacking.
    While the hot towel was doing its work, I managed to ask Herb if he thought he had a job for me.
    Herb launched into a new tirade as the barber splashed him with bay rum. His beard seemed to be growing back already—he had the kind of five-o’clock shadow that used to make Richard Nixon look so sinister in photographs. The best thing for me, frankly, Herb thought, would be to throw me into the mass-market business, right up to the goddamn neck, and get rid of all my fucking Oxford, Limey intellectual pretensions and prejudices once and for all, so I could get a grip on what real people did in the real world. It would do me no harm to go out at dawn with “the guys in the trucks,” carrying cartons of mass-market titles and arranging them in the racks. That’s how you learned the business, the only way, if I wanted his opinion, and if I didn’t, what the hell was I doing here? (I was later to discover that this was something of a romantic illusion in the mass-market