NOTHING RANDOM

Engaging biography of the man who was at the center of the American publishing scene—and ubiquitous in many other venues—for half a century.

Benoît Cerf (1898–1971), who changed his name to Bennett, was born into an entrepreneurial Jewish family and came to publishing after working on the Columbia University newspaper, armed at 21 with a considerable inheritance. He spent some of it acquiring the Modern Library, whose reputation he would build by signing books such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was his determined legal defense of the latter that cleared Joyce’s novel, banned as pornography, for sale in the U.S.—and, as publishing veteran Feldman writes of Cerf and partner Donald Klopfer, “the signal achievement that catapulted them and their infant upstart, Random House, onto the map of America and the world.” The name was something of a joke, indicating the serendipitous nature of its early publishing program, but Cerf’s intent to become “one of the greatest publishers of the country” was well planned: He championed writers’ careers, essentially promising the likes of Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, that he’d “take everything he wrote, for adults or kids,” and publishing a string of sometimes difficult greats: Stein, Faulkner, Auden, Ellison, Michener, Capote, Angelou, Welty—the list goes on. At the same time, he made his own outside reputation as the author of often groan-worthy joke books, a newspaper columnist, a friend of Hollywood’s jet set (his wife’s first cousin was Ginger Rogers), and a frequent television presence on, among other shows, What’s My Line? All fitted the nature of a man who called himself “an awful ham.” As Feldman chronicles, even though Cerf’s many extracurricular pursuits may have impressed some publishing purists as unseemly, they all helped sell books, from paperback bodice rippers to the most august literature.

A well-crafted life of a publisher whose world spanned culture high and low, and whose influence endures.