TURNING PAGES

A former publisher recounts his long career in the book trade.

Descended on his mother’s side from the innovative publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday, Sargent grew up far from the epicenter of publishing culture, in rural Wyoming. The recession he faced when graduating from college led him to a job as a textbook salesman (“Nobody ever dreams of being a textbook salesman”). He then worked his way into a series of progressively more prominent positions, including a stint at the old family business. In this anecdotal memoir, the author recounts plenty of missteps (“I took the Newbery Medal sticker off the jacket of Misty of Chincoteague to save a few bucks”) and an equal number of sometimes qualified successes, as when he unleashed Sarah Ferguson’s Budgie the Little Helicopter on an unsuspecting world. The best parts of the book are sharply drawn portraits of colleagues, authors, and bosses—perhaps none so sharp as that of former Simon & Schuster head and renowned tyrant Dick Snyder, whom Sargent managed to survive even though Snyder once scrawled “I hate Budgie” on a sales memo of Sargent’s. There’s a nice moment when Donald Trump is bested on a deal to print a special edition of Eloise, an unexpectedly growly moment involving Jimmy Carter. There’s also a light-bulb-going-on episode starring a then-unknown Jeff Bezos, whose commercial madness definitely had a method, even if one that required no small amount of bullying. Salman Rushdie, Michael Jackson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Winston Groom, LL Cool J: Luminaries of all stripes populate Sargent’s pages, which lead to a rather grim conclusion: getting fired by a publisher who made Snyder look like a lamb, which occasioned an empathetic note from former FBI head James Comey: “In similar experiences in my life, I found it helpful to occasionally whisper ‘Fuck ’em’ to myself.”

A pleasant book about books with insights into publishing past and the conglomerate stranglehold of the present.