At Random

At Random
Author: Bennett Cerf
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-06-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 030781999X

“I’ve got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.” So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House’s first decades. Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and ’30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing’s golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on What’s My Line?) helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades’ worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, At Random is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.

Reminiscences of an Octogenarian

Reminiscences of an Octogenarian
Author: Bruce M. Metzger
Publisher: Baker Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1995-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441241817

Bruce Manning Metzger's memoirs trace his life from his childhood in the Pennsylvania Dutch country and his student years at Princeton through his distinguished career of teaching, writing, lecturing, and editing. Professor Metzger's work has won him the gratitude of both biblical scholars and the larger Bible-reading public. His text-critical work on the New Testament is reflected in the standard Greek text now used and appreciated by scholars worldwide. His efforts on the Revised Standard and New Revised Standard versions of the Bible helped produce the readable, accurate English translations used for study and devotion by so many. His work on The Reader's Digest Bible and The Oxford Companion to the Bible has made the Bible more accessible for an untold number of readers. In these memoirs, Professor Metzger's own words put a human face on his monumental scholarly achievements. The wide array of stories and vignettes--from Senator Joseph McCarthy's attack on RSV committee members and Metzger's audiences with the pope to the time Professor Metzger and other members of the NRSV committee had to crawl out of a library window to get to their dinner--offer the reader a personal insight into some of the twentieth century's crucial developments in the text and translation of the Bible.

Looking Back

Looking Back
Author: Lois Lowry
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780395895436

Using family photographs and quotes from her books, the author provides glimpses into her life.

Old Books in the Old World

Old Books in the Old World
Author: Leona Rostenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1996
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN:

This is a charming account of postwar book buying abroad by the "Holmes and Watson" of antiquarian books. After the war, Americans went abroad for European culture, food and art, but Rostenberg and Stern, the Grand Dames of the antiquarian bookselling world, went to Europe to buy old books. Old Books in the Old World glows with the details of their book-buying trips abroad between 1947 and 1957. Filled with tales of steamships, cobblestone streets and dusty rare bookshops, this illustrated journal draws from original diaries and letters and contemporary recollections. Full of history and bookish tales, this personal insight into postwar Europe and the antiquarian book-selling scene will be of interest both to the seasoned bibliophile and to the casual reader.

Wait Till Next Year

Wait Till Next Year
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1439188580

By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.