BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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“Frankly, I have no use for Messrs. Little and Brown . . .
it’s the ‘and Company’ I’m fond of.” — Ogden Nash
Dagmar and Ogden Nash
With my first job in book publishing at Little Brown and Company’s Medical Division, I had to agree with Ogden.
The division’s publisher was Fred Belliveau.
The word “gentleman” may have been invented because Fred showed up. Worldly, sophisticated, inspiring, handsome, polished, well-dressed, and well-mannered.
And Fred wasn’t particular about gender. He once announced at a company meeting that I had a cute ass. Oh, for the days when somebody thought I had a cute ass.
The division’s editor-in-chief was Lin Richter, extraordinarily talented, a good and kind listener, and an editorial wizard. She moved in only one direction, forward—she grabbed life head on. Once, she and her husband went on vacation to Jamaica where, in the middle of the night, a burglar shot Lin’s husband with a crossbow (he lived). Talk about extreme vacationing! (Me? I like to rent a one-speed bicycle at the boardwalk.)
Lin and Fred
There was also the matter of the Union Club, one of several traditional men’s club in Boston. It was much favored by Little Brown’s top executives. Women were allowed into the club for receptions, but they had to enter through the service door. The story goes that Lin was the first woman to say, “Fuck that, I don’t walk through anybody’s back door.” In she walked through the Union Club’s front door, and out the window went that policy. God, but I loved her.
In 1966, Fred and Lin published Human Sexual Response by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson. In this book for the medical profession was stuff never before put to paper. Stuff that EVERYBODY wanted to read about. Like female sexual arousal, vaginal lubrication, orgasm, and even (holy smokes!) multiograsmic possibilities.
People demanded the book from their bookstores. So much so that Human Sexual Response was the only “short discount” book ever to go to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. (At a short discount, a store only gets a 20% margin off of the book’s retail price as opposed to the usual 50-to-55%.). Human Sexual Response stayed on the bestseller list for more than five months and was translated into over 20 languages. (Little Brown nailed it again in 1970 with Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy.)
Better yet, the brilliant and savvy Lin and Fred wrote a layperson’s (get it?) edition of Human Sexual Inadequacy. It too went on to be a huge bestseller. As a wanna-be-publisher in my early 20s, I was so lucky to be hanging out with them.
Doug and Lee
I also worked there with Leigh Stoecker. Leigh and her husband, Doug, became best friends to Sally and me for the next half century. You married folks know how remarkable that is — for one spouse to pull in a friend plus his/her spouse, only to have the four of you become best of friends. Wow!
And there was Curtis Vouwie, who was a sales rep for the medical division who later came in-house to be an editor there. He went on to establish OEM Press (as in “Occupational and Environmental Medicine”). But most importantly he introduced me to Robert Parker’s Spenser series. Life-changing!
Curtis’s launch of OEM Press inspired Randy House, who like me worked in the medical division before getting into the trade business. When I left my lowly position in the division’s sales department and went south (New York) to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for a marketing position, Randy left his lowly position in the division’s editorial department and walked down Beacon Street to Houghton Mifflin for a subsidiary rights position.
Tomorrow: Curtis Vouwie and Randy House