My First Job

BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

WHEN, not long ago, I was told that we had signed the latest of a long series of contracts with the New York Times for twenty-five thousand lines of advertising in the year to come, my thoughts wandered back to the summer of 1911 when the Times gave me my first job. I had completed my junior year at Columbia, my father was taking the family abroad for the summer, and somehow, though I had never been to Europe, I didn’t want to go. Even more strange, I had an idea I wanted to work. Father had long been in the advertising business — he had his own agency — and from the windows of his office in the Candler building on West Forty-Second Street you could almost look into the windows of the old Times Tower. He was a friend of the miraculous Louis Wiley, Mr. Ochs’s associate and invaluable business manager.

Mr. Wiley, a large head on a very short body, was no slouch as a business genius, as I was soon to discover for myself. And, apart from seeing that ample advertising accompanied “all the news that’s fit to print” and that the paper achieved the circulation to support this advertising, he attended all the public functions that Mr. Ochs was wise enough to avoid and performed ever useful services in soothing the ruffled feelings of dowagers, the doings of whose sons and daughters and nieces and nephews might have furnished tasty morsels for a less dignified and decent paper than the Times.

So father bethought himself of his friend Louis and telephoned over — I had a feeling that he might almost have opened the window and used a megaphone — to ask whether there was any chance of his giving me summer employment. “Send the young man over,” said Mr. Wiley, and I went at once. I was told that the little Napoleon always sat on a pile of cushions to bring enough of him above the level of his desk. You couldn’t possibly have guessed his height. “Would you like to see how the business end of a great newspaper is managed?” he asked me. What could I answer? I ask you, my reader. He buzzed, and a very pleasant gentleman named Skinner appeared. I followed Mr. Skinner to his office and learned in a rather vague sort of way that my duties would be to solicit advertising for the paper.

I couldn’t have been a very bright boy, because some days passed before it dawned on me that I was receiving no salary, only carfare and the promise of a commission on any orders I secured. Worse than that, the good Skinner (and he was an awfully nice fellow) said to me one day, “Do you suppose there are any other fellows in your class who would like jobs like this?”

Well, I called on innumerable but reluctant businessmen, whose names and addresses Mr. Skinner gave me. I remember going to Newark to see someone at the Murphy Varnish Company, and someone else at the Worthington Pump Company. I was all but literally thrown out by a Mr. Kurzman, the proprietor of an exclusive establishment of haute couture on the east side of Fifth Avenue in the lower Thirties. Nowhere did I have any luck, and in retrospect I am hardly surprised, for I imagine everyone I called on had been long and vainly solicited by better men than I.

Then one Saturday (no five-day week in those times) when I was spending the weekend with relatives on the Jersey shore, I received a telephone call from my father’s agency to come right into the city to take care of a good contract for the New York Times which they were holding for me. I lost no time, and the contract proved indeed to be a sizable one; the advertiser, I remember, was Meyrowitz, the well-known opticians. I rushed around to the Times with it and then went back to the country feeling that after all the summer had not been wholly unproductive.

Days and days went by, and I awaited my reckoning from the cashier. Finally, word came that no commission would be paid on this particular contract: Meyrowitz had been an old advertiser in the Times and was simply returning to the fold, the paper would have received this business in any case. I became increasingly indignant, but it was no use, and in the end I demanded to see Mr. Wiley. I have never retained any recollection of that interview beyond this: he pressed a button on his desk, and I found myself out in the corridor.

But the summer’s job was not altogether without profit. In those days the New York Times Book Review had an annual or semiannual sale of review copies to its employees at greatly reduced prices. I was allowed to buy some of these books.

WHEN in 1915 I started publishing on my own and paying our money to the Times, the Book Review meant a great deal to us, and I began to view it with a critical eye. It didn’t seem to me to be as good as it ought to have been — not as good as the rest of the paper. Then, as now, comparison with the London Times Literary Supplement seemed inevitable and invidious. On January 7, 1920, I sent this letter to Mr. Ochs:

Some months ago I took it upon myself to write you about what seemed to me the disproportionate amount of advertising, as compared with reading matter, that the Sunday Book Review has been carrying. You were away from the office at the time and the letter was referred to the advertising department, who took care of it most courteously, to be sure, but in such a way as to miss the point that I was trying, however feebly, to make. I have heard so many comments of late from people not intimately connected with the book world to the effect that the Book Review is carrying so much advertising and so little reading matter these days that it looks like a publishers’ trade paper and not at all inviting to read, that I am writing you again.

I do not think there is any gainsaying the argument of your advertising department that even when they print two columns of reading matter to two columns of advertising, they are turning down a great deal of advertising and deliberately sacrificing perfectly good dollars.

The whole question is I think just how exclusively you are out for the dollars, and as an example of what can be done when the management has a mind to do it, I am sending you herewith a copy of the Times Literary Supplement (of London) for December eleventh See how generous they have been with white paper for reviews, and at a loss to their exchequer I am sure. The positive gain, however, to the public at large seems to me out of all proportion to the monetary sacrifice made by the publisher. And after all, I would not write you on this subject if I did not believe that you were making some sort of monetary sacrifice to publish a book review at all. It does seem to me, quite honestly — and in saying this I am not complaining professionally because, whatever happens, I am absolutely married to the Times for my advertising — that the Times today is missing the greatest opportunity of its career to become a superlatively and supremely important arbiter of the literary tastes of a very large part indeed of the American reading public.

I hope that this letter will not be turned over to your advertising or to any other department. I have taken the liberty of addressing it to you personally and it is personally to you that its appeal is intended. As I said above, the arguments of your management would be absolutely unanswerable in any case and what I should like to see done could only be done in spite of those arguments as a matter of very real and farsighted vision.

I hope you will excuse me for taking up this much of your time, but as I said in my earlier letter I have always heard a great deal, from Maxine and Sidney Lowenthal for instance, of your personal fondness for and interest in books.

After thirty-eight years I’d let most of what I wrote Mr. Ochs stand. Of course the Book Review has long been very profitable; I am sure Mr. Ochs’s affection for books has turned out to be a very sound investment. And it gets a far bigger share of the advertising budgets of all of us book publishers than does any other medium. This has been true for many, many years. Indeed Mr. Ochs himself once told me that in his opinion the reviews his paper printed were not nearly so important as the publishers’ announcements. Perhaps as a result, the Book Review does quite well as a news paper. But not as a critical journal. And it must want it that way, I am sure. But even more surely it owes its readers, and the serious writers whose books it reviews, criticism that could with some frequency be called distinguished. That it doesn’t even pretend to give.

The Times has developed no outstanding critics of literature. Nor, on the other hand, has it seen fit to follow its opposite number in London and devote its columns to anonymous criticism. How differently has been its approach to the theater, music, news itself wherever it is being made — even the motion picture. Yet it remains far and away the most important and influential journal of its kind on the North American continent. A pity.