The Lady with the Borzoi by Laura Claridge

Author:Laura Claridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709730
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18

THE WAR’S END

AT AN AFTERNOON BUFFET LUNCH at Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel in early November 1943, Blanche shared stories with Mencken of her brief trip overseas. The newspaperman, rarely jealous, turned up his nose at what he considered the flashy tactics of the war journalists, writing about their own exploits instead of focusing on the soldiers. Sensing his envy, Blanche quickly turned to the reason for the day’s event: guests were celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Joe Lesser as a Knopf employee. Lesser, by now the company’s treasurer and a board member, was feted by forty-two well-wishers, mostly fellow employees, and with Blanche and Alfred seated at the same table. Though the Knopfs had agreed with their board on the unusually generous gift of a five-week winter trip to the destination of their choice for Lesser and his wife, no one gave a speech or even offered a toast. Alfred asked Mencken to announce the gift, and Menck’s brief tribute focused on Mrs. Lesser appearing “so proud” of her husband—possibly a jab at Blanche for the neglect with which she’d been treating her spouse of late in favor of Hohe.

Having come to the firm as a clerk, Lesser was now one of its key officers. Though the Knopfs still brought in two-thirds of the books, Lesser was the only employee who could sign contracts. At least the company had developed a practical if demanding method to track their publications. After an author delivered the finished manuscript, whoever had been conducting the negotiations conferred with those in sales, advertising, and production, after which a five-by-seven-inch pink slip of paper was clipped to a card for estimates of advance sales, “sales during the first six months, sales after six months, college sales, advertising appropriations, and print orders.” There was also a space for comments on “General” as well as “Special” markets, meant for media, publicity, and advertising-copy suggestions. Months before publication, and after the card had been circulated for comments, it was “batted around at weekly business meetings.” One year after a particular book was published, the original estimated sales were compared with the results. According to Alfred, the cards “enabled Mr. Lesser to make a reasonably accurate forecast of the firm’s profits a year in advance.”1

Blanche especially wished Joe well: despite his typically fair-minded approach to both Knopfs, when the going got really rough, she felt she could trust him to take her side. She had urged Alfred to approve the gift, especially in light of the company’s recently released financial report for the second half of the fiscal year—and in light of her expectations for the forthcoming fiction A Bell for Adano. Knopf was doing well these days, the budget analysis “very satisfactory,” according to Mencken. The net profit for six months was $40,000, after federal taxes of $63,000, with the current assets of the company $501,000 and its liabilities $245,000.2

Now Blanche fixed her attention upon the journalist John Hersey’s first novel: she considered A Bell for Adano an important book, and she was right.

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