Jason Epstein, Columbia College ’49, the visionary publisher and editor, died last week at the age of 93. It was Jason who developed the idea of the trade paperback — paperbound editions of great books that had previously been priced out of the range of college students. The Doubleday Anchor series he helmed published books by Stendhal, Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, and various others, some of whom he had encountered in Columbia’s famous senior-year Colloquium on Important Books, which, in Epstein’s year, was team taught by Moises Hadas and Quentin Anderson.
Mass-market paperbacks had been the home of dime novels, pulp fiction, and the occasional noir masterpiece, but Epstein reasoned that, thanks in part to the GI Bill, a college education was becoming more the norm than the exception. If that was so, trade paperback editions of the classics — and of such a notable work of scholarship as J. Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages — were inevitable. He was right.
The trade paperback “revolution” was a brilliant example of literary commerce beneficial to reader, author, and publisher alike. It exemplified an enlightened attempt to broaden the American mind beyond the stereotypically anti-intellectual caricature of eggheads and masters of circumlocution who called a spade an implement for deep digging. Why shouldn’t the children of lower-middle-class immigrants have access to the books that made a Columbia education an intellectual adventure of the first order?
In 1958 Epstein left Doubleday for Random House, where in time he would occupy the corner office. In addition to the authors he edited (Auden, Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Jane Jacobs et al), he was a fountain of new ideas. With his wife, Barbara Epstein, a talented editor in her own right, and their friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, he founded the New York Review of Books as a silver lining of the ruinous newspaper strike of 1962 that deprived straphangers of their favorite tabloids and broadsides and caused the demise of four of the city’s dailies. The Review sustained its success, Epstein maintained, as a highbrow alternative to the hopelessly medicore New York Times Book Review of the time.
In an early issue the new magazine, Epstein exemplified the book review as a form of literary demolition when he wrote about a new edition of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Aside from its faults — and these include the binding, which is too flimsy for volumes this large,” the new edition was likely the best we shall have (he wrote with a straight face) even though the publishers failed to replace Philip Guedella’s introduction, “which was no good to begin with,” and worse, the text is illustrated with engravings by Piranesi, admittedly brilliant, but wrong for the occasion, and besides, the engravings are printed “in a brown tone rather than Piranesi’s own black.”
Inspired by Edmund Wilson, Epstein did much of the spadework for the Library of America series of classics. In the 1980s, he foresaw the method of distribution that Jeff Bezos perfected in Amazon. If only there had been an Internet in 1987, Epstein’s idea of a “reader’s catalogue” would have had a chance to beat Bezos to the punch.
Jason was always sure he was right, whether the subject was American foreign policy or the proper way to make mayonnaise. About publishing he was never wrong. When he recommended something I usually tried it out, to my chagrin only once. When he wrote about esoteric Chinese dishes for The New Yorker, he referred to an obscure restaurant in Chinatown, where the dish of choice was not listed on the menu but had to be ordered specially. A friend and I went and ordered the dish despite the waiter’s vehement attempts to discourage us. It was not a dish, to paraphrase the waiter’s gesticulations, designed to appeal to the Western palette. The waiter was right.
I interviewed Epstein a few times when I wrote about books and publishing for Newsweek and other publications. For Columbia College Today in 1985, my profile of Jason ran under the heading “Jason Epstein, ’49: A Kingpin of the New York Literary Mob.” His demise reminds me of the time when the route from Columbia College to the publishing industry was direct: Alfred Harcourt, Donald Brace, Bennett Cerf, Richard Simon, Max Schuster, Robert Giroux, Jason Epstein, Robert Gottlieb are names that trip off the tongue. What I remember most about my conversations with Jason was the way his face brightened when he spoke of Morningside Heights in the postwar years. Life in New York City then, he said, “seemed to me the very height of glamour.” — DL
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