Simon & Schuster celebrated publicly their tenth anniversary in the book business. “Fortune” magazine devoted some pages to the success of this firm as did Publisher’s Weekly. To what do Simon & Schuster attribute their success? The ability to pick manuscripts that become best sellers! Simple and concise but try and do it!
Ignace Paderewski, whose opinion of the Jewish race is as well known as his piano playing, is the subject of a biography by Rom Landau which Crowell will publish this season. The same firm will publish in January a biography of that American troubadour, Stephen Foster, by John Tasker Howard.
The Trotsky book on Lenin will not be published by Funk & Wagnalls even though I said so. It will be published by another “big” publisher (whose name I am in honor bound not to disclose). Said publisher paid a very nice advance, especially since they knew that Trotsky had not written a line, at the time the contract was signed.
Bertram D. Wolfe, who was once secretary of the Communist Party but has since been expelled because he disagreed with the central party’s views on the method for making America communistic, is writing the text for, Diego Rivera’s “Portrait of America”. Mr. Wolfe, who is director of the New Workers School, recently agreed to go out to Sunnyside, L. I., and teach some of the more serious truth seekers of that community the basis of communism.
David Karsner, author of “Silver Dollar”, who is working on a Philadelphia newspaper, is at work on an other biography. The short, thin mild looking little man always picks some large robust figure to write about. His latest is a once famous coal and steel operator who went through a fortune of $70,000,000. Yes, I said seventy million?
If you haven’t discovered the detective stories of Erle Stanley Gardner it is about time you dit. His latest, which is called “The Case of the Missing Legs”, will be out in February. Fast moving, well dialogued, good plot and just tricky enough so that the reader isn’t fooled completely, it is a story far above average.
Hendrik Van Loon, the immense Dutchman who did so well by dressing up the geography he learned in grammar school and making it into a book for adults, is off on a world cruise. He has been hired by a steamship company to lecture to the other members of the tour. For this labor he will receive, besides first class accommodations for himself, wife and a secretary, the sum of $10,000.
Aben Kandel has returned from Hollywood and will finish his novel about life in New York.
James Waterman Wise is preparing another book on the Hitler trouble.
A Jewish columnist from Milwaukee is going to be brought to New York to do a column for the New York Evening Post.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
