Borzoi at Random

Former employees of Alfred A. (for Abraham) Knopf, a publisher with the appearance and manner of a retired Cossack sergeant, recall that on the frequent occasions when Knopf was displeased, he would rumble: "If this keeps up, I'm going to sell to Bennett Cerf." At last, without a frown, Knopf has sold. The price, according to Random House President Cerf: in the neighborhood of 135,000 shares of Random House stock, worth roughly $3,000,000. Knopf and his wife Blanche, an aloof, astringent woman who is the firm's president (her husband is chairman), will still run their publishing house as an independent fief under the Random suzerainty, and their books will retain the familiar Borzoi escutcheon.

Bubbles Bennett A. (for Alfred) Cerf, 61, about the deal with Knopf, who is all of six years older: "It's been a dream since I was in college. When I went into publishing, this man was my ideal. Why, it's almost like having a favorite professor and then joining him on the faculty."

Long Live the King. The merger, Knopf remarked regally last week, "solves the matter of succession." The dynastic facts: Alfred had always expected his son Pat, 41, to take over the firm, but after years of being treated as heir transparent by his formidable father, Pat walked out last year to set up his own publishing house, Atheneum Press. Now Alfred knows that he can leave the firm in good hands, and that is, as Pat puts it, "a great thing for my old man."

Apart from these personal matters, the merger joins two impressive publishing lists. Knopf (1959 sales: more than $4,000,000) has an outstanding array of dead authors--Thomas Mann, Gide, Willa Gather, Camus, Kafka, Sigrid Undset, H. L. Mencken--but is a little spottier on contemporaries, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bowen. John Hersey. John Updike. Random House (1959 sales: more than $12 million) has the late Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis, as well as Faulkner. John O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Irwin Shaw, James Michener.

The move makes economic sense, too, on the principle (truer of publishing than of marriage) that two can live more cheaply than one. Ultimately, a single sales and distribution staff will serve both firms. Rising costs are making mergers a major trend in the publishing field. In the last six months alone, Henry Holt. Rinehart and John C. Winston merged, as did World and Meridian, and others will certainly follow.

Face to Face. Despite the merger's logic, the Knopf-Random alliance has its startling side. In an era of increasingly faceless publishers, Alfred Knopf and Bennett Cerf are among the few who are known outside the trade, but their personalities are remarkably different.

Knopf began publishing in 1915 from a desk in his father's office (the elder Knopf was in the clothing business), now feels that most American writers do not know how to write--a fault that makes little difference because, as he sees it, American readers do not know how to read. Sunny Bennett Cerf, on the other hand, was working for a Wall Street broker when a publishing acquaintance (the late Horace Liveright) asked him to take Theodore Dreiser to a ball game; Cerf was so impressed by the literary giant that he quit his job that day, bought a one-eighth interest in Boni & Liveright, and ever since has been convinced that American readers and writers are just fine.

Knopf wears a walrus mustache and alarming purple shirts with pink ties, while Cerf blends into the grey-flannel landscape. Knopf, were it not for his reputation as a gourmet, might be suspected of attending a book-and-author luncheon with the express purpose of devouring the author. Cerf, no gourmet, is as friendly as an encyclopedia salesman. He talks effusively, and more telephone conversations than his listeners may suspect emanate from a tan wall set in his office lavatory. While Knopf likes to spend his time with intellectuals and artists, Cerf prefers a Broadway crowd, shows himself on TV (What's My Line?), judges Miss America contests, and has filled any number of joke books (e.g., Try and Stop Me) with rheumatic knee-slappers.

Early reports had it that the Random-Knopf merger was settled on a handshake over lunch. Alfred Knopf says nonsense--it was settled in his office. His denial is unnecessary. If the matter had been broached at a lunch arranged by Knopf, the gourmet who never dines west of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, and Cerf, who lacks the strength to resist a pun, the result would have been disastrous, and the scene could have been played only one way:

Publisher K: Well, Bennett, how do you like the soup?

Publisher C (suppressing a snicker) A consomme devoutly to be wished.

Publisher K (choking): The deal's off. I'll sell to Simon & Schuster.

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