Winning The Old-Fashioned Way

By R.Z. Sheppard

It is a lesson forgotten by many Americans but remembered by the Germans and Japanese: a dedication to quality is bound to pay off. With the returns now . in, it is clear that the star literary performer of 1987 was not an individual but the publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a firm that has been publishing the best in fiction and nonfiction for more than 40 years.

Editor in Chief Roger Straus Jr. and his closely knit family of editors and writers have had quite a year. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is currently No. 1 on the best-seller lists. Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, a summer smash, is No. 3. Earlier in the year Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome and Philip Roth's The Counterlife held positions on the lists. The National Book Critics Circle named The Counterlife the best novel of 1987. In addition, the N.B.C.C. award for poetry went to C.K. Williams for Flesh and Blood, and another Farrar, Straus author, Larry Heinemann, won a National Book Award for his novel Paco's Story. Joseph Brodsky's Nobel Prize for Literature was a welcome honor, but then the publisher has no fewer than six other living laureates on its list: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elias Canetti, Wole Soyinka, Czeslaw Milosz and William Golding.

All this seems to have been accomplished on a shoestring. Farrar, Straus is well known for skimpy salaries. It has occupied the same dingy office space in downtown Manhattan -- far out of the midtown orbit of most of the giant firms -- for more than 20 years. Wolfe politely describes the low-rent decor as a "nice saggy-book look." The waiting area contains a desk and a single metal chair. But then no one waits very long. The thing authors like best about FS&G is that they get to meet the people who work there. Says Brodsky: "Other publishers could be compared to factories. FS&G isn't a publishing house; it is an extension of my home."

Complete with a Big Daddy and a Kindly Uncle. Roger Straus Jr., 71, is brawny, with silver hair and a salty tongue. Editorial Board Chairman Robert Giroux, 73, is more reserved, an inside man whose contributions to the list include T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell and Bernard Malamud. The outspoken Straus bluntly rejects the nostalgic notion that publishing was once a gentlemen's business. "They were poor businessmen," he says of many of the resonant names of the profession, "poor marketers out to massage their own egos generation after generation."

Straus shuns the bureaucratic style of those merged entities resulting from takeovers by huge conglomerates that demand a fast return on their investment. He works in close contact with his employees. When the air conditioning broke down, he dashed out to buy Good Humors for the entire staff. Such gestures serve as an amusing reminder that the publisher is descended from the Guggenheims and the Strauses, old East Coast families noted for their philanthropic activities. Straus put up $50,000 to help start FS&G after World War II. He insists that he does not subsidize the company with his own money, although he admits to having used his personal line of credit when things got tight. Farrar, Straus' sales have gone up 50% in the past two years, although up from what remains private information, one of the advantages of not being part of a publicly held corporation.

Controlling the size of the enterprise means more collegial working conditions. FS&G's authors seem glad to forgo the ritual overpriced lunch (Straus takes writers to modest neighborhood restaurants) for the opportunity to work closely with underpaid four-star editors. Turow, who turned down a proffered $275,000 advance elsewhere to take $200,000 at FS&G, says the house's cachet "made it an honor to take less money." Doing business the old-fashioned way has long-term rewards as well. "Sometimes a writer ahead of his time has to be nursed along," says Giroux. "Remember, Moby Dick was a flop in the 19th century -- too much whale."

With reporting by Kathleen Brady/New York