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Like everyone with a nodding acquaintance of the history of that time, Sanjiv Mehta assumed that The East India Company had ceased to exist until he was contacted by the group of English businessmen who had quietly resurrected its name. With appropriate approvals from the British Treasury and the Royal School of Arms, they secured […]

When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down […]

The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. […]

My Craigslist post said, among other things, “I’m a 36-year-old white guy. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and have always gone to diverse schools. I’ve always had a decent number of black friends. That’s changed over time. I work in the publishing industry, which is super white, and I’ve realized that my group […]

It is hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so many things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great writers are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not only published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have […]

The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw […]

A 2000 interview with Denis Dutton, founder of the Arts & Letters Daily site. (Dutton died Dec. 28, 2010.) “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader […]

The site’s internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent — growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers. Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled […]

Holden Caulfield had it right. The test of a great book, he said in “The Catcher in the Rye,” was whether, once you finished it, you wished the author were a great friend you could call up at home. I remembered Caulfield’s insight when we convened a roundtable of writers to come to Newsweek. The […]

[Not single-page] I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it.