Alfred Knopf (1892-1984) - 31 August 1984

This is, or ought to be, even for people who take the world and themselves very seriously, the one time when even God gives them a weekend pass from their social conscience.

Labor Day weekend – three days when nobody, except of course all the people who maintain the physical grid of our lives, is expected to labour. The Congress has gone home, the Reagan team and the Mondale team are hunched up in their separate dugouts, polishing up their weapons for the two-month onslaught on each other which won’t begin till Monday.

Any family that is getting along even fairly well is at home preparing a picnic or a beach party or a mountain hike and millions of people will be pouring out to the baseball glamour. Since it’s just on or over 100 degrees across the 2500-mile stretch of the mainland from the Arizona dessert to the Atlantic most of them, I imagine,will prefer to retreat to the air conditioning of the living rooms with the blinds down and the beer on hand, to watch all the native heroes sweating it out in the ghastly glare of the noonday sun.

Well, this brief, blessed pause in the politics and the public bustle of life, allows me to do something I meant to do three weeks ago, an intention which was unfortunately overwhelmed first by the Ferraro finances and then by the Republican circus at Dallas.

A great man died, and since he was neither a movie nor a rock star, nor a famous author, anarchist footballer or Central American dictator, you’re unlikely to have heard of him. Let me introduce him by recalling a cocktail party held many years ago, for a posy of visiting English publishers, book publishers. The host, was himself a publisher and he’d invited the opposite numbers of the British as guests.

That was the problem for one young Englishman who nudged his way through the babble, to an old and artful publicity man who had set up the party, an old roly-poly man who looked like a Chinese Buddha, but was actually once a penniless Russian immigrant and now the very Richelieu of American public relations. Asked what was troubling him, the Englishman said, "Well it’s all very exciting but my problem is, I don’t know who’s who. I mean who is the American equivalent of Faber & Faber, say, who is the Cassells man, who might I avoid, who should I defer to, do you see what I mean?"

The old Russian always saw what you meant, even before you meant it. He dusted the cigar ash from his legion of honour boutonniere and he said, "You don’t need to spot every identity, all you need to know is the two ends of the gamete. Now, if you look discreetly over in that corner, you see the tall, laughing fellow with the glasses, he is in the book business. In the opposite corner, the man who looks like the Archduke Franz Joseph, he is Alfred Knopf. He is a publisher. In fact, he is the publisher."

Now this distinction between the old-time publisher wholly devoted to books, and the new breed who have gone into the book business, as they might have gone into banking or real estate, is rapidly growing so blurred that for some listeners, that anecdote needs an explanation.

Authors are not marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try and assert a saleable identity different from that of the other starlets and if they fail to do it, their books within a month or two are marked down, remaindered and the publisher writes off a tax loss, putting it down to amortisation of his product.

The American humourist Calvin Trillin once said that the shelf life of a hard-backed book is somewhere between milk and yoghurt, and the fittest publishers who survive are those who can collar the highest price for the paperback rights. And if they are notably successful at this, they, sooner or later, are bound to be bought up as subsidiaries of computer firms and movie companies or conglomerates which see no reason to look on a book as a marketable product different from a vacuum cleaner or a soft drink.

Even the firm, the Alfred A Knopf which, for 70 years or so, was as odd and private a concern, as a tapestry designer living alongside a wallpaper factory, was absorbed as a business into a larger book firm which in turn became owned by an electronics corporation and then by a newspaper chain. But so long as Alfred Knopf lived, and let us pray, long after he’s gone, the imprimateur of the house of Knopf fits discerning and scholarly editors, its standard of choice. Even its devotion to old typefaces will remain sacrasanct.

Now this special status, as of a man of such obvious distinction – think of General George Marshall or of Robert Tyre Jones, I mean you would not think for some time of calling by their first names – this special status was earned by the very early impact on the profession of publishing, of a man of commanding presence and formidable character. Alfred Knopf was the son of a father – he had a German grandfather – who was a prosperous New York financial consultant. A man, who from all accounts, set the example, or in the modern jargon, the role model for his son. A moustachioed, imperious man who must have earned the jocular title, which passed on to his son, of the last of the Hapsburgs.

The son, Alfred, graduated from Columbia University in 1912, and was treated by his father to a post-graduate tour of Europe. Alfred was already steeped in books, and meant to be not just a reader, but a maker of them. He was only 20 but he made it his business, to seek out Joseph Conrad and Goldsworthy and Katherine Mansfield, and he listened to the gabby Frank Harris and decided at once to be a publisher.

He came home, he was an accountant with a publishing firm for three years or so, and at the age of 24 decided to go it on his own. His father set him up, but only to the extent of a telephone and a desk, not yet a room. He bought an English translation of four plays by Emile Augier. Emile Augier? Alfred was not under the delusion that he was floating the Pickwick Papers. He liked this Frenchman’s work and thought it ought to be published and for the next 60-odd years, that was his guiding motive. Ten of his first dozen books were translations of what he decided were promising unknowns, or the unjustly neglected. Of course he knows well that somebody had to pay for the French poet or the young Argentine novelist, or the history of the American fur trapping trade that would sell no more than 2,000 copies.

So, as necessary ballast to the high-flying unknowns he published one or two very popular romantic novelists, and in the early '20s, he had a windfall in the cryptic thoughts of a Lebanese mystic, Kahlil Gibran, who for the past 50 years or more has been the Chairman Mao of successive generations of moony undergraduates, aesthetic scribbles, flower people and other mooching brooders. At last count, I believe Gibran’s The Prophet had sold 30 million copies.

But, from the 1920s into the 1980s, the Knopf list, over 5,000 separate titles, is staggering in its majesty, intelligence, comprehensiveness and daring. No writer of any promise or suspected distinction of any country or colour, no poet, scholar or jurist, historian, music critic, essayist, ever went unread or unconsidered. What set Alfred apart from all other equally catholic and enterprising publishers was his assumption that a serious publisher owes it to the world of readers to introduce them to the best that's being written anywhere around the world.

Sixteen of his discoveries, or writers he banked on when they were either unknown or favourites of a minority turned into winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, including Knut Hamsun, Thomas Munn, Yasunari Kawabata, Sigrid Undset, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Twenty six others, most unknown when he first published them, won the Pulitzer Prize. Never was there a publisher less chauvinist, less insular – and through a time when nationalism was taking a new and ferocious lease on life.

He published, early on, people who came to be classics in their native England, America, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal Russia, Greece, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Korea (Kim Yong-ik), Egypt (Waguih Ghali ?) Finland, (Aino Kallas) and Japan, the distinguished trio of Massur Koto, Shohi Orakur, Eigi Yoshikawa. Without exception, these latter exotics were introduced to the English-speaking world by Alfred Knopf, not to mention the more familiar eminences that he either introduced us to or impressed on us early in their career such as Elliot, Pound, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Ilya Ehrenburg, Sholokhov, Wallace Stevens, HL Mencken and, on and on.

In his late 80s Alfred no longer swept into his office with the terrifying panache of the magnifico variously called the Shah, the Eastern potentate, the Spanish Grandee. But he still said no as often as he said yes, pushing unknown Davids against the Goliaths of the book business, lovingly chose for this book or that a typeface designed by (Argust Jason?) in 1688 and in the next breath alarmed his sales staff by ordering a first printing of 5,000 for some dense but intelligent treatise on the First Amendment, or commanded a reprint, of Gilberto Freyre's classic, long out-of-print account of the racial history of Brazil, the masters and the slaves.

Towards the end, his great frame pattered into the office, but he still chose his editors with great care, he regularly let out a blast at the bestseller list, which he forever regarded as a species of fraud. And he could, until the last few months, look up and contemplate with justifiable pride, his own compound in a Third Avenue skyscraper, the private international zone which was the house that Knopf built. Remember the name. Alfred, Knopf. Dead, at 91, simply the best publisher of the 20th Century.

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