There is a stand-out sentence in this succinct, fascinating, carefully crafted personal view of book publishing in the US over the past 60 years. It refers to "one of the ablest and most intelligent editors I have ever worked with", arrived from the Village Voice to work for the Schiffrin's company.
Until his tragic disappearance in the summer of 1999, in what is presumed to be a hiking accident, Joe Wood made an immeasurable contribution to The New Press.
Stephen King might grow a bestseller from such an observation, but here the randomness of human existence takes its measure: books become emblems of civilisation, bulwarks against the white noise of a fragile and capricious world.
The Business of Books (a "version" of which appeared in France last year, more tellingly called L'Edition sans Editeurs) editeurs) is just that: the story of how "international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read". It has all the seriousness, high moral tone and depth of analysis that one might expect from a prince of his profession, a transplanted Russian Jew rooted in the culture of New York and in the matter of literature.
It tells, briefly, of his father Jacques, translator and publisher, who with Andre Gide created the legendary Editions de La Pleiade series for Gallimard in France in the 1930s, taking boat during the summer of 1941 from Marseilles to Casablanca to Lisbon to New York - city of the European diaspora - and there establishing Pantheon Books with Kafka's German publisher Kurt Wolff: "The experience of exile was dramatic and suggested a world lost, never to be retrieved".
It tells of his student years in Cambridge, England, his wife a student of F.R. Leavis's; of the excitement in leavening American life during the 1950s with intellectual discoveries garnered from Europe; of founding Signet Classics for New American Library in the early 1960s (a series later imitated by the "far handsomer" Penguin Classics in the UK), bringing the tablets down from the mountain; of his own justly celebrated "second-generation" Pantheon list - Foucault: Sartre: Laing: Bergman: Myrdal: Chomsky: Nadar - built up under the aegis of Random House before it became pulled into the maw of corporate publishing and politics, and the regime of the bottom line squeezed it dry. It tells of good books and of necessary books, and how they came to be. It honours and it names.
With the strategic backing of charitable foundations, loyal author support (Studs Terkel, Marguerite Duras and Edward Thompson were among those who followed him from Pantheon) and unerring editorial judgment, Schiffrin has steered The New Press safely into the 21st century.
Over the past decade chain stores have been replacing independent bookshops (down from 5400 across the USA to 3200 today) and since 1960 returns (the proportion of books sent back unsold in any given year) have increased from 20 to 40 per cent; and piquantly described here as having a shelf-life somewhere between that of milk and yogurt, a virtual date of expiry attaches to many books created for mass consumption. Andre Shiffrin, though, is in the business of nurturing more durable forms, and this memoir (typeset in a well-leaded Bodoni font, part-clothbound but unsewn) is his testament to that achievement.
Antony Farrell is publisher at The Lilliput Press, Dublin