Jason Epstein, Editor and Publishing Innovator, Is Dead at 93

Jason Epstein, Editor and Publishing Innovator, Is Dead at 93

His literary and marketing instincts brought quality paperbacks to American readers and led to the creation of The New York Review of Books.

The editor and publisher Jason Epstein in his office at Random House in 1968. He could be described as a man of letters with a feel for commerce or as a man of business with a taste for fine literature, and both would be correct.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times

 

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2022

 

Jason Epstein, the editor, author and publishing visionary who introduced the quality paperback to American readers and who, over dinner and in the midst of a newspaper strike, planted the seed for what would become one of the country’s leading intellectual journals, The New York Review of Books, died on Friday at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 93.

 

His daughter, Helen Epstein, confirmed the death.

 

Mr. Epstein could be described as a man of letters with a feel for commerce or as a man of business with a taste for fine literature, and both would be correct. His major publishing achievements owed much to an uncommon mix of literary and marketing instincts.

 

They came together momentously in the winter of 1962-63, when he and his first wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, had the poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, over for dinner one evening at their Upper West Side apartment.

 

At the time, Mr. Epstein was a top editor at Random House, where he was guiding and helping to shape the work of a formidable roster of writers, among them Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, E.L. Doctorow, W.H. Auden and Jane Jacobs. Newspapers had all but disappeared from the streets because of a grueling strike that had shut down The New York Times and six other New York papers.

 

Mr. Epstein observed to his guests that in the absence of The New York Times Book Review on Sundays, the book-reading public was being underserved. It was a familiar theme for him. He had long seen a potential market for an American version of The Times Literary Supplement of London (now known as TLS), an independent weekly publication.

 

“There’s only one person in the country who could do it,” he had been fond of saying, “and I’m busy.”

But at the dinner table that night, he revived the idea. The time was ripe, he proposed, to introduce a new book review. His guests agreed.

 

“Jason was, like, ‘Kids, let’s put on a show,’ ” Ms. Epstein later recalled.

 

The next morning, Mr. Lowell took out a $4,000 bank loan, secured by his own trust fund, and cajoled his moneyed friends into investing in the project. Ms. Epstein and the editor Robert B. Silvers, who was persuaded to leave his job at Harper’s Magazine, became co-editors. Ms. Hardwick took the title of editorial adviser.

 

The first issue of The New York Review of Books, dated Feb. 1, 1963, was star-studded. There were articles by Dwight Macdonald (reviewing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), Mary McCarthy (on William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”), Philip Rahv (on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Susan Sontag (on Simone Weil), Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, Ms. Hardwick and Mr. Epstein. There were poems by Mr. Lowell, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren.

 

An Immediate Literary Success

The Review, appearing twice a month, was an immediate success, thanks in part to Mr. Epstein’s foresight in sending bundles of free copies to college bookstores around the country. When the strike ended in March after 114 days (helping to kill off four New York dailies), Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers decided to keep The Review going. It is still going.

 

A decade earlier, Mr. Epstein had been an editorial trainee at Doubleday & Company, freshly laureled with a master’s degree from Columbia and given to spending hours at the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, when he hit upon an idea: If expensive hard-bound classics were made available as inexpensive paperbacks, an expanding postwar university population might form a profitable market for them. He raised his idea with Doubleday’s editor in chief, Ken McCormick, as they were walking across Central Park, and in 1953 Mr. McCormick gave him the go-ahead to start such a line of paperbacks, calling it Anchor Books.

 

 

Mr. Epstein, just 25 at the time, enlisted artist friends like Edward Gorey to design covers, and Anchor soon began churning out titles: D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature,” Edmund Wilson’s “To the Finland Station,” Francis Fergusson’s “The Idea of a Theater,” Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma.”

 

Within two weeks the first four titles sold 10,000 copies apiece, for anywhere from 65 cents to $1.25 (about $6.80 to $13 in today’s money).

 

“Jason has the mind of a scholar and the instincts of a pushcart peddler, and that’s what made Anchor Books,” a colleague at Doubleday later told Philip Nobile, the author of “Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and The New York Review of Books” (1974).

Mr. Epstein’s friendship with the literary critic Edmund Wilson led to another publishing innovation. Mr. Wilson suggested over a drink that the reading public might warm to a standardized edition of great American literature, similar to the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

 

From this evolved the Library of America, an expanding series, first published in 1982, of handsomely bound volumes in elegant black dust jackets of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James and many others.

 

Other Epstein projects fared less well. The Reader’s Catalog, a listing of some 40,000 book titles that could be ordered from warehouses by phone — a precursor of online selling — was launched in 1989, but went under when it could not compete with the superstore chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble.

 

 

Despite its failure, Mr. Epstein held fast to his ambition to reverse the trend in American book selling and publishing toward a steadily narrower selection of books, mainly high-turnover best sellers by richly compensated brand-name authors. He dreamed of a diversified marketplace of backlist books kept in print — his old Eighth Street Bookshop writ large.

 

He created one in 2003, when he co-founded On Demand Books, thanks in part to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The company markets the Espresso Book Machine, a device that prints, collates, covers and binds a single book in a few minutes at “the point of delivery,” in industry jargon. Small enough to fit in a bookstore, a library room or even an airport newsstand, the device eliminates the need for shipping and warehousing while fostering widespread availability of millions of titles.

 

Mr. Epstein also brought out books of his own, including “The Great Conspiracy Trial” (1970), a defense of the Chicago Seven, the activists charged with conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; “East Hampton: A History and Guide” (1975), written with Elizabeth Barlow; “Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future” (2001); and “Eating: A Memoir” (2009).

 

“Eating” was based on a cooking column Mr. Epstein wrote for The New York Times in the early 2000s. Its recipes were drawn from cooking experiences that went as far back as his childhood visits to Maine, where he would watch his grandmother cook in the warmth of her wintertime kitchen.

 

Jason Epstein was born on Aug. 25, 1928, in Cambridge, Mass., to Robert Epstein, a partner in the family textile business, and Gladys (Shapiro) Epstein, a homemaker. He grew up in the Boston suburb of Milton and, an avid reader, graduated from high school at 15.

 

 

Though much younger than other college-bound peers, he enrolled at Columbia immediately; among his teachers were the scholars Eric Bentley, Mark Van Doren, Joseph Wood Krutch and Lionel Trilling. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a master’s in 1950, both in English.

 

After Doubleday hired him, he courted and, in 1954, married Barbara Zimmerman, another ambitious young Doubleday editor from Boston, whose father knew Mr. Epstein’s. She had distinguished herself at the house by editing Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” (1952). They went on to be labeled the first couple of publishing, high-profile book editors whose dinner parties were intellectual feasts meriting mention in Edmund Wilson’s journals.

 

 

The marriage ended in 1980. In 1993 he married Judith Miller, then a reporter at The New York Times, who survives him. In addition to Helen Epstein, his daughter from his first marriage, Mr. Epstein is also survived by another child from that marriage, Jacob, and three grandchildren. Barbara Epstein died in 2006.

 

A Productive Publishing Union

 

Mr. Epstein moved to Random House in 1958, hired by Bennett Cerf, the company’s co-founder. He left Doubleday in part out of dismay that it had refused, on grounds of taste, to publish “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel about a middle-aged man’s obsession and affair with a very young girl. Mr. Epstein had published Nabokov’s writing in his quarterly The Anchor Review.

 

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Cerf worked out an arrangement whereby Mr. Epstein would bring in and edit books while being free to start up businesses of his own, providing there was no conflict.

 

It proved to be a productive union for both parties. While editing first-rank writers, Mr. Epstein brought in books like Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System” (1960), which became a bible of American youth in the 1960s; “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), a defense of urban diversity that he had persuaded Jane Jacobs to develop from an article on the failures of city planning; and “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” (1971), by the community organizer Saul Alinsky.

 

In 1976 Mr. Epstein was appointed editorial director, a job he held until 1995. (He was also acting publisher of Random House from 1976 to 1984.) He officially retired in 1999 but continued to edit books into his 80s.

 

Some who followed Mr. Epstein’s career saw a contradiction between his left-leaning politics — often apparent in his own writing for The New York Review of Books — and his love of luxury: Montecristo cigars, custom-made shoes, fine food and, for his home libraries in Lower Manhattan and Sag Harbor, mainly hardcover books.

 

He saw nothing contradictory in that, however. His prevailing ambition to reach a wide audience with books that were both intellectually satisfying and affordable could be boiled down to a populist’s wanting the best for everyone.

 

Mr. Epstein saw the digital universe as a potential ally in that pursuit, whether through electronic books or on-demand printing. In 2000, he said in an interview on the PBS program “The Open Mind” that publishers “throw a book out into the retail marketplace without any idea where it’s going to go.”

 

 

“Barnes & Noble orders a book from Random House, we print 10, 15, 20 thousand copies,” he continued, “but who knows where and on what shelf and what clerks are going to open the package and whether they’re going to know what the books are about or whom they’re intended for? We don’t know that.

 

“That explains,” he continued, “why so many books are returned unsold from booksellers to publishers. And why it’s so hard, sometimes, to find the book you’re looking for in a bookstore. And why it’s so hard for authors to find their way to their appropriate readers. But in this other system, you will have targeted markets for each author. The technology makes that possible, and therefore it’s going to happen. Not today, but eventually. That’s going to make a whole new world.”

 

Mr. Epstein saw book publishing as more than a business, though. For him it was almost a calling, one that might struggle to turn a profit. Publishing, he said in the same interview, was “more comparable to what priests and teachers and some doctors do than to what people who become lawyers or businessmen or Wall Street brokers — what they do.

 

 

“It is a vocation, you feel you’re doing something extremely important, and it’s worth sacrificing for, because without books we wouldn’t know who we were.”

 

 

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a former senior book critic for The Times, died in 2018. William McDonald and Alex Traub contributed reporting.