Imagine: A publisher on the cover of Time

In an interesting profile on Investor’s Business Daily, Amy Reeves takes a look at Random House co-founder Bennet Cerf. Reeve’s focus — after an odd intro that seems to operate under the delusion that most people know of him thorough an old game show that hasn’t been on TV for fifty years — is, as you would expect from a publication called Investor’s Business Daily, focused on the fact that while you could say Cerf was one of America’s greatest indie publishers, he was, from start to finish, a “mogul.” “His luck started with his birth into a rich New York family,” she observes. He got into the business by loaning a publisher $25,000 in return for an editorship. Reeves notes that Cerf was, after all, a unusually good acquiring editor — his acqusition of James Joyce‘s Ulysses and subsequent manipulation of a court case against it for obscenity was particularly brilliant — but she observes as well that it was through his shrewd acqusition of other publishers (such as Alfred A. Knopf) that established, for good or ill, the model by which modern corporate publishing now operates. And judging by the fact that the company he invented is now the world’s largest publisher (after having been acquired itself) and took in over $2 billion in sales last year, it’s a safe bet that that is going to remain the model for some time to come.