Exile

Schiffrin and Wolff in the Pantheon apartment

The Nazi occupation of Paris, and a narrow escape from a concentration camp, didn’t slow Jacques Schiffrin down.  According to David Kirkpatrick, in an article in the NYT Book Review, when Schiffrin settled in New York City he joined Kurt and Helen Wolff to begin began Pantheon Books, a small publishing house that translated European literature.  

The company began in the Wolff’s apartment in 1942 and focused on translating European books.  Pantheon grew and prospered over the next twenty years under the direction of Schiffrin and the Wolffs and in the 1960s it was purchased by Random House and moved into the Knopf division.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, little Andre Schiffrin grew up in New York City surrounded by intellectuals and books and, upon graduating high school, attended Yale.  

In a wonderful interview in The White Review Andre explains how he began his career in publishing.  It started as a summer job at New American Books and, although he was not on the editorial staff, he suggested that the company consider publishing inexpensive paperbacks of the classics, with critical introductions, that could be used in schools (wait, doesn’t this sound familiar?).  The series eventually became the very popular Signet Classics.  In the book, The Business of Books, Schiffrin claims that, at the time, he never considered the fact that he was following in his father’s footsteps.

In 1961 Pantheon offered Andre Schiffrin a position as a junior editor and he began work down the hall from his father’s old office (Jacques died in 1950 when Andre was only 15).  Over the decades Schiffrin discovered and published many new authors like Noam Chomsky and Michael Foucault and Pantheon became known for supporting intellectual, and often leftist work, into the 1980.  

The history of Pantheon reads like a soap opera through the 1980s but basically, Andre was forced to resign his position because he would not downsize or reduce the number of titles he printed.  The entire episode seems to have been a power struggle between Andre and the new Random House boss, Alberto Vitale and big names like Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel and E.L. Doctorow came to Schiffrin’s defense.

In 2000, Schiffrin published a memoir, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, by the title it seems that he got the last word in the dispute.

Pantheon continues to publish books but, depressingly, has expanded into graphic novels.  One of it’s current popular titles is about a rabbi and his talking cat.  La Pleiade continues to publish it’s elegant, well respected volumes of classic world literature, accompanied by critical notes and essays.  And Andre Schiffrin now oversees The New Press, a publishing house acclaimed from taking risks and tackling tough issues.  

It seems like, in the end, everyone got what they wanted thanks to Jacques Schiffrin.  It’s too bad he can't make a return visit to see his legacy.

La Pleiade

Edmund Wilson didn’t exactly invent the idea of creating the Library of America (see yesterday’s post), he borrowed and adapted it, which is how most great ideas start off.  

Wilson was inspired by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, a series of classic French books.  This collection of readable paperbacks, now numbering more than 500, includes mostly French books but also some world literature and philosophy.  Eleven new titles are released each year.

If you’re a collector, especially a book collector, I suggest you stop reading immediately.  The series is extremely enticing for those of us who enjoy gathering sets of anything, beautiful books or precious decorative objects.  I was first hooked by the color coded system:  20th century is tobacco (their color word, not mine), 19th century - emerald green, middle ages -  purple, antiquity - green, etc.  I can just imagine the leather-bound rainbow sitting on my living room shelf, after I read them, of course.

The series was born in 1923 when Jacques Schiffrin, a Russian Jew, moved to Paris and began a publishing company called ‘Editions de la Pleiade’.  His idea was to republish French classics in affordable leather volumes that people would enjoy reading.  At the time it was an exciting new idea and Schiffrin produced volumes by Baudelaire, Voltaire, and Stendhal.  When Schiffrin ran into money troubles in the 1930 he was bailed out by the larger publishing company Gallimard and Schiffrin was able to stay on as publisher.  

Interestingly, the history of La Pleiade, on the Gaillimard website, notes that Schiffrin remained as publisher until the beginning of World War II when Jean Paulhan ‘took over’.  They neglect to mention that Schiffrin was forced to resign because of the 1940 Nazi occupation of Paris.  

While the city was occupied,  The French Government was established in Vichy, an unoccupied territory of France and one of their first laws was that “foreign nationals of the Jewish race” would be held in a “special concentration camp”.  Schiffrin and his family made the wise decision to escape and went first to Casablanca and then onto New York.  His son, Andre was only five years old at the time.  Andre, now a famous publisher in his own right,  later wrote a book about the experience called,  A Political Education, Coming of Age in Paris and New York.  

La Pleiade continues on today as a Gallimard Publishing project.  They have published 531 books from 195 authors.  The texts are based on original manuscripts and are printed on delicate Bible paper and bound in leather volumes with gold lettering.  They are Jacques Schiffrin’s lasting legacy and gift to the world.