Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 1029

Q:

But you still publish Pat Suppes?

Cerf:

Oh, yes, we do.

Q:

When you got rid of Blaisdell, he didn't go with Blaisdell?

Cerf:

Suppes stayed with us. All the other Blaisdell books went with him to Ginn, but Suppes we wouldn't part with at any price.

Q:

And you kept Singer?

Cerf:

Singer is still part of Random House. We've got a new management in there now. We've moved it to New York where it should have been all of the time. We've revised the whole setup. We've got a man named Francis Egan heading Singer now. He has been there about six months. He's just turning the whole thing upside down. It takes time, but we're convinced Singer is going to be an important part of our business.

That is the one acquisition that we made that you might say, “What the hell did they do that for?" Well, we wanted to be in the textbook business; and, instead of starting a business, which takes four or five years, we thought that we'd get one that was actually going and doing well. On the surface it was. As I say, for the first two years that we had it, those profits continued; but we didn't realize the dry rot that was creeping in.





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help