At Random was another one of those hard-covers that called to me after it wound up on a cart outside the Southwest Library at Wesley Place. There’s no indication of how many years the book stood languishing in the stacks without being checked out. It’s uncertain what title it made way for in the finite shelf space indoors. It’s anybody’s guess where the book would have wound up had it not caught my eye as I was about the quotidian business of buying groceries on a Saturday afternoon.

In 1927, Bennett Cerf’s venture was what is called nowadays a start-up company.  At that time, sitting with his business partner Donald Klopfer and commercial artist Rockwell Kent, Cerf was struck by an inspiration: “I’ve got the name for our publishing house. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.”

Much of the raw material for At Random came from interviews of Cerf, tape-recorded during 1967 and 1968, conducted as part of the Columbia Oral History program. The transcripts of these interviews were augmented by Cerf’s diaries, scrapbooks, published pieces, and correspondence files (the editors, Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Albert Erksine, note, parenthetically, that “he threw away very little, apparently”). While it had been Cerf’s intention to write a memoir, he died suddenly in 1971. The book came out in 1977.

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelists, poets, and playwrights were published at Random House. Some of the authors (O’Neill, Joyce, Faulkner) were true and enduring literary luminaries who thus far have stood the test of time. Other writers, while enormously popular in their day (Jeffers, Schulberg, Tregaskis), have more or less settled into the fine print of obscurity.

At Random is a solid paean to the days when publishers were known by name: Knopf; Macmillan; Scribner; Harcourt, Brace; Houghton & Mifflin; Simon & Schuster. The biography is mostly sympathetic to the personalities who populate is pages. The tales are tame by the standards of today, and not intended to be sensational; its fleeting forays into infidelity and occupational intoxication pale in comparison to the present-day preoccupation with celebrity, fueled by paparazzi, bloggers, tell-alls, and twenty-four-hour news cycles.  

A gentleman like Cerf would hardly recognize this place, where he is now hardly recognized.  His life and times evoke an age when content and character mattered more, and an unintentional nostalgia for the same.

It’s a digital age we live in now, where the demise of paper printed with words is regularly prophesied. The house that Cerf built is now part of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.