Book Review: Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III (2023)

The lovely cover of Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III, 2023. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The inscription from Charles Scribner III inside my copy. We connected over F. Scott Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable, surprisingly enough! (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The distinguished publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons was founded in 1846. For fans of Jazz Age literature, Scribners is probably best known as being the publishing home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. In 2023, Charles Scribner III published Scribners Five Generations of Publishing, a history of the company. Charles Scribner III is the fifth Charles Scribner to work for the family firm, and he and his father oversaw the merger of Scribner’s with Macmillan in 1984. (The Scribner imprint is now a division of Simon & Schuster.) 

Scribners Five Generations of Publishing is a fascinating look at the challenges and rewards of book publishing. Scribners has had more than its fair share of famous authors, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, J.M. Barrie, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, the aforementioned triumvirate of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, to Charles Lindbergh and P.D. James. Scribner shares personal stories about many of these authors, passed down from his father and grandfather.  

I knew I would enjoy reading this book when I read Charles’ description of Henry James: “James is a difficult author to read—beyond my patience—but of towering importance to the history of literature.” (p.29) My sentiments exactly.  

Charles Scribner III is a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, as am I, and I found his paragraph about Fitzgerald to be an excellent summary of Fitzgerald’s brilliance: 

“There is something magical about Fitzgerald...the real magic lies embedded in the prose, and reveals itself in his amazing range and versatility. Each novel or story partakes of its creator’s poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuoso and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald’s hallmark: the indelible stamp of grace. He is my literary candidate to stand beside the demigods Bernini, Rubens, and Mozart as artists of divine transfigurations.” (p.45)  

Needless to say, I concur with Scribner’s assessment of Fitzgerald. There is indeed a magic that surrounds his sparkling prose. Scribner also aptly describes Fitzgerald’s duality: “Just as his life bridged two centuries, so does his work have a Janus-like aspect, looking back to the Romantic lyricism and epic dreams of nineteenth-century America and forward to the syncopated jazz of the twentieth.” (p.43)  

Thanks to his family connections, Scribner provides us with a portrait of Ernest Hemingway that allows us a glimpse at another side of this literary legend. Scribner quotes from the moving letter that Hemingway wrote to his father after his grandfather’s death. Hemingway called Charles’s grandfather “the best and closest friend that I had.” Shortly before Hemingway’s own death, he entrusted Charles’s father with his last will and testament, a tribute that speaks volumes about the close relationship between the author and his publisher.  

There are other fascinating tidbits as well: Charles’s father considered Charles Lindbergh “the fussiest author he ever had to deal with.” (p.97) Lindbergh was so controlling that he measured the space around punctuation marks! Although I guess that isn’t too surprising, given Lindbergh’s notorious attention to detail. When he was preparing for his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh trimmed all of the white space off of his maps and papers, in an effort to save as much weight as possible.  

Throughout the book, one feels something of the sense of obligation and duty that the Scribner family did to keep the publishing house going. There’s an admirable lack of ego that runs through all 5 of the Charles Scribner’s, and the other Scribners who led the firm. Charles Scribner II had a deep disdain for “the vertical pronoun,” as he called it, once circling all the capital I’s on a memo. (p.31)  

Charles’s father is an excellent example of putting family duty over personal glory. A brilliant academic, he had to turn away from academia when the family business needed him after World War II. Ultimately, he turned his commitment to scholarly work into editing many of the reference works that Scribner’s published during his leadership.  

Charles’s father is also the source of two of my own favorite quotations from the book: “You can always tell a moral question because it makes you feel so rotten.” (p.100) And his bon mot when author James Jones left Scribners for another publisher: “My disappointment is under control.” (p.117) 

We also learn from Charles that his piano playing skills might have contributed to Scottie Fitzgerald’s decision to keep Scribner’s as the publisher of her father’s works. In the late 1970’s, thanks to changes in copyright laws, Scottie and her adviser, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, were looking at the possibility of changing publishers. When Scottie arrived at the Scribner’s office for a meeting with Charles and his father, she saw the piano in Charles’s office and asked him to play her something. He played his favorite Chopin waltz. “Halfway through it, I had the chilling thought that Fitzgerald’s future at Scribners might depend on this waltz.” After Charles finished playing, Scottie sighed and said, “It’s all so romantic.” (p.153) And so the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald remained with Scribners, his only publisher in the United States.  

Scribners Five Generations in Publishing is a lovely testament to books and literature, and it is a reminder of a bygone era, when a book publisher made decisions based not just on how many units they could sell, but on the talent of young, unproven authors. If you love the world of books, you’ll enjoy Scribners Five Generations in Publishing.