The Unpublished Memoir of Simon & Schuster's Co-Founder
The price tag, $5,000, is steep. But given the author and subject matter – “An unpublished look at American publishing history and practice” – someone is bound (pun intended) to snap up the manuscript.
Written in the late 1950s, Fools Give You Reasons is an 84-page marked-up professional memoir from Simon & Schuster co-founder Richard Simon. As Rebecca Rego Barry, who once worked at Simon & Schuster, blogs:
Several of Simon’s contemporaries published memoirs of their lives in books, e.g. The Memoirs of a Publisher by F.N. Doubleday (1972), At Random by Bennett Cerf (1977) and at S&S, Turning the Pages by editor Peter Schwed (1984). Alas, Simon’s manuscript went unpublished, and had been kept in the family until now.
Bookseller James Cummins has posted a sample page from the manuscript’s Foreword. It’s pretty fascinating to enlarge the image of the page and read what Simon had to say about a certain lunch, and the keys to publishing a bestseller.
