If you haven’t read the long, fabulous Q&A with legendary editor Pat Strachan in Poets & Writers yet, well, do! It’s full of fascinating, deep-thinky details about the art of editing literary fiction and poetry — Strachan has worked with everyone from Joseph Brodsky to Tom Wolfe — but my favorite parts were about what it was like to work in book publishing back in the day. In case you’re wondering: It was different and better and somewhat more glamorous!
“I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun — the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids — because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.”
Yeah, when was the last time you ‘costumed up’?