The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,19

supposed he could have tried to find some pulpy, less-esteemed publishing house, but after one literary agent’s particularly savage assessment, he just gave up.

“Which agent?” I asked.

“Geoffrey Olden,” said Roth.

“What did he tell you?” I wondered if Olden had been as nasty with Roth as he had been with me.

“Something characteristically imperious, unctuous, and snide,” said Roth.

When Jed Roth began sending his manuscript around, the Olden Literary Agency was brand-new, Geoff Olden having just left the venerable Sterling Lord Literistic to form his own agency. Olden was not yet thirty and had only half a dozen clients but already had the attitude of someone who had been in the business for decades. Olden invited Roth to his Soho office, an invitation that Roth foolishly mistook to mean that Olden was interested in his work. Sitting behind his desk, Olden crossed his hands over Roth’s manuscript, studied Roth through his eckleburgs, and said that “no serious house in New York would ever consider publishing this in its current form,” and that there was only one way any publisher at all would consider doing so.

Which way was that? Roth asked.

“If every word of it was true,” said Olden. He smirked, then slid the manuscript across his desk back to Roth.

“Jackass,” I said.

Roth put the manuscript in a drawer, deciding that he had no future as a writer, that his ideas were too hackneyed and unliterary. He still loved books, but he would no longer fantasize about writing them. From time to time, he might think back to the Blom Library and those strange characters he had seen there, but when he did, he would no longer wonder What if? He’d leave that question to people with more talent and imagination.

Instead, he became an editor, worked his way up the ladder at Merrill Books, a fixture of New York publishing since the early 1950s when James Merrill, Sr., founded it. James Jr., who was in charge when Jed Roth started working there had been an undergraduate at Yale during Merrill Books’s early days, when it was primarily an old boys’ operation, redolent of bourbon, cigars, and exclusive East Side clubs where men swam naked and discussed Great Ideas in steam rooms. Younger, energetic editors toiled for aristocratic elder statesmen and the occasional elder stateswoman. In the late 1970s, after Merrill Sr. stepped down and his son took over, the publisher maintained its prestige and also most of its previous editors. James Sr. kept an office where he penned his exceedingly honest and exceedingly uninteresting memoirs. The differences between Merrill Books, Sr., and Merrill Books, Jr., were predominantly ones of style. A somber, studious, and grubby downtown office became a slick midtown one located on a high floor of a steel-and-glass office building on Seventh Avenue.

Roth started at Merrill Books by opening mail, making coffee, answering phones, and getting called “Young Man” or “Boy” by Merrill Jr., who seemed to think that being called by name was a privilege his employees had to earn. Roth was passed over for promotions in favor of younger assistants, those with family connections or those who happened to be sleeping with one of Merrill’s editors. Still, Roth persisted with a furious intensity and certainty of purpose, dutifully carrying out tasks that the other assistants considered themselves above. After senior editor Ellen Curl performed her annual ritual of firing her assistant, Roth applied for the position, and when he got it, did absolutely everything asked of him without complaint, working nights and weekends; went without sleep so he could read manuscript submissions; wrote detailed coverages; offered recommendations for or against publication that were remarkably canny. He lasted longer at this position than any assistant Ellen Curl ever had. Of all his talents, most useful was knowing the sorts of manuscripts Merrill Books wanted, not always the most entertaining books, not usually the ones Roth enjoyed reading, but ones that maintained the publisher’s reputation. Soon, he began to acquire his own books, and although few were great financial or literary successes, most made a modest amount of money, and Roth enjoyed the cachet that came with being a respected editor at a respectable publishing house.

But after James Merrill, Sr., died, and other veteran editors including Ellen Curl began retiring, James Merrill, Jr., became more concerned with maintaining a financial legacy for his own children, fuckups the lot of them, than the literary prestige of the company his father had built. He severely reduced the number of books Merrill was publishing