Recently I devoured the memoir Avid Reader: A Life, by the legendary American editor and publisher of the late 20th century Robert Gottlieb. It contains the warning that “all editors’ memoirs basically come down to the same thing: ‘So I said to him, “Leo! Don’t just do war! Do peace too!” ’ ”
“Naturally, it’s one’s successes one tends to remember—as with Leo,” Gottlieb ruefully concludes. But in his own case the successes include books such as Catch-22, and The Chosen, and True Grit, and the authors Gottlieb edited range from Toni Morrison to John Cheever, from John le Carré to Barbara Tuchman, and from Miss Piggy to Bill Clinton. These books, and the others he published with enthusiasm, sold millions of copies, often with initial print runs of hundreds of thousands.
Yet I am...
Doug Gibson, after a career in publishing that ran from 1968 to 2007 and involved being the head of Macmillan of Canada and McClelland & Stewart, skipped from the quiet role of editor and publisher into the loud one of shameless author. He has written two books, Stories about Storytellers (ECW Press, 2011) and Across Canada by Story: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure (ECW Press, 2015). He has given more than 160 performances of these two books, and is preparing to tour with a new sesquicentennial show entitled “Canada’s Greatest Storytellers, 1867–2017.”
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