Book Club

I am a fan of memoirs about publishing. For close to forty years, I have enjoyed reading them, and I still find them fascinating. The first two I read were Sir Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing and, later, The Truth about a Publisher. Sir Stanley was famous for publishing Bertrand Russell and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but my reason for reading him was that I had just lied my way into a very junior job at a British company that didn’t believe in hiring people with no experience. I was desperate enough and hungry enough to embellish my resumé; I was fairly sure they wouldn’t bother checking with Whitcombe & Tombs in New Zealand to confirm whether I had worked there as a junior copy editor or, as was the actual case, a junior bookstore clerk.

The best memoirs provide insights into an era and the people, including the author, who made it memorable. Some, like Michael Korda’s highly entertaining Another Life, give you...