I Inherited a Publishing House
The will was probated, the paperwork complete. It was all official; I’d inherited a publishing house.
I was hardly ecstatic knowing that, with computer technology, more and more books were being birthed annually. Nearly 400,000 new titles were self-published in 2012, according to R.R. Bowker. The figure represents a 59 percent increase over 2011.
The publishing house was left to me by my friend and co-author, Frances Diane Robotti, who died at 93. It is called Fountainhead. Haven’t heard of it? It closed its doors in 1976, probably before many current editors at Hyperion and Penguin could ride a bike. Fountainhead (FH) was established in 1960 (a year when 15,000 books were published, according to Bowker) in New York City and put out 2-3 titles per year, none bestsellers. Among them: Crucial Moments of the Civil War by Willard Webb; The Gift of Laughter and Nineteen Other Short Stories by Alice Maxwell; and Fairy-Lamps: Evening’s Glow of Yesteryear by Amelia MacSwiggan. A fairy-lamp is a candle with a colorful glass dome that gives off a twinkling light. They were popular in the late 19th century and today are collector’s items. For more info, check out http://www.fairy-lamp.com/Fairylamp/FairyLamp.html, a site run by the Fairy Lamp Club, which has 150 members nationwide.
Frances had been married to the late Peter Robotti, a restaurateur who owned an elegant Midtown restaurant called Le Chateau Richelieu that opened its doors in the 1930s. She served as hostess. Through the years she got to know titans of business, entertainers, politicians, and publishing-world types such as Blanche Knopf and Bennett Cerf. She also knew the author Thomas Wolfe, who would drink Cointreau and order spaghetti, made especially for him. Frances liked him. She told me, “Unlike so many writers you hear of, he paid his tab.”
Frances started FH because she wanted a limelight to match her husband’s. On one of my early visits to her apartment in Midtown Manhattan, she showed me some FH books. They were beautifully bound and nicely illustrated. She made it clear that she hadn’t gone into the business to make money. She had a B.A. in English from Hunter College, loved to read, and relished publishing on topics that interested her and her friends. FH created a buzz for the Richelieu, too, as most books received a kick-off party at the restaurant.
She had a partner, Rose Portugal, about whom she didn’t say much, except to tell me that she never forgave her for missing the opportunity to have the famous American composer Virgil Thompson write a preface to a book on music. “The old bastard wanted $500,” Rose told Frances. “I told him to forget it.”
After FH closed its doors in 1976, followed by the restaurant in 1983, Frances must have felt a little desperate that her invigorating life with had dried up. On one occasion, she sent me an obit from the New York Times about a well-known literary agent. In the margin, she wrote: “We went to the same dentist.”
But Frances was no social butterfly. She was a serious writer and something of a pioneer. In 1948, she published Chronicles of Old Salem (Newcomb & Gauss), an historical primer on the famous Massachusetts town. A few years later, she came out with Whaling and Old Salem (Bonanza Books) also to favorable reviews. It was an era when writing history books – let alone on the topic of whaling – was a male dominated field. Her Jewish background presented another hurdle to opening doors, but her charm gained her acceptance into circle of WASP historians and spinster librarians. These books were followed by several co-authored with her husband on cuisine, including French Cooking in the New World (Doubleday, 1967), whose chapters on Creole cuisine appeared long before Paul Prudhomme came on the scene.
In the early 1990s, she hired me to co-author The USS Essex and the Birth of the American Navy (Adams, 1999), the tale of a Salem-built warship that sailed in the same era as the better-known USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides.” In the six years required to write our book, Frances and I spoke by phone less than a dozen times. She considered phone calls an intrusion and wasn’t about to take up email. Instead, we met twice a year for long dinners and corresponded by U.S. mail. Sometimes I received two or three letters a day, typed on her electric Smith-Corona, critiquing chapters, discussing marketing, and suggesting names of people who might write us a preface.
Frances was a woman of great generosity and sometimes-great illusions. In the years before her death, she told me she was trying to sell FH for $50,000. I should clarify: She was selling sell rights to the books because nothing else remained of FH: no typewriters, file cabinets, contracts, or records of any sort. The only physical evidence was an embosser that crimped the official FH symbol into official documents. I helped her prepare a press kit. I thought the price was too high, but kept my mouth shut.
When I learned, upon her death in 2003, that she’d left me FH in her will, I was touched, but also a little miffed that she’d invited me to carry on the illusion. I didn’t even know whether I wanted the company. I asked the estate attorney to make sure there were no liens against the house. FH was clean. Who would want to sue FH, anyway? As for the owning the book rights, I had to consult an intellectual property professor at Columbia Law School, where I’d worked at the time. (I held rights to some, but not all of the titles.)
This is the way things stand a decade later. I figure better to have a latent publishing house than no house at all. Who knows when fairy-lamps night make a comeback? Besides, I’m honored she’d name me FH’s caretaker.
After Frances died, I went to her apartment to help her lawyer look through some papers. He called me into a second bedroom, pointed to a dusty box, and said, “There’s some unpublished Fountainhead manuscripts in there. You want’em?”
I spent an hour sifting through them. One was a history of vinegar. No bestsellers that I could see but, with the spirit of Frances hovering over my shoulder, I took them.
