'Everyone Believes He or She Could Write a Book'

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and editors, and presumably readers, find interesting and important? Taste is notoriously transient. Most of it is rooted in fashion and peer pressure, what other folks like.The July 14, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, published seventy years ago, opens with the “Trade Winds” column of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971). As a kid, I knew him as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? Later I learned he was cofounder of Random House, publisher of the Modern Library I relied on for my education. Cerf published Faulkner, John O’Hara and Whitaker Chambers’ Witness. We can blame him for publishing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cerf’s column is feeble stuff: “Hard-pressed publishers have come up with a lucrative and relatively new gimmick in recent months: histories of great corporations, financed by the corporations themselves. The publishers usually supply the…