Jason Epstein, Editor and Publishing Innovator, Is Dead at 93

The first issue of The New York Review of Books, dated Feb. 1, 1963, was star-studded. There were articles by Dwight Macdonald (reviewing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), Mary McCarthy (on William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”), Philip Rahv (on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Susan Sontag (on Simone Weil), Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, Ms. Hardwick and Mr. Epstein. There were poems by Mr. Lowell, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren.

An Immediate Literary Success

The Review, appearing twice a month, was an immediate success, thanks in part to Mr. Epstein’s foresight in sending bundles of free copies to college bookstores around the country. When the strike ended in March after 114 days (helping to kill off four New York dailies), Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers decided to keep The Review going. It is still going.

A decade earlier, Mr. Epstein had been an editorial trainee at Doubleday Company, freshly laureled with a master’s degree from Columbia and given to spending hours at the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, when he hit upon an idea: If expensive hard-bound classics were made available as inexpensive paperbacks, an expanding postwar university population might form a profitable market for them. He raised his idea with Doubleday’s editor in chief, Ken McCormick, as they were walking across Central Park, and in 1953 Mr. McCormick gave him the go-ahead to start such a line of paperbacks, calling it Anchor Books.

Mr. Epstein, just 25 at the time, enlisted artist friends like Edward Gorey to design covers, and Anchor soon began churning out titles: D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature,” Edmund Wilson’s “To the Finland Station,” Francis Fergusson’s “The Idea of a Theater,” Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/books/jason-epstein-dead.html