Not everyone involved with books shares Korda's enthusiasm, of course. The power that TV wields--an endorsement by Oprah Winfrey is probably the industry's most sought-after prize today--means that a potential author's telegenicity is factored into how much a publisher is willing to pay for a book, or whether a house is willing to gamble on it at all.

It isn't television, however, but the shift in ownership structure that has brought about the most profound change. The sixties was a time for revolution in many things, and book publishing was not exempt. When longstanding differences among Alfred and Blanche Knopf and the heir apparent, their son Pat, boiled over and caused the latter to leave the family firm and start Atheneum, the Knopfs stunned the publishing world by selling their jewel to Cerf and Klopfer's Random House in 1960 (just as, some three decades later, the simmering disagreement between Roger Straus père et fils produced a similar result, sending Farrar, Straus & Giroux into the German von Holtzbrinck family's hands). Most recently, it was the desire of Ingram family members to sell the family firm to Barnes & Noble that generated headlines, a deal that was scotched after reports leaked out that staff at the Federal Trade Commission saw potential antitrust violations in the concentration of so much bookselling power in one vertically integrated place.

Back in the sixties, publisher-owners like Cerf and Klopfer began to worry about the tax implications for their families if they should die, and they also recognized the need for greater capitalization. At the same time, Wall Street discovered book publishing, just as large media corporations like RCA, CBS and MCA discovered the word "synergy." They were followed by the conglomerates, wanting not synergy but "diversification." Then, in the current era, the more focused "synergy" of mega-entertainment/infotainment business clusterings such as those under the Viacom or Time Warner or News Corporation or Disney umbrellas came into vogue.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, the marriages were arranged and consummated, the money was made and the inevitability of the future divorces was the writing on the wall. In the eighties, a whole new series of mergers and acquisitions were brokered, some involving fallout from the previous ill-considered couplings; the nineties have only brought more.

Somewhere along the way, foreign buyers got in on the act--Robert Maxwell bought Scribner, Atheneum, the Free Press and Macmillan (until his going down in flames sent them into the S&S orbit); Rupert Murdoch (now an American citizen, lest we forget!) bought Harper & Row; Viking and later Putnam came into the fold of the British company Pearson; the von Holtzbrincks bought Holt, St. Martin's (previously owned by the Brits anyway) and FSG; and Bertelsmann bought Bantam, then Doubleday and Dell, then finally Random House. The last, of course, had been taken public by Cerf and Klopfer and then sold to RCA, which in turn sold it to Condé Nast magnate S.I. Newhouse and his family, thence to Bertelsmann. Ironically, under both Newhouse and Bertelsmann, the publishing houses can claim to be "family owned"--but the bureaucratic layers of a huge corporation have been interposed between book and owner.

Korda, at times hilariously, describes life under S&S's first conglomerate owner, Gulf + Western, and its manic and autocratic CEO, Charles Bluhdorn. (Not surprisingly, though, he keeps mum about current owner Viacom.) The deal with Bluhdorn was orchestrated by Snyder to prevent S&S from going into other (for him less desirable) hands. Once within G + W, whose method, like so many others, was to grow by agglomerating more and more companies so quickly that the banks didn't notice the whole scheme was being funded on debt, Snyder realized that in order to keep up with what was happening across town at archrival Random House, he needed to go on a buying spree himself.

At Random House, Pantheon, Knopf, Vintage and "Little Random" had been joined by Ballantine, Fawcett, Times Books, Villard, Crown, Clarkson Potter, Harmony and major British houses, all under the Newhouse family. S&S wanted to go one better. With the consent of Martin Davis, who succeeded Bluhdorn as Gulf + Western CEO (and changed the corporation's name to Paramount, after the Hollywood studio it also owned), Snyder set about making S&S (unhappily for a time renamed Paramount Publishing) into a huge educational as well as trade book publisher. The die was cast when he spent $700 million to buy Prentice-Hall in 1987.

But when S&S passed into Viacom's hands, the "synergy," seemingly, no longer worked--if it ever had. Korda tells us that S&S had grown from an $11 million US company to a $5 billion global corporation under Snyder's stewardship. But Viacom saw things differently: It sold off the educational units and unceremoniously ousted Snyder in the process.

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