In fact it passed most of us by, probably because we were looking in the wrong direction.In October 1959, a revolution of sorts had occurred when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public at $11.25 a share (it rose to $14 the next day and was soon selling for $45), setting off a boom in publishing stocks that quickly drew other companies, including S&S, into the stock market. It is probably coincidental (though ironic) that the moment when book publishing became the darling of Wall Street, ushering in a long period of mergers and acquisitions which is not yet over nearly forty years later, began with the death of Dick Simon.Dick Simon, The New York Times noted with a rare touch of irony in its obituary of him, had persuaded a Reader’s Digest writer to turn an article of his into a book called Sudden Death and How to Avoid It, sold over 260,000 copies of it, and was now dead himself at the age of sixty-one. The age of the entrepreneurial publisher, whose drive and personal taste was enough to make a publishing house grow and thrive, was over.Dick was, in fact, a victim of the same forces that had persuaded Cerf and Klopfer to turn Random House public, a combination of success and undercapitalization that had led Schuster, Simon, and Shimkin to sell S&S to Marshall Field III in 1946.
