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An interview with George M. Nicholson.

Article Excerpt
George M. Nicholson introduced and popularized high-quality paperback publishing for young people in the United States. He ran a number of major houses before launching a new career as an agent, remaining throughout an innovative, knowledgeable, and influential figure in the children's book industry.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: How did you come to work in children's book publishing?

GEORGE M. NICHOLSON: In September 1959, I came to New York on my way to graduate school. Albert Leventhal, the father of a friend of mine, was the president of Artists and Writers Guild, the company [part publisher and part packager, half-owned by Golden Press and half-owned by the Western Printing and Lithographing Company] that published Golden Books. Albert, who played hunches all the time and was very kind to his children's friends, took me to lunch, rather glamorously, at the Rainbow Room, and said: "Ugh! You don't want to be a college professor. I have an opening in our Catholic children's book department. You could start here on Monday." When I blanched, he said, "No, no. I'm not asking if you're a good Catholic, just whether you know about being one." I said I did know, and so the next week I reported for work at Artists and Writers' offices in Rockefeller Center, where for the next five years I did everything under the sun.

LSM: What were your first impressions of publishing?

GMN: I didn't know much about the other houses then, but at Artists and Writers you got a chance to do everything. I cleared permissions, did layout and design, prepared indexes, wrote copy; in other words, I assembled books. One was very conscious of the fact that we weren't publishing great literature, but it was a great training ground. I took the weeklong Western Printing Publishing Course, which was offered by Western to anyone in publishing, as part of which you were taken out to Western's various plants to see full-color presses in operation. You ended up truly understanding how book manufacturing worked. Later, this experience made me realize how little most people at publishing houses knew about the printing process.

In those days there was a massive gulf between so-called mass-market publishing and so-called trade publishing. Both terms were really misnomers: mass market because it's a distribution term--it doesn't necessarily characterize the content of the book at all, but simply refers to the sale of books in nonbook outlets; and trade because the trade houses then largely sold their children's books to school and public libraries, not through the retail trade. Because Artists and Writers was a mass-market house, most of the books I worked on were never reviewed. Yet remarkable work was being done there. From its beginnings in the early 1940s, Golden Books had been an attempt to make better books available to every child. They were child-oriented, brightly packaged, very cheap, and they were everywhere.

LSM: What books did you work on at Artists and Writers?

GMN: The Catholic books were pretty frightful. There were pop-up books on the Mass. Little prayer books. To my hideous embarrassment, I was credited as the anthologist of The Catholic Children's Book of Verse. Every so often I would have to go up to Yonkers to get the bishop's imprimatur. That was fascinating! The imprint was called Guild Press Books. After a few years, Artists and Writers sold it off.

The first time I got really interested in children's literature was while working on a project with Science Research Associates, who were producing books for schools and asked Artists and Writers to do all the editorial work. For a year I went back and forth between New York and Chicago to work on these seventy-two individual booklets, written at different grade levels, which were sold as a boxed set. Artists and Writers made...

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