But Graydon Carter’s delightful “When The Going Is Good” takes you back.
For ten years, I worked as Books Editor, then VP and Books Director, for O, the Oprah Magazine. At its peak, O featured twenty-plus pages of books coverage in each monthly issue, more if you count author-centric features outside the “Reading Room” section of the magazine. By the time I was hired, “Reading Room” was down to four pages, a few more for the annual “Summer Reading” issue. The magazine industry was on its way to being governed mainly by SEO (with some notable exceptions, like The New Yorker and the Atlantic)—in other words, choosing topics to cover based on how often they were being googled by consumers.
I started my career in publishing at the “Book World” section of The Washington Post in 1976, when the newspaper was in its heyday. Ben Bradlee strode the halls; he and Sally Quinn, who reigned over the Style section, were an item; Katharine Graham, fresh off the paper’s Watergate revelations, presided over it all. …
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