In the first part of this article, published in the March/April 2024 issue of the magazine, I told some stories about how my formal education at Denison University and the University of Chicago influenced my publishing career. In this part, I will delve into my time at Northwestern University teaching in the English department, my first published book, the early years of Chicago Review Press, and my sidestep into real estate.

Northwestern University

When my scholarship at the University of Chicago was about to end, I had to start the frightening process of writing job application letters to colleges and universities. I was invited to interview at two quite good schools and might have landed a job at one or the other, but out of nowhere the chairman of the English department at U of C called me into his office and told me that he could arrange a three-year instructorship for me in the English department at Northwestern University. This was not a tenure-track position, but it would give me time to polish up my dissertation and allow me to gain some skill as a teacher. 

Northwestern was a great place to learn how to teach. I taught three courses every semester, one of which was always an English major core course—Victorian Lit, American Lit, or Contemporary Lit—and also creative writing and poetry classes. The fact that I had never taught a class at any level did not strike anyone in the English department as a problem. One of the oddest things about training to be a college professor is that there is never even a single required class in a PhD program that teaches you how to teach. You just sink or swim.

The students gave me good reviews, but I was slowly getting it through my head that a successful academic career at a good school was not about teaching at all. No amount of brilliant teaching would ever get you tenure. It really was “publish or perish.”

But it was the teaching that I thought was valuable and interesting. The emphasis on academic publishing might have been attractive to me if the literary criticism then being published was any good, but it wasn’t. The “New Criticism” was then still hanging on. This approach specified that a literary text had to be put on a pedestal and admired for its structural coherence and purity as a unique, autonomous, aesthetic object. Historical context, culture, or God knows anything having to do with the author’s life could not be admitted into this sort of analysis. Why would I want to do that sort of writing?

My next career step was to publish a couple of books out of the back room of the bookstore. I got permission from the University of Chicago to use Chicago Review Press Inc. for my company name, not wanting to go into the book business with no credibility at all. For material to publish, I relied on some of my old author contacts at Chicago Review Magazine. The first book I published was Prairie State Blues, a wonderful collection of very moody and poetical cartoon strips. 

I took copies of Prairie State Blues around to the local booksellers and talked a few into putting a copy or two onto their shelves on consignment. A few copies did sell, but the main excitement for me was to hold this first book in my hands, a tangible object, a product, a beginning of something. A few years ago, I got a phone call from a graduate student who was doing his dissertation on a new and suddenly popular genre called the graphic novel. I was delighted to be told by him that Prairie State Blues was the first graphic novel ever published in America.

Then I tried publishing some poetry, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan Foundation. It was very good poetry, and the books received excellent reviews and even some awards, but none of the booksellers would touch it on any terms. Moreover, it turned out that applying for grants was time-consuming and very dull work.

Finally, I had an epiphany. What could I publish that would be sure to command some shelf space in the bookstores? The answer was a book that offered inside information for young people about living in Chicago. I knew some very clever young people who were deeply engaged in the local scene. Out of this train of thought came Sweet Home Chicago, a hip guide to the city that was a big success from the beginning. It finally went through something like 10 editions over 20 years. For the first couple of editions, I was hip enough to write some of the content myself. For later editions, I had to hire the hip.

This book was followed by a whole series of Chicago guidebooks. Guides to restaurants, stores, places to live, and home remodeling, to name just a few. In 1976, I sold the bookstore and opened a small shabby office in downtown Chicago that I shared with two author agents. Our warehouse was on one floor of the coffin factory across the street. My wife Linda came to work at CRP as editor-in-chief. She turned out to be a brilliant editor. She could take a flaccid page of prose and with three surgical changes make it sing. 

Well, we were in business—or perhaps only “sort of” in business. There were about 10 years of putting in a lot of sweat equity before we were able to a take a meaningful salary out of the company. However, book sales grew steadily, and I did not have to put additional capital into the business. We were able to reach a distribution agreement with a small but high-quality local publisher who had a sales force of commissioned reps that visited most of the bookstores in the US. For Chicago Review Press to have a national sales force was a major step up. 

But at this point this company that was distributing our titles got into financial trouble and stopped paying us. We sued to get paid, and they dropped our list. How were we going to get our books to market? I called Jerry Stroud, the head of the commissioned rep group that had been selling our list in the Midwest territory. Jerry was a phenomenon. At the big national book show you would hear a dozen high-pitched voices calling out “Jerrrey, Jerrrey,” and he would march down the aisle between the book displays leading a pack of young editorial women and grinning like a movie star. He could sell anything to anybody.

I asked Jerry if he would sell my list directly into his territory. I remember every word of his answer: “Of course not. Your list is much too small. Except I will because I like you, and I think you have a chance to make a go of it.” I asked, “What will I do about selling the rest of the country?” He said, “I’ll make some calls.” An hour or so later, he gave me the names of the other rep groups he had talked into selling my books. Each group was the best in its own territory, and I had the whole country covered.

Another important event in the company’s early history was the publication of The Home Invaders, an autobiography by a jewelry thief named Frank Hohimer who worked for the Mafia. Some hundreds of pages written in longhand on yellow legal pads showed up in my inbox. The return address was a maximum-security prison in Illinois. The text was very crudely written but full of fascinating detail. The mob extracted information from insurance companies about where the most valuable jewelry could be found and shared it with Hohimer in exchange for a piece of the action. In his account, he vividly described numerous actual home invasions and gave detailed accounts about how he broke into seemingly very secure places. Who knew that some insurance agents worked with the Mafia? And do you know that it is easy to open a locked sliding glass door? All you need is a shovel and the right technique.

I sat down at my typewriter with the manuscript and began a sort of translation on the fly, beginning with the first sentence. As I typed along, I fixed up the grammar and spelling, provided transitions where needed (a few of them invented by me out of whole cloth), and sharpened up some descriptions. But I made a very big point of not losing this unique author’s voice by cleaning up his prose too much. The book sold quite well, there was a mass market edition published by Playboy, and then Michael Mann, the very hot producer of the new “Miami Vice” TV show, bought the rights to make his first movie, “Thief,” starring Tuesday Weld and James Caan. “This publishing gig is pretty easy,” I told my little staff, “We publish books and movie makers send us big checks.” 

It did not, however, quite work out that way. We subsequently sold movie rights half a dozen times, but we have never had another movie actually made from one of our books. Just after The Home Invaders was published, I was invited out to lunch by a fellow whom I could see at first glance was a mafia guy. He asked me a few questions about the sources for the book, quickly concluded that a person who looked and talked like me could not possibly be any sort of threat to his interests, paid the bill, and disappeared.

Then my amazing wife and four of her friends wrote a book, The Balancing Act: A Career and a Baby, about the challenges and rewards of combining a demanding professional life with motherhood. In 1976, this was, for many people, a heretical idea. Chicago Review Press published the first edition to good reviews, except for one in MS Magazine that found the book to be elitist because the authors were too well educated. But we only sold a few thousand copies of the first edition. At that point, we did not really know how to promote a book. 

However, in 1982, we brought out a second edition with a better subtitle: Instead of A Career and a Baby, it was now A Career and a Family. And by then we had found a publicist who could book TV appearances for authors. Linda with one of the other authors appeared on “Good Morning America,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” and half a dozen other major shows that interviewed authors. This strong media exposure put Chicago Review Press into a different league in the world of book publishing and sold a lot of copies.

The next Chicago Review Press publication that was of great importance to Chicago Review Press’ growth was a very strong selling, very long-lived, backlist title, the sort of cash cow that all successful publishers must have at some point in their development. The woman who was doing book publicity for us on a freelance basis told me about one of her other customers, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, which created and administered the NCLEX test. Every candidate for a Registered Nursing degree had to pass the NCLEX test to be accredited. Could the National Council author a book that would sell, she asked?

I did some research. There were three very successful titles from major educational publishers that prepared nurses for the NCLEX exam: big expensive texts. I went to the State Boards of Nursing with a very simple idea. I asked them if they had actual questions from past tests that were no longer in use. They said they had lots of them because questions sometimes became public knowledge and had to be replaced with new ones. Give me those old questions, I said, and we will make a practice test book that will tell students whether they are ready to pass the real test and also will give them some guidance as to which areas of nursing they might need to review. We published a thin, inexpensive, but very useful book for nursing students. We sent posters advertising the book to all the nursing schools to put up on their bulletin boards. Over many years, we sold millions of copies in various editions.

A Sidestep into Real Estate

In 1980, a friend and I bought a brick and timber building in a rundown Chicago neighborhood. I needed cheap office and warehouse space; he was running a Tai Chi studio. The building we bought had four floors that totaled about 5,000 square feet. At that time, Chicago had many hundreds of these buildings. They were built at the turn of the 19th century to house light manufacturing businesses. They were constructed with Chicago common bricks, beautiful pink bricks that are still in high demand, and very thick wooden timbers to support their floors and roof. They also had many windows and 12-foot-high ceilings. Most of them, however, were in bad repair or empty. We shoveled the sawdust out of our building and moved in, taking one floor each. 

To our astonishment, we quickly and at a good rate rented the other two floors. Suddenly these derelict buildings were thought to be very cool by certain younger tenants. They were lofts! Then a big brick and timber building across the street from our first one, 120,000 square feet, became available for very little money. I convinced my partner that we should buy it. He persuaded a bank to loan us the funds to renovate the building so long as we agreed to do just one floor at a time to limit their risk. 

We started on the sixth floor. We sandblasted its brick interior walls and timbers, replaced all its windows, and the existing plumbing, heating, and electrical service. It looked great, and we were able to rent the sixth floor even before the work was finished. This allowed us to renovate the rest of the floors very quickly and profitably. I believe my friend and I were the first in Chicago to understand how these brick and timber buildings could be transformed into lofts, and we were able to convert about a dozen more of them before the fad became a trend.

My short career as a real estate developer gave me the capital needed to grow the publishing business quickly. We were able to purchase the assets of quite a few good independent publishing companies and a real warehouse. 

In the final part of this article, I get into the major changes that occurred in the industry in the late 1970s, the microcomputer revolution, IPG after I retired, and more.

---