Then there was the 353.9-carat rough diamond he picked off a conveyor belt at a South African diamond mine. It was cut into three flawless diamonds, including a 137-carat pear-shaped gem known as the Premier Rose, which sold in 1989 for $10 million, a price many believe was the most ever paid for a diamond, then or possibly ever.
Mr. Goldberg was celebrated for the colors of his diamonds as well as for their size. The rarest are red, and he sold the largest flawless red diamond known, the 5.11-carat Red Shield. His famous Pumpkin gem was a vivid orange and had a finished weight of 5.54 carats.
Laurence Graff, one of the world’s largest diamond dealers, said in an interview that Mr. Goldberg was unusual because he would shave off more of the stone to improve the gem’s appearance, even though a lighter stone fetched a lower price.
“He loved every stone he handled,” Mr. Graff said.
Publishing on Fifth Avenue
What E. P. Dutton Contributed to American Literary Enterprise
By ALLEN SINCLAIR WILL | December 23, 1923
MIDDLE FIFTH AVENUE HAS BECOME THE literary Rialto of America, the grand arena of successes and failures in authorship and publishing, and the dean of a group of daring leaders of the book industry who made it such passed away only recently. Edward Payson Dutton, who died Sept. 6 at the age of nearly 93 years, was a link between a half-forgotten day when Boston held up her queenly head as the mistress of letters on this side of the Atlantic, and these new times when the writer’s door of fame is planted firmly in the rocky soil of Manhattan Island.
Much more than half of the total publishing in the United States and fully 95 percent of the strictly literary publishing is now done in New York City, the largest proportion in this small district. When Mr. Dutton, coming from Boston, set out to realize his ambitions here, this district had none of the character of a great literary mart which it possesses today.
As early as 1874 E. P. Dutton & Co. had printed 700 books. Soon afterward came Mr. Dutton’s first success with a “best seller.” It was characteristic of the kind of books that he preferred to publish that this was Canon (afterward Dean) Farrar’s “Life of Christ.” Other publishers had turned it down on the ground that there were too many works of the same kind on the market. One of them told Mr. Dutton later that it made him heartsick to contemplate his own mistake of judgment.
A Vision for Books That Exults In Happenstance
By DINITIA SMITH | January 13, 2001
IT IS SOMETIMES SAID OF JASON EPSTEIN, the longtime editorial director of Random House now in retirement, that he has had four great ideas in his life.
One: At 22 he invented the high-quality paperback in the form of Anchor Books. Two: In 1963, during the New York newspaper strike, he had the idea for The New York Review of Books. Three: In 1982 he created the Library of America with its definitive editions of American classics, conceived earlier with Edmund Wilson at the Princeton Club while Wilson drank a half-dozen martinis. Four: In 1986 Mr. Epstein invented the Reader’s Catalog to market books directly to readers, a precursor of Amazon.com.
And now, perhaps, Mr. Epstein has a fifth: that the World Wide Web, contrary to gloomy predictions, may be the best thing to happen to literature and book publishing since Gutenberg. While publishers tear their hair out over slender profit margins and worry that the Internet will be the end of books as people know them, Mr. Epstein says he believes that the Web will save the book business, enable books to be published more cheaply, and bring bigger royalties for corporations and authors.
For most of his time in publishing, Mr. Epstein has been part of the intellectual elite that defined the city’s cultural horizons. Looking ahead, he posits a utopian universe in which books will be ordered from the Internet and printed on demand by A.T.M.-like machines, doing away with middlemen and resulting in lower costs for readers.
“There will be no shelf space problem,” he said. “The publisher doesn’t buy paper, order a printing, ship books to retail stores. He doesn’t need a sales force.” In this view Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, unprofitable because their businesses still require middlemen, will become brokers of books.
With the innovations Mr. Epstein foresees on the Web, publishing will become a cottage industry once again. In his vision books will not disappear and neither will bookstores, which will become local shrines, still redolent with the smell of paper and glue.
“I’ve never been wrong about the future of the business,” Mr. Epstein said. “It sounds boastful. But it’s not boastful to tell the truth.”
German Media Giant Will Buy Random House for $1.4 Billion
By DOREEN CARVAJAL | March 24, 1998
BERTELSMANN A.G., THE GERMAN MEDIA conglomerate, struck an estimated $1.4 billion agreement to buy the shiny crown jewel of American publishing, Random House, in a deal that will solidify Bertelsmann’s claim that it is the world’s largest English-language publisher of trade books.
By merging its Bantam Doubleday Dell division with Advance Publications’ Random House, Bertelsmann will increase to 10 percent from nearly 6 percent its share of the $21 billion book market in the United States, which ranges from Bibles to mass-market paperbacks.
Half of the top 20 American publishing houses, with a 28 percent share of the total market in the United States, are now in foreign hands.
The announcement by Bertelsmann executives in Germany surprised executives in the gossipy world of New York publishing. “It’s as if the New York Yankees were sold,” said Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, which represents more than 7,200 published authors. “Our fear is that with this sort of situation they’re going to look for efficiencies and some ways to cut costs.”
Half of the top 20 American publishing houses … are now in foreign hands.
The deal further heightens the power of Bertelsmann, which ranks as the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, behind Walt Disney and Time Warner. It already owns the RCA and Arista record labels, and magazines like McCall’s and Family Circle. In addition, the company recently announced plans to create an online venture to sell books that would challenge the two Internet leaders, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
The secret negotiations for Random House—and its highly desirable backlist of classics by authors from James Joyce to Dr. Seuss—started in mid-November when Bertelsmann’s chief executive-elect, Thomas Middlehoff, approached S. I. Newhouse Jr., the chairman of Advance Publications, during a celebration of his 70th birthday.
For months, Bertelsmann executives had made public their goals to buy an American company to expand into the United States. Mr. Middlehoff, a rising star who will become chief executive in October, had moved temporarily to the United States several months ago to learn more about the American side of Bertelsmann’s publishing operations and to improve his English.
“I came here to study English and instead I bought a company,” joked Mr. Middlehoff, 44.
Editorial: Mr. Pulitzer and The World
May 10, 1908
THE TRANSFORMATION WHICH MR. JOSEPH Pulitzer has wrought in The New York World since it passed into his ownership and control 25 years ago today justifies the ceremonies of rejoicing and commemoration with which our neighbor marks its anniversary. From a newspaper of small circulation and little influence there has been developed by his energy and under his directing mind a great property, one of the chief newspapers of the world, an effective force for right and sound things in public affairs, a salutary influence in the community, a journal that, in the broad lines of its policy and its effort, stands for what right-minded men ought to think and desire, for what good citizens do think and desire. To a multitude of good causes The World has lent and is continually lending its great influence.
To a multitude of good causes The World has lent and is continually lending its great influence.
Mr. Pulitzer has exhibited a veritable creative genius in newspaper making. In a degree quite unusual in journalism, The World is his personal work; it is what
he has sought to make it, what he has with great ability, unsparing labor, and infinite painstaking actually made it. The Times heartily joins in the congratulations he receives today.
The New York Times Introduces A Web Site
By PETER H. LEWIS | January 22, 1996
THE NEW YORK TIMES BEGINS PUBLISHING daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents.
The New York Times on the Web, as the electronic publication is known, contains most of the news and feature articles from the current day’s printed newspaper, classified advertising, reporting that does not appear in the newspaper, and interactive features including the newspaper’s crossword puzzle.
The electronic newspaper (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry, said Martin Nisenholtz, president of The New York Times Electronic Media Company.
The company, formed in 1995 to develop products for the rapidly growing field of digital publishing, is a wholly owned subsidiary of The New York Times Company, and also produces The Times service on America Online Inc.
“Our site is designed to take full advantage of the evolving capabilities offered by the Internet,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times. “We see our role on the Web as being similar to our traditional print role—to act as a thoughtful, unbiased filter and to provide our customers with information they need and can trust.”
With its entry on the Web, The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age and to cut costs for newsprint, delivery and labor. Companies that have established Web-based information sites include television networks, computer companies, online information services, magazines and even individuals creating electronic newspapers of their own.
“The New York Times name will get people to look at the product once or maybe twice, and the fact that The New York Times has the kind of reach and credibility it does may persuade people to look three or four times,” said John F. Kelsey III, president of the Kelsey Group, a consulting firm. “The market is booming for newspapers on the World Wide Web.”
In 1900, Readers in New York Had A Choice of 15 Newspapers
By PHILIP H. DOUGHERTY | August 16, 1966
New York’s top five newspapers have a combined circulation of 5 million copies daily.
IN 1900 THE READING PUBLIC IN NEW YORK had a choice of 15 daily newspapers of general circulation. The list has now dropped to four.
Yesterday The Herald Tribune joined the newspapers relegated to history by mergers and failures—papers such as The Globe, The Commercial Advertiser, The Press, The Sun, The American and The Mirror. During the 66 years there were papers that came and went—The Daily Graphic, 1924–32; The Daily Mirror, 1924–63; PM, 1940–48; The Star, 1948–49; and The Daily Compass, 1949–52. One that came and prospered was The Daily News, founded in 1919.
Twelve of the 15 dailies that were on the newsstands at the turn of the century were represented in last spring’s merger of The Herald Tribune, Hearst’s Journal-American and Scripps Howard’s World-Telegram and The Sun. The other papers on the stands were a five-year-old paper called The Daily News that was to perish in 1905; The Post, founded in 1801 and now the city’s oldest paper; and The New York Times, founded in 1851.
“The most sensational merger in an era of mergers”—that is what Frank Luther Mott in his book “American Journalism” called the 1931 consolidation of Roy W. Howard’s Telegram with Joseph Pulitzer’s World and Evening World. Mr. Pulitzer had died 20 years earlier.
The merger of The Journal and The American in 1937 was an all-Hearst consolidation.
Things were quiet on the merger front until 1950 when The World Telegram took over The Sun, the newspaper that had been made great by Charles A. Dana.
The next newspaper death, and the last until yesterday, was that of Hearst’s morning tabloid, The Mirror, which was bought by The Daily News. The Mirror had had the city’s second-largest circulation after The News. That was in 1963 following the winter of the 114-day newspaper strike.
In Defense of Madison Avenue
By JAMES KELLY | December 23, 1956
LIKE HOLLYWOOD, WALL STREET AND Broadway, Madison Avenue is known by the companies it keeps. Like them also, Madison Avenue has been dreamed about, written about, lied about—and become a label. It is, last of all, a narrow thoroughfare running from 23rd Street to the Harlem River on the east side of Manhattan and peopled during the daylight hours by messenger boys, chic office girls, and level-eyed executives with undented hats and shiny shoes. First of all, it is the accepted capital of a community of 45,000 advertising people (about 25,000 of them in New York City alone) who have been entrusted by hardheaded big and little businessmen with the spending of an estimated $10 billion in 1956. By popular consent, it is the voice, image and brandmark of our own free enterprise. Or by not-so-popular consent.
Madison Avenue these days is under sharp indictment. Advertising is America’s pagan religion, the Account Executive for Indictments says, and it forces a fantastically false way of life through expert use of its own Golden Rule: “We have something to sell and we can make you buy it.” Tantalized and tempted by dreamworld pictures dangled before them, the victims of Madison Avenue have an itchy urge to buy now and pay later. They mortgage their futures in installment buying.
It is shocking (the indictment goes) that nobody seems to care whether an advertising campaign is good or bad for the country. It is all a numbers game, with virtuoso agency men playing the public like a piano. Headlines with a benefit twist, short copy and shorter ideas designed to fit the reader’s attention span, illustrations that people can identify themselves with—the tired old one-two-three pitch for the mass audience.
And here’s that bright new medium, television, operating in exactly the same way. On behalf of a television client, an agency will prepare hard-sell commercials and frame them in an elaborate show supplied full-blown by one of the super-specialist television package companies. And success or failure depends upon how many people saw the show (reported by hocus-pocus ratings), not upon how many enjoyed it. The same success or failure applies to politics as well as products. Madison Avenue sells ideologies and candidates just as it sells soap, in quantity and by advertised brands. All right.
Madison Avenue Likes What It Sees In the Mirror
By STUART ELLIOTT | June 23, 2008
A TELEVISION SERIES ABOUT AN ADVERTISING agency in the 1960s may be generating almost as much buzz on Madison Avenue as the three-martini lunch once did.
The series, “Mad Men,” is inspiring commercials; designer fashions; window displays in department stores; merchandise like cigarette lighters, CDs and calendars; and a mock issue of the trade publication Advertising Age.
The series was even the subject of an $8,000 question on a recent episode of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” asking which business “Mad Men” is about. When a contestant asked the audience for help, 86 percent answered correctly.
The impact of the show is indicative of the constant interplay between advertising and popular culture, which is intensified because of its setting. “Mad Men” tells stories inside a fictitious New York agency, Sterling Cooper, that are about not only how the industry was five decades ago but also meatier subjects like the price of success and how far America has—or has not—come on issues like gender, race and religion.
“It’s a mirror on ourselves from another time,” said John Nuzzi, senior vice president and group director for entertainment at the Los Angeles office of Initiative, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
Lionsgate, which produces “Mad Men,” is sponsoring a make-believe issue of Advertising Age, a 16-page ad section in the actual June 23 issue. The idea was the brainchild of Initiative, the Lionsgate media agency.
The ad supplement is designed to resemble how Advertising Age loo
ked in 1960, when the first season of “Mad Men” is set. One highlight is an imaginary interview with the main character, a conflicted creative director named Don Draper. (The executive producer, Matthew Weiner, provides the answers.)
Interspersed with the faux articles in the ad section, which cover plotlines from “Mad Men” as if they actually happened, there are articles carrying headlines like “How TV Alters U.S. Elections” (after the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race) and “Auto Sales Hitting 6.6 Million” (compared with 16.15 million last year).
Selling New York as the Place to Be
By PHILIP H. DOUGHERTY | June 28, 1977
Looking down onto Madison Avenue from the offices of advertising agency Young & Rubicam.
THE MOST AMBITIOUS AND EXTENSIVE ADVERtising program ever undertaken to make New York State a tourist mecca broke last night on TV in 20 markets in and around the state.
“I love New York,” shouts a woman from West Virginia and men from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, filmed in a variety of beautiful locations by Mike Zingale, director-cameraman. The background music, as a camera zooms around the Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls, Fire Island, Lake Placid, Whiteface Mountain and other scenic spots, is a new song, “I Love New York,” by Steve Karmen.
The State Commerce Department, working with an unprecedented $4.3 million budget, is mounting a five-week media blitz to establish the state in vacationers’ minds as the place to be. Wells, Rich, Greene is the agency.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 34
