Following Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing (2023), Scribner offers 18 essays on literature, art history, and music. It’s easy to settle into them like a lush, comfortable chair. Scribner writes that F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed “more of me than any living author.” Gatsby is “pure fiction and pure Fitzgerald: the hopeful, romantic outsider looking in.” An art historian, Scribner is excellent at discussing The Great Gatsby’s iconic cover painting, Celestial Eyes, by Francis Cugat. Among Scribner’s endearing recollections is an exchange between the author’s father and Ernest Hemingway: “My dad commented that at the age of eighteen months I had taken to pulling out all the books from the bottom shelves at home. Hemingway wrote back, ‘What young Charlie is doing is trying to remove all the dead wood from publishing; make a note of it for his biographers.’” In one chapter, Scribner riffs on the “five best books on family businesses,” among them Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (“the stuttering bookworm Claudius…survived to rule the business next since no one took him seriously enough to murder.”) and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (“A family business need not be legal to thrive.”). In addition to sprightly chapters on singers Mary Costa and Frederica von Stade and masters Michelangelo, Rubens, and Velázquez, Scribner ponders the story behind the making of Bernini’s 17th-century Cristo Vivo. It doesn’t hurt that he was able to buy the sculpture. He writes, “In the dog days of August 1975, a month after starting my first job as an editorial assistant at Scribners, I decided to reward myself extravagantly for my modest paychecks: I bought the Bernini crucifix….I liquidated some savings and arranged to have it shipped to the office. It arrived in a crate that looked like a small coffin, much to the bemusement of my publishing colleagues.”
