It was a literary trial, but the men were discussing beauty contests. Jeffrey Vernon, a lawyer for the Justice Department, asked Jonathan Karp, the C.E.O. of Simon & Schuster, if book publishers competed for high-demand authors on “non-financial” terms. “Pulchritude,” the executive responded, and Vernon repeated the word back in the form of a question. Karp clarified: “It’s beauty.” “Beauty,” Vernon repeated again. “O.K. I should have guessed that you would have a big vocabulary as the head of a publishing house.”
Vernon’s quip was more cutting than he realized; it is hardly a given in 2023 for the head of a book publisher to be, well, bookish. Once reserved for the prose style of Ernest Hemingway or the open-collar shirts of Farrar, Straus and Giroux co-founder Roger Straus (“to allow his silk ascot to debouch,” per Tom Wolfe), beauty in publishing is now, for the most part, a term for contests over ghostwritten celebrity memoirs.
