No One Knows What They’re Doing

It’s 2015. I’m an executive art director at Penguin Young Readers. I’m sitting in the corner office of my new boss, the recently-hired associate publisher. Let’s call him “Dee”. Dee’s windows face south and east. It’s a hell of a view of lower Manhattan. Dee asks me, “Do you know what an associate publisher does?”

It wasn’t rhetorical.

Before Dee showed up, I reported to the president and publisher of our imprint. Let’s call him, “Rocky”. Rocky was fine. Not great. Decent, most of the time. He was handed the job, out of the blue, by the former president of Penguin, Don Weisberg. Rocky would often share how much he cried in those first few months because, as he said, “I had no idea what I was doing.”

On occasion, he was a touch inappropriate and immature. He once referred to my design team as “Giuseppe and his ladies.” He dragged out the word, ladies. Laaadieeesss.

After Rocky and I met with Giada De Laurentiis in 2013, all he wanted to do was talk about the fact that her dress barely covered her breasts and buttocks. It wasn’t sexual, per se (he was gay). It was more like, “Did you see that?!?”

Rocky had a short fuse. Huge chip on his shoulder. A bit of a braggart. He kept bringing up his tight relationship with “Jo” (J.K. Rowling) during his time as Scholastic’s marketing whatever. As if the success of Harry Potter had something to do with him.

He took offense at the drop of a hat. In 2011, librarian extraordinaire, Betsy Bird, made a disrespectful remark about our imprint’s books, while making a complimentary remark about the mustache of one of our editors. In response, Rocky ordered us to build a six-foot-long foam-core mustache. We all signed it, and sent it to her. Betsy and I talked about what she did with the mustache on The Illustration Department Podcast.

I asked him once if he kept in touch with coworkers after they left. He said, and I quote word for word, “No. Once they leave here, they’re dead to me.”

My performance reviews with Rocky were good, thank you very much. He did credit me for turning the imprint around from “crap mass” to award-winning.

Side note: “Trade” books were often seen as the slicker, sexier, fancier children’s books. They got the attention, the shelf space, the marketing money, the awards. “Mass” books were the more affordable kids’ books—paperbacks, sticker and activity, chapter books, etc.—you’d find at the grocery store, or discount chain store, or on spinner racks at the independent shops. They were cheap, disposable, less than. These days, the trade/mass line is blurring more and more.

Rocky marveled, yes marveled, at my management prowess. Folks in publishing tend to be… dramatic, disorganized. My design team and I were so buttoned up (a phrase my old boss used to say, a lot), that Penguin Random House exempted us from a corporate-wide initiative to use a god-awful, third-party, desktop program that was supposed to “improve routing and approval workflow.” We explained our process to them, and they said, “Okay. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Rocky’s approach to publishing books was cloaked in cynicism and pride. Still, he was fine. The man he hired to be my brand new boss, the associate publisher, was decidedly not fine. Dee was much, much worse.