In September 1974, I was a newly minted editor in chief at the University of Chicago Press. On my first morning on the job I was invited to have coffee with the press's director, Morris Philipson. We sat in his book-lined office overlooking the Quadrangles. On the wall facing me was a picture of a splendidly mustachioed man.
"Who's that?" I asked. "Alfred," he replied, his voice suggesting I should have known, "Alfred Knopf." Before I knew it, Morris, suddenly animated, began to talk about his old boss, the then-legendary publisher he admired above all others.
I can almost recall his words—Morris, the most articulate of men, spoke in full sentences choosing his words with care. What he admired was Knopf's taste and judgment, the great distinction of the books on his list, and the way Knopf published those books—with care and style, and with a distinctive look that you could recognize at a glance.
I don't know if anyone ever called him "the Alfred Knopf of scholarly publishing," but it fits: Morris Philipson was the Alfred Knopf of the university press world. The press he ran was a reflection of the man, his taste and judgment, his high standards, and his attention to detail. "Publishing," he liked to say, "is made up of countless details, none of them seemingly important, unless forgotten or poorly done." None of us who worked at the university was allowed to forget that.
But that doesn't say it all. Alfred Knopf was a publisher, through and through, and the best of his time. Morris Philipson was something else, something different and perhaps more. He was a scholar and a teacher. Shortly after getting his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, where he studied with Jacques Barzun, he taught at City University of New York's Hunter College and the Juilliard School. And he was a writer.
I read his first novel, a wicked satire called Bourgeois Anonymous. Later I read several of his novels in early drafts, and more than once was secretly pleased to see one of my names attached to one of his characters, or even a little bit of me in one of them. Morris once told me that he wrote "steamy gothics" under a pseudonym. What name?" I asked. He never said. "If you're smart enough," he told me, "you'll figure it out." I never did.
Being a scholar and teacher and a writer as well as an editor and publisher can be a difficult combination, and Morris was a complicated man. But I believe it was one a key to his success. He had, as Laski once said of Asquith, a "fragrant zest for learning."
He knew the academy and was at home in it. Like many Chicago graduates, he had a keen and well-stocked mind, and he knew how to use it. He was a superb reader and a fine writer. When he published many of the finest scholars and writers, he dealt with them as an equal.
Morris trusted his judgment. And this allowed him to take risks. One of his gambles was Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, a semiautobiographical novella about growing up in Montana written by a crusty but beloved professor. It had been turned down by a string of commercial publishers. Chicago had never published fiction. But Morris went ahead and published it, in 1976, because he knew it was good, and because he knew Chicago could do a good job of promoting and selling it. As he said later, "We did more for Norman's book than any commercial publisher would have done." The book sold more than half a million copies. And in 1992 Robert Redford directed the movie.
Morris also encouraged his editors to take chances. As an added exhortation, he ordered a huge wooden sign from a famous brewer in England, and hung it in the editorial department. "Have Courage," it read. I can see it now.
At Chicago, Morris published Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida before they were famous, and Isak Dinesen and André Malraux and Paul Scott when their books went out of print. He did the same for hundreds of young scholars and other writers for 32 years. And he did it with style. Chicago Style.
