Reading for Pleasure was published by Harper & Brothers in 1957 and represents a different facet of Cerf’s literary personality. Where his humor collections were popular entertainment, Reading for Pleasure was a serious anthology — or as serious as Cerf, who never lost his light touch, was capable of being. The book gathers excerpts from novels, short stories, essays, and plays by the writers Cerf most admired, many of them Random House authors whose careers he had personally shaped.
The selections reveal a man of catholic and generous taste. Cerf included passages from William Faulkner (whose The Sound and the Fury he had championed when no other publisher would touch it), Eugene O’Neill (whose plays Random House published for decades), Truman Capote (whom Cerf had signed as a nineteen-year-old), James Thurber, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, and Robert Penn Warren — alongside older writers like Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Edgar Allan Poe. The mix of highbrow and middlebrow was deliberate: Cerf believed that the distinction between literary fiction and popular entertainment was artificial and harmful.
The introductions to each selection are the book’s greatest pleasure. Cerf writes about his authors with the affection and insight of a man who knew them personally, dined with them, edited their manuscripts, and sometimes lent them money. His portrait of Faulkner — taciturn, courtly, occasionally drunk, always brilliant — is more vivid than most full-length biographies. His account of Capote’s emergence as a literary prodigy captures both the excitement and the unease that Capote’s precocious talent provoked.
Reading for Pleasure is the closest thing Cerf wrote to a literary testament — a record of what he valued, what he believed publishing was for, and what books meant to a man who had spent his life making them available to the widest possible audience.
Collecting Reading for Pleasure
First edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1957): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Later editions: $3–$8