“I’ve got the name for our publishing operation. We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.” So recounts Bennett Cerf in this wonderfully amusing memoir of the making of a great publishing house. An incomparable raconteur, possessed of an irrepressible wit and an abiding love of books and authors, Cerf brilliantly evokes the heady days of Random House’s first decades. Part of the vanguard of young New York publishers who revolutionized the book business in the 1920s and ’30s, Cerf helped usher in publishing’s golden age. Cerf was a true personality, whose other pursuits (columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio host, collector of jokes and anecdotes, perennial judge of the Miss America pageant, and panelist on What’s My Line?) helped shape his reputation as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm and brought unprecedented attention to his company and to his authors. At once a rare behind-the-scenes account of book publishing and a fascinating portrait of four decades’ worth of legendary authors, from James Joyce and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty, At Random is a feast for bibliophiles and anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on inside a publishing house.

Bruce Manning Metzger's memoirs trace his life from his childhood in the Pennsylvania Dutch country and his student years at Princeton through his distinguished career of teaching, writing, lecturing, and editing. Professor Metzger's work has won him the gratitude of both biblical scholars and the larger Bible-reading public. His text-critical work on the New Testament is reflected in the standard Greek text now used and appreciated by scholars worldwide. His efforts on the Revised Standard and New Revised Standard versions of the Bible helped produce the readable, accurate English translations used for study and devotion by so many. His work on The Reader's Digest Bible and The Oxford Companion to the Bible has made the Bible more accessible for an untold number of readers. In these memoirs, Professor Metzger's own words put a human face on his monumental scholarly achievements. The wide array of stories and vignettes--from Senator Joseph McCarthy's attack on RSV committee members and Metzger's audiences with the pope to the time Professor Metzger and other members of the NRSV committee had to crawl out of a library window to get to their dinner--offer the reader a personal insight into some of the twentieth century's crucial developments in the text and translation of the Bible.