Lesley wrote the following, memorializing her dear friend Eirick. Along the way, we learn SO MUCH about Lesley's life and career in publishing.
====================
EIRIK’S CAREER IN PUBLISHING (part 1 of 2)
Born in Bergen, Norway, 2 April, l938
Education: Universities of Bergen, Caen, London and Munich. Major: Philology. Received doctorate from University of Bergen.
1960s: Came to US to teach French at Grinnell College, Iowa. He met Seib Adams, who was working for Doubleday Publishing Co., and he recruited Eirik as a textbook salesman.
1970s: Seib was VP of Holt, Rinehart & Winston’s College Division in the early 70s, and Eirik became the Publisher of Foreign Languages (Spanish, French, German and Italian) with an office in Corte Madera, in 1971 or l972.
by Lesley Walsh
I was looking for a publishing job in January, l974, after teaching political science and history in 2-year colleges since l970. Eirik fired his secretary on January 8, I was sent as an agency temp on January 9; he hired me on January 11.
In January, l976, we moved the Corte Madera office to Holt’s New York office on Madison Avenue. I stayed for three weeks to reorganize the College Department space to fit in the Californians (much to the dismay of the NY people). I was not popular. Someone tried to commandeer Eirik’s nice California filecabinets after I filled them; the radiator pipes in Eirik’s office froze and when they thawed, ruined his carpet; he hired a new secretary who was dyslexic, and left me to train her, while he and Seib went off to a sales meeting. I left NY very gladly after three freezing weeks, inside and out, and went back to SF to look for a new job.
In 1977, I was working at a small publishing house, badly run and nearly broke, when I heard that Eirik was back in California and about to start his own company. I called him immediately, and found out that he was under contract to Random House to create a foreign language list for them. Seib, now VP of the Random House College division, had set up the deal. Eirik had his own California corporation, as of October 12, 1977, funded by Random House. For the first year, minimal funding allowed him to travel and scout for authors while working from his home. I immediately expressed willingness to “moonlight” for him, take care of office chores, etc., at an (extremely!) low hourly rate. I installed an old typewriter in my diningroom, picked up the phone and started calling and mailing to four-year colleges to line up review panels for what we blithely assumed would be our first four books.
On his travels, Eirik met Thalia Dorwick at Sacramento State Univ. She had just been named Foreign Langauge Teacher of the Year for California. He immediately persuaded her to lend a hand in her spare time (!) to comment on manuscripts, etc., and soon to take a leave of absence from SSU in 1979 to see how she liked being a Spanish editor. Eirik also contacted a number of authors we knew from Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and we were soon issuing contracts.
In August, ‘78 I had gallbladder surgery. My recovery was not aided by EB, who made me laugh, causing considerable pain in the first few weeks. When I was able to get around, I still couldn’t drive, so he had to take me to the copy place and the post office, a situation which caused him considerable consternation, since it involved him in doing things he had carefully avoided knowing anything about: practical things, like collating pages, stapling, and sticking on stamps. He kept asking me when I’d be ok again, not necessarily out of sympathy.
When I did recover, it was time to look for an office. All EB’s glamorous office daydreams cost too much, and we started looking at older buildings downtown, near transportation and services like office supplies and post offices, whose necessity EB had now come to recognize. We found four rooms at 703 Market Street, the first steel-framed skyscraper in SF. Built in the l890’s, it had huge windows with wide ledges (no airconditioning, and it took two people to open a window). Each office had a little cupboard with a sink in it, the better to wash ink off your hands. This appealed even to people who hardly knew what ink was….
My career in the SF business world had acquainted me with equipment dealers, the phone company, and every secondhand business furniture store in SF. Random House’s funds were sparse, so I called on my thrifty Norwegian instincts (shared 100% by my boss, of course), and furnished our four rooms for about $750 total. (Thalia was the only beneficiary of a new desk.) I bought my own trilingual IBM electric typewriter, since we couldn’t afford one; aquired a phone system, a handcranked postage meter, a copier, and a coffee maker (the last two lived in my office, of course). We were ready for business, with a sign, “Eirik Borve, Inc.” on my office door. (Not on EB’s door: I was to be receptionist as well as bookkeeper, manuscript typist in five languages, coffee-maker, copy girl, EB’s secretary, and eventually caterer/party organizer/costume maker.)
I had house-hunted in the East Bay for Thalia at EB’s command (“Find her a house with a yard for the dogs and an electric kitchen! But not an expensive house!”). She joined us on opening day, January 2, 1979. We went out for a lavish lunch on Random House, at the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel.
The first manuscript, a Spanish reader from old buddy Ed Mullen of U. Missouri, soon arrived. EB handed it to TD, who asked (reasonably enough) what she was to do with it. He replied, “You edit it.” That was all the job training she received. I gave her a copy of proofreading marks from a book I had, and she was all set to invent her job as she went along. I also changed her typewriter ribbons, acted as fashion consultant for her first road trip (she almost froze to death in her new outfits when she got to New York in February), and brought her lunch in when I went for mine.
Life was full of editorial and financial crises, daily, weekly, and monthly. But we soldiered on, and generally broke each other up laughing, instead of lamenting.
In the first summer, we invited the Spanish and French authors to come out to SF, the better to drag work out of them. Some of them turned out to have "writer's block" which created interesting development problems. In the case of the Spanish book, Thalia had to become a co-author to get a manuscript that we could publish. We all learned that the phrase "It's in the mail!" meant "It's NOT in the mail!!"
Between crises, we played. We had the first (and last) EBI picnic, where we all wore t-shirts with the Publisher's photo on them. Strangers thought he was running for political office. We had our first annual Business Meeting, for which we dressed formally: EB (the corporate president, vice president, secretary, sole stockholder and publisher) wore a suit, and LW wore a suit and hat (which became a tradition). Our corporate attorney, Kate, who was pregnant at the time, received a baby bonnet; fortunately, she had a girl. TD and I presented EB with a gavel, the better to pound the table as he changed titles with himself.
By fall, we had moved beyond hiring my mother as assistant copy person, to a part-time kid from a private academic high school. University High continued to supply copy/mailing kids until we were taken over by Random House in l987. Thus we were guaranteed a modicum of intelligence somewhat above that of the average high school student. At the very least, they were able to read and write. This proved to be an advantage as our publishing chores got more complex.
We also acquired our second editor, Mary Gill, who had worked with EB at Holt. She took over the French list, and also started English as a Second Language, which turned into a 16-book series. Among Mary's tasks was taking me out for walks now and then to talk me out of quitting, when things got a bit too much.
Not that EB was hard to work for—he was merely impossible a good part of the time. A genius at what he did best—planning the list and coaxing people to sign contracts to write the books—practical issues were not his thing. He did what he did, Thalia and I did what we did, and he expected everything to turn out just fine. Fortunately, it usually did.
That included an IRS audit in our third year. We had yet to publish a book, and the IRS somehow thought that was strange. This got EB's attention! Since he had NO Idea how I kept our accounting records, he came rushing to me to ask, and seemed astonished when I produced all kinds of records and back-up material. I went out and bought a book on tax audits to bolster our confidence. EB explained to the nice lady auditor how we could be in business so long without a product or income from same. I produced records in triplicate on demand. The auditor passed us, and the lawyer and accountant heaved sighs of relief. EB was overjoyed; he rushed out of the office, without a word, and rushed back in a few minutes with his arms full of roses, which he dumped on my desk. I knew perfectly well that he had been nervous as a cat during the whole ordeal, but in EB fashion, once it was over, it was all just another day in publishing.
Eventually we DID publish a book (Ed Mullen's), and finally, the first of our four first-year texts. This inaugurated a new set of traditions—Book Parties! I made sashes with gold lettering saying "Author" on them, we invited friends and freelancers to share cake and champagne, I took pictures of everybody looking relieved and hilarious. We all marveled at actually holding a real book that we had created. The authors were astounded that all the work and hounding about deadlines had produced something they could proudly show their families, friends and (most important) their academic colleagues. Whee!!! We brushed the champagne and crumbs off my office rug, and got on with the next one.
Book parties were, of course, in addition to birthday parties, Christmas parties, no-occasion parties, whatever. If there was an excuse for champagne and French tasty treats, we managed to find it. Eirik's parents and friends from Norway came to visit, which also generated dinners and parties.
The office refrigerator, which we inaugurated the first time Seib visited us, held only vodka and orange juice. We went out to a classy Chinese gourmet dinner, drank three bottles of wine between the four of us, and Thalia temporarily lost the Bay Bridge trying to find her way home.
We also had massive bashes when Foreign Language conventions were in town, involving all our authors, freelancers, friends, spouses (where applicable), etc., etc. My husband set a new record for pouring powerful drinks, and turned one of our in-house Modern Language Assoc. parties into a major drinking contest. Jim Budd was the other bartender, but got less business than Ron since he poured with more restraint.
I took so many pictures of all our happenings that we started a collection of photo albums, and presented the first one to Eirik on his birthday. Thalia and I wrote captions for that book, but eventually that got to be too big a task.
Gradually, Random House got tired of doing business with us by long distance, and started hiring people to work in San Francisco. We acquired Karen Judd for Production, first of all, and later Alan Sachs as a sales rep. They in turned created the need for more support positions, and pretty soon we had two and a half floors of our building, and 26 people! EBI consisted of only four of us, however, until the last year before Random House acquired the company—by then there were six of us!
In August of l987, Random House absorbed EBI and we all became RH employees. They decided we needed classier offices, and moved us to 55 Francisco St., on the north edge of SF Bay. Our 7th floor offices had incredible views of the Bay. We had architects and designers to design the space, which initiated traumas over who got a view office, and who did not. We had a mail/copy room, a kitchen, and a conference room—such luxury! And new phones, and computers! Computers were a decided innovation for some of us, who were not sure they were a Good Thing.
EB had a huge new office, with view windows on two sides, and an Executive Potty. All this was un-Norwegian to him, and he was actually embarrassed by the grandeur of it all. He got used to it, however.
Of course we had a massive party to celebrate our new opening, and since it coincided with another Foreign Language meeting, a lot of our authors came to it, which added excitement to the occasion.
I was office manager at Francisco St. Although I didn't see why I shouldn't be, apparently the thought had not occurred to Eirik, because he came into my office before the move to say that he didn't know what kind of job I could fill at the new location. Although I was more than slightly disconcerted, I told him I expected to be the office manager, which struck him as a new idea (what did he think I'd been doing since 1979??), so he said he'd go ask some of the others what they thought. I knew at least one person would be glad to see the back of me, but to Eirik's amazement, everyone else was quite enthusiastic. Eirik came rushing back and told me this, in a tone of the utmost surprise. It was not one of the better days in our long relationship, even though Random House told him to give me an immediate $3,000 raise to get me up to the proper salary level!! I realized, of course, that most of my supporters were eager to dump all the office chores they didn't want onto my shoulders, but that was okay by me.
We continued to add new people to the staff, and we published our first Biology books as well as Foreign Language and ESL. The parties went on as before, and we were all pretty happy with the whole situation. Then came a bombshell: Si Newhouse, the owner of Random House, decided to get rid of the entire College Division. Although it was successful, it was of course not as profitable as trade publishing. So he told the Division president to sell it. Seib, who was Executive VP, was given the task of dumping the entire list on another publisher within two weeks, or the Division would be put up for auction. A friend of Seib's from his Doubleday days was the head of the McGraw-Hill College Division at the time, and Seib did the deal over lunch. On December 1, l988, we became employees of McGraw-Hill.
(SEE PART 2)
