(with all due credit to Deborah Harry, aka, Blondie, “Heart of Glass”)
I moved back to NYC from DC in the summer of 1978. The city was still reeling from bankruptcy in 1975 and the infrastructure was not quite in splinters but close. I didn’t notice any of it. I was so happy to be back. Smoking a pack and half of Marlboros each day, going to the movies, reading on graffiti’ed subway cars.
In order to make a run at getting an entry-level job in publishing, I signed up for a couple of publishing courses at NYU’s extension school. I was managing a management bookstore for the American Management Association on 50th and 6th, as part of the Association’s funnel for course materials for their thousands of seminars. The store gave me an opportunity to expand it into a full-fledged trade bookstore but being on the 7th floor of a NYC skyscraper didn’t help a retail store after awhile.
The courses at NYU were taught by Genevieve Young, then at Little, Brown. I didn’t realize that she was a giant in the industry. One of the first women (and certainly Asian-American) senior editors in publishing in the ’50s, who worked with many high-profile authors and was credited with keeping “Love Story” with Harper & Row. She quietly took an interest in me and wrote me a recommendation letter that I used to get freelance copyediting work at Harper & Row and Scribners.
I took a job at a tiny imprint named Delilah Books (distributed mainly by Putnam’s), which was the first house to publish rock-and-roll and pop music titles. I was going to learn to edit and proof and copyedit with the senior editor, Karen Moline, and work the reception desk, do the mailings and the post office runs, a general assistant to whoever needed one. All within the airy 1600-foot loft in Tribeca.
I was clueless about the punk scene in Manhattan and so the presence of Lester Bangs or Alan Betrock or Blondie, the Ramones (all of whom came to Karen’s desk) didn’t leave me open-mouthed. And Neal Peters, the photographer an avid Ann-Margret fanboy; Martin Togroff’s “Complete Elvis” with guest essays by many of the contemporary music critics. It was only later that I realized my good fortune. It was here that I glanced by Stephanie Chernikowski, who lived in the same building as Karen and, of course, was threaded into the music scene of lower Manhattan in the late seventies and early eighties.
What I learned at Delilah was not just how to do so many hands-on things that wouldn’t have been possible at a more traditional setting but it gave me the confidence that I could do all of them!