Turning Pages by John Sargent is everything I expect from this extraordinary, honorable, and talented man. I will always be grateful that a big part of my career took place at St. Martin’s Press under his leadership; I could always count on John to do the right thing, even when it was hard and unpopular. His wide-ranging life story—unexpected and interesting from the very start—is insightful, thoughtful, and hard to put down. I laughed—I even cried—and enjoyed every moment of the ride.”
—Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Four Winds and The Nightingale
"Turning Pages is funny, thoughtful, profoundly moving, and deeply insightful. With this book, a memoir but really a series of beautifully written vignettes, John Sargent has invited us into an extraordinary life and a remarkable career, as he takes us from unfortunate buckaroo to the very top of the New York publishing world. We meet his titan of a grandfather, known as Efendi (the first initials of his name), as well as his eccentric, passionate, one-off mother, and all the characters in this full life. I loved this book, but then, in all candor, I love John Sargent. Himself a titan, an eccentric, a passionate one-off. And a great friend and champion of freedom of speech, of writers, of all voices, especially the dissenting ones. Turning Pages is not just a wonderful book; it is a call to awareness, even as it entertains."
—Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“A remarkable and absorbing memoir—funny, poignant, and rich with insights about books, authors, the publishing business, and life. An extraordinary cast of characters has trooped through John Sargent's life, and they're all here, finely drawn, page after page.”
—Rick Atkinson, New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man... I don’t have too many heroes, but one of them wrote the book you’re holding. Like a publishing industry Zelig, John Sargent, the former CEO of Macmillan, has been at every pivotal point in the industry with heart and brains. Some of that literary magic must have rubbed off because no one could have told this epic story but the man himself—and tell it he does.”
—Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of the Longmire series
“In Turning Pages, John Sargent has created an addictively entertaining, moving, and highly unusual memoir by telling the best (and only the best) stories from a remarkable life and career. Reading this book is like sitting by a campfire with one of the most consequential figures in contemporary book publishing as he shares tales of friendship and leadership—along with inspiring observations about writers, publishing, and life. With locations ranging from a one-room schoolhouse in Wyoming to the wilds of Alaska to the wilder boardrooms of Amazon and beyond, this is a gem of a book told with immense modesty and wry grace.”
—Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club and We Should Not Be Friends
2023-07-13
A former publisher recounts his long career in the book trade.
Descended on his mother’s side from the innovative publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday, Sargent grew up far from the epicenter of publishing culture, in rural Wyoming. The recession he faced when graduating from college led him to a job as a textbook salesman (“Nobody ever dreams of being a textbook salesman”). He then worked his way into a series of progressively more prominent positions, including a stint at the old family business. In this anecdotal memoir, the author recounts plenty of missteps (“I took the Newbery Medal sticker off the jacket of Misty of Chincoteague to save a few bucks”) and an equal number of sometimes qualified successes, as when he unleashed Sarah Ferguson’s Budgie the Little Helicopter on an unsuspecting world. The best parts of the book are sharply drawn portraits of colleagues, authors, and bosses—perhaps none so sharp as that of former Simon & Schuster head and renowned tyrant Dick Snyder, whom Sargent managed to survive even though Snyder once scrawled “I hate Budgie” on a sales memo of Sargent’s. There’s a nice moment when Donald Trump is bested on a deal to print a special edition of Eloise, an unexpectedly growly moment involving Jimmy Carter. There’s also a light-bulb-going-on episode starring a then-unknown Jeff Bezos, whose commercial madness definitely had a method, even if one that required no small amount of bullying. Salman Rushdie, Michael Jackson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Winston Groom, LL Cool J: Luminaries of all stripes populate Sargent’s pages, which lead to a rather grim conclusion: getting fired by a publisher who made Snyder look like a lamb, which occasioned an empathetic note from former FBI head James Comey: “In similar experiences in my life, I found it helpful to occasionally whisper ‘Fuck ’em’ to myself.”
A pleasant book about books with insights into publishing past and the conglomerate stranglehold of the present.
