name: Bill Adler
birth_date: 1929-05-14 00:00:00
death_date: 2014-02-28 00:00:00
avg_rating: 3.72
ratings_count: 2877
about: Bill Adler pursued his goal of being the  P.T. Barnum of books by conceptualizing, writing, editing, compiling and hustling hundreds of them — prompting one magazine to anoint him “the most fevered mind” in publishing.Mr. Adler achieved early success by collecting and publishing letters children had written to President  John F. Kennedy. He followed up with children’s letters to Smokey Bear, Santa Claus, Vice President  Spiro T. Agnew and President  Barack Obama, among many others.He helped popularize novels written by political, entertainment and sports celebrities, supplying ghostwriters and even plots. He signed up beauty queens to write diet and exercise books.As an agent, his clients included  Ronald Reagan,  Nancy Reagan,  Howard Cose Bill Adler pursued his goal of being the  P.T. Barnum of books by conceptualizing, writing, editing, compiling and hustling hundreds of them — prompting one magazine to anoint him “the most fevered mind” in publishing.Mr. Adler achieved early success by collecting and publishing letters children had written to President  John F. Kennedy. He followed up with children’s letters to Smokey Bear, Santa Claus, Vice President  Spiro T. Agnew and President  Barack Obama, among many others.He helped popularize novels written by political, entertainment and sports celebrities, supplying ghostwriters and even plots. He signed up beauty queens to write diet and exercise books.As an agent, his clients included  Ronald Reagan,  Nancy Reagan,  Howard Cosell,  Mike Wallace and  Ralph Nader.Mr. Adler was best known for his own titles. He wrote “What to Name Your Jewish Baby” (1966) with  Arnie Kogen and “What Is a Cat? For Everyone Who Has Ever Loved a Cat” (1987). In 1969, he compiled “The Wit &amp; Humor of Richard Nixon.” In 1995, he published “Cats’ Letters to Santa.”One of his more famous tricks — a word he preferred to gimmicks — was the 1983 mystery novel “Who Killed the Robins Family?” by Bill Adler and  Thomas Chastain. On the cover was an offer of a $10,000 reward for solving a series of fictional murders.A team of four married couples from Denver won by coming up with the answers to 39 of 40 questions posed in the book. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in January 1984 and remained there for the better part of a year, selling about a million copies.“Ideas are my mistress,” Mr. Adler told United Press International in 1986, saying he used his “given abilities to conceptualize books.”It was People magazine that commented on Mr. Adler’s “fevered mind” in 1983, adding that publishing traditionalists regarded book packagers like Mr. Adler as “money-crazed barbarians with the sensibilities of turnips.”Referring to Mr. Adler’s books,  Roger W. Straus Jr., president of the publisher Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, told People: “They’re pretty chintzy, as a rule. It’s like throwing a quarter in the street. If you listen attentively, you find out it ain’t silver when it hits the ground.”Others disagreed. “I consider Bill Adler unparalleled in the publishing industry — terribly, terribly original,” Mr. Cosell said.One of Mr. Adler’s best-selling books was a collection called “The Kennedy Wit.” The president’s aides approved the project early in the administration, but Kennedy was said to have been angry about it, causing Random House to drop the idea. Mr. Adler suspected that the president had not wanted his humor emphasized so soon after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.After 35 more publishers turned the book down, Mr. Adler finally obtained a $2,500 advance from Citadel Press, a small publisher. The book, released in 1964, after the president’s assassination, was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than six months and sold more than 1.4 million copies.William Jay Adler was born in Brooklyn on May 14, 1929. His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised by relatives. He attended Brooklyn College for three years and was drafted into the Army, then trained as a flamethrower for the Korean War.After finding out that flamethrowers led infantry into battle, he applied for Armed Forces Radio, saying he had experience in broadcasting, though he did not. He was a disc jockey in Tokyo until his discharge in 1953. He then worked in broadcasting, as humor editor at McCall’s magazine and as a book editor for Playboy, where he first came up with book ideas.One brainstorm was to ask the Kennedy White House if he could read mail sent to the president. In a time of much looser security, he was allowed to spend the day copying letters in the White House pos ...more