Up and down and around
Subtitle: a publisher recollects the time of his life.
Edition: [1st ed.]
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Published: 1971
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
Subjects: Canfield, Cass, 1897-
Description: It is heartening news when a man who has grown up with the twentieth century, an active participant in its social-political-business life, can affirm that he has had a marvelous time. Cass Canfield is such a man, and his book is spirited proof of his claim. Born shortly before the turn of the century into a society governed by conventions and graces that largely disappeared with the First World War, he might have realized the family fears that he was destined to be a first-class wastrel had not his mother-a woman of stern moral fiber-insisted that he had a living to make. By a devious road-schooling at Groton, Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, and a fling at the world on a footloose tour of the Near and Far East-he came out to book publishing through the doors of Harper & Brothers when the firm was in a critical period of transition. He had found his niche. After the stockroom, where he was initially assigned to study the backlist, and four years in the London office, where his editorial activities began, the only way was up. 

When Cass Canfield came on the publishing scene in the mid-twenties, writers like Thornton Wilder, E.B. White, James Thurber, John Gunther, J.B. Priestley, Richard Hughes, E.M. Delafield, Louis Bromfield, Andre Maurois-all eventually lured by Canfield to the Harper list-were at the beginning of their careers. Canfield brought to his work an unappeasable curiosity and sense of adventures, a dogged persistence, and that most valuable of publishing assets-a nose for writing and writers. No one more enjoyed the challenges presented, challenges both editorial and administrative. He was back and forth across the ocean, on business and pleasure bent, indulging a taste for travel that would never flag. Other times brought other challenges. There was the Depression, then World War II and its aftermath. As a volunteer civil defense worker, and during his service with the Board of Economic Warfare and the Office of War Information, Canfield undertook responsibility and met people outside the field of publishing. In the postwar years some of these contacts resulted in book of political memoirs that chronicled the history of the times: books by Henry L. Stimson, James F. Byrnes, Sumner Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Sherwood, and others. Still later, a tour of Africa with Adlai Stevenson led him briefly into politics, and a visit to Indian brought him involvement-through the Planned Parenthood movement-in the world struggle for population control. So the personal adventure continued in ever widening circles. Very much a man of his time, Cass Canfield has also been able to take part in changes that herald the future. Up and Down and Around is his report on a vanished world, charming in retrospect, and on the turbulent, chancy, exhilarating world that is today.