The following talk was given at the IHS's annual Local History/Family History Summer Symposium July 2, 1995, in Indianapolis.

1903 was an important year for the Bobbs-Merrill publishing company of Indianapolis. Not only did the firm change its name from Bowen-Merrill to one that would become synonymous in American trade publishing with best-selling popular literature, what then-president W. C. Bobbs called "good clean fiction and corking good tales," but the firm also hired David Laurance Chambers as Bobbs's secretary. For the next fifty-five years, until Howard W. Sams bought the company in 1958, Chambers's role in the affairs of Bobbs-Merrill expanded by geometrical proportions. In 1921 he became vice president; in 1925, editor; in 1935, president; and in 1953, chairman of the board. As president, he retained his role as head of the trade department, where no publishing decisions were made without his approval and where the initials DLC designated supreme authority.

A cultivated and complex man, Chambers was well known in publishing circles for both his charm and his temper. Faced with either, or with some ingenious combination of both, the authors, editors, and salespeople who worked with him over the years were generally powerless to oppose his will. Whether his associates loved him or hated him, they never forgot him, and his influence on American publishing was immense, not only through the authors he cultivated and the books he published, but also through the many young editors he trained who went on to establish successful publishing careers. Even Hiram Haydn, whose unhappy relationship with DLC I described in the spring 1995 issue of Traces, wrote in his otherwise negative portrait in Words & Faces that Chambers was "probably the finest, most precise trainer of copy editors in the country." He was that, of course, and much more.

The project files in the vast Bobbs-Merrill Collection at Indiana University's Lilly Library contain thousands of examples of Chambers's correspondence with authors and memorandums to staff, and almost any sampling reflects the intensity with which the editor and publisher approached his work. In 1975, twelve years after Chambers's death, author Glenn Tucker remembered the "unbelievably large volume" of correspondence that he accumulated in his ten years of writing under Chambers's direction:

Just when you might be idling, a jerk up note arrived. Not infrequently, when he had no word of progress, he would write merely, "Are you ill?" If he thought you might miss something he might say, "What did you think of so and so in the Draper manuscripts?" Never, "Be sure to cover Draper."

His letters to authors were only the beginning of an almost continuous output from his desk. He wrote memorandums—--"pink slips," the office called them--to the office staff, sometimes to one seated only a few feet away. "Pink slips" in a never ending stream were the controlling deity of the Bobbs office. Most of them dealt with matters of style, a Chambers fetish. Like the tornado across the Indiana farmlands was the blast that blew through the Bobbs-Merrill office if anyone in editing permitted "contact" as a verb, or "drape" as a noun. . . . His comments to staff in the New York office, where publicity and minor author contacts were handled, were known as "blue slips." Two batches went out of Indianapolis every night.

Haydn, who as editor in the New York office from 1950 to 1954 would have disagreed with Tucker's characterization of what went on there, retained what was perhaps an exaggerated memory of "dozens of varieties of memorandum pads, pink, blue, yellow, white and green, that DLC dispensed with an overgenerous hand." In particular, however, he recalled one "staccato hailstorm of blue memos" and explained that blue "was the fateful color, the warning of impending eruption."

Last summer, supported by a staff grant from the IHS, I spent a week at the Lilly Library working in the Bobbs-Merrill Collection, and I read a good chunk of Chambers's correspondence. As an editor myself, I found much to admire in the tactfulness with which Chambers could deflect unreasonable demands, suggest revisions or cuts in unwieldy manuscripts, or stifle impossible projects. Perhaps the most prevalent author's complaint that Chambers faced throughout his career was that the firm did not do enough to promote books; he certainly wrote his share of letters on that topic. Adhering to a standard set by the firm in 1916 of not advertising a single title until sales from list advertisements justified the expenditure, Chambers believed that word-of-mouth was what made best-sellers—not advertising. And DLC knew something about best-sellers.

In the 1920s he was instrumental in finding and developing such best-selling authors as John Erskine, Bruce Barton, Richard Halliburton, and Earl Derr Biggers. In 1925, the year Chambers became editor, Erskine's The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, and Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance appeared. They would become all-time best-sellers. Biggers's first Charlie Chan mystery novels began appearing about this time too, signaling the beginning of a golden age of soaring sales and profits for the trade department.

The Great Depression, however, brought an abrupt halt to these good times. During the 1930s, according to Jack O'Bar's history of the firm, Bobbs-Merrill "sought every possible means to reduce the cost of doing business." As the trade and law book divisions began to lose money, staff members were given forced vacations and pay reductions. Only the schoolbook division remained profitable.

By 1943, when Bobbs published Hiram Haydn's first novel, By Nature Free, Chambers refused to promote the book apart from its inclusion in list advertisements. Haydn wrote, "Never has human hand squeezed a dollar tighter than Mr. Chambers's." According to Haydn, "The reviews were staggeringly good, but Mr. Chambers's response to my request for more advertising was to assure me that the budget was used up and I should be content with such good reviews." Of course, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, published the same year, received no more advertising than did Haydn's book, and it became a runaway best-seller, selling close to two million copies by the mid-1960s.

The same complaint surfaced in the comments of other, less biased, authors. Historian Thomas D. Clark described his relationship with Chambers in a revealing article he wrote in 1967 for an issue of Indiana University Bookman that was entirely devoted to the Bobbs-Merrill Collection. In the article, entitled "David Laurance as I Knew Him," Clark recounted his first meeting with Chambers in 1939:

I have never been more anxious to make a good impression than at the moment I crossed the threshold of Mr. Chambers' office. I was not, however, prepared for what I saw. Mr. Chambers was a fairly tall, stooped, grey-haired man. He gave me the impression of having stepped fresh out of a Dickens novel. His shirt tail was out, his hair was rumpled, and he looked at me over pince-nez glasses as if I had brought a dead fish into the parlor. He made me sit down across the broad, tousled desk before him and talked in such a low voice that only by the grace of God could I tell what he was saying. The main points I got were that the book business was bad and that he had not worked his shirt tail out in anxiety to publish my book.

Clark's book, Rampaging Frontier, did well, and the author contracted to do another. At the time he was negotiating the contract, Clark related that the firm was under extreme financial pressure, which he ascribed to the large ($50,000) advance it had given Edith Bolling Wilson for her memoirs and which the substance of the book and its sales did not justify. Regarding his second book, he wrote:

I never could persuade Mr. Chambers to take advantage of certain potential sales outlets for Pills, Petticoats, and Plows, and I still believe these would have proved worth while. Sales had become the Achilles heel of the Bobbs-Merrill Company. Mr. Chambers, no doubt, was hard on his sales managers and promotion people. Too, the depression years were hard on the book business generally. I felt, as perhaps every author has felt from the beginning of time, that the Company did not always push books as effectively as it might have done.

In the course of bringing out a third book, Southern Country Editor, the firm asked Clark to renegotiate his contract at a lower royalty rate. Clark considered the possibility of standing by his initial contract and angering "some very warm friends," but decided to renegotiate in order to help the company. "Later," he wrote, "I learned that one or two authors proved unruly indeed." One refused to write a congratulatory letter that had been requested for Chambers's birthday.

Chambers's impatience or weariness with authors' demands surfaced on occasion. The earliest recorded instance that I know of was in a memo he wrote to the New York office on 27 May 1926, in the days when he was dealing with Barton, Halliburton, and Erskine. "One of the trials of life," he confided, "is the necessity of constantly showing an accommodating spirit to authors." (I've thought of having this statement embroidered and placed above my desktop computer.) Halliburton, especially, could be a trial. In another memo that Chambers wrote to an assistant not long afterward, he said of the author of The Royal Road to Romance, "He's a fool in some ways and needs watching." Later in his career, Chambers could at times be less than accommodating to authors. Once, while walking with Glenn Tucker down Meridian Street in the 1950s, the publisher commented that Lew Wallace built the stately Blanchern apartment building with an advance he received for the Prince of India. When Tucker groused that his "piddling little advances would not build a respectable shanty," Chambers responded "dryly," "The trouble with you is that you have not written a Ben Hur." Thomas Clark first saw his book Rampaging Frontier when he encountered a student at the University of Kentucky carrying it around campus. Querying Chambers about why he had not been sent an advance copy, the publisher responded (and I'm sure it was dryly) that he considered "it more important to get books on dealers' shelves than into authors' hands."

For a man who spent his life reading books and manuscripts and giving advice to writers, Chambers left behind very little in the way of his own writing. The only published work that is attributed to him is a pamphlet, Indiana: A Hoosier History, that he produced in 1933 to accompany the display of Thomas Hart Benton's murals at the Chicago World's Fair. Late in his life, his friends encouraged him to record his memories of his long publishing career, but he found himself unequal to the task. "I urged that Laurance write his memoirs," Tucker wrote, "so that his fascinating recollections would not be lost. He always gave a verbal rejection slip, and in publisher's style without reasons."

To another, closer friend DLC did give reasons. In the mid-1950s Chambers carried on a personal correspondence with an old friend from Princeton days, Samuel Duff McCoy, in which Chambers exhibited what was for him unusual degrees of vulnerability and candor. In June 1955 McCoy, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and the author of numerous books, sought to light a fire under Chambers in regard to his memoirs:

I don't know of anything that has delighted me more than hearing from you that others beside myself (and of course there have been many others, and many who began "pressing" you long before I did, last September) are urging you to get busy—instanter—on your reminiscences. . . . Well, let's have no more shillying and shallying! Get at it, me lad, shanghai somebody to talk to, two or three evenings or afternoons each week, and play the recordings back to yourself each following morning. I'll bet you find it more fun than a picnic. Good Lord, instead of one bookful, you would find material piling up for dozens more!"

As good as this advice was, Chambers found himself unable to take it. "Dear Sam," he responded,

You are a true friend. It is an extraordinary evidence of friendship that you take so great and encouraging an interest in the idea of my poor memoirs.

I am in great confusion over the whole matter . . . My memory is like this sheet of paper, without depth or variety. I am the least observant of men; I have no idea of the color of anyone's eyes.

Nevertheless, Chambers made an effort to remember: "What I am doing is to jot down from day to day anything that comes to the old noodle, from anywhere in the past, without order or consequence. Sometime I might impose a form upon these orts and shards. No harm done if I can't." Chambers evidently was never able to impose order on the few remaining pages of reminiscences that are now in the possession of his granddaughter, Diana Chambers Leslie, but everything he says is worthwhile to anyone seeking to know more about him.

We know, for example, that DLC was born in Washington, D.C., on 12 January 1879, the youngest in a long line of men named David Chambers. From his autobiographical "orts and shards," however, we learn that he "was born on a snowy Sunday morning" and that his parents thought of naming him "January." His father, David Abbot Chambers, served during the Civil War as private secretary to Senator John Sherman of Ohio, and his grandfather, Dr. David Chambers, had been a physician in Zanesville, Ohio, where both DLC's father and mother were born. DLC's great-grandfather, Col. David Chambers, was an especially colorful character, according to a 1948 write-up by the Citizens Historical Association of Indianapolis. Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1780, he served as a confidential express rider for George Washington during the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), was a volunteer aide-de-camp to Gen. Lewis Cass during the War of 1812, and was a printer in Benjamin Franklin's shop. In 1810 he moved to Zanesville, where he established a newspaper and became state printer. As a politician, he would serve as mayor of Zanesville, state representative, state senator, and U.S. congressman.

Following in the footsteps of previous Davids Chambers, DLC attended Princeton University, where he was a brilliant student. Graduated in 1900 with an A.B. degree, he was salutatorian of his class and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation he won the Charles Scribner Fellowship in English, earning his M.A. in 1901, and worked as secretary to Henry Van Dyke, professor of English poetry and Princeton's chief literary figure, until 1903, when he began with Bobbs-Merrill.

The bulk of Chambers's autobiographical writing dealt with his Princeton days, which the aging publisher obviously remembered fondly, despite his penchant at this time of his life for belittling his accomplishments:

At Princeton I was a greasy grind, an objectionable character. Having got all first groups the first term, I set sail to keep up this record, a form of egotism which I now despise, all the more because I accomplished it. The accomplishment was not due to any exceptional intelligence but to the development of a parrotlike memory—an unintelligent matter. There were subjects about which I understood little . . . but in an exam, if I could spot about where in the textbook the answers to a question began and ended, I could spin it off almost word for word. I had to be careful lest my dumbness would show itself in my covering too much ground—over answering the question.

After graduation in 1901, Chambers disappointed his father by not pursuing a career in law. While working as Van Dyke's secretary, the aspiring editor collaborated with his boss on an edition of the Poems of Tennyson. Van Dyke wrote the introduction, and Chambers did the notes. Examining the proofs, Chambers "got sore" because his name was not on the title page. Prompted by Van Dyke, the editor at the publishing house wrote Chambers "a letter of severe reprimand." Nevertheless, when the book appeared Chambers's name was on the title page, but in smaller letters than Van Dyke's. In the margin of his text Chambers wrote, "I do not recall my emolument—on royalties."

In the spring of 1903, when Van Dyke was too busy to evaluate a manuscript for Bobbs-Merrill, Chambers took the assignment and reported so well that he was sent one or two more. "The work seemed down my alley," he recalled, and he asked about an opening at Bobbs. Although there was none, the firm said it would keep him in mind. Chambers then interviewed in New York with Charles Scribner's Sons and Century. "They used almost identical words," he wrote: "'Young man, if you want to make money, don't go into the publishing business.'" (Another candidate for possible embroidery and framing.) Undeterred, Chambers found a job that summer with Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia as assistant to the managing editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. He found the job unsatisfying, and when he received an offer from Bobbs-Merrill, he asked the advice of his managing editor. "Chambers," he replied, "the Editor-in-Chief [Edward Bok] is the kind of a man who is liable to come in any morning and fire the lot of us, including me. Go west, young man." In September he began work with the firm that he would stay with for the next half century.

I can't resist speculating for a moment about what the ramifications might have been had Chambers been hired by Scribner's instead of Bobbs-Merrill in 1903. Would Chambers's presence at Scribner's have influenced the hiring and career of Maxwell Perkins, who began at the old-line publishing firm in 1910 and who went on to define the classic image of the American editor through his work with such authors as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Taylor Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe? When Perkins began the editorial phase of his career in 1920 by persuading Scribner's to publish Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise over the objections of the other editors, one wonders whether or not the presence and seniority of Chambers might have altered the outcome. Perkins faced similar opposition in the course of bringing out Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. After the publication of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel in 1929, which other firms had considered hopeless, Perkins firmly established his reputation for clairvoyance. His editorial method, which involved a tireless and at times heroic effort to reveal and develop an author's talent, would become the standard of measurement for trade editing.

Hiram Haydn, who was an editor in the Perkins mold, had his share of run-ins with Chambers, and one imagines that Perkins would have too. Haydn wrote that Chambers did not appreciate the work of the new generation of writers: "I do not believe that he would have signed John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck or Nelson Algren if he had had the chance." Chambers supported Haydn's belief in the 1950s when he wrote in a letter to McCoy: "An awful durned lot of that modern 'sophistication' you talk about is repulsive and base and phony and pretentious and inane. I hate the word." Neither was Chambers a proponent of the kind of creative editing practiced by Perkins, though he did his share of uncovering and shaping authorial talent. Glenn Tucker quotes Chambers as saying, "An editor's work ought to show, but he never should." One wonders what might have happened had these two forces in American publishing, Chambers and Perkins, collided.

As he grew older and as the publishing world changed, Chambers looked back wistfully to his early days with the firm, when books by James Whitcomb Riley sold by the thousands without the benefit of a written contract, and when it must have seemed to him that the most important authors in the country were either published by Bobbs-Merrill, resided nearby, or both. He was close friends with Meredith Nicholson and Booth Tarkington, though the latter never published with Bobbs-Merrill.

In a five-part article that ran in the Indianapolis Times in July 1940, reporter Harry Morrison offered this telling characterization of Chambers at sixty-one years of age:

Mr. Chambers is the motivating force of this whole operation. His whole life has been built around books. If you ask his associates what his hobby is they'll reply: "Reading manuscripts."

He likes music. He likes to gather with people. He likes bridge. But he would never think of doing these things if his wife didn't remind him. He rarely takes a vacation. Last year was the first time he was ever seen to go off for a rest without a pile of manuscripts big enough to fill the entire rear seat of an automobile.

Turning his attention to bookshelves opposite the president's office, Morrison found "a graphic history of Bobbs-Merrill" in what he estimated were two thousand trade volumes. After randomly citing a number of titles and authors on these shelves, including many Indiana authors, the reporter closed his fifth installment on a rather bleak note:

Mr. Chambers saw the rise of Bobbs-Merrill as the publisher for outstanding Indiana authors. He deplores the present lack of Hoosier writers, says he doesn't know the reason, hopes still for the miracle that will put Indiana back to the front again as "the literary state."

Chambers would endeavor for the rest of his career to bring Bobbs-Merrill back to the forefront of American publishing. Yet, despite such successes as Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951), Saunders Redding's On Being Negro in America (1951), and Elmer Davis's But We Were Born Free (1954), Bobbs-Merrill would never again attain the prominent position it had once occupied.

Chambers's place in American publishing deserves further inquiry. While the distorted portrait painted by Hiram Haydn in Words & Faces needs correcting, the very amount of space devoted to him in the book bespeaks the significance of Chambers's role and the power of his presence. DLC may have had a quick temper, and he was perhaps unable to appreciate new trends in American literature; but he loved good writing, and he loved Indiana. He was never able to give up on the idea that the two went hand in hand. That he did not leave behind a volume of self-serving memoirs is a fact that is as important for an understanding of his character and motivations as is the realization that his only published work was a history of Indiana. After long-failing health, Chambers died in Indianapolis on his eighty-fourth birthday in 1963, the friend of dozens of authors. One remembered him as "the greatest editor who ever lived." Another recalled his last visit in the office at Howard Sams, where Chambers "was putting together carded notes on the Civil War, still writing, thinking, wondering, dreaming, still himself, but much older." For his daughter, Evelyn Chambers Denny, he remains "in his favorite red leather chair by the library window at 5272 North Meridian Street, with a manuscript or galley before him, a pencil poised over his ear, and the Unabridged nearby."

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