Illustrious Secession

Bright blossoming dust jackets, the rank foliage of blurbs, the outstanding branches of personalities--with these flourishes the publishing business. Last week a prime cutting was taken from the sturdy bush of Doubleday, Doran. Transplanted hastily from Garden City, L. I., the slip took root on 41st St., Manhattan. The new cutting goes by the name of Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.; its two stems are John Chipman Farrar and Stanley Marshall Rinehart Jr.; its most illustrious branch is a Doubleday, Doran author, the mother of one of the new publishers, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

This is the second transplanting within two years for these three members of the literary tree. Last year witnessed the strange union of the massive Doubleday, Page publishing house with the firm of the veteran literary impresario, George Henry Doran. Best selling Mary Roberts Rinehart had long been a joy and a profit to Mr. Doran. Her son, Stanley, polished and sharpened by Harvard from which he had his degree in 1919, son-in-law of Mr. Doran, had risen from the post of advertising manager of the Bookman to vice president and general manager of the firm. In the same year that Rinehart was graduated from Harvard, John Chipman Farrar took a degree from Yale where he was at the beginning of what Yale called its Literary Renaissance. At the ripe age of 25 Farrar was boosted from an apprenticeship on the Sunday edition of the New York World, into the editorship of Mr. Doran's Bookman. Many were the literary celebrities he had interviewed and lunched with, many the women he had lectured to before Mr. Doran sold his Bookman and made still-young Farrar editor of his publishing firm.

United still were this trio in the Doubleday, Doran merger. They merely drifted from Madison Avenue, Manhattan, out to Garden City--the worldly and well-manicured authoress, her stalwart, handsome son, and his universally acquainted friend with a shock of red hair. George H. Doran's "young men" were well cared for: Stanley Rinehart became sales director, John Farrar editor of Doubleday, Doran.

Last week this arrangement was rudely disrupted. On June 1 Messrs. Farrar & Rinehart left the firm. On June 2 they found two promising young authors. On June 3 they started to incorporate. On June 4 they moved into offices. On June 5 their business was in motion, Mr. Rinehart as president, Mr. Farrar as vice president. Said Vice President Farrar: "We will never grow so large that all members of the firm cannot read and be interested in any book we publish. . . . While we believe in applying journalistic methods to publishing we feel that . . . there is a need for literature that is written in quiet places and that is brought to the public with dignity."