F.S.G's Moving Day: "The money went into the books, not painting the walls."
The intimidating publisher of serious and lovely books, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, is moving to a new HQ. Editors and publicists have been toiling away without hot water in the ladies' bathroom sinks! Rebecca Mead explains in her "Talk of the Town" this week.
“You had to put your own hot-water tank in, and that was not something that was in the F.S.G. budget,” Isenberg, who is a senior vice-president and director of operations at the company, explained the other day. “The money went into the books, not into painting the walls.” Elaine Kramer, the company’s longest-serving employee, who was hired in the accounts department in 1952, said that, while the employees were happy about the prospect of improved amenities—there will be a pantry, so for the first time coffee will be made in-house, rather than brought in—many of the writers, over the years, had been attached to the house’s primitive living conditions. “Isaac Singer—he liked it that way,” Kramer said.
It's almost too perfect -- not to mention hilarious -- that the writers were the only ones who adored the "primitive conditions" that existed.
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