Robert Silvers (1929–2017)

March 24, 2017 2:55 PM

Robert B. Silvers, a founder of The New York Review of Books, which under his editorship became one of the premier intellectual journals in the United States, a showcase for extended, thoughtful essays on literature and politics by eminent writers, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

New York Review of Books: “Where do things stand? Have we closed?” Days before his death, on March 20, Robert B. Silvers was doing what he had been doing every day for the past fifty-four years: thinking about, fretting over, and laboring on The New York Review of Books. On his sickbed, galley proofs were fanned out across the coverlet, photographs spilled from manila folders (“I do think it’s important to get the reporters’ raised hands inside the frame”), and a large, black, multiline telephone lay humming and blinking beneath his right hand. Even as his illness began to sap the legendary energy that had propelled him, well into his ninth decade, through fifteen-hour workdays and a social calendar that his young assistants would have found daunting, Bob would lift the receiver when the office called and declaim his favorite greeting: “Hello, hello, hello!"

New Yorker: Remembering Robert Silvers

Washington Post: Why we should all mourn Robert Silvers

New York Review of Books writers on Robert Silvers

posted by not_the_water (10 comments total)

Thanks for posting this. Silvers should be much better known (though of course he didn't want to be); the NYRB has been one of the main ways I've fed my mind for basically my entire adult life, and I'm incredibly sad that he's gone. (And not just because my current subscription goes through the end of November—I hope they have a good succession in place...)
posted by languagehat at 3:17 PM on March 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

ONE RECURRING PROBLEM for Bob was the books. He was haunted by the books “piling up” in our office—and our futile efforts to control the tide. When a writer told him about a book—or else he saw a mention of it somewhere—he’d often stand up and bellow, “The perfect book for X. Do we have it? Can we get it? Can I see it?” The first person to walk into the office in the morning would usually find book reviews cut up, titles circled, with little notes. “Get soonest,” or else “Show me.” On weekends, he would sometimes get up and amble around, pulling out books from the stacks by the window and yelling at whoever was on that shift. “Poems by Octavio Paz, what could be more important?!” “Cyber-security—it couldn’t be more important.” Most things “couldn’t be more important” for Bob. When reassured that a suitable list of reviewers had been drawn up, he would sit back down and resume editing. Once he went to the accountant’s office to resolve a tax issue and came back with half a dozen books he’d swiped from her desk. “Why did no one tell me about these?!”

"On Robert Silvers," n + 1

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posted by standardasparagus at 3:17 PM on March 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

I hope they have a good succession in place

This has been my main worry, and it felt sort of selfish. But many of these eulogies emphasize the extent that the paper was an expression of him, so maybe the feelings are not so inappropriate. I don't want the Review to die too.

Being younger than the Review itself, I've only been on board for the last 16 of its 53 years, but I'm grateful for them.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:43 PM on March 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I am 87 and subscribed after buying the very first issue, which came out to offer book reviews during a NY newspaper strike. Still get it.
posted by Postroad at 4:26 PM on March 24, 2017 [20 favorites]

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posted by 4ster at 5:57 PM on March 24, 2017

The book publisher, NYRB, is probably my favorite publisher these days. I literally just walk through bookstores looking for the logo on spines. Never disappointed.

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posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 8:20 PM on March 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

NYRB introduced me to the idea that a well-written (and edited) book review could be a potted education in the subject as well. I was given my first issue of Private Eye that same year and, between the two, have never been the same since.

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posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 2:12 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

NYRB is such an important part of American intellectual life.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:54 AM on March 25, 2017

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I had a professor in college tell us: "If you want to know what a well-written essay looks like, read any article in the New York Review of Books. That's what I want your term papers to look like".

I've been a subscriber ever since (~25 years).
posted by crazy_yeti at 7:33 AM on March 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

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posted by one weird trick at 5:14 AM on March 26, 2017