Georges Borchardt in Poets & Writers

Nice video interview with agent Georges Borchardt up at the Poets & Writers site. I love listening to Georges Borchardt, even when he doesn’t include Open Letter as a new small press that he recently had dealings with. (Like last year when we published Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar)

But seriously, he once told me the story of how he got into being an agent by trying to sell the rights to Samuel Beckett. And the number of French authors he’s agented in the States over the past half-century or so is astounding. (Due in large part to his connection with Gallimard.)

Similar to John Calder, Borchardt is one of the great old-school publishing people still in the business. And his stories are amazing.

I’m probably misremembering this a bit, but he once told me about Stanley Elkin’s belief that if you can’t be a bestselling author, at least you can write enough books to take up a shelf in a bookstore.

Great to see Borchardt getting featured like this, although it’s super surreal to hear him talk about ebooks. . .