During the past decade, more and more attention has been paid to the role that certain publishers played in French literary life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Books about Louis Hachette, Georges Charpentier, Bernard Grasset, and now Gaston Gallimard—the subject of a new biography by Pierre Assouline[1]—illuminate the peculiar conditions defining a business that has always been held to transcend mere business, in which men who could rightfully account themselves captains of the industry they helped to create also figured as soldiers of intellect and promoters of cultural reform. Such men have become almost legendary. The imprints with which each one marked his age no longer bespeak a personal temperament, style, or adventure but survive, where they do survive, as ornaments that lend moral prestige to bland, corporate entities.

Born in 1881, Gaston Gallimard grew up on the Bight Bank, in the social environment immortalized by Marcel Proust. Indeed, his father had much in common with Charles Swann, being a bourgeois scion who set himself a leisurely course that saw him progress downward through life from youthful aestheticism to middle-age dissipation. What Gallimards before him had earned in commerce Paul Gallimard spent on objets d’artand the woman he married at age thirty brought a dowry sufficient to let him pursue his hobbies without restraint. “In the idiotic world of bibliophiles, in the world of people slavishly devoted to old printed matter, this fellow Gallimard, who will spend three thousand francs for a private, deluxe