“Roger Straus and Robert Giroux, 1956”: they made a curious pair. Photograph by Hans Namuth / Center for Creative Photography / Hans Namuth Estate

What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time. That would include in our day, beyond the obvious candidates, houses as unalike as Oxford University Press and New Directions. But there’s also the energy and flair with which it brings its books to the attention of the general reading public, so doing justice to its authors. And there’s its loyalty to those authors. And its over-all conviction that books matter. And, of course, turning a profit.

A new book—“Hothouse” (Simon & Schuster), by Boris Kachka—takes as a given that its subject, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has been and remains a great publisher, and without any question that’s the case. FSG, as it’s generally called, has brought us more than half a century of distinguished books, rarely slipping below the level of distinction it hoped to achieve. How it did so is certainly worth both parsing and paying tribute to, but a degree of disillusionment with this project sets in when we get past the cute title to the even cuter and more hyperbolic subtitle: “The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House.” The tone is set: this vigorous and often diverting trot through the history of an important cultural institution is frequently slapdash and overwrought in its determination to show just how hot the house was—in fact, “hands down, the hottest house in New York.” I’ve been in the business close to sixty years, and there’s never been a single hottest house; neither FSG nor any other publisher has ever been perceived as one—except perhaps by the central character in Kachka’s account, Roger Straus, the crucial “S” of FSG and, to put it mildly, an accomplished blower of his own horn.

Roger (which is how he’s referred to throughout the book—we’re on a first-name basis here) drifted into publishing, as so many of us have done, though not by the usual route. Here was no wet-behind-the ears idealistic book lover, recently out of college, scratching at the door of opportunity—no Dick Simon and Max Schuster, no Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House. Roger Straus came from the union of two of the most prominent German-Jewish families in America, the Strauses and the Guggenheims. The Strauses had been members of Our Crowd longer, and they had the more illustrious background: not just big money but serious government service. Roger’s grandfather Oscar had served as minister to the Ottoman Empire under Cleveland, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft, and as Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and Commerce. The newer—and therefore slightly tarnished—Guggenheim money came from the American Smelting and Refining Company. But it was very big money indeed.

It was Oscar’s son, the first Roger Straus, who married Gladys Guggenheim. “Rarely, outside glorious Temple Emanu-El, was so much of New York’s new elite gathered in one room,” Kachka tells us. This Roger was dragooned into the Guggenheim family business, and made a considerable success and a great deal of money but preferred to lead a relatively modest existence—an estate of “a mere thirty acres” in Westchester County, as opposed to the new Guggenheim spread of two hundred and fifty acres in Sands Point, Long Island: Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg. Our Roger—Roger, Jr.—spent his childhood and youth shuttling between these two principalities, concentrating on sports and girls. He didn’t finish high school—some private tutoring plus serious pull eventually got him admitted to Hamilton College, from which he also never graduated. However, he spent summers working as a copy boy at a local newspaper, and “the cocky teen” was “turned on.” During this period, he grew close to a young woman named Dorothea Liebmann, an heir to the Rheingold brewing fortune, whose parents had “stormed their way into the haute bourgeoisie,” and was far more literary than Roger would ever be—known later for her stylish writing and for rereading Proust almost every year. They were married in 1938. He was twenty-one and without real occupation, but fortunately “he and Dorothea had two trust funds to tide them over.”

Roger went to work as a journalist, wandered into a magazine called Current History, and started a book-packaging firm. After Pearl Harbor, he was disqualified for active service because of osteomyelitis (which luckily didn’t affect his ferocious tennis game), and landed, thanks to a rich pal, in something called the Branch Magazine and Book Section of the Navy’s Office of Public Information; he did six weeks of training at Cornell and emerged an ensign—with a fetching uniform. On the job, he met and worked with a number of writers and made endless contacts—making contacts was one of his lifelong gifts—including one crucial to his future: a Navy lieutenant, in civilian life an editor at Harcourt, Brace, named Robert Giroux (the future “G” of FSG), who, “hair prematurely white at age thirty, outranked the handsome, grinning twenty-seven-year-old flack.”

By the time the war was over, in 1945, Roger knew that he wanted to be a publisher—that is, he wanted to have a publishing house of his own. The money was found, some from his family, some from outside sources, and an appropriate editorial partner was found as well: John Farrar, who had been one of the founders of Farrar & Rinehart, the Rineharts being the sons of the formidable, best-selling Mary Roberts Rinehart. But when Farrar came back to New York after a distinguished war career he was instantly and unceremoniously ousted from the company he had helped found. He needed a job, Roger needed a partner with editorial experience, and, in the fall of 1946, Farrar, Straus & Company launched its first list.

Despite Farrar’s experience, what was determining for the company’s success was the character, the temperament, the psyche—and the talent—of the young Roger. The talent wasn’t primarily editorial, although he was a canny reader, and he had taste (he liked to say that his favorite FSG book was Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian”). And although he was certainly shrewd on a day-to-day basis, his core strength was strategic: he knew what he wanted in the long term, and he knew how to move toward it. Roger needed to be a very big frog in whatever pond he was going to be in, and he needed as well to be in total charge, which meant not joining one of the established houses. The question was how to impose himself on the book world with a newly hatched, undercapitalized company that had no backlist and no really prominent editor on board.

Farrar did acquire a number of established writers (Theodor Reik, for one), and he presided over several best-selling novelists, but the FS list was somewhat schizophrenic. The first book published was an interior-decorating how-to called “Inside Your Home,” and close behind it came “Francis, the Talking Mule.” The book that was a harbinger of things to come was Carlo Levi’s “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” a critical triumph and best-seller in 1947, and it was Roger who had acquired it—through a scout. His famous days of personally descending on Europe in search of major writers didn’t begin until twelve years after the firm came into being, although he preferred to forget that detail. But his instincts for commercial publishing were already sharp: in 1950, on a tip from another scout, he published “Look Younger, Live Longer,” by the health guru Gayelord Hauser, which sold half a million copies—a huge number in those days—as well as Judge Samuel Leibowitz’s sensational “Courtroom,” another commercial triumph.