For too many years I’ve hoped Robert Gottlieb would write about his long career in book and magazine publishing. As far back as 2009, as part of an online book club about, of all things, a Dan Brown novel, I wished Gottlieb, the man who may well define editing for the second half of the twentieth century (and a good part of the twenty-first), would “stop dithering and write his memoirs.”

AVID READER: A LIFE by Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $28.00

Most books about book publishing are long-winded, too full of self-absorbed bombast, or show why their writers were better off being editors or publishers or some other industry-related job. But Gottlieb’s memoir, here at last, is the exception. He waited to tell his life story because he was so busy working on the stories of others. The chapter headings reminiscent of Henry Green book titles—“Reading”, “Learning”, “Working” “Dancing”, “Writing”, and “Living”—suggest the perpetual motion of the present. Avid Reader, a delightful concoction of well-told vignettes from his stints at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, plus five years as the editor of The New Yorker, did away with my years-long impatience.

Gottlieb also hesitated to write a memoir because such books, in his estimation, “basically come down to the same thing: ‘And then I said to Leo, don’t just do war, do peace, too’.” That reasoning makes sense. Showing what goes into making a book often results in a commensurate loss of magic. The current publishing climate demands we peek behind curtains. We ask authors how their novels resemble their real lives or about their research process. Writers are practically strong-armed into promoting their books on social media, taking in effusive praise and scathing criticism (or, in this volatile climate, near-hate speech.)

The best editors’ memoirs revive the magic without devolving into nostalgia. At Random, the posthumous 1977 autobiography by Random House co-founder and media personality Bennett Cerf, is required reading not only for Cerf’s droll style in talking about his authors, but because of how he chronicles his life against the backdrop of great changes, from the family-owned smaller businesses of the 1920s to the first wave of consolidation in the 1960s.

The best editors’ memoirs revive the magic without devolving into nostalgia.

Avid Reader succeeds on both counts. While Gottlieb glosses over technical details of being a publisher (though he relished every aspect), his career could not have existed without further waves of corporate mergers, the dawn of blockbuster advances and book launches, and the rise of the digital marketplace. Yet it is fitting Gottlieb finally tells his life story at a time of stasis, where digital sales are flat or declining, print sales are only “up” if you read the data the way you want, and Amazon is the mightiest corporation in the book space. A perfect time for reflection, then, until the next unknowable disruption.