I REMEMBER the moment when I finally decided that I was pulling my weight, or at least some of it, in the great collective effort that is, or used to be, the American economy.

In the early ’80s I was a young editor working at Penguin Books. What you might call a terminal English major, I had drifted professionally through the ’70s, far more interested in literary, cultural and intellectual matters than any sort of career advancement. I liked the ’70s: Everything was so squalid and low in the water that you could be left alone to figure out who you were and what you might be good for on your own schedule. But now I had talked my way into my dream job at this prestigious publishing house and I knew it was time to get busy.

I had the idea that we should reissue two early novels by the fine writer Alice Adams. In order to clear the sum of money necessary to do so, I had to generate, by myself, calculator and production cost sheets in hand, a profit-and-loss statement, or P. & L., which would then be signed off on by various departments. My last hurdle in executing this modest financial transaction of maybe $7,500 was to secure the initials of our chief financial officer. A numbers guy. Not much of a reader.

Like all publishing P. & L.’s, ours factored in typesetting, cover art and printing costs, marketing, overhead, the cost of money and the revenue from projected sales and subsidiary rights to spit out a percentage figure on the bottom line that indicated the likely return on investment. (When I first was confronted with one of these forms, I thought, so that’s what a “bottom line” is. Interesting.) We were theoretically required at that time to have our P. & L.’s yield a return of at least 8 percent, and I had become adept in ways to make or exceed that number. You could shave on the cover art. You could shave on marketing and advertising. You could basically lie about projected sales and hope no one called you on it. The techniques I had developed in college to make my ham-handed chem lab experiments yield the proper results found a practical new use.