Out of the Past
MY FIRST memory of the place is of seeing four black women sitting at a cluster of adjoined desks. The sight surprised me. I had seen similar ones at editorial offices before, but only at those of African-American publications, a category that did not include Current Biography. The sight also made me feel at home. I am black, too; these women, past thirty (two were well past it) and not slim, looked like my aunts. This was not the usual job-hunting experience at a midtown Manhattan publishing company. But then, this was not the usual publishing company. And we were quite a ways north of midtown Manhattan.
That is not to say that the H.W. Wilson Company, situated in the South Bronx on the banks of the Harlem River, a few minutes’ walk from Yankee Stadium, was progressive or hip. Hipness and progressivism, in fact, had they somehow stumbled onto this place, would have found their opposites amid the long, long hallways of dull brown carpeting, the tomblike quiet, and the stacks upon stacks of magazines whose contents were read, summarized, and listed alphabetically by subject in the volumes of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, and many other indexes compiled here at this outpost of the library world, the workplace of those who were not up for the excitement of the library.
