MAGAZINE MAGNATE

Susan Ronald () could have titled her latest . That’s the effect of reading this kaleidoscopically entertaining biography-cum-portrait of a publishing era removed from today’s by a distance ungaugeable in years., , , and —his first startup, , did not come until 1939—into an international juggernaut he steered as America’s highest-paid publisher. As upright a citizen as ever ran magazines, Nast is the apple of Ronald’s eye. She moves him in and out of frame, sometimes presenting him in close-up, sometimes at the horizon—a human lens through which to study not only one man’s engrossing story but many stories personal, institutional, and historical. Among telling vignettes about Nast, whether venture or divorce or bankruptcy, Ronald veers into the Great War’s impact on fashion magazines, the Depression’s causes, the gentleman’s agreement Mr. Nast and Mr. (William Randolph) Hearst made not to poach one another’s star staffers, and the machinations that enabled Nast to hold onto his eventually beleaguered fiefdom as long as he did, assuring its survival and remarkable expansion under the Newhouse clan, the latest generation of which is now tap dancing as hard as it can, struggling to replicate Nast’s achievement under conditions far more parlous than he ever could have imagined.