"I knew Mencken for more than forty years, intimately for well over thirty. Books have been published which describe him as a man I find it difficult to recognize. His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and exasperating by turns, but everlastingly consistent. The private man was something else again"
A New Yorker, ALFRED A. KNOF was a junior at Columbia when in the summer of 1911 he look his first job as a, space salesman for the New York TIMES. Following my his graduation he served a brief apprenticeship with Doubleday Page, and then in 1915 he branched out on his own with his first catalogue of Borzoi Books. From that day to this his standards in the selection and manufacture of books have been the pride and envy of the American book trade.
ALFRED A. KNOPF had graduated from Columbia and was serving his apprenticeship at Doubleday, Page & Co. when his enthusiasm for Joseph Conrad first had the opportunity to express itself. It seemed to him shocking that such a master of English prose should be so little read in the United States, and when he was allowed to read the manuscript of Conrad’s novel, CHANCE, young Knopf initialed a campaign to present the author in a new light.
A New Yorker who graduated from Columbia, ALFRED A. KNOPF is the originator of the Borzoi imprint. His first catalogue of new books, published in 1915, represented a determined effort to present to Americans the works of great European writers, and from that day his standards in the selection and manufacture of books have been envied by many and equaled by few.