Jason Epstein

At 96 years old, Jason Epstein physical status not available right now. We will update Jason Epstein's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

After graduating, Epstein joined Doubleday and Company as an editorial trainee, earning $45 a week. While working there, he saw the need for inexpensive, well-made paperbacks of the kinds of books that his classmates, many of them veterans studying on the GI Bill, were reading but could not afford to own in their hardcover editions. With the support of Ken McCormick, Doubleday's chief editor, he launched Anchor Books in 1953. This was the first so-called Quality Paperbacks, which quickly became the dominant paperback format. In 1954 Anchor Books won the Carey–Thomas Award.

Epstein left Doubleday in 1958, frustrated at the company's refusal to publish Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, Lolita. He joined Random House publishers, and eventually became editorial director in 1976, serving in that capacity until 1995. At Random House, he edited such writers as Jane Jacobs, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Korda, Benzion Netanyahu, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Kennedy. He also worked with Ted Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, who arrived with storyboards to recite "Green Eggs and Ham". He acquired a reputation of being rude and ridiculing other editors' suggestions. He admitted that he was a "disagreeable presence" as he had little patience with other people. Nevertheless, he continued to edit the company's most valuable authors after being relieved of his post as editorial director in 1984.

During the New York newspaper strike of 1963, Epstein, his wife Barbara, and their friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick created The New York Review of Books. As he was working for Random House, he couldn't be an editor for this as well. So they turned to their friend Robert Silvers to be its editor along with Epstein's wife, Barbara. The New York Review of Books was a journal dedicated to serious reviewing of books. He had his list of distribution contacts from Anchor Books, and Robert Lowell invested $4,000 dollars from his trust fund to get the company started. The first issue came out on February 1, 1963. It sold out and 2,000 letters arrived urging them to continue. Although he retired in 1999, he continued to be affiliated with the publisher and edited books into his eighties.

In 1979, Epstein took up and forwarded the critic Edmund Wilson's concept for the Library of America, well-made, reliable editions of important American writers similar to the French Pleiade editions. With the support of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first volumes were published in 1982. He later published The Reader's Catalogue of 40,000 titles available by mail order, an analog precursor of online book selling. In 2004, he co-founded On Demand Books, marketer of the Espresso Book Machine, which reproduces a paperback book from a digital file in a few minutes. Epstein predicted that the Espresso Book Machine will supplant the 500-year-old Gutenberg printing press technology.

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