(1969) The Seven Minutes Read Online Free PDF

why.
    Sipping his root beer, Barrett thought of his old friend and of their friendship, a friendship that was older although less easy than the one with Abe Zelkin. After Harvard, when he and Philip Sanford had both gone to New York, he to become a disenchanted do-gooder, Sanford to start out as an editor in his father’s famous publishing house, he saw his college roommate frequently. Not only did he like Phil, but he owed him much after all that Phil had done during Barrett’s year of crisis with his mother. Even after Phil Sanford married, Barrett continued to meet his friend for their weekly lunch at the Baroque Restaurant and to go occasionally with him to some sports event at Madison Square Garden. Since moving to California, Barrett had seen Sanford only a half-dozen times. These occasions had afforded Barrett no pleasure. Phil Sanford had always sounded gloomy when talking about his wife and two children, and he had been as miserable as ever over his helpless serfdom in Sanford House, which his father ran as a one-man operation.
    But the last time Barrett had seen Phil Sanford, only three months ago or less, when Barrett had flown into New York on some overnight business and they had dined together in the Oak Room of The Plaza, it had been a happier meeting than usual. Sanford’s life had changed short months before this reunion with Barrett. For the first time, he had been given an opportunity to prove himself. While he was filled with anxieties, he was also filled with enthusiasm.
    That giant of publishing, Wesley R. Sanford, Phil’s father, had been felled by a sudden stroke. While it had not been a massive stroke, it had been a warning one, severe enough to force him into retirement. In the eyes of the stricken gray giant, Sanford House, so long the discoverer and sponsor of authors who had been knighted with the Nobel Prize in literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix Gon-court, was now a house without a head. Phil Sanford, the only heir, had always been regarded with condescension, even disdain, by his mighty father. It was as if the self-made giant had always known that he could not sire another in his image. He had regarded his son as a pygmy, a weakling, an incompetent, a total disappointment. This had been Phil’s Cross, and the fact that he had suffered such treatment for so long without going off on his own had infected Phil’s wife, who had also come to see him as weak and gutless.
    The word that Wesley R. Sanford had left a flourishing publishing business without a satisfactory heir had passed rapidly from Publishers’ Row to Wall Street. Great communications complexes, conglomerates seeking diversification of their holdings, were eager to buy up the firm, with its valuable back list and prestigious name. Only partially recovering from his stroke, Wesley R. Sanford, it had appeared, would decide to sell. And then his only son had gone to his bedside and, for the first time, pleaded for a chance. Whether illness had deprived the convalescing giant of resolution or whether he had been waiting for such an appeal from his heir and been impressed by it, Wesley R. Sanford had gruffly told his son that he would have his chance.
    Philip Sanford had been given two years to prove himself as a capable independent publisher. If in that period he kept the firm in the black, maintained and expanded its prestige, the firm would remain in the family, with Philip as its president and eventual owner. However, if Philip’s guidance proved faulty in that period, he would be removed from the head office, and the publishing house would be sold off lock, stock, and back list to one of the communications industries vying for it.
    Unused to decision-making and authority, Philip Sanford had got off to a poor start. Of the first twenty books published under his direction in his first year, the majority had been failures, and the rest had either barely broken even or made only minor profits. Not one could be called