This remembrance first appeared in Stranger’s Guide on July 28, 2024.
On July 23, 2024, the American essayist and editor Lewis H. Lapham died. Since then several beautiful obituaries have been written about the great man and I won’t attempt to repeat these, though I certainly encourage reading them. Instead I want to focus on a very particular time and place where I worked with Lewis and knew him best—the book-filled offices of his last great project, Lapham’s Quarterly.
After a storied tenure of nearly thirty years at Harper’s Magazine, Lewis founded Lapham’s Quarterly in 2007 as a magazine of the history of ideas. The offices were housed on Irving Place just off Union Square in Manhattan. Here I spent eight years as executive editor and found the offices to be a magical place filled with knowledge, wit, history, literature, and cigarette smoke. In those book-lined rooms I got an up-close lesson on how to start a magazine and how to run it with grace. It’s also where I met Abby Rapoport, Stranger’s Guide’s publisher and my co-founder as we built our own magazine years later.
Back in 2007 I was the first full-time editorial hire Lewis made. On my first day of work, I was greeted by the only other staff members in the office. The first was Ann Gollin, Lewis’ rock and longtime assistant. The second was a young intern in flip-flops and cut-off shorts. That was it, that was the entire operation. There was no website, no magazine, no subscribers. Instead there was just the beginning of Lewis’ idea that we cull through the great books and create a digest of thought and ideas. Each issue would be on a new theme, be it war, religion, or food.
When I left eight years later, Lewis had built a thriving magazine with forty thousand subscribers and an annual gala—the Decades Ball—headlined by the likes of Tom Hanks and Anne Hathaway. There was a robust intellectual editorial board that met four times a year around a large wooden table to discuss Thucydides, Marx, or Hannah Arendt.
But that all came later. On that very first day of work, Lewis took me out, first to a party at André Schiffrin’s penthouse apartment, where he introduced me to Joan Didion before slipping out to a late dinner at Elaine’s. Here we sat at what Lewis assured me was the best table in the house. Within minutes the grande dame herself, Elaine, plopped down at our table with a tremendous sigh, as if we were just the port in the storm she’d been waiting for. An endless stream of people dropped by to say hello or to drink or to argue politics late into the night. I was accustomed to a very different crowd—those of small leftist magazines and the New School philosophy graduate students.
“Where am I?” I wondered. “What have I just signed on to?”
When Lewis founded Lapham’s Quarterly, he had already been inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He was already famous as an essayist, editor, and author of countless books. But despite all his accolades, those early days at Lapham’s Quarterly had the feel of a 1940s movie about a plucky team of actors putting on a show, a kind of “Gee shucks folks, let’s make a magazine!” On Lewis’ desk, next to the ashtrays and the blue folders full of notes, sat the book How to Start a Magazine, which was hurriedly tucked away the day the New York Times came to photograph the offices. In those days, I was married to the magazine’s art director and we didn’t yet have kids. So almost every evening after work we’d head off for drinks with Lewis at the nearby bar, Paul & Jimmy’s, where Lewis quickly established himself as a regular. It was here we spent countless hours discussing this nascent publication, its cover, the printer, the feel of an issue, and ideas for themes and authors.
Lewis was an incessantly hard worker; he was the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave. Almost every night after work he’d head off to a dinner, a book party, or some other glamorous literary event. Although he was already in his seventies, I never saw a man work harder.
Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly opened with an essay by Lewis that he would painstakingly labor over for weeks; seventeen drafts for one essay was not uncommon. Ann Gollin, his trusty accomplice in all things great and small, would diligently transcribe the essays he dictated on a small hand-held tape recorder. And then she’d transcribe them again, then yet again, as he crafted and re-crafted each sentence.
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