'New York Review Of Books': Founded By Canny Capitalist Opportunists

“What happened was this: there was a great newspaper strike in New York in the autumn of 1962, and my friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, had the inspiration — which he imparted to the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick — that this was the one time in history that you could start a book review without a penny, since all the publishing houses had no place to advertise their new books. No New York Times Book Review. Jason and I knew that, if we started a plausible book review, then all the publishers would simply have to take a page. They had to show their authors that they were publishing books.”
 — Here’s an interview with Robert Silvers.