The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley, Bookman by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $25.95; 432 pp.) : F.P.A.: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS by Sally Ashley (Beaufort: $17.95; 272 pp.)

Franklin Pierce Adams once wrote that “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” Indeed, nowhere is the temptation to gild the past more inviting than in the world of letters. Ours is a vulgar age, goes the lament. Gone are the giants of writing and publishing, who labored in the vineyard of ideas and opinion simply because, like Martin Luther, they could do no other.

The subjects of two new biographies--Mitchell Kennerley, controversial publisher and dealer in literary antiquities, and Franklin Pierce Adams, a.k.a. FPA, the most celebrated and influential newspaper columnist in our history--embody the struggle to lead the literary life. They converged on New York City from opposite directions--Kennerley in 1896, the precocious young head of the American office of a distinguished British publisher; Adams at 22, in 1904 from the middle-American yawp of Chicago. Their careers and characters, played out with brio in the ebullience of the first decades of the century, describe two powerful humors--the fancy and the funny--that shaped the then-callow American literary culture, as well as the affections, both dark and light, that to this day motivate people to whom words and ideas appeal.

Kennerley, an 18-year-old British publishing prodigy with a Bohemian manner and an appetite for first editions, made a name for himself over the next 20 years as a publisher--producing the works of many of the most distinguished writers of his day, including Frank Harris, D. H. Lawrence, Walter Lippman, Van Wyck Brooks, Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells--and as a bookmaker who insisted on the highest standards of production and design. Later when he shifted his attention from publishing to the world of book collecting, as the head of the Anderson Art Galleries, he used his contacts in the publishing world and his singular ability to stand in the spotlight to create the American market for literary things.

He presided over headline-making auctions (“Auctions speak louder than words,” quoth he), including the famous sale of the John Quinn collection, featuring manuscripts and first editions of Joyce, Synge, Yeats, James, Kipling, Stevenson, and the greatest assemblage of Conrad manuscripts ever sold. Matthew J. Bruccoli suggests that the sale of the Jerome Kern collection still stands as the most glamorous literary sale in our history. Under Kennerley’s stylish guidance, the book auction became a big money carnival at which Americans of fortune competed for artifacts of culture with the same breathless swagger that ruled the day on Wall Street.

Kennerley was passionate about books--not just their contents, but their pages, their covers, their spines. “You do not know how friendly a second-hand copy of a book can be until you have carried it home and wiped off the dust from the cover, from the top edge, from the endpapers and maybe also from the inside pages and have fondled it back to renewed life and service,” he wrote five years before his death and long after his star had faded. He was passionate about talent as well, maintaining throughout his susceptibility to the real thing. But it was his third passion--for money--that brought him, over and over again, to grief.

Indeed, many of the same writers who praised his taste, and, more important, his devotion, ended up threatening to take legal action in pursuit of their royalties. Kennerley was eternally spending great sums, refinancing loans, always on shaky financial ground, floating his various enterprises by the force of his personality, which Bruccoli describes as a combination of “cool egotism, arrogance, audacity, ruthlessness, relentlessness and charm.” Indeed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was rumored to be one of Kennerley’s many lovers, may have had the last word on his chimerical aspect in a letter that Bruccoli suggests was an invitation to an affair, “I have not infrequently thought that you are one of the best men in the world. . . . I have a hurt in my heart to do something to please you. . . . I wonder whether more people love you or hate you. You could probably be quite perfectly hateable.”

By the time of his suicide in 1950, Kennerley had arrived at a place with which he had no experience, broke and obscure, reduced to selling his furniture to pay his debts.

The bookish urge that animated Kennerley--revealed in his reverence for the rarefied, the literary object , the manuscript as well as the meaning--helped shape the fledgling American publishing industry. And the industry, as though in return, was a convenient empty stage for his private drama of artfulness and high style. His was the transit of the English aesthete. Indeed, snobbery of the elite remains--in contrary tandem with the American democratic urge to which Adams imagined he aspired--a powerful force at work in publishing today.

Adams’ column, best known as “The Conning Tower,” was not a conventional newspaper column. Rather it was a people’s literary forum, a serendipitous anthology of one-liners, light verse and opinions on just about everything, over which Adams presided as author, editor and ringmaster for 33 uninterrupted years. (Adams missed one day because his publisher was late renewing a contract.) Its contributors included--among thousands of good citizens--Ring Lardner, Edna Ferber, E. B. White, Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood; “The Conning Tower” was first light of day for talents like George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, John O’Hara and James Thurber. At the height of its popularity it was required reading for anyone with the slightest hope of being in the know. There is no more telling tribute to the reach of its playfulness than the fact that it inspired no less morose a figure than Eugene O’Neill to contribute a light-hearted valentine.

As for Adams, he was the chief, often called the Boss, of a gathering of the literary tribes in the ‘20s when the great work at hand was the invention of an American literary voice. Step 1 in the grope toward something of their own was emergence from the Continental shadow of people like Kennerley. And so Adams and his crowd, including Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, cherished things American. They wrote poems about baseball. (Adams wrote the poem that made “Tinkers to Evers to Chance,” part of our national myth.)

They played poker with a merciless vigor, winning and losing huge amounts at the regular meetings of the Thanatopsis Poker Playing and Inside Straight Club. Pretension became the enemy and humor the weapon. Adams and his cronies--the famous Algonquin Round Tale--raised satire and the smart-aleck remark to a kind of civil religion. Ever alert to pomposity and buncombe they spared no effort to prove that they were just plain folks even if they had to do it in iambic pentameter. And so they nurtured a potent American tradition of down-to-earth sophistication that began with Huck Finn’s confession that he wouldn’t a-tackled it at all if he’d a-knowed what a trouble it was to make a book and that, as Ashley suggests, thrives today in Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen.

Adams was dedicated to erasing the line between art and life. (Ashley suggests that his column, always full of diary entries and personal opinion, was the forerunner of the radio and television talk show that traffics in the personality of the host.) Indeed, after 20 years of marriage to a woman with whom he fell in love while a lad in Chicago, Adams fell in love with another woman, and some of his readers may have seen it coming before he did. Not for Adams the engravings, typography, the leather bindings, the rich man’s detail that fascinated Kennerley. Rather, he invited his readers to consider the art of his life and mind, commending a palatable version of high culture into the hands of anybody who could afford a newspaper.

As with Kennerley, who published poetry for the ages and a potboiler reputed to have been dictated by the ghost of Mark Twain, today’s book publishers continue to find themselves torn between the arrogance to shape taste and the economic necessity to reflect it. But for those who persist, the writers, the editors, the readers, the book people who, for reasons ignoble or fine, stand by their attachment to the printed world, the tension between the private muse and the public taste, the gnostic and the crystal-clear, is no burden at all. It is, on the contrary, the occasion, the very engine of our ambition.