NONFICTION - May 23, 1993

I NEVER HAD A BEST-SELLER: The Story of a Small Publisher by Jacob Steinberg (Hippocrene Books: $19.95; 288 pp.) The name may not ring a bell, but it’s difficult to get through high school, let alone college, without encountering at some point a book produced by Twayne Publishers Inc. A specialist in series books sold primarily to educational libraries, Twayne is probably best known for its Authors Series, an ongoing set of some 1,900 books introducing readers--typically, no doubt, students writing terms papers--to authors and literary movements and which is said to be “the largest single project in the history of publishing.” Although Jacob Steinberg, Twayne’s founder, does a fair bit of horn-tooting in “I Never Had a Best-Seller,” he tells a generally interesting story, one centering on the struggles an independent publisher must face in order to survive. Steinberg eventually sold the company to ITT, which then had a small, backwater-ish publishing operation, and the author soon learned what corporate ownership meant: high overheads, mistrust of the idiosyncratic and reverence for the bottom line.