Joel Miller sees a thread stretched between three men who died this month: publisher Richard Snyder, author Cormac McCarthy, and editor Robert Gottlieb.

He begins at a time when publishing wasn’t particularly professional.

“I’ve been a full-time professional writer for 28 years,” McCarthy said in 1989, “and I’ve never received a royalty check. That, I’ll betcha, is a record.” Possibly, but probably not. Publishers have always lost money betting on books. As William Jovanovich once said of his own kind, “The publisher can at once be regarded as a scoundrel by his authors and an idealist by his bankers. . . .”