Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher
When Emily Stokes became the editor of the Paris Review in 2021, she had a lot on her plate: leading a complete redesign of the magazine, switching to a new printer, and pulling together her first issue. So, understandably, she spent her first few months making some design interventions in the office. “Moving furniture around is a good form of procrastination when you are in a complete panic,” she told me on a recent Thursday afternoon.
Stokes “got craigslisty,” acquiring two couches and two armchairs for her office. She banished a bookshelf that had relegated the web people to a dark corner. She also brought in some friends with art and design backgrounds to help, including the architectural designer Nick Poe, who made three large but simple tables: one to act as a counter near the kitchen, one to sit in the middle of the office, and one that doubles as Emily’s desk and the conference room table. “Then I realized I needed to make a magazine, so I stopped and hired some editors.”
Though the Paris Review kept a Paris office on Rue de Tournon from its founding in 1953 to 1974, by 1956 its editor and owner, George Plimpton, had moved to New York. For most of its life the quarterly had its office in his home at 541 East 72nd Street. It was a black and white town house with a red lacquer door at the end of a quiet, brick-paved cul-de-sac overlooking the East River. Covering a final party held by Plimpton’s wife, Sarah Plimpton, before she sold the house, articles in Vulture and the New York Times recounted how over the years the house’s guests had included luminaries such as Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Kurt Vonnegut, and Katherine Anne Porter. Indeed the journal, best known for its signature interviews, has also long played host to writers and socialites. “It’s always been two things at once,” Lorin Stein, editor from 2010 until 2017 told Refinery29 in 2013. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.”
Embodying that double life, a pool table in the Plimptons’ house served two purposes: It was a desk for laying out the issues and a serving surface for hors d’oeuvres. Over the pool table hung a large 1967 Andy Warhol print of a receipt billed to the Paris Review for the “prompt delivery” of one bottle of vodka and two bottles of Blair House Scotch, ordered on his way to a gathering at the town house.
The office has a piano (“untunable,” per Stokes, but nevertheless “someone usually plays it at the end of a party”), and on the wall hangs a 1967 Andy Warhol print of a receipt billed to the Paris Review for the “prompt delivery” of one bottle of vodka and two bottles of Blair House Scotch.
Plimpton died in 2003, and though he wrote into his will that the Paris Review would be allowed to continue to work in the house free of rent, its offices soon moved to a loft at 62 White Street in Tribeca and then, in the spring of 2013, to their current home in Chelsea. The parties continued. In 2005 then senior editor Christopher Cox secured a new pool table. Though it was rumored among the staff to be Plimpton’s original, Cox, who would later become the editor of Harper’s Magazine, actually collected it with an intern from an Italian social club in Bed-Stuy that was giving it away. They managed to shatter a giant window in the club while transporting it, but, according to Cox, “Thankfully the club was closing anyway, so it didn’t escalate.”
In 2017 Stein resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment, leading to the implementation of more professional management practices. Under the stewardship of a foundation to which Plimpton signed over control before he died, the publication prospered. Since 2003 the print circulation has tripled to 28,000. The party continues—and even plays a role in that prosperity. Its annual gala, the Spring Revel (held at Cipriani), acts as a major fundraiser.
Back in the office, one of the tables that Stokes commissioned has replaced the pool table, but the new table still also serves as a bar. Stokes also kept the cues, which hang next to the fridge as, she said, a “conceptual work of art.” During the Review’s invitation-only issue launch parties, Stokes’s office serves as the designated smoking room, in part because it contains the door to the fire escape. The office has a piano (“untunable,” per Stokes, but nevertheless “someone usually plays it at the end of a party”), and on the wall hangs that same Warhol print of a receipt from Plimpton’s house.
Overall, the office retains a homelike quality. An amply stocked kitchen occupies one quadrant. Staff fondly refer to a set of couches framed by back-issue-laden bookshelves as the “living room,” and the business manager recently set up a record player. Executive director Lori Dorr told me about a recent gathering featuring performers from the Metropolitan Opera, complete with a baby grand piano the Met brought into the living room just for the night.
That said, the space is not without its shortcomings. Stokes’s office is the only conference room. The heating breaks at least once each winter. During one such outage, everyone put on a new piece of merchandise, a red sweatshirt. “We looked like the world’s worst Christmas card,” Stokes recalled.
The staff would not mind, in fact, moving back into a home-home. How do they see the publication’s relation to Paris today? Shot back Stokes, “Or to reviews?” (Yes, the Paris Review is neither in Paris nor does it publish reviews.) Dorr suggested they would love to celebrate their upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary in the French capital. “Or,” added Stokes, “it would be nice if for our anniversary someone would like to buy us a house…” In Paris or New York? “Both.”