By Anya Schiffrin

Raised on the Upper West Side with a publisher father and a stay-at-home writer mother, I grew used to my parents hosting book parties a few times a year. We gathered on their terrace, overgrown with fruit trees, marigolds, and geraniums, which my mother thought were ugly but could survive the blistering New York summer sun. The writer Lore Segal remembers that Fran Lebowitz was spotted at one party and my father, who was quite shy, said to Lore: “you go talk to her.” By the time Lore had made it across the crowded terrace, Lebowitz had already gone.

What is a book party? A get-together to celebrate the publication of a book and its author(s), to get the word out, and sell books. But also to discuss the subject of the book at hand. Like all gatherings, they became extinct during COVID-19, but are making a comeback, although in altered forms. The younger generations prefer experiential versions. Post-COVID era book parties can and do include, for example, cosplay (dressing up), bike rides, huge cakes, decorated tattoos, and even botox injections.

“The traditional cocktail party where the host gathers a who’s who of the literary society to toast a new author’s book is waning,” said Meredith Howard, promotions director at Columbia University Press, “but those were dying out before the pandemic anyway. What resonates more with the younger crowd are book experiences instead of parties. Plus, they do really well on social media.”

I have evolved also. I now order Mama’s Too pizza, instead of cheese and charcuterie from Zabar’s and shrimp from Citarella. (Slightly embarrassing since “Shrimp is a sign of status in New York,” Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar commented at a book party I threw for her years ago.)

But the pizza gets devoured, as it was recently when we had a full house at a book party for “Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany.” Published in March by Columbia University Press, Newshawks was written by my former colleague Larry Heinzerling, his co-author and AP colleague, Randy Herschaft, and Heinzerling’s widow, Ann Cooper, a top-notch journalist and editor, who finished and edited the book after Heinzerling’s untimely death in 2021, and who also happens to be West Side Rag’s senior editor. Newshawks examines the complicated and controversial relationship the AP had with the Nazi regime, including a little-known photo exchange that operated through the war years with the blessing of the Nazi Foreign Ministry.

Heinzerling and Cooper were devoted Upper West Siders. Their first dinner date was at Metisse in 1999, and they were regular customers at Silver Moon, especially for the fruit tarts.

“We used to eat in the Indian restaurant where Aangan is now, at Broadway and West 103rd Street,” Cooper recalls. “That’s where we took my son, when he was nine or ten, to tell him we were going to get married. He was so excited, he literally bounced up and down in his seat and asked Larry if he could be best man (the answer was ‘yes’).”

Heinzerling had a long track record of covering big stories in his 41-year AP career. He had reported in South Africa during the 1976 Soweto uprising, in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and was deeply involved in the negotiations to free Terry Anderson, the AP reporter kidnapped in 1985 in Beirut and held hostage for seven years (Anderson died last month). A terrific writer and sharp thinker, Heinzerling was famously shy and never bragged about his past. He not only spoke and read German, but his father, Lynn Heinzerling, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning AP correspondent, had known or worked with many of the characters in what would become his son’s book.

In 2016, the AP commissioned Heinzerling and Herschaft to investigate claims in a report published by German historian Harriet Scharnberg, whose research on AP’s photo operation in Berlin concluded that the agency had ceded too much of its independence to the Nazi government in the years 1933-1941, in exchange for being allowed to work under the regime. Heinzerling and Herschaft dug into archives — including AP’s own extensive records — and filed freedom of information act requests to open secret government files. They saw that the story of AP covering Nazi Germany reached far beyond the photo operation, which was the focus of their 2017 report, Covering Tyranny. After I read that report, I made an introduction to my editor at Columbia University Press, Phil Leventhal, who quickly saw that this would be an important book.

Heinzerling and Herschaft got to work, but during the pandemic, Heinzerling was diagnosed with advanced cancer and died before the book was finished. Working closely with co-author Herschaft, Cooper rewrote, edited, and brought the book to publication. It was a hard job, not just because of her sadness, but also because of the inevitable editor’s dilemma of wanting to respect the author’s wishes while needing to make changes to the copy. Cooper is known as a thorough editor, and one of the questions that came up during the Q&A at the book party for Newshawks was, “What’s it like to edit your husband, especially when he’s not there to argue?” Cooper acknowledged that in some ways it was easier, because he could not push back on cuts needed to get the manuscript down to Columbia’s prescribed 100,000 words.

If you know someone who has gone through the awful grind of writing and publishing a book, consider celebrating them with a book party. It’s a rewarding experience for all!

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