More Conversation With Marsha Cohen - Editor, Writer

In 1970 Marsha Cohen sought adventure. She took a freighter from Brooklyn to the Netherlands. There were only 12 passengers on board.

I was impressed. How did she select the country? Did she already know Dutch? Marsha laughed.

“No,” she said. “In fact, I may not have realized they even spoke a different language there.

“I followed a cousin of mine who’d gone to the Netherlands to escape being drafted and going to Vietnam. It was after all 1970. Through the cousin I met my husband, Dom.”

Dominique Boer was working a Dutch publishing company, Elsevier. Of course Marsha wanted to stay in the Netherlands. She even learned Dutch.

She was in love. “To stay, I needed a job,” says Marsha. “Dom told me that Elsevier had a scientific division where they published journals in English, things like Brain Research. I applied there and started working as a freelancer That was perfect for my non-existent immigration status.

“About a year and a half later we came to the states and married. After 6 months in New York, we returned to The Netherlands. We settled in Haarlem, we had children and I continued doing free-lance work. Dom had a new job as editor in chief of a popular science magazine at Holland’s largest magazine publisher VNU.

“VNU wanted to break into the U.S. market with a scientific magazine for young people. There wasn’t anything like that at the time. ”

“So back we came to the States to develop the magazine. We called it Science Illustrated and pitched it at 9-14 year olds. They gave him a retainer to set up an office and find employees. Dom hired good people who knew both publishing and science. “People like me. I did picture researching at NASA and places like that and I loved it,” says Marsha.

Unfortunately financial difficulties forced the publisher to terminate the Science Illustrated project just as it was ready to launch. ”It was awful.” In 1980 they gave Dom The Golden Handshake. That’s Dutch for The Golden Parachute.

Dom could have gone back to Holland and continued working at VNU but instead he and Marsha stayed in the US and started their own company: The Tappan Group. What did the Tappan Group do, I wondered.

“Anything,” said Marsha. “Anything someone would pay us to do. We got our first work from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the U.S.A. We were to promote Dutch companies in America.

“We started a magazine called HollandUSA. Holland is loaded with international companies and we profiled them in the magazine to promote them in this country. Companies like KLM, Phillips, Shell, the financial company Nationale Nederlanden , ABNAmro bank. Once we wrote about a little Dutch company that manufactured high-end, well-made, beautifully designed clothing for children. Bloomingdale’s noticed Oilily. They placed an order, and the company took off.”

The focus of Holland USA. broadened to include promoting America to the Dutch. Dom interviewed state governors. Each promoted his state as an ideal place for Dutch companies to invest and prosper. Tennessee, for instance, sent a delegation to Holland to lure KLM to TN. They succeeded and Memphis became a KLM gateway city. It still is.

“We also did work for the Dutch government, starting with the Dutch IRS. That was key because it eventually took us back to Holland. We moved to the Hague because although Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, the Hague is the seat of the government. All the government offices are there.” The Tappan Group worked for a bunch of the Dutch Ministries – it still does -- and via via Marsha landed up working for a group specialized in dredging. Dredging?.

Yep. Dredging. Because of The Netherlands’ location and history, the country has developed extensive maritime expertise. Many Dutch companies specialize in water management issues like dredging, land reclamation, dyke construction, urban water management. Just ask the folks in New Orleans who they turn to for advice.

When Marsha was asked to do an international English language dredging magazine, she of course said Yes. Magazine publishing was not a problem. But content was another thing.

Marsha started studying these water related issues. Her knowledge of US/Netherlands business ties, her background in science and her ability to communicate clearly in English and in Dutch combined to bring her to the unexpectedly fascinating world of water management. Now her specialty is dredging. Most of her writing, editing, and research, and publishing now have to do with dredging.

Who would have guessed? Marsha herself wouldn’t have.

A Conversation With Marsha Cohen - publishing production

    “I had just graduated from college as an English major.  My mother wanted me to teach, that's what women did, so obviously I wanted to go into publishing.”

     Marsha Cohen did go into publishing.  Viking urged her to take a temporary job in production until something in the editorial department became available.

     “If you had told me back then, when I was 21 or 22 years old, that what I learned in a publishing production department would be amongst the most valuable lessons I ever learned, I would have laughed in your face.  It was though.  It isn’t enough for something to be well written.  You really need to know what’s involved in putting a book together.  You need to understand about price estimation, paper suppliers, printers, delivery scheduling.  You need to know the limits and the possibilities of production.

     “My boss was an older guy.  Of course at 22 everyone seems older.  He was probably only in his late 40s.He didn’t think girls could do the math needed for cost estimates.  Anti-feminism was really the norm in the late 1970s and early 80s.  We forget how prevalent male chauvinism was, even in modern times.  He was so senior in the company that he had 6 weeks annual vacation.  He took it all at once, leaving me “alone” and giving me an opportunity I’d never have had if he were at work.

     “At that time, Viking was James Joyce’s U.S. publisher.  They’d handed Ulysses off to Random House which could better afford the coming litigation costs, but Viking published Joyce’s other books.

     “When my boss was off on his long vacation, a new Joyce manuscript came to light.  Giacomo Joyce.  It was Joyce’s diaries from when he lived in Italy.  There were intense secret meetings about this book.  Viking wanted to publish it quickly to establish copyright.  My boss would have been at those meetings, but since he was away I got to go.  I made the first executive decision of my short career.

     “Precautions were being made to protect the secrecy of the project.  It had already been arranged that the printer would work with special speed to get the book right out.  Now executives worried that wasn’t enough.  They decided to tell the printers that the job was top secret and ask them to demand that their workers keep mum about what they were printing.  Prevent leaks.  This didn’t make sense to me.  I spoke up. ‘These are just ordinary guys, going into work.  They aren’t paying attention to what’s on the pages they’re printing.’  I don’t know how I had the nerve to speak up so forthrightly to all these big shots at the secret meeting.  I was surprised I opened my mouth, but I told them not to alert workers to a secret that they would otherwise not notice.

     “ ‘Hmm,’ said the men at the meeting.  My point carried.  I was even more surprised that someone was listening.”

 

     Marsha Cohen stayed in the production department at Viking for 1 ½ years.  When she left, she didn’t yet realize how much she had learned and it was later still before she understood how valuable those lessons were.

     Marsha took a job a Van Nostrand on 41^st Street across from the public library.  Van Nostrand was a scientific publisher.  It had a small trade department that published books about sports and children’s books, especially children’s books about science.  Marsha worked in that trade department.

     “I had such an amazing boss at Van Nostrand, Dorothy Briley.  She’d worked at Abington Press in Tennessee.  She knew so much about publishing and she was very generous with her knowledge.  I learned a lot from Dorothy Briley, she was a wonderful female role model, and I liked her tremendously.”

     Van Nostrand published some children’s books on space travel.  I read some of them myself as a child.  Those books promised that I could go to a space port when I grew up and take a rocket trip to the moon or even Mars.  I remember that promise well.  Marsha remembered it too.  Like me, Marsha Cohen was disappointed that the thrilling promise was not kept. 

     In spite of the fun working at Van Nostrand, Marsha was restless.  She wanted something new.  “I didn’t go to the moon,” says Marsha.  “But I did go to Europe.”

     So ended Marsha Cohen’s first adventure in publishing.  Others were just ahead.