Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (3)

 In the mid-1970s the publicity department at New American Library consisted of four people: a publicity director, the publicity director's secretary, a publicity director's assistant (who set up interviews of the authors of some of New American Library's most recently-published books with the producers of various local and national corporate media radio or television talk shows) and a publicity clerk.

The New American Library publicity director's private office within the corporate office skyscraper included a large window that enabled the publicity director to look out from her desk at the world outside during the workday. But an aisle about two to three yards wide, that other employees walked through during the workday, separated the doorway from the publicity director's private office from three desks across this aisle.

These three desks across the aisle were separated about two yards from each other. And on the chairs behind each desk sat either the publicity director's assistant, the publicity director's secretary or the publicity clerk.

In the mid-1970s, there were still many skyscraper office workplaces in Manhattan in which the office workers who didn't have their own private office spaces with doors did not work between the three walls of a cubicle. And at New American Library in the mid-1970s, no cubicle wall separated me from the desk and telephone of the publicity director's secretary, which was about two yards away from the right side of my desk. In addition, no cubicle wall separated the New American Library publicity director's secretary's desk and telephone from the desk of the publicity director's assistant, which was about two yards away from the right side of the publicity director's secretary's desk and against a wall on the publicity director assistant desk's own right side.

About three or four yards away from the left side of the publicity clerk's desk, behind which I now sat at the New American Library skayscraper officer, was the desk of the person who was then working as an assistant to the director of New American Library's promotion department.  And, like the New American Library's publicity director, the promotion department director also had a private office with a door in which the person whose office it was could look out a skyscraper window at the outside street below from the skyscraper office.