Robert Gottlieb, who died this week, was arguably the most visible worker in all of book publishing, his extraordinary labor highlighted in memoir and documentary and now, of course, in obituaries. I liked his book Avid Reader, and I liked many of the books he edited and published. As someone pursuing a career in the same field, I was glad there was a public figure making my job intelligible for nonspecialists—someone whose book about publishing helped my dad, for example, make sense of what I was doing (far less successfully) all day.