This 706 page doorstop of a book was not meant to be read from cover to cover, but rather dipped into either from front to back in chronological order or randomly as the spirit moves one.

Gottlieb was the vaunted editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and “The New Yorker” who edited books by some of the 20th-21st Century’s best authors, including Joseph Heller, Jessica Mitford, Lauren Bacall, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, and Robert Caro. He was also a prodigious writer whose “Avid Reader: A Life” and “Near Death Experiences and Others” I loved and who wrote essays for The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and was the ballet critic for the New York Observer for 21 years.  His relationship with Robert Caro working on the four volume biography of LBJ was the subject of a superb movie entitled “Turn Every Page”.  Gottlieb died on June 14, 2023 at the age of 92.

His collaborator, Robert Kimball, was the music critic for the New York Post and the author of “Cole” about Cole Porter.

Gottlieb and Kimball set out to “choose one thousand or so of the “best” America and English lyrics” of their time, beginning in 1900 and ending in 1975 when the musicals that had been so successful on Broadway and in Hollywood movies seemed to die out with the emphasis on “arrangement and performance rather than words and music.”

What they’ve given us is a remarkable collection of min-biographies of 119 lyricists, some famous (George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Noel Coward, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Sammy Cahn, Alan Jay Lerner, Stephen Sondheim) and some totally obscure to most people but not for these two discerning and deeply knowledgable editors.  What a treat it was to randomly open this book and discover that P.G. Wodehouse of Jeeves fame had collaborated with Jermone Kern to write the immortal “Cleopatterer” and “Tulip Time in Sing Sing”.  Or, what about Otto Horbach (1873-1963) called the ‘dean of U.S. librettists’ by Variety who wrote ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ which I remember dancing to the Platters version of in 7th grade!  Then there’s George M. Cohan (1878-1942) who had six hit shows on Broadway at one time in 1911 and was immortalized by Mickey Rooney in the 1942 movie Yankee Doodle Dandy and in the 1968 Broadway play “George W”.  Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway”, “Over There”, and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” remain sung today. And how about Irving Caesar (1895-1996) who wrote “Tea for Two”.

You get the idea, and I only read through the first 50 pages and then moved to randomly opening this incredible book.  If you’re into musical theater or just love the American Songbook, this is a fun and informative volume to keep handy.  Page 422 features Johnny Burke’s “Pennies from Heaven”,  page 561 has “Kids!” by Lee Adams (“What’s the matter with kids today?”), page 246 has Oscar Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”  Great stuff.