Bernard Shir-Cliff


Bernard W. Shir-Cliff, an editor for Ballantine Books, Contemporary Books, Warner Books and other publishers, also translated books and later became a well-known literary agent. As a senior editor at Warner Books, he was responsible for the huge publishing success of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, which she writes about in her autobiography, All in a Lifetime.
As the editor at Ballantine in the 1950s and 1960s, he handled the Zacherley anthologies, the paperback of Hunter Thompson's , Harvey Kurtzman's The Mad Reader and other early Mad paperbacks. He made four contributions to Mad and also contributed to other magazines edited by Kurtzman, such as "The Karate Lesson" in Kurtzman's Help!. He satirized Sports Illustrated in the second issue of Kurtzman's Trump.
In 1956 he edited the humor anthology, The Wild Reader, featuring essays, poems and satirical pieces by Robert Benchley, Art Buchwald, Tom Lehrer, John Lardner, Shepherd Mead, Ogden Nash, S.J. Perelman, Frank Sullivan, James Thurber and others. The 154-page paperback was illustrated with cartoons by Kelly Freas who also did the front cover.
The screenplay of Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses was translated by Shir-Cliff for publication by Ballantine in 1962. He also was the co-translator with Oscar De Liso of the screenplay for Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
In the early 1980s, when he was editor-in-chief of Warner Books, Shir-Cliff commented on the publishing recession and lower reprint prices:
Until his recent retirement, Shir-Cliff was an agent handling such books as John R. Dann's Song of the Earth.