Showboat; Robert Straus and his flair for selling literature.(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A few months ago, Roger Straus, the founder and newly appointed chairman of the literary house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, gave a dinner party for twenty-five or so people in a private hotel dining room in Frankfurt, at the time of the international book fair. Before he sat down to eat oysters and venison, Straus, who is eighty-five, moved through the room with smiling, slouchy glamour, hands in pockets, bending back a little from the waist as if about to sing "Fly Me to the Moon." He wore a fine double-breasted pin-striped suit. His wavy white hair was swept from his face. He welcomed male friends by gripping their shoulders with both hands. He kissed some women three times: once on each cheek, and then again on the forehead. He said the same thing to both men and women: "Hi, baby!"

Straus is a link to a publishing past that seems simpler and more heroic than today's. His guests were Europe's grandest publishers -- one British editor calls them the Nobel Squad -- and the mood was congenial and easy but ceremonial. "Half of European literature is represented at this table," one guest said. Then she added, almost seriously, "If you get this invitation, you have arrived at Olympus. There is no way up from here." A knife struck a wineglass, and Siegfried Unseld, the head of Suhrkamp, the prestigious German literary publishing house -- a prizefighter of a man wearing a funereal suit -- stood and made a toast to Straus, his approximate contemporary. "When we meet, we always try to find out, Has the other one all the marbles?" he said, speaking slowly. Straus blew an affectionate Vegas kiss across the room. Inge Feltrinelli, the president of the Italian publishing house Feltrinelli, and the widow of its radical millionaire founder, was watching admiringly. "I met Roger a long time ago in New York," she said, in heavily accented English. "He looked like the Great Gatsby. He was the antithesis of Brooks Brothers. He was the most elegant man you have ever seen -- absolutely dashing, sexy. Cufflinks this size! And the ties . . ." To represent an ascot in full bloom, she made a big, rolling motion under her chin with both hands. "One time we had lunch -- a blond, blond cashmere jacket. I touched it. I said, 'Roger, you're divine.' And then after lunch he posted Susan Sontag's letters for her. She was too much in her work for this banal task. You know, he is a gentleman who takes care of a girl."

For a man whose company is now owned by one of Germany's largest media conglomerates, Roger Straus is oddly persuasive in the role of bespoke independent American publisher. Since the nineteen-sixties, as all but a few American publishing houses have become drawn into multinational companies, Straus -- the publisher of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mario Vargas Llosa, and John McPhee, among others -- has been the man whom reporters called to hear how corporate ownership was screwing up the rest of the book trade. Straus would describe those responsible as "spaghetti salesmen," or something similar. But in late 1994, after conceding that his son, Roger Straus III, had no interest in filling his shoes, Straus announced that he had sold F.S.G. to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, in Stuttgart, which owns eighty subsidiaries in Europe and the United States, including Henry Holt, St. Martin's, and Picador. Straus remained the head of F.S.G., which he has run since 1946, but, to the surprise of his friends and his several enemies, it somehow happened that he also remained a symbol of plucky anti-corporate American publishing. F.S.G.'s apparent independence says something about the laissez-faire style of the von Holtzbrinck group. But it chiefly points to the seductive force (and the commercial value) of the persona that Straus presents so irresistibly to the world, and which has remained unchanged: the ascots and lilac socks; the flirtatious, confiding manner of a nineteen-fifties Hollywood gossip columnist; the flagrant disregard for the new shape of American publishing ("huge corporate bullshit"); the episodes of professional vengeance; and the almost pretentiously ramshackle offices on Union Square. Straus has continued to be the Last Great Gentleman Publisher.

"A lot of people still think we are independent," Straus told me in Frankfurt, a day or two before the dinner. We were sitting at F.S.G.'s small open-plan stand, in a corner of the international hall at the book fair. Across the aisle was the Random House stand, which looked like a full-sized Starbucks, with brightly lit portraits of John Grisham and Bill Bryson on the walls. "Look at that real estate, for Christ's sake," he said, smiling. "You could land a fucking airplane in that." His growl has force but little volume, and sometimes it is hard to hear much more than the expletives, the elegant archaic slang, and the names of Farrar, Straus authors who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. ("Joseph Brodsky put me down as next of kin. . . . Took these two stew bones out to lunch . . . three or four Martinis . . . everybody says he's a prick but that's nothing to do with the price of fish.")

Straus has been attending the Frankfurt Book Fair since 1961. "Before, as a Jew, I didn't feel comfortable," he told me. But friends, including the London publisher George Weidenfeld, finally persuaded him. "They said, 'Come on, Roger, we'll take you to dinner.' And by that time things were calmer in my head. I should have come sooner. I like it -- it's sort of kicky." Today, Straus and his longtime executive assistant, Peggy Miller -- a tall, chic, ironic woman a generation younger than he is -- move through Frankfurt like movie stars. "This is the part of publishing Roger loves the most -- the international brotherhood," Jonathan Galassi, the president of F.S.G., said.

Straus turned a small postwar publisher of historical novels and nutrition manuals into America's foremost literary house, and to watch him at work in Frankfurt was to get a sense of the style that helped him pull this off. That morning, between meetings, he had been trying to bring together two friends in the brotherhood: one had a publishing company to sell, the other was looking to buy one. ("Power broker? I'm a pimp.") Younger editors and agents were paying their respects -- "Who the fuck was that?" Straus whispered, laughing, as they walked away -- and old friends were dropping by to hear this year's Nobel Prize rumors. Earlier, Straus had taken the trouble to goad an old antagonist while both waited for an elevator, and now he smiled guiltily at the remembrance of it. ("He loves having enemies -- it's really very invigorating for him," Galassi says.) But into the gossip and cheerful slander Straus always wove a pitch for a "marvellous" new book, an editor who was about to join the firm, or the virtues of the F.S.G. children's list. He was working the hall. As the writer Nadine Gordimer later said, "Roger is not an august ornament. He goes into the office every day. He reads everything. He cares what happens to your work." Derek Walcott, one of the poets on F.S.G.'s list, and a good friend of Straus's, says,"He does this thing, which is 'I'm just a dumb Jewish guy.' But in fact he's a man of great sensitivity, and a reader."

Authors say that the guiding Straus principle is personal loyalty to them and their work. "Many publishers actually despise their authors and get into ego wars with them," Roger Straus III, who once worked at F.S.G., and is now an architectural photographer, told me. "But his ego and his authors' ego are one; there's no space between his publishing house and their work." The poet Seamus Heaney says, "What's great about Roger is the head-on strength of body and personality, the forthrightness, the swiftness of his judgments, the immense largesse."