NONFICTION - Dec. 30, 1990

IN THE COMPANY OF WRITERS: A Life in Publishing by Charles Scribner Jr. (Scribner’s Sons: $22.50; 157 pp.). There was a time when the Scribner name carried prestige in the publishing world, back when Maxwell Perkins edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. That’s not true today, however, as hard as Charles Scribner Jr. tries in these bland, overpriced memoirs to put a positive spin on the house’s decline. Scribner, who ran the company from 1952 to 1986, does offer, however, a few nice recollections of well-known writers, one a classic--the letter of condolence the author received from Hemingway when his father died: “Since he had to die at least he has gotten it over with.”