Random House
Cerf and Klopfer's acquisition of Modern Library was the beginning of their publishing business, which they later named Random House. The publishing company used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend and fellow Columbia alumnus Rockwell Kent.
Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with such writers as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others. He published Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand, though he vehemently disagreed with her philosophy of Objectivism. He admired her "sincerity" and "brillian[ce]", and Rand became a friend. However, when Cerf refused to publish Rand's 1964 book The Virtue of Selfishness (which was originally titled The Fascist New Frontier), Rand changed publishers; the two never spoke again.
In 1933, Cerf won United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, a landmark court case against government censorship. Thereafter, he was the first in the United States to publish James Joyce's unabridged Ulysses. (Originally published in Paris by Sylvia Beach in 1922. One chapter from its previous serialization in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Chicago-based literary magazine, The Little Review, had led to its being found "a work of obscenity".)
Random House had the rights to publish the book in the United States in 1932, and they arranged for a test case to challenge the implicit ban so as to publish the work without fear of prosecution. The publisher, therefore, made an arrangement to import the book and to have a copy seized by the United States Customs Service when it arrived. After seizure, the United States attorney took seven months before deciding whether to proceed further; although the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to assess the work's obscenity considered it a "literary masterpiece", he also felt it was obscene within the meaning of the law. The office then sued under the Tariff Act of 1930, which allowed a district attorney to bring an action against obscene literature. Cerf later presented the book in question to Columbia University.
In 1944, Cerf published the first of his books of jokes and anecdotes, Try and Stop Me, with illustrations drawn by Carl Rose. A second book, Shake Well Before Using, was published in 1949. Then, he became a member of the Peabody Awards board of jurors, where he served from 1946 to 1967 and 1970–1971. He was chair juror of the Peabody Jurors Board from 1954 to the end of his first term in 1967, and published a weekly column, "The Cerf Board", in the Sunday supplement magazine This Week. Cerf was also inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa in 1967 at Florida Southern College.
In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what became known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop", a compilation of Cerf's jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit.
