Appearing robust for someone of his years, Cameron can weave a web of tales about writers, editors and publishers that if captured on tape would constitute a rich oral history of twentieth century book publishing.

You have to nudge him back to the story line from time to time when he drifts off into biographical eddies ("Woodchuck is the very best tasting game animal") and literary cul-de-sacs ( "Mary Welch Hemingway, the best looking and most corrupt woman I ever met"), but the trip is a rewarding one.

For someone whose life was lived in the literary fast lane in Boston and New York, Cameron's roots are solidly Midwest and rural. He grew up in Indianapolis at the turn of the last century and spent most summers on his grandfather's farm in Rush County.

It was on the farm that he gained his passion for hunting and fishing, an avocation he pursued relentlessly in the company of his wife of 63 years, Sheila, who died in 1998.

Cameron speaks with enormous pride of his book the "L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook," which was the outgrowth of hundreds of expeditions to hunt and fish, and cooking the bounty of those wilderness outings.

Published in 1983, the book has sold more 170,000 copies in hard cover, Cameron says, and remains in print, still in hard cover. An earlier book, "The Nightwatchers," that drew on his interest and fascination with owls, was published in 1972, but is no longer in print because the publisher by mistake "pulped" the last 30,000 copies which it had intended to sell as remainders, thus the original illustrations were forever lost.

Cameron got his start in book publishing at Bobbs-Merrill, a Indianapolis house where he began as promotion manager. "It turned out that I had larceny in my blood; I could sell,'' he recalled during a recent lunch at the Harvest Valley restaurant, where Cameron had praise for the icy Martini, straight-up, prepared for him.

From a top editorial position at Bobbs-Merrill, he later became editor-in-chief at Little Brown, the leading Boston publishing house where he presided over a string of best sellers, especially the historical novels of Samuel Shellenbarger, and developed, with historian Dumas Malone, the first two volumes of what would become a majestic six volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, for which Malone won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

"I was one of those guys who's very good at picking commercial winners," he said without apology. "There was a period when everything we touched turned to gold, one best seller after another."

Even though he had great financial and publishing success at Little Brown, Cameron eventually left the firm because of its insistence that he provide his employer with advance notification of all of his "outside" activities, meaning his political activities, such as whether "I was going to speak against the Korean War. I never considered that I was a radical."

For the next 10 years, he says he was blacklisted because of his left-wing politics and was unable to find employment in mainstream publishing. He and Sheila moved to a cabin in the Adirondacks and started a publishing firm called Cameron Associates.

"We published revenge books," he said, in other words any book against (Sen. Joseph) McCarthy." Cameron said: "I spent all kinds of time in front of congressional committees," because of his politics. "Oh God, yes. I made it difficult for the government because I didn't give a ....."

After nearly a decade in literary exile, Cameron was hired by Alfred Knopf, founder of the legendary New York publishing house, for which he worked until his retirement. Cameron recalls both Alfred Knopf, and his wife Blanche as larger than life personalities and publishing giants.

At the time he was hired, Cameron recalls: "Alfred said to me, 'I don't want to know anything about your past." Meanwhile, during two luncheons with Blanche, she said: "I want to know everything about you."

Blanche Knopf's impact on the publishing firm is best illustrated, said Cameron, by the comment of an editor who remembered her from the 1940s: "I knew the war was over when Blanche turned up in Paris" and signed up three French writers whose work Knopf would publish in translation. The trio of authors: Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone deBeauvoir.

"Knopf was a rare bird," Cameron said, especially in his understanding that "to make a book that was beautiful is as meaningful" as the content of the volume.

"Publishing today," Cameron said. "I don't recognize it any more. They don't believe that anything any good can be a book club choice. It's not true."

What about Oprah's Book Club selections? "She's nothing, but she's something. Of course, she's very attractive," Cameron says with a devilish grin.