Book Chat

Interview: Working for Mr. CliffsNotes

By Jenny Shank, 8-10-07

Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the famous yellow-and-black study aid, CliffsNotes (formerly known as Cliff’s Notes).  The company was founded by Clifton Hillegass in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1958.  Hillegass sold his company for $14 million to IDG books in 1999, and died at the age of 83 in 2001.  From 1968 to 1969, when my dad, John Shank, was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska (before he became a Denver tax attorney for telecommunications companies), he worked at CliffsNotes in the shipping department.  I recently interviewed my dad about his time at CliffsNotes, the fabulous parties full of “artsy craftsy” people that Hillegass threw, and the life lessons he learned from Cliff and the other employees at CliffsNotes.

NewWest: What exactly did you do at CliffsNotes?

John Shank: Generally what I and other students did was we would get orders in and fill them.  The way they had it arranged was in a square you could walk around with a box and a trolley, and we would take the titles and put them in boxes for shipment.

NW: Was the system based on something that had come before?

JS: I don’t know--this was ‘68 and I think Cliff started in the late fifties, and originally he started with a few Shakespeare titles and then kept growing. The more popular titles were in the middle of the shipping room--Shakespeare and a lot of other classics, and then on the outside were the less popular titles, both in alphabetical order.  It was all done manually.

NW: Were most of the orders from bookstores?

JS: Almost all were from bookstores.  Some of these were very small orders--you weren’t talking about a lot of volume, and the CliffsNotes sold for a dollar a copy back then.

NW: But it was still worth the while, no matter how small the order?

JS: Yes, even just a small box full of titles, ten or fifteen.

NW: Did they ship all over the country?

JS: All over the country and the world.  We filled orders to Asia and Europe.

NW: Did you get to know Cliff?

JS: A little.  He was almost always there.  He wasn’t intimidating, but he was a very intellectual individual.  He didn’t come into the back room much.  He always classically wore his glasses on top of his head.  And when we were just starting there, coming from small towns in Nebraska, we thought it was an affected thing to do--"Hmmm, this guy must be very comfortable if he can afford to walk around doing that.” But then once we got to know him, we could see it was just who he was, keeping his reading glasses on top his head.  But he was very smart.  I got to know him better over time where he would ask me to bartend for some of the parties he had at his home for Lincoln socialites.  He was always gracious to the students who worked for him, and he hired students for many years.  He let students come work for him for a year or two and then move on.  He had a constant stream of kids that were coming and going.

NW:  What was his home like and what were those parties like?

JS: I just vaguely remember.  To me at the time, coming from a small town in Nebraska, it was like an antebellum home.  A big house, with what I recall were white pillars.  It seemed like the top-of-the-line Lincoln social life was there.  Doing that, you felt you were seeing somebody who was very well liked and well known in the Lincoln community.

NW:  Everyone was dressed up?

JS: Oh yeah.  But it was more like artsy, craftsy people than it was lawyers and lobbyists and that type of thing.  Professors and writers, more of an art type of background.  Which, certainly I never had any background in.

NW:  I read that he studied physics and geology at the University of Nebraska, but he must have loved literature too?

JS: He must have.  I never knew that he’d studied physics.  All I ever knew was that he was very, very bright.  He had a lot of good talent around him, good people.  And they all really liked him.  He was just that kind of guy.

NW: What were the perks of working for CliffsNotes?

JS: One of the biggest perks was that on football game days in Nebraska, you could never find a parking spot near the stadium, and he let you park in their parking lot.  That was the biggest perk.  Of course you could get any of the titles that you needed for your own classes for nothing.  But I think the biggest perk was that it gave you a place to go and work for a couple years in college.  The pay was good, it was above minimum wage, and you got to meet professional people, for most of us for the first time in our lives.  You know, at that time, in 1960s, most people were not coming from college-educated families.  They were the first generation in these families going to college.  And you got to meet people like Cliff, who was very well educated, and Dr. James L. Roberts, the English professor who was the consulting editor on all of these books, and he was just a kick.  He was very, very bright, really into literature.  You thought he would be hard to deal with, but he was a wonderful man.  And they had an in-house CPA who was their Chief Financial Officer.  His name was Dick Spellman.  It was the first time I got to meet someone that had that kind of background.  They were all just wonderful people.  It sort of belied the rest of your working career, where you found out that some people aren’t that hardworking, honest, or likeable.  These guys really were.

NW: How did he find the authors?

JS: I’m not sure of the process.  I know that initially Cliff found the authors, but then eventually Dr. Roberts, the consulting editor, and another lady whose name I can’t remember, would interview people over the phone.  They’d get a sample of their writing and then chose them.  I don’t know if they were talking to several people at the same time for one title, but I do know they had a pretty rigorous process.

NW:  Did Cliff read the books?

JS: I think Cliff read most of the books initially.  But eventually there were so many titles, I can’t imagine he read them all.  But maybe he did.  He would come in to the shipping room every once in a while and he’d grab one of the notes and just start looking at it, take it back to his room and read it, because he was always interested in quality control.

NW:  Did Cliff ever worry that students would use CliffsNotes to get out of doing assignments and not read the actual book?

JS: It was always a criticism they had.  I remember talking to Dr. Roberts about this--I don’t remember talking to Cliff about it.  But Dr. Roberts said that that’s never what it was meant for.  It was meant to help people with difficult material.  You’re going to college to learn how to think and learn some things.  If you’re using it for that kind of short cut, you’re just cheating yourself.

But I think initially they were pretty comfortable that they were being used for what they were intended for, back in the 1950’s and early ‘60s.  They knew there was always that possibility, but I think they thought they were really doing a service.  As a student myself who used them, they really did help you understand more difficult plays and literature that you hadn’t been exposed to before. 

I think that although I liked to read before, just being around those people made me enjoy reading even more because they liked learning for learning’s sake.  And you got them out of a setting where they were your instructor, so you weren’t worried about getting a grade, and you got to talk to them, and you saw that they were actually still interested in learning long after they had a profession and long after they had any reason to keep learning.  It instilled in me the idea that learning is life-long and reading is interesting and fun.  Cliff really emphasized the importance of learning to think, and that helped me later when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to go to law school.

NW:  Do you think working at CliffsNotes was a formative experience for you?

JS: It probably was.  As I look back on it now, out of all the jobs I’ve had over all the years, it was one of the better jobs I had.  I really enjoyed it.  And you got to enjoy the people, too.  If you like the work and like the people, that’s a bonus.

NW:  The word “CliffsNotes” has become a generic term meaning the shorthand version of something.  Was that true at the time you were working there?

JS: I don’t think it was quite there then, but it probably was getting there.  I remember when you got to college, the first thing you heard about was, “Oh you’ve got to get the CliffsNotes for that.” It also showed you there was a gap.  It wouldn’t have been essential if there wasn’t a need for it.  There was a market for it.

NW: Do you think CliffsNotes took off when it did because at that time, more kids of different backgrounds from all over the country were going to college, not just the elite class of people who would have been taught the classics in a certain way in high school.  Now college was open to the children of people who had never been to college.

JS: After the war, you had this huge volume of kids going to college for the first time, and they probably didn’t have the classical training that the elite did.  You can only spend so much time on Shakespeare in high school.  If you think about it, Cliff met a market at the time, he had a really good idea, and obviously the demand was there. They had a good product too.  One of the things that got me about people who worried about whether students were using CliffsNotes to cheat was, well, they wouldn’t have to cheat if they were taught properly.  To me it was just a really good teaching tool, and they were good teachers.

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