"Are you or aren't you interested in making money?" a Harvard Business School classmate asked Victor S. Navasky "rather emotionally" during a class discussion one day. Navasky had enrolled in 1994 when, after 16 years as editor of The Nation, he made the switch to become its publisher and part owner. The Nation—the little left-wing opinion journal that could since 1865—has in fact only made a profit three times in its long history. Maybe. No one, says Navasky, can seem to agree which three years those were. This Tuesday at the Free Library, the Swarthmore alum will probably have other things to talk about besides making money. But as his new book, A Matter of Opinion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), proves, finance actually can be kind of interesting. And the rest of the book, part history of The Nation and part memoir of his time there, is fascinating. Navasky meditates cogently and sometimes wittily on the nature and purpose of magazines like The Nation (and unlike it—The Nation turns out to have more in common with alter ego The New Republic and arch nemesis The National Review than you'd think). There's a lot about the good ol' days of the Cold War—remember when the fate of grand ideologies seemed to rest on whether or not Alger Hiss had lied, and accusing people and magazines of Communist sympathies was a blood sport? And there's a lot of history that reads like gossip of the very highest brow: Susan Sontag gets angry. Truman Capote almost gets arrested (he never turns in his article, either). Christopher Hitchens wanders in and out. Jurgën Habermas talks about public debate and breakfast. There are many, many meetings over cocktails. Does this mean vodka tonics at the library? Probably not, but there's only way to find out; come, if you subscribe or if you don't.

Victor Navasky reads Tue., July 11, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.