“What is unusual,” says publisher Cindy Spiegel, who worked at PRH before relaunching her imprint independently, “is that these people have been in the same place for so long and hadn’t moved around, and that feels like an old-fashioned, but good, thing. Photo: Rebecca Smeyne/The New York Times/REDUX These preternaturally gifted editors who really stood for literature - fine writing, fine editing - they were protected so long as he was there.” Mehta died in late 2019, and many see these buyouts - taken together with Robert Gottlieb’s death last month - as one final convulsion, the climactic purge before a full generational shift in publishing is complete.įormer Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta at the publisher’s 100th-anniversary party at the New York Public Library in 2015. He was a bulwark against the kinds of things they’re doing now. “ Sonny Mehta must be turning in his grave, and that’s freshly dug. I read him the list of names as he sipped a margarita in the library bar of the Lowell Hotel on East 63rd Street one night last week. Aronson, who worked as an editor for Random House back when it was run out of the old Villard mansion on Madison Avenue, long before the era of corporate consolidation. “Alfred Knopf must be turning in his grave,” says writer Steven M.L. In certain uptown literati circles, this is like watching a Borzoi be fed to a wood chipper. And two top editors, Shelley Wanger and Jonathan Segal, are taking the buyout, too. Longtime publicity chief Nicholas Latimer will go, as will head of production Andy Hughes, who has for decades given Knopf books their literary sheen. The Knopf Doubleday group is losing Victoria Wilson (she published Anne Rice and Lorrie Moore and wrote an 860-page Barbara Stanwyck book - and that’s just volume one!), Ann Close (edited Lawrence Wright, Alice Munro, and Norman Rush), and managing editor Kathy Hourigan, who has worked with Robert Caro on all his books dating back to The Power Broker. Those departing include Viking editors Wendy Wolf (there since 1994, her writers have included Nathaniel Philbrick, John Barry, and Steven Pinker) Rick Kot (he’s edited Barbra Streisand, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Ray Kurzweil), and Paul Slovak (Amor Towles, Elizabeth Gilbert, and David Byrne). They ruled the best-seller lists with their golden guts, and no one in accounting ever balked at their expense-account lunches at The Four Seasons. Many who are leaving came up in an era in which editors were truly autonomous, and sometimes as famous as their writers. Many of the most influential editors have quietly decided to take the buyout, some for fear of being laid off later, others because they simply no longer recognize the place at which they’ve spent their entire careers. There were layoffs Monday, but what’s really transforming the publishing house are the buyouts currently underway. An executive named Nihar Malaviya has since taken over and is steering the company through this post-pandemic period, when sales are down across the industry and costs of goods and services are up. operations Madeline McIntosh, who left in late January. Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in America, is cleaning house.Īfter CEO Markus Dohle failed in his attempted megamerger with Simon & Schuster last fall, he departed in December. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images
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