Knopf announced Wednesday morning the death of Ashbel Green, “a former vice president and beloved senior editor at Knopf,” on Tuesday night, near his home in Connecticut. Sonny Mehta said, “Ash was a prodigious talent, one of the most significant editorial figures in modern publishing, famous for his breadth of reading and grasp of history. Many of us had the good fortune of learning a great deal about the business from him. He was a beloved colleague, and his contributions to our company – an esteemed editorial legacy – are part of what still define us today.”
Green started at Knopf in 1964, moving from Prentice-Hall, and worked with authors including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George H. W. Bush, Andre Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Ken Burns, John Keegan, Joseph Ellis, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Ernest Gaines, Philip Caputo, Geoffrey Ward, Ross Macdonald, and many others. A funeral service will be held on September 28. Plans for a memorial service will be announced later.
NYT piece
In personnel news, Lottchen Shivers has joined FSG as associate director of publicity. She was most recently evp, marketing and publicity for Abrams and has been running her own freelance PR outfit since January 2012. In addition, Brian Gittis and Steve Weil have both been promoted to senior publicist.
Brettne Bloom has been promoted to partner at Kneerim & Williams after more than 12 years with the agency, which has renamed itself Kneerim, Williams & Bloom.
In the UK, Phil Earle will move to Bloomsbury later this year in the new role of sales director for children’s books. He has been at Simon & Schuster UK.
At last week’s international Bertelsmann Management Meeting in Gutersloh, Random House Publishing Group president and publisher Gina Centrello, Knopf Doubleday chairman and editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta and president Tony Chirico became the first Random House US executives to receive Bertelsmann’s Entrepreneurial Achievements Award for exceptional business performance and career achievements.