Jeffrey Batzli has been named creative director, trade books at Rodale, effective August 1. Previously he was creative director of Barnes & Noble’s publishing business, including the Art, Photography and Production departments of the B&N Bargain trade division, and also Sterling’s trade division.
At the Quarto Group, Iain MacGregor has been hired as publisher for Aurum Press. He was formerly publishing director of Collins in the UK. Aurum’s list will “reorientate back to its illustrated roots.”
Writer, researcher and sex therapist Virginia Johnson, 88, died Wednesday in St. Louis. Along with longtime collaborator (and onetime husband) William Masters, Johnson “helped make the frank discussion of sex in postwar America possible if not downright acceptable” in books such as HUMAN SEXUAL RESPONSE (1966) HUMAN SEXUAL INADEQUACY (1970) and HUMAN SEXUALITY (1982), published by Little, Brown.