Perseus announced internally on Monday “several key changes” in their international sales and rights business to fuel their growth, including a number of new appointments. A newly created vp of international sales and marketing will oversee the London and New York-based international sales teams from New York once a search is completed. VP of international sales and business development Chitra Bopardikar “has decided to depart the company to pursue new interests.”
The company has created a new international operations & communications department, with Agustina Casal leading the new unit as director, reporting to Carolyn Savarese in the role. (Casal continues to work on the Faber Factory JV and the Constellation vendor strategy teams.) Isabelle Bleecker and Jennifer Thompson have both been promoted to vp, international rights.
Waxman Leavell Literary is expanding, hiring four new agents all at once. They are joined by Cassie Hanjian (who worked in foreign rights at The Park Literary Agency); Fleetwood Robbins (who had been a developmental editor at Wizards of the Coast and an editor and publicist at Del Rey Books and ); and Kirsten Carleton and Julie Stevenson (both had longtime positions at Sobel Weber Associates). Hanjian will handle both fiction and nonfiction; the other three will focus on fiction only.
At Artisan, Judy Pray has been promoted to executive editor.
Josh Leventhal will join the Minnesota Historical Society Press as an acquisitions editor on October 1. Formerly publisher at MVP Books, he is a twenty-year veteran of the publishing industry.
Founder of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store Stephen Cogil Casari, 66, died due to complications from cancer on September 15. Joyce Meskis, who bought the Tattered Cover from him in 1974, tells the Denver Post, “He was certainly a superb bookman. And he had a great love for the book industry, to which he devoted the rest of his professional life.” Cogil Cesari was an owner of the Chicago-area Book Market chain of 22 stores (which was sold to Walden), and as an agent he “shepherded Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It to publication.”