Barnes & Noble chief digital officer Fred Argir will retire from the company on August 3. Chief information officer Bill Wood will move up to chief digital officer, working “side by side” with chief merchandising officer Tim Mantel “to market and merchandise the website.” (Before joining BN in 2015, Argir was at Toys R Us and Sports Authority.)
Cristopher Garrido has joined Harper Christian as vice president and publisher for its Spanish publishing program. Previously he developed and directed a Spanish publishing program at Lifeway Christian Resources.
Melinda Merino has been promoted to editorial director and associate publisher of Harvard Business Review Press. Erika Heilman has been hired as commercial director and associate publisher. She had co-founded Bibliomotion and has been the managing director of the publishing consultancy Carpedea. Heilman takes over from Keith Pfeffer, who left to become associate vice president, trade sales, North America, at Callisto Media. (Also joining Callisto this month is former Barnes & Noble chief merchandising officer Mary Amiccuci, who is svp, strategic partnerships and brand ventures.)
Forthcoming
Gallery will publish former Trump Administration aide Omarosa Manigault Newman‘s “tell all and takedown” UNHINGED: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House on August 14.
Michael Lewis‘s audio original from Audible releasing July 31, The Coming Storm, turns out to be an excerpt from his new book. Norton will publish THE FIFTH RISK on October 2, a look at a Federal bureaucracy being starved of resources: “In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.”
Auctions
A previously undiscovered, unpublished chapter (as well as other unpublished chapter fragments) of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X was purchased by the Schomburg Center at a little-noticed auction this week. That 25-page chapter, “The Negro,” for which the Schomburg paid $7000, may or may not be part of the long-running rumor that three chapters were cut from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY (written with Alex Haley). That it surfaced at the auction of African-American historical artifacts by Guernsey’s auction house was, the NYT reports, a surprise to Malcolm X scholars. The auction also offered the manuscript for the published book, bearing “dense traces of Haley’s and Malcolm X’s complex negotiations over the finished text,” which the Schomburg Center acquired Center also acquired, for an undisclosed sum.