Rebecca Kuss joins Inkyard Press as editor. She was formerly associate editor/director of recruitment & acquisitions at Glasstown Entertainment.
Camille Kellogg has joined Imprint as assistant editor. She was editorial assistant at Harper Children’s.
Chloe Puton has been promoted to director of publicity for the Workman imprint.
In the UK, Lisette Verhagen will join PFD as an agent for international clients on January 6. She has been head of rights at David Godwin Associates.
Former ceo of Harper UK Victoria Barnsley has created The Brideshead Festival, marking the 75th anniversary of publication of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a three-day event to be held in June 2020 at Castle Howard (the location for the film and TV versions).
Obituaries
Editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton, 80, died at home in Manhattan on Friday, December 13. Sifton was executive vice president of Knopf from 1987 to 1992 and then senior vice president and publisher of FSG and editor at large of Hill & Wang. Her son, Sam Sifton, is food editor at the New York Times.
Retired literary scout Jutta Klein, 64, passed away on December 10, after battling cancer since 2018. She was president of Jutta Klein Associates, a New York-based literary scouting agency, from 1983 to 2013.
Distribution
Meredith has settled on a new home for the former Time Inc. Books line. Now operating as TI Inc. Books, the full backlist catalog will be sold and distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) as of January 1, 2020.
Awards
Poets & Writers will present their Leadership Award to Oprah Winfrey at the organization’s 50th Anniversary Gala in March. The Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards will be presented to Michael Chabon and Amanda Gorman.
The Mystery Writers of America named Barbara Neely as the 2020 Grand Master. Neely is best known for her Blanche White mystery series. San Francisco mystery convention Left Coast Crime won the Raven Award for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing.” Associate publisher and editorial director of Minotaur Books Kelley Ragland will receive the Ellery Queen Award. These awards will be presented along with the rest of the Edgars in New York City on April 30.
Best Of
BuzzFeed chose its best books of 2019.
Bookselling
Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego, which was in danger of closing, has found new owners and will relocate next year. Jenni Marchisotto and Matthew Berger bought the store and will move it to 3555 Rosecrans Street. All employees will keep their jobs.
George R.R. Martin has opened Beastly Books, a bookstore in Santa Fe, NM featuring autographed books. Located next to the Jean Cocteau Cinema, which he bought in 2013, the store is named for Cocteau’s film, Beauty and the Beast, along with “a certain TV show I worked on in the 80s.” Martin said he was inspired to open the store after hosting many events at the cinema featuring authors: “All of them have signed stock for us. The only problem was the Jean Cocteau lobby was far too small for us to display all of these wonderful autographed books.”