Vanessa Mobley is moving to Little, Brown as executive editor, starting December 1, reporting to Judy Clain. She had been an executive editor at Crown.
Jon Pott, vp, editor-in-chief of of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, has announced that he will retire on June 30, 2015. He first joined the company in 1968 as editor, rising up to become editor-in-chief in 1982. “When I came to the company I intended to stay for one year,” Pott said in the announcement, “Forty-six years later, that is a deadline I am deeply grateful to have missed.” He added: “If — as I have been — one is in publishing first of all out of a love for language and ideas, Eerdmans is a wonderful place to be.” The company will begin the search for a new editor-in-chief in early 2015.
The latest acquisition for the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas is the archive of the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, purchased from his family (through Glenn Horowitz). The family has “not decided whether to publish” Marquez’s unfinished novel about a middle-aged married woman having an affair on a tropical island, excerpted in the New Yorker.
Founder of Coffee House Press Allan Kornblum, 65, died on Sunday following a long battle with leukemia. The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls him “a poet, an editor, a master of the letterpress, a scholar of the history of publishing, a passionate mentor and teacher, and, in his household, the resident cook.” The funeral is scheduled for next Saturday; a public memorial “will take place early next year.” Coffee House Press publisher Chris Fishbach has posted a remembrance: “Allan’s influence extended beyond the books he worked on—for forty-two years he championed new voices and new publishers and fought tirelessly to get them the attention they deserve. It was a lifetime of service not only to literature but also to the field of publishing, of which he was a devoted scholar. Whether it was choosing just the right font, navigating the changing marketplace of bookselling, or understanding the historical pattern of the changes in printing technology, his wisdom and devotion were unmatched.”