Obits

Penguin Random House vp, director, digital strategy and consumer engagement Erika Seyfried, 36, died in Vermont on Sunday. She had been staying at a vacation home with her husband near the Saxtons River and was reported missing after leaving to walk her dog. Penguin Random House said Seyfried, “Established herself as a marketing leader through the innovative digital campaigns she developed for our books. Her reader-centric approach to consumers, her social-media prowess, and her tireless nurturing of our authors earned her reverence throughout our company and our industry. With her forward-looking, inclusive approach to every team and project she led, […]

A memorial for the late Lynn C. Franklin, who passed away on July 19, will be held on Wednesday, September 29 at 6:00 pm at The Cosmopolitan Club, 122 East 66 Street, in New York City.

Art book publisher Daniel Farrell, 74, died on August 16. He brought the BBC television program Antiques Roadshow to the US and opened the US offices of Antique Collectors’ Club (now ACC Art Books) with Diana Steel in 1990. He also organized the Art Book Fair in New York.

Playwright, journalist, and book critic Gregg Barrios, 80, died of a heart attack on August 17. He served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and the San Antonio Express-News reports, “He served in Vietnam, taught school in tiny Texas towns, founded an influential film society at the University of Texas at Austin and spent time in the Factory, Andy Warhol’s famed studio in New York.” George Cisneros, co-founder of Texas arts group Urban-15, told the paper: “Gregg was the gregarious interrupter of the status quo who would not leave well enough alone. He never accepted a culture […]

Jack Covert, 77, founder of Porchlight Book Company (previously known as 800-CEO-READ), died on Friday, August 13. He started the business inside Milwaukee’s Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, and retired from the company in 2014. The company writes: “We believe in books, but our business is centered around the services we provide to customers—because that is how Jack oriented the company. It was an ethos he extended to the employees of the company, as well. He told us when he retired that the thing he was most proud of was how the company he built provided a foundation for the lives […]

Columnist and financial thriller writer Michael M. Thomas died August 7 at 85. The NYT notes that he “wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them — people he dismissed as ‘social climbers, stock market papermongers, real estate shills and assorted other virtuosos of hype and blather’.” Graydon Carter told the Times, “Michael came from money, and he made money. As a result, he could write about people who came from money and made money like a modern-day Trollope.”