Obits

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.”

The renowned Upper East Side bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters announced that founder and co-owner Nach Waxman “died suddenly” on Wednesday, August 4. They write: “He built the store into a worldwide haven for people who were serious about food and drink books. He encouraged the best authors, respected the passion and curiosity of cooks and readers at all levels, and never lost a sense of pleasure and wonder at discovering the myriad ways people wrote about cooking, eating, and drinking. All of us who worked with him will miss him deeply. As we carry on the tradition he created, […]

Former Random House and Workman sales exec Michael Rockliff, 76, died on July 29. He began his career at Random House in 1968 and remained there for 38 years. He then worked as director of library sales and marketing at Workman before retiring in 2015. PRH notes, “At sales conferences, Rockliff could be counted on to discuss, with equal passion to the pitches for imminent bestsellers, a book on displaced European Jews or a biography of an obscure but pathfinding musician. Over time, his colleagues began referring to these volumes—many of which went on to win prizes—as ‘Mike Books.’ One […]

Author and longtime leader of Italian publisher Adelphi, Roberto Calasso, 80, died on Wednesday following a long illness. In 2015 he bought back Rizzoli’s majority share in Adelphi, where he worked for almost 60 years, to prevent its sale to Mondadori. Rival publishing house Feltrinelli said, “Roberto Calasso has been and will continue to be a central figure of reference for the Italian and international literary panorama.” In the US, Farrar, Straus will publish Calasso’s new book, The Book of All Books, in November, and his The Tablet of the Destinies will follow in 2022. Calasso’s longtime editor, FSG president Jonathan […]