Founder and co-owner of Washington, DC’s much-admired Politics and Prose bookstore Carla Cohen died this morning following her battle with a rare cancer of the bile ducts. The Washington Post remembers her as “a former urban planner who conceived of Politics and Prose as a salon where Washington readers and writers could gather to challenge each other in discussion about the big ideas of the day — a place that would reach beyond customers’ pocketbooks and become part of their lives.” Cohen and fellow owner Barbara Meade put the store up for sale earlier this year. In a obituary posted […]
Obituary
Remembering Ralph Vicinanza
His agency has provided a formal obituary, which reads in part: “Ralph M. Vicinanza, literary agent, died suddenly at his home on Saturday, September 25, 2010. For over two decades, Vicinanza achieved worldwide recognition for his vision in opening the international marketplace for American authors, predominantly in the science fiction and fantasy genres. By discovering previously untapped markets for his clients’ work, Vicinanza carved out a large literary territory and dominated the field of foreign rights. “Vicinanza began his publishing career at the Scott Meredith Agency. It was there that three important things about the industry’s international scene became clear […]
People, Etc.
Author, agent, film and television producer and publishing executive Stanley L. Colbert died on September 21 in Toronto, Canada. He was Sterling Lord’s original partner in the Lord & Colbert Agency (with Lord handling magazine sales and Colbert selling to book publishers). As an agent he found a home for Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD after Robert Giroux couldn’t sort out the author’s second manuscript and sent him to Colbert. But Kerouac drove a falling out with Lord and Colbert became an editor at Henry Holt. He moved to LA in 1956 to head the literary department at the William […]
People, Etc.
Jill Schwartzman is joining Hyperion as a senior editor, acquiring pop culture, humor, memoir, biography, narrative nonfiction, popular history, and up-market commercial fiction. She was senior editor at Random House Trade Paperbacks. Former Barnes & Noble director of digital content Mike Ferrari has joined Borders, as merchandising director, trade books. Reporting to svp, merchandising Larry Norton, he will oversee categories including mystery/thriller, fiction, romance, science fiction, graphic novels, sports, local titles, business, computers, literary fiction, poetry, performing arts as well as Spanish books. (Before he joined B&N many years ago, Ferrari had worked for Walden.) Paris Review co-founder and former […]
Editor Larry Ashmead Dies
Larry Ashmead, 78, best-known for his 18 years as an editor at Harper & Row and then HarperCollins (after starting at Doubleday, working at Simon & Schuster for 15 years, and then moving to Lippincott), died of pneumonia on Friday, after battling melanoma. After retiring from Harper in 2003, Ashmead was then affiliated with InkWell Management as an agent from 2005 to 2009. (The agency also represented Ashmead’s book about funny names entitled BERTHA VENATION: And Hundreds of Other Funny Names of Real People, published in the UK by Profile.) In 1994, he was LMP’s pick for Editor of the […]
Remembering Elaine Koster
Agent and former publisher of NAL Elaine Koster died on Tuesday in New York, at age 69. In the second phase of her career Koster founded an eponymous literary agency in 1998, where she represented Khaled Hosseini among others. While publisher at NAL, she famously acquired paperback reprint rights to Stephen King’s CARRIE from Doubleday for $400,000 at the beginning of his career Chandler Crawford at the Chandler Crawford Agency, who represented translation rights for the Koster Agency’s books, said: “I am heartbroken that Elaine has died, though I take comfort in knowing how much she did for the publishing […]