David Moldawer has joined Portfolio as an editor, reporting to publisher Adrian Zackheim, acquiring business titles with a special focus on the Internet and new media, creativity, productivity, management and leadership, and marketing. He was at St. Martin’s. Packager Carter Smith died suddenly at home on October 7. In 1970, he founded Media Projects, one of the first independent book production companies in the US, which he ran for 30 years. In 1980, he helped found the American Book Producers Association, and served as its first president.Notice Erik Riesenberg has been promoted to Random House national accounts manager for Baker […]
Obituary
More on Pat Kavanagh
The Guardian says the agent Pat Kavanagh’s death was due to a brain tumor, which the Times adds was diagnosed just five weeks ago. The Independent notes that “she had collapsed in the street two weeks ago and was staying in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. Friends and family were privately told last week that her tumor was inoperable.” She was 68. They share testimonials from clients including Blake Morrison, Robert Harris, and Hermione Lee. Short story writer Helen Simpson, among visitors to Kavanagh’s home today, said: “It has been so very quick. It’s been like […]
Literary Agent Kavanagh Dies
Renowned agent Pat Kavanagh (and wife of author Julian Barnes) has died. A spokesperson from United Agents, the firm that Kavanagh helped to form after leaving PFD last year, said: “Pat Kavanagh was an exceptional agent and a great friend. We all owe her a tremendous amount. She was an extraordinary presence who was much loved and will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her clients. All our thoughts are with Julian at this difficult time.”
On DFW
As covered this weekend, author David Foster Wallace, 46, was found dead in his Claremont, CA home on Friday night, having hanged himself. Pomona College, where he was the Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College, will hold a memorial service. Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch tells the NYT, “He had a mind that was constantly working on more cylinders than most people, but he was amazingly gentle and kind. He was a writer who other writers looked to with awe.”LATNYT The NYT followed today with a second obituary, this time with some insights from Wallace’s father […]
Robert Giroux, Publisher, Dies at 94
The former publisher died in his sleep earlier today. The NYT writes: “If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus, Mr. Giroux, as editor-in-chief, was its quiet mover, working behind the scenes to shape its list of books and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste. The publisher Charles Scribner Jr., in his memoir, In the Company of Writers: A Life in Publishing (1991), wrote, ‘Giroux is a great man of letters, a great editor, and a great publisher.'”NYT
On Laurence Urdang, 81
Lexicographer Laurence Urdang, managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language and contributor/publisher of over 100 dictionaries and other reference books, died last week from congestive heart failure. The NYT notes of the RH dictionary that it “was the first dictionary to be organized with the aid of a computer — Mr. Urdang presided over a seven-year research and compilation project that, at a cost of $3 million, was, at the time, the largest undertaking in the history of Random House, a company founded in 1925. But it was merely a foundation for […]