KATE JONES, A GREAT LOSS TO THE BOOK WORLD

Kate Jones

The following wonderful, much deserved tribute is from Robert McCrum writing in The Guardian, Thursday February 7, 2008

Kate Jones, who has died of cancer aged 46, was one of the brightest and best in the British book world: a rare and gifted reader, a dedicated and inspiring editor, and an exceptional publisher. In the last years of her short life, she was also the guiding light and much-loved boss of the London office of American literary agency ICM.

Books were her life. Kate was always a reader, but she was also blessed with a lovely, infectious sense of humour. She was a lifelong PG Wodehouse fan. As a child in Grays, Essex, when her local library discovered that she had devoured all the books in the children's section, the librarian gave her a bunch of extra tickets and invited her to roam at will across the adult shelves.

With such instinctive literary passions, it was hardly surprising that Kate, who was
educated at a local comprehensive school, took first-class honours at
Goldsmiths College, London (1980-83). Fresh from there, she joined the Tessa
Sayle literary agency as an assistant, the traditional first step on the
publishing ladder. There, at the feet of Tessa and her American partner Liz
Darhansoff, she learned the nuts and bolts of the business. Even in the
beginning, she attracted admiration for the calm and good-humoured way in
which she managed the demanding talents of the agency.

In 1986, Kate joined Macmillan as general assistant to another doyenne of the book trade, Philippa Harrison, and also worked with the editor Kyle Cathie. Soon she became a
fully-fledged editor herself, taking up a senior position at Hamish Hamilton,
where she published, among many successful titles, Ronan Bennett's first novel
The Second Prison (1991).

In 1995, Kate's career at Penguin/Hamish Hamilton was temporarily overshadowed by the breast cancer that would ultimately kill her. But it was typical of her determination to remain
blithe in the face of life's adversities, a quality she kept to the end, that
she went back to work as an editorial director at Viking/Penguin.

Her life then entered perhaps its richest phase when, in 1996, she married the lawyer John Tackaberry,whose first wife had died of cancer. She took a sabbatical from Penguin, which
in turn sponsored several precious weeks of travelling throughout South
Africa, France and Australia.

During this break from books, the former BBC journalist Martin Bell made an impromptu invitation to Kate to run his tumultuous parliamentary campaign for the Tatton constituency
during his challenge of the disgraced Conservative Neil Hamilton at the 1997
election. Independent-minded Kate, always a fierce libertarian, was the
perfect agent for a would-be independent MP. She ran the operation
brilliantly, controlling expenses carefully to ensure there could be no
question of any disgruntled challenge to Bell's successful election. It was
typical of Kate that, when she knew her candidate had won, she advised him to
bring his white suit to the declaration of the result, "looking quietly
confident".

Of course, Kate could never stay away from books for long. On her return, she was appointed editorial director of Viking and Penguin General and worked with several established and
successful authors, including Peter Mayle, Barry Unsworth, Sara Paretsky and
Esther Freud. Among her writers she was revered for the charm, tact and wit
with which she delivered her literary verdicts, the fruit of her intelligence
and reading. As a Wodehouse aficionado, she also masterminded Penguin's
relaunch of its Wodehouse backlist, commissioning promotional blurbs from an
astonishing array of unlikely Wodehouse lovers, including Tony Blair. Here, her
literary and publishing instincts were perfectly united and later inspired the
acquisition, for Penguin, of the Ian Fleming backlist.

Friends and family will remember many miracles in Kate's short life but, after the chemotherapy during her first bout of cancer, none could equal the blessing of her daughter Molly,
who was born in 2000.

Perhaps Kate always knew her days were numbered. It was to spend more time with Molly that she left Penguin in 2001 and began freelance work for the Fleming estate. Here, with vision and
persistence, she pioneered the commercial exploitation of a classic
contemporary backlist in a way that is widely seen as the blueprint of
literary estate management.
Her work for the Fleming estate gave her a taste for the complex challenges of intellectual property rights and made her the perfect choice to head the new London office of ICM
Books in 2003. Here she worked until the last week of her life, looking after
a stable of devoted writers, including William Boyd, Cherie Blair, Patricia Duncker,
Bernadine Evaristo, Rageh Omaar and Robert Peston.

Last December a routine check-up gave her the all-clear, but two weeks ago her cancer returned. She is survived by John and Molly.

Hadley Freeman writes: The first time I met my agent Kate
Jones, she won me over by drinking even more hot chocolate than I and matching
me in my love for the works of Edward St Aubyn. This meeting pretty much sums
up our years of friendship and what Kate was like: a source of sweet warmth
and literary cerebralism.
But such warmth clothed an
inner strength. When I cowrote a book with Victoria Beckham two years ago,
Kate stood by me fearlessly when dealing with the Beckham machine, which,
unsurprisingly, can be a pretty intimidating beast.
She never spoke about her other clients to me - such namedropping would have been alien to Kate - but whenever I asked her specifically what one was like, her face would light up.
But it was her role as a parent that clearly brought her the greatest joy. My overriding memory of her is the occasion when she gave me a lift to the Hay festival two years ago. I
turned to the back seat and watched Kate tirelessly read the same book to
Molly, for the whole journey, over and over, while Molly clung to her mother's
arm, like a trusted life raft.

Kate Jones, publisher and agent, born
July 11 1961; died February 1 2008

And here is another thoughtful obituary from Andrew Franklin writing in The Independent.

R.I.P. Kate, we will all miss you. Deepest sympathy to John and Molly.