Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Publishers Lunch


Today's Meal


New York Times Book Review editor Jennifer Ildiko Szalai will move over to serve as nonfiction book critic starting in January, taking over as Jennifer Senior moves back to long-form journalism for the paper. As books editor Pamela Paul writes, "Sometimes, you search for the ideal candidate for a position far and wide, and find that the best one is sitting right across from you." She adds, "Jennifer is one of the most stylish, incisive, original writers on books, politics and culture today. A Canadian native who grew up between cultures – her father was Hungarian and her mother is from the Philippines – Jennifer is accustomed to negotiating between different viewpoints; she is an independent thinker with a supple, open mind attuned to books on many subjects – politics, foreign policy, government, social sciences, economics, science, technology, business and the arts." For the past four years Szalai had edited reviews, Bookends, and various columnists.

People, Etc.

At Chronicle Books, Tessa Ingersoll has been promoted to associate director of international sales. Lynda Zuber Sassi been appointed to director of international and subsidiary rights sales.

Linda Iarrera is joining McGill-Queen's University Press as sales manager. Previously she was manager of institutional sales for US academic library accounts at Wiley.

Mark Hillesheim left his position recently as national account manager for Legato. He was the final dedicated Legato employee, and with his departure that distribution unit is formally finished. Following Ingram’s acquisition of the Perseus distribution companies in 2016, Legato and its clients have been fully integrated into PGW. Legato was founded as an "affiliate" of PGW and had used its systems.

Authors
Simon & Schuster and ceo Carolyn Reidy held an early 90th birthday party on Monday night for Mary Higgins Clark, "forever the first lady of Simon & Schuster." Her actual birthday is December 24 and S&S staff gave her a special "advent calendar" featuring all of her books from over the years to count down to the occasion. As Reidy noted, birthday parties for authors are rare events, but "when it comes to authors, there's absolutely nobody like Mary Higgins Clark....We are fortunate and grateful to be able celebrate one of the best Christmas gifts a publisher could ever receive." Clark called it "the happiest of relationships," noting that S&S acquired Where Are The Children? for publication in 1975 when "two other publishers turned it down without a comment." (The acquiring editor was Phyllis Grann, who left S&S before the book was published. She
told the AP previously, "I was allowed to buy anything for $3,000 or under without going through contortions.")

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has made available online an extensive digital archive of Gabriel García Márquez's papers. Comprising approximately 27,500 items, it includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The Center indicates that the Marquez materials are among their "most frequently circulated collections."

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