(photo by Martha Kaplan)

Last night, legendary Knopf editor Ashbel Green died while at dinner with his wife, Elizabeth Osha, and friends near their Stonington, Conn., home. He was 84.

Mr. Green, who was known as “Ash,” started working at the publishing house in 1964 and went on to edit over 500 books by a stable of well-known authors, political figures and journalists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vaclav Havel, George H.W. Bush and Walter Cronkite.

To many in the publishing world, Mr. Green was one of the last of the old-style gentleman editors.

“You could hear his typewriter from anywhere on the floor,” said Paul Bogaards, director of publicity at Knopf. “He was a classic editor with a red pencil.”

“He was an editor’s editor,” said Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon. “Those kind of people are rare in any generation.

Born in 1928, Mr. Green graduated from Columbia College in 1950 and later earned a master’s in Eastern European history at Columbia University. He is a descendant of Presbyterian ministers; one of his ancestors, also named Ashbel Green, was the eighth president of Princeton in the early 1800s and an acquaintance of George Washington.

He began his career in publishing at Prentice Hall in publicity, and started as a managing editor at Knopf in 1964. He was promoted to senior editor and vice president at the publishing house in the early 1970s. Even after he retired in 2007, he remained up-to-date on the industry and stayed involved with his authors and colleagues.

“I really think that most editors wake up each day hoping they're going to find something they love," Mr. Green told the Missouri Review in 2000. "I have a real sense of excitement when a new writer comes in with a novel or a collection of stories or an idea for a political book--someone you feel has a fresh voice, whom you can publish with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Mr. Green was also known for helping young editors.

He was both a friend and mentor to Andrew Miller, who came to Knopf from Vintage to take over Mr. Green's stable of writers when Mr. Green decided to retire in 2007.

Mr. Green would invite Mr. Miller and their assistant over to his Upper East Side apartment for drinks about once a month—a kind of involvement with younger editors that is rare in book publishing.

“He was a mentor to me by example,” said Mr. Miller. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was unflappable. He handled bad news with equanimity. He handled authors and agents so well and was always so kind—which is harder than it seems.”

When Knopf vice president and senior editor John Siegel started at Random House in the 1980s, Mr. Green came into his office within five minutes and offered to take him to lunch.

“His default was to help young editors,” said Mr. Siegel, who remembered how Mr. Green would sometimes defer to him when it came to acquiring books that they both wanted.

“He was part of the fabric of this place. He was such a decent, decent man. The thing with Ash was that he always took the high road,” said Mr. Siegel, audibly upset.

Although Mr. Green’s death was sudden, he had struggled with diabetes and cancer and had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“The last few years weren’t easy, but he made it seem easy,” said Mr. Fisketjon.

A funeral will be held in Stonington this Sunday. A memorial service in the city is being planned for the fall.

Blanche, left, favored Dior couture.

On Monday Farrar, Straus and Giroux acquired a biography of Blanche Knopf—the wife of Alfred A. Knopf, founder and namesake of Random House's rival literary imprint—by Laura Claridge.

“What’s fascinating about it is this writer has access to a tremendous cache of papers,” FSG executive editor Ileene Smith told The Observer yesterday.

Although she was reluctant to reveal more about the project, first reported by Publishers Marketplace, Ms. Smith told us that Ms. Claridge (who has written biographies of Emily Post, Norman Rockwell, and Art Deco painter Tamara De Lempicka) inherited papers collected over more than twenty-five years by two previous intended biographers of the Knopfs. The first was Susan Sheehan, veteran New Yorker writer and author of Pulitzer-winning Is There No Place on Earth For Me?

After working on a Knopf biography for many years, Ms. Sheehan abandoned the project and gave the papers to Peter Prescott, the longtime book critic for Newsweek who died in 2004. His family gave the materials to Ms. Claridge.

Unlike previous attempts, Ms. Smith explained, Ms. Claridge's is the first to focus on Blanche. Although she is largely overshadowed by her husband’s legacy, Blanche founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. alongside Alfred, serving as director and vice president.

“That angle into the Knopf story is a particularly interesting one,” Ms. Smith said.

In the few articles written about her, Blanche is credited with luring the European giants like Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and André Gide (as well as the Americans like John Updike and H.L. Mencken) who established the house’s literary credentials. Plus, the native New Yorker was so stylish we're surprised the film rights haven't already been bought. Blanche was fluent in French, wore haute couture, lived off salads and martinis and selected the house's Borzoi trademark, which she regretted after owning a pair of the Russian wolfhounds, according to the Knopf Archive at the University of Texas.

The project—bought in a pre-empt from the Carol Mann Agency—is Mr. Smith’s first acquisition for FSG, which she joined from Yale University Press in February. At Yale and, before that, at Random House, Ms. Smith acquired Janet Malcolm’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Two Lives; Azar Nafisi’s Nabokov scholarship; and Eve Ensler The Good Body.

In the early hours of Jan. 24, the 51-year-old executive director of publicity and marketing for Knopf posted “The Hierarchy of Book Publishing,” a top-100 ranking of his colleagues and competitors, on his personal Tumblr. Far from a fawning Forbes-style list, Mr. Bogaards’s blog post was a gallows-humor-inflected schematic of an industry in collapse. Books are so screwed, it suggested, that a self-published genre geek (J.A. Konrath, #2), the father of a 4-year-old child who has purportedly been to heaven (Todd Burpo, #4) and the intern running the company Twitter feed (#6) all faced sunnier futures than a feared industry veteran like Andrew Wylie (#11).

A couple hundred publishing-industry observers liked and reblogged the post, including the official Tumblr accounts of Vintage/Anchor, Penguin Press and Pantheon Books.

“It’s funny because it’s true,” Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, a HarperCollins assistant, commented.

“AHHHHH PERFECTION,” wrote Emma Straub, the bookstore-clerk-turned-fiction-writer. “And I don’t even get half the jokes.”

But to senior members of the industry, Mr. Bogaards—“Bogie” to friends and colleagues—didn’t quite stick the landing. To them, the power list, rife as it was with personal snipes, more closely resembled a burn book, the wide-ruled repository for a middle schooler’s toxic thoughts.

He called Bill Clegg, the book agent who penned a memoir about his crack addiction, “Stovepipe.” He said New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote his reviews “juiced, listening to Earl Scruggs.” He imagined superpowered agent Binky Urban (#11) saying, “I wouldn’t take that offer to my maid.” He said nothing of hot-streak publisher Amy Einhorn, per se, but ranked her hair at #3.

This list particularly raised eyebrows for its treatment of women. Next to the names of several, including Word bookseller Stephanie Anderson (#63) and Newsweek editor Tina Brown (#88), Mr. Bogaards added that he “would nail her.”

In Mr. Bogaards’s defense, his book-world libido is gender blind. He would also nail Jamie Byng (#45).

But if one considers the underling who will have to pitch the next big Knopf release to Newsweek, it’s clear the list shared more than its tone with a burn book. It also carries the genre’s thinly veiled self-destructive impulse. Everyone knows such observations are better left unsaid, let alone written down. That’s kind of the point: the thrill of knowing that your thoughts will be known by everyone who never asked for your opinion.

In addition to those who registered their amusement online, there were many who privately rolled their eyes.

“It’s not very Knopf,” one editor sneered.

Others were incredulous, wondering, “How does he still have a job?” and “Who has time for this?”

Still others, women in particular, reacted with “total, utter horror.”

Not on Mr. Bogaards’s end.

“Mostly, people were upset about their ranking,” Mr. Bogaards told The Observer, reached on his ski vacation via email. “‘Why is so-and-so above us?’ Like I’m Comscore.”

All that week, in elevator banks and email chains from Soho and Midtown, editors asked one other, “How is Bogie getting away with this?”

It’s possible he’s not getting away with it. Sonny Mehta, the mercurial Knopf patriarch and Mr. Bogaards’s immediate superior, may simply be unaware of the Tumblr flame out. Mr. Mehta does not use social media and has been out of the country since shortly after it was published. Mr. Bogaards said the two had not talked about it.

But Mr. Mehta has put the brakes on his trolling in the past. Mr. Bogaards had been developing the material in the Tumblr post for months on his Twitter account (@knopfprguy), where he published a mix of PR tips, anti-Amazon bile, and book world fan fiction (imagining what Jeff Bezos and Larry Kirshbaum [#13] would say to each other at the National Book Awards and the like). He amassed 2,000 followers in the process, which is not bad for the publishing industry. In the fall, the stream included a recurring character called Harper Sales Guy, a hard-drinking clown adrift in the digital age.

Did you hear the one about the Harper Sales Guy? He tried to sell his Sony Discman on eBay.

As Mr. Bogaards’s followers speculated about the identity of Harper Sales Guy, Jonathan Burnham, the HarperCollins publisher who would be Harper Sales Guy’s boss, called Mr. Bogaards’s real boss and asked, who is Paul Bogaards and why is publicly trashing my sales guy?

Mr. Mehta asked Mr. Bogaards to reconsider his avatar and Harper Sales Guy became S&S Sales Guy.

If Mr. Bogaards is getting away with something, it’s because, over more than 20 years, he’s proved himself an aggressive and dynamic foil to Mr. Mehta’s Old-World gentility, someone who can be trusted to adapt and react to a rapidly changing business and a powerful publishing figure in his own right.

Mr. Mehta spotted him as a young publicist at William Morrow, where he had led a successful campaign for Michael Chabon’s debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. During the ’80s-’90s heyday of broadcast news, Mr. Bogaards, a tall and boyish-faced redhead, was known as the guy who always got his authors on Charlie Rose’s show.

At Random House, Mr. Bogaards worked in the promotions department, a division Jane Friedman had recently spun out from the traditional publicity shop. Promotions handled television appearances and author tours exclusively; the matter of reviews was left to the longtime department head, Bill Loverd, an elegant peer of Mr. Mehta’s who went over the catalogues with book review editors at his table at the Four Seasons.

Dealing with the television industry’s sharklike producers, Mr. Bogaards developed a brash style that helped Knopf earn the market share its blue-chip roster deserved. Behind Mr. Mehta’s self-effacing politesse, Mr. Bogaards ran big, shameless, TV-driven campaigns for writers like former President Bill Clinton and Carl Hiaasen and earned a reputation for wrangling tough talent.

“He can work with James Ellroy,” said Sarah Weinman, news editor of Publishers Marketplace (and #19). “Not many people can.”

Ms. Weinman herself got a light teasing in Mr. Bogaards’s list but said she enjoys reading his feeds nonetheless.

Boris Kachka, the New York contributing editor who ranked #42, thought his Bogie-given name, “Boris the Butcher” (a reference to his Joan Didion profile), was a bit much, but added that Mr. Bogaards was never too serious when giving him a hard time.

“He quaintly calls that ‘just busting your chops,’” Mr. Kachka said.

To the seasoned industry reporter inundated with press releases, Mr. Bogaards’s no-nonsense style is a god-send.

“I like working with Paul because you always know what he’s saying about a book is straight-up,” Ms. Weinman said. She remembered that Mr. Bogaards’s pitch line for Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman was “It scared the shit out of me.”

Like all good publicists, Mr. Bogaards is strategic and plays a long game.

“He holds a grudge just long enough to have something to hold over on you,” one editor said.

“I have a long memory with the press,” Mr. Bogaards confirmed.

But in an industry so courteous, operating like the press secretary in a gubernatorial race can be divisive.

An editor at a national magazine bristled when her rather formal query for an author interview was returned with “Offline convo” and his phone number.

“Is this guy for real?” she asked.

As the houses clamor to get their titles into the increasingly scarce column inches reserved for book coverage, one editor said that there are only two publicists who retain the clout and the author lists to make journalists come to them: Mr. Bogaards and Jeff Seroy, head of publicity and marketing at Nobelist factory Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Mr. Seroy does not share Mr. Bogaards’s affinity for Twitter and Tumblr, but he does believe they are a key part of the way books are publicized in 2012.

“Every publisher needs to have a full tool kit, that’s for sure. But how we deploy them will vary,” Mr. Seroy said. “It’s just like with authors. Some are ideal for the media and do triple flips off the high board, and some just stay in a cave and write.”

“Bogie is restless and craves attention and is also, from the sound of it, horny,” he went on. “The platform is perfect for him.”

But on a platform where addictive immediacy fuels compulsive intimacy, promotion and self-promotion can quickly become muddled.

“Louise Brockett is every bit as skilled, and you’ll only find her name in the paper when she got married and when she dies,” Mr. Seroy said. “Is Knopf a better digital-age promoter than Norton? I don’t think so.”

Mr. Bogaards wrote that he hopes people take his personal Twitter and Tumblr feeds for what they are: “a curation of industry anxiety.

“Interspersed with humor. And cocktails.”

“I’m probably the poster boy for how not to engage on social media,” he added. “No one should follow my example!”

When Mr. Mehta re-merged Knopf’s publicity and promotions departments in 1999, Mr. Bogaards got the executive director spot, leaving Mr. Loverd a lame duck vice president who retired a few years later. Some took the shake-up as a sign of his closeness to Mr. Mehta. On Twitter Mr. Bogaards suggests a flirtatious rapport (“Email from boss: ‘Bogie, I’m going to fucking kill you. S.’ Love him!”), but others insist that no one is as close to Mr. Mehta—a man so cool Knopf staffers pretend to smoke just to get a private audience at the holiday party—as they would like you to believe.

Although some thought  Mr. Bogaards’s choreographed ascension effectively extinguished the old Alfred A. Knopf culture within the house’s publicity department, in his admiration of Mr. Mehta there’s a certain longing for a bygone era of book publishing.

Even all the talk of whom he would nail suggests a version of the old-boys’ club at yesteryear’s three-martini lunch. Around Knopf, Mr. Bogaards, who lives with his wife and children in New Jersey, has a reputation for playing the alpha male. In the past, he would practice his slap shot in the office, occasionally sending errant pucks down the hall. Now, his Twitter and Facebook avatar is a photograph of a rooster in a metal crate—a caged cock, if you will. Emasculated frustration was written all over the Tumblr post, which described the decline of the publishing industry by deftly using of the implements of its destruction.

Self-publishing platforms like Tumblr enable writers to circumvent the processes that keep publishers in business, but books were never totally about the bottom line. Much more frightening is the fact that they threaten to undermine the publisher’s historic role as culture’s gatekeeper.

Tumblr, Twitter and any other social media that bring authors directly to their readers, unmediated by editors or the magazine journalists whom publicists dispatch to profile them, only serve to dispel the aura of brilliant but imperceptible literary editing that gave the industry its clubby glamour.

It may be that Knopf has let Bogie’s burn book fly as an act of willful ignorance: If they don’t acknowledge it, maybe it will go away. (With any luck, it will take the whole crass enterprise of social media with it.)

The inverse appears to be true, anyway. Giving Mr. Bogaards attention does seem to egg him on. In the Bogie burn book, he snuck in a slight dig at Mr. Burnham, the HarperCollins publisher who tattled on him. The big six publishers collectively ranked #10, but they were individually listed. Mr. Mehta was described as “handsome.” Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch was “not as handsome as Sonny.” FSG’s Jonathan Galassi got “complicated, a poet,” and S&S’s Jonathan Karp was deemed “a real Yenta.”

“Do they have one at HarperCollins?” Mr. Bogaards wrote where Mr. Burnham’s name ought to have been. “Checking on this.”

Reached via email, Mr. Burnham said he hadn’t read Mr. Bogaards’s Tumblr and so could not comment.

kstoeffel@observer.com

The abridged top five:

1. Brand name authors (e.g. Steven King)
2. Proven self-publishers (e.g. J.A. Konrath)
3. Amy Einhorn's hair
4. Authors who have been to Heaven, met God (e.g. Todd Burpo, Tim Tebow)
5. Fantasy writer George R. R. Martin

The list goes all the way to 100, shouting out all the book reviewers, a couple of book fairs, BookScan, summer Fridays and lots of people's hair along the way.

Read it to find out where you/your boss rank, and if he would nail you. Or simply to bear witness to the birth of an Internet meme (fingers crossed): Binky Urban fan fic. (See #80.)

In Mr. Bogaard's opinion, publicists come in at #98, but for this we think he's #1.

We suspected that publishing was probably not trying to sabotage its largest online retailer but we double-checked in case Gizmodo was actually on to something. "There seems to be some content in the post that’s wrong," Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, told us last night after we e-mailed him a link to the Gizmodo complaint. "It’s a problem with Amazon not with Random House."

This is what the Gizmodo post looked like yesterday:

Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.

This is what it looks like now (it's all crossed out, for those of you whose web browsers aren't picking it up):

Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.

Conclusion: publishers do not want to ruin the Kindle.

The American version.

On the occasion of his 25th anniversary of designing book covers for Knopf, Chip Kidd discusses the design for the cover of Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84. Mr. Kidd engaged in "positive-negative play with the cover and the binding" that allows the subject on the cover to "exist in two different planes of reality."

The British version.

Waiting in the wings.

Bill Clinton is writing another book! Called Back to Work, it's going to tell everyone how to get America “back into the future business.”

In a statement from Knopf, the book is said to detail "how we can get out of the current economic crisis and lay a foundation for long-term prosperity. He offers specific recommendations on how we can put people back to work, increase bank lending and corporate investment, double our exports, restore our manufacturing base, and create new businesses. He supports President Obama’s emphasis on green technology, saying that change in the way we produce and consume energy is the strategy most likely to spark a fast growing economy and enhance our national security."

This sounds like a political agenda...

"We cancelled our contract for Julian Assange’s memoir," wrote Knopf spokesperson Paul Bogaards in an e-mail to The Observer. "The author did not complete his work on the manuscript or deliver a book to us in accordance with our agreement. We will not be moving forward with our publication."

Canongate had a contrary assessment. "We will publish the unauthorised first draft which was delivered to us in March," read an unsigned statement from the publisher. "It fulfils the promise of the original book proposal and is, like its author, passionate, provocative and opinionated. We are proud to publish it.”

Julian Assange received a $1.3 million advance to write his memoirs last December. The book was to be published by Canongate in Britain and Knopf in the U.S. and ghost written by London Review of Books contributor Andrew O'Hagan, who apparently spent 50 hours in a country house with Mr. Assange to garner material. According to The Independent, Mr. Assange's feelings about his memoir soured early:

At the time Mr Assange trumpeted the deal, saying he hoped his book would become “one of the unifying documents of our generation” which would explain his “global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments.”

But the relationship soured soon after the first draft of the manuscript was delivered to him in late March, prompting Mr Assange to pull the plug on the deal declaring, according to those present, that “all memoir is prostitution.” For the publishers his complaints came out of the blue. Only a week earlier he had posed for a photo shoot and cleared the portrait that now graces the book’s front cover.

Hoping to make up for losses, Canongate has decided to publish Mr. Assange's memoir anyway, under the comical title Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography. Mr. Assange was given a 12-day window to file an injunction, reports The Independent, but failed to make the deadline.

Gates.

Robert Gates just retired from his job as secretary of defense. Now, of course, he is writing not one but two books.

The first, to be published in 2013, will be a memoir about his experience as the only secretary of defense to serve two different presidents from both parties while at war the entire time. The second, for 2014, will "focus on Gates's philosophy about leadership, his views about great leaders he has admired, and his thoughts about effective leadership, even in the face of adversity and difficulty." Fun.

While Gates was hired by George W. Bush, in opting to go with Knopf for his books instead of a conservative imprint it appears that his books will take a non-partisan approach (reasonable given his bi-partisan tenure in the office). Donald Rumsfeld, in contrast, published his memoir Known and Unknown with Penguin's conservative imprint Sentinel.

News of the memoir first came from the Twitter account of Claudio Lopez, the head of Random House's Spanish division. Canongate publisher Jaime Byng later confirmed the news.

Assange will complete the manuscript by March, and the memoir should be available in stores--if not leaked cables--in late 2011.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

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