By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 9/19/12 2:42pm

Publishing

(photo by Martha Kaplan)

Knopf Remembers Longtime Editor Ashbel Green

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. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 2/22/12 9:19am

books

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Bogie’s Burn Book: There’s a Tumblin’, Tweetin’ Bull in the Knopf China Shop

A few weeks ago, Paul Bogaards did something few good publicists, let alone the head of public relations at New York’s most patrician publishing house, would suggest their client do.

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.” Read More

By Spencer Morgan 4/16/07 12:00am

E-Mail Can Ruin Your Life

When David Shipley, editor of the New York Times Op-Ed page, and Will Schwalbe, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, met for oysters in Grand Central Terminal in May of 2005, neither man would have guessed that their conversation that day would result in a 247-page book about e-mail.

“We were having lunch at the Read More