For readers who can't get enough Julia Child, Sara B. Franklin's The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America offers one more inroad to the great chef. (Jones famously shepherded Mastering the Art of French Cooking to publication.) But readers who come for Julia should find themselves equally smitten with Judith and convinced of Franklin's subtitle's veracity.
Judith Jones (1924-2017) grew up comfortably in Manhattan and attended Vermont's Bennington College, which didn't subscribe to the day's notion that for women, higher learning should lead to marriage. After graduating, Jones landed at New York publishing giant Doubleday, from which she took a leave so she could travel abroad, where she fell in love with food. Doubleday established a Paris office, where Jones rescued from a slush heap what would become the 1952 publishing sensation The Diary of Anne Frank. Jones's editorial judgment earned her a stateside publishing career at the male-dominated and prestigious Knopf, where she worked for more than half a century.
Anyone enamored of publishing's golden age will thrill to reports on Jones's professional duties: "She spent most of the weekend in Cambridge with the Childs, then, on Sunday, went to Ipswich to have lunch with John Updike," and so on. In her introduction, Franklin, who has edited a book on chef Edna Lewis (another Jones author), says that The Editor is "not a definitive biography," and it isn't. Informed by Franklin's interviews with Jones, the book has enough "Judith told me"s to suggest a full-bodied collaboration. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer