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| Bob Bender | |
One sign of the imprint's longevity and excellence is the staff, many of whom have worked at Simon & Schuster for decades. Senior editor Bob Bender remembered that when he joined Simon & Schuster in the Dick Snyder era, it had "a ferocious reputation." He was told that if he lasted only six months, "there was no disgrace in that." But "it's turned out to be a wonderful place with a terrific group of people that does a terrific job of publishing," he said. Bender is an editor's editor with a broad and deep list across many categories. He is David McCullough's editor, and among the the books he published this year are Jonah Berger's Contagious and Mario Livio's Brilliant Blunders.
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| Gypsy da Silva (photo: Jonathan Evans) | |
Associate director of copyediting Gypsy da Silva remembered that in 1966, on her first day at the house, she was given a book to work on that "everyone thought would be a dog." It was a German title called The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines that had been translated in the U.K. "We had to fight for a first printing of 10,000," she said. But within a year, the book that Simon & Schuster retitled The Way Things Work sold more than a million copies.
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| Alice Mayhew (photo: David Jacobs) | |
Legendary editor Alice Mayhew, whom Karp described as "the heart and soul and conscience of our editorial operation" (of the 90 titles Simon & Schuster is celebrating in the Anniversary Library, she edited 29), has focused on biography and history and politics. She remembered buying Our Bodies, Ourselves, which involved taking the shuttle to Boston during a "terrific snowstorm. There was snow up to over my head, and I was late leaving. I met the authors in Cambridge. They were having an intense conversation. No one said, 'Take your coat off, have some tea.' " But she made the deal, and the book, first published in 1971, became a bestseller--and cultural touchstone.
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| Marysue Rucci | |
Editor-in-chief Marysue Rucci spent 13 years of her early career at Simon & Schuster and returned in April 2012. In her time, she discovered Kathy Reichs in the slush pile and has edited Little Bee by Chris Cleave, among many other titles. She edits some nonfiction, too, and is head of the fiction program.
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| Trish Todd | |
Trish Todd, v-p and executive editor, has had two tours of duty at Simon & Schuster. The first was 1981-1984 as assistant to Marty Asher at Pocket Books; she returned in 1995 as editor-in-chief of Touchstone Books, and three years ago moved to Simon & Schuster. She recalled a time when she read the three-box manuscript of Having It All by Helen Gurley Brown in one night. It was a Mad Men–like era when there was a line on the standard supply order form for liquor, and every Friday at five there was a cocktail party in the offices.
Associate publisher Richard Rhorer worked at Simon & Schuster in the early 1990s in sales and returned recently. During his first stint, the imprint published No Ordinary Time, and he hoped to meet its author, Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom he greatly admired. But that didn't happen right away. "I waited 18 years to meet her," he said.
Art director Jackie Seow started at Simon & Schuster as a senior in college and was the one paste-up mechanical artist in a department of five. Among highlights of her tenure: photographing the White House while working with Hillary Clinton, Socks and Buddy on Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets and bumping into Bill Clinton, which caused the Secret Service to "freak out, because we weren't supposed to be there." She also remembered the jacket mechanical of Greta Garbo's biography, which had been completed but stayed in a drawer for years until after the elusive star's death.