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| Sonny Mehta | |
Sonny Mehta, renowned editor-in-chief of Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, died December 30. He was 77. In a statement, Penguin Random House said Mehta's "contributions to the world of letters and publishing are without precedent. His exacting standards--in editorial, production, design, marketing, and publicity--were a beacon to the book industry and beyond. He was a friend to writers, editors, and booksellers around the world. Mehta was also a gentleman, uniquely so, who cared deeply about his colleagues and the work with which he entrusted them. He was a beloved figure at Knopf, working at the only career he ever wanted. He lived a life in books, of books, and for books and writers."
Mehta began his publishing career in London in 1965 at Rupert Hart-Davis. He joined Granada Publishing in 1966, where he co-founded Paladin Books, before moving on to Pan Books in 1972, where he helped relaunch the Picador imprint.
During his London years, Mehta worked with an impressive roster of authors, including Douglas Adams, Bruce Chatwin, Jackie Collins, Germaine Greer, Michael Herr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Robert Stone, Graham Swift and Edmund White.
In 1987, he moved to the U.S. when he was named president and editor-in-chief of Knopf, becoming only the third person--after founder Alfred A. Knopf and Robert Gottlieb--to lead the imprint in its 104-year history.
Under Mehta's leadership, six writers published by Knopf were awarded Nobel Prizes--Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertész, V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison--and dozens of others won major literary honors. At Knopf, Mehta published world leaders, acclaimed historians and a long and enviable list of fiction and nonfiction writers as well as poets. When Knopf and Doubleday were united to form a new publishing group in 2009, other notable writers came under his direction.
"I'm not sure my friends outside the writing world believed me when I told them I had the finest editor in the world. But I did," said Omar El Akkad in a New York Times piece that gathered memories from some of Mehta's writers. "More than anything I have achieved or ever will achieve, those rare afternoons spent in Sonny's office listening to him dissect the inner workings of a novel will always be the fondest memories of my career. He came to literature from a place of love, and that love is evident in every book he ever touched."
In a tribute, Chiki Sarkar, founder of Juggernaut Books and former head of Penguin Random House India, wrote of her mentor: "Sonny Mehta was regarded as the world's best publisher. What did that mean? It meant he published Michael Ondaatje, V.S. Naipaul, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez. It also meant--and this is the great lesson he taught me--he published the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, the Millennium series and Jurassic Park. He published the latter as seriously, as passionately and as imaginatively as the former....
"In the West, you rarely get to do Fifty Shades alongside Kazuo Ishiguro. So, Sonny--and the Knopf he shaped--was unusual. The Sonny hallmark was outstanding design and strong marketing alongside the selection of books--yet another lesson he taught me. Whenever I hear a publisher say I care only about the books, sales and marketing don't count, I think to myself, you're no publisher. Great publishers love marketing and sales and all the other stuff that makes up the selling of books.... We all wondered if he was ever going to retire. He'll die on the job, said most of us. And he did, he went just the way he wanted to go. Goodbye, dear Sonny. I'll miss you."
In 2018, Mehta received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement from the Center for Fiction. In remarks he delivered when accepting the honor, Mehta said, "Reading has been a constant in my life. I have always found comfort in the confines of a book or manuscript. Reading is how I spend most of my time, is still the most joyful aspect of my day. I want to be remembered not as an editor or publisher but as a reader."
A viewing will take place tomorrow, Friday, January 3, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel at 1076 Madison Ave. (at 81st St.) in New York City. Plans for a memorial service will be announced.