Chris Kerr of Parson Weems remembers Mike Shatzkin:
Mike Shatzkin hired me for my first publishing job in 1975, as a sales representative for the Two Continents Publishing Group in the southeastern states. Eventually, it grew to include any open territory and included Atlanta and Kansas City.
We met in a way that I learned was the Publishing Way: Mike was my sister's fiance's (Larry Gagosian, the art dealer) college roommate at UCLA. Mike had casually asked her if he knew anyone in Washington, D.C. She replied, "My brother knows a lot of people." I had just seen my job as a trade magazine editor advertised in the Washington Post classifieds so I knew that my tenure on K Street was to be short lived. And what could be more fun than visiting bookstores and talking about books I had not read?
We hit it off immediately. He was super smart, wildly interested in everything, and keen to get started. We had a sales meeting in a LaGuardia Airport motel and hit the road. I still have the binder we were given. The Shatzkins were the Kings & Queens of Detail. His dad and mom, Len and Elke Shatzkin, and sister Nance owned the distributor, an early iteration of what PGW, IPG, and Consortium were to become, except that TwoCon cherry-picked the titles to be distributed.
I still remember the first list: Man's Body, An Owner's Manual by the Diagram Group, which the Washington Post complained was far too focused on sex and not the brain (it seemed about right to me), a facsimile of Leslie's catalog for the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia, an exhibit of which the Smithsonian Institution was mounting in its original building, The Castle, and my favorite, Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself, a discussion of Custer's Last Stand from the Native American point of view, shepherded into production by Joe Medicine Crow, education chief of the Crow Nation. As it happened, the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian, was reopening with a Custer exhibit and Joe was invited to give the opening talk to an invited audience of several hundred. I thought that this was the way it was always going to be: greeted by Dillon Ripley, the Smithsonian head, interviewed by Judith Martin, Ms. Manners for the Washington Post. How little I knew.
Mike was a remarkable polymath and an autodidact; he vacuumed you for information and he loved to argue. It could be exhausting. And I grew up in a house where dinner arguments were always on the menu. Everything was under the microscope. Mike was all about family. His, mine, anyone whom he encountered. Parties in his East 50th St. apartment or the family compound in Croton on Hudson were massive, noisy and huge fun. Nance's husband, James, now gone, once rescued our youngest when he fell into the pool. Years later, I would meet people whom I had met at a Shatzkin party.
Once you were a member of the team, no matter where you eventually worked, you were always on the team. A baseball fanatic, Mike considered us all "utility fielders." He once assured me that "we are always looking for a place to put you, Chris," with the confidence that if summoned, I would follow. His last call was to chair a seminar on Today's Bookselling Community for an annual conference he organized. Mike, being Mike, had already picked the panelists, briefed them, and all I needed to do was not embarrass him. We drew about 75 folks, but Mike decided that next year's session would not need this gathering because "bookstores are disappearing." He expressed a similar sentiment when he called me in to consult with a prospective purchaser of Politics & Prose. "I've advised them to not waste their money," he said. "But they really want to be part of the D.C. scene." I was happy to talk with them, but they were outbid by the far more insightful current owners.
I have lost track of his many side ventures. There were a lot of them. He and the family pioneered inventory control systems and worked with Undercover Books, Shaker Heights, Ohio, run by Philip Turner's family, and, later, Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vt., and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with Ed and Barbara Morrow and their son Chris.
He also championed an updated edition of his Dad's classic, In Cold Type, the only book I have ever sold with a publisher warning on the title page. Years later, I learned that the book was the introductory publishing textbook at a leading U.K. college where a friend taught it. I encountered similar students and teachers in Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. The book was a pied-piper for publishing. The Shatzkins treated publishing as a business and respected the process, which they always had under a microscope. It remains a frame of reference for my entire career; my best bosses respected the process, reveled in its details, and were open to any ways to make it better. This flies in the face of much of the industry's romance with itself.
Mike was also a music entrepreneur. He advised my sister's upstairs neighbor, Sonny Rollins, on his music contracts, he advised a leading U.K. music publisher on his American launch, and he introduced and produced a group, New Zealand's The Drongos.
Mike was also an author. Right out of college, he wrote an essay on the New York Knicks, called The View From Section 111. In my first year in publishing, he gave me Cooking With Grass; it is still on our shelf. He also wrote The Ballplayers: Baseball's Ultimate Biographical Reference, which was updated, and The Baseball Fan's Guide to Spring Training. The Shatzkin Files was an annual. I loved the title; it suggested a CIA case officer's revelations. And he was recruited by Ingram to help with their recently published company history. He was also something of a pamphleteer; he could write like a storm. His newsletters were widely read and quoted. He was an exceptionally generous advice-giver. I sent friends to him for counsel, and he was always open and responsive.
It is difficult to think of him as gone. He was a lifelong runner, and, later, a gym rat. When I visited him at Lenox Hill Hospital in September, most of what we talked about was his fitness routine, walking the streets of New York, and the cute hospital staff. He knew them all by name, thanked everyone, and rigorously cross-examined the young doctors. They loved him. He loved to engage; he was engaged. He was in the world, a political citizen who would have been recognized in any gathering as a willing student. And deeply kind. RIP.