Hooray for NYC writer Jeremiah Moss, proprietor of the blog “Vanishing New York,” who will be writing a book inspired by his blog for a HarperCollins imprint. H/t to Publishersmarketplace.com for reporting the news in their daily deals email. Subscription is required for viewing the book industry site, but here’s a quick screenshot of the item. 
Happy to see that @AAKnopf threw a bash for its 100th birthday last night. I treasure my anthologies from two earlier anniversaries.
As I wrote on this blog last week, I’m now working at the soon-to-reopen at Rizzoli Bookstore’s new store in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan. Last night we held a reception for media and book publishing professionals in our handsome, still-under-construction new digs. There was a ribbon cutting with the Manhattan Borough President and celebrity toasts (pictures below). It was a thrill to meet many people to the space and say, “Welcome to Rizzoli’s new bookstore!” I was tickled to bump in to an old friend, Ralph Gardner, Jr., who I knew in NY back in the ’90s, and whose Wall St. Journal article on Rizzoli’s exciting plans, published almost a year ago, I linked to in my post last week. We’ll begin welcoming customers with a soft opening next Monday, July 27. The new store is at 1133 Broadway, near 26th St. This will be a very exciting week.
This photo I took during last night’s party shows gorgeous murals of the Italian artist Fornasetti above the expanse of our literature section.
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Click here for more of my iPhone shots from last night.
To longtime readers of this blog, and many, many friends in the book business, I’m excited to announce a new venture I’m going to be part of. I’ll be working as a bookseller in the soon-to-be-reopening Rizzoli Bookstore here in New York City. You may recall that last year Rizzoli lost its prior location on W. 57th St when their lease there ended. They’ve found a fabulous new location in the St. James, a landmark building on Broadway between 25th St and 26th St in the booming Manhattan neighborhood of NoMad (north of Madison Park). The Wall St Journal’s Ralph Gardner wrote about Rizzoli’s plans in a story here. Earlier this month, Rizzoli sent out this fact sheet. Decorated handsomely with elegant fixtures in a museum-like setting, the new 5,000 square foot store will offer a stellar inventory of illustrated books in art, photography, architecture, interior design, fashion, film, theater, dance, music, and cooking, along with current releases and classics in fiction and nonfiction, and childrens books. The selection of titles will be fabulous.
The store will have a soft opening, apt for our sultry summer weather, starting July 27. While I’m already spending lots of my time there to help get the store opened and underway, and will continue working many hours in the early weeks once it opens, my longterm schedule will nonetheless permit me to continue operating Philip Turner Book Productions, my editorial service and publishing consultancy, and in fact have completed work on two manuscripts for author clients this month.
I am really excited with this opportunity to be back working on the floor of a well-stocked bookstore, which brings my career full circle. It all began for me with Undercover Books, the three-store indie chain I ran with my family in Cleveland, a business I worked in from 1978 until 1985, when I came to NYC and began working in publishing. I worked for big publishing houses from 1986 until 2009, when I began my consultancy. Now, thirty years after leaving Undercover Books, I’m back as a bookseller. I look forward to seeing NY friends and visitors to the city in the new Rizzoli Bookstore, at 1133 Broadway.
April 2 2018 Update:
Epic obituary of Drue Heinz who used her wealth to support literature incl #EccoPress (now @eccobooks) #Antaeus, etc. In 1989, an author I edited, Ellen Hunnicutt, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for In the Music Library. Sympathies to @Daniel_Halpern. https://t.co/zNfM0wzfcV
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) April 2, 2018
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June 4, 2015
I was delighted to see Publishers Weekly reporting this afternoon that Daniel Halpern of Ecco Press is being awarded The Center for Fiction‘s annual #MaxwellPerkinsPrize for “championing writers of fiction in the United States.” I met Dan in 1987, when his stewardship at the literary magazine Antaeus brought us in to contact. The author of a book I’d edited and published, Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize, an award sponsored by Antaeus—a literary magazine underwritten by cultural benefactor extraordinaire Drue Heinz and edited by Dan Halpern—for a distinguished body of work in short fiction.
Ironically, I had earlier encountered the circus novel, by an as-yet unpublished writer known to me at first as E.M. Hunnicutt, when I worked as first reader/contest judge at Scribner, who in the 1980s sponsored a first novel prize in Max Perkins’s illustrious name*. Mildred Marmur, then Scribner’s president and publisher, gave me my first job in publishing, following my seven years as a bookseller.
In the Scribner job, working three days every week for six weeks, my brief was to read between 5-50 pages of the more than 700 contest entries, filling out a questionnaire for each one, and recommending those I believed merited second readings. Hunnicutt’s novel was among the 70 or so I recommended (it fascinated me at the time that the number I urged for second readings was practically speaking 10% of the total. By happenstance, I wondered, or some kind of talent factor?
Hunnicutt’s manuscript was among the talented tenth I recommended for second readings, though just before job ended, I learned it wouldn’t advance further in judging. Bouyed my enjoyment of the 100 pages I had gone ahead and read, so I photocopied the title pages of the ms with the author’s contact info. A few weeks later, I got my first full-time job as an acquiring editor, at Walker & Company, I contacted Hunnicutt, who turned out to be Ellen Hunnicutt, and made her novel my first-ever fiction acquisition. Ellen had long gone by E.M. to elide her gender when submitting work to publications such as Boys’ Life. Upon my acquisition of the novel, Ellen made it clear she would now be using her proper name. Some months later, with the novel edited and in galleys, Ellen learned she was recipient of the aforementioned prize named for Drue Heinz, who I wrote about when she died in April 2018. The lead juror for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1987 was Nadine Gordimer, the great South African writer, and resolute anti-apartheid campaigner. Ellen and I were very excited as her first novel headed toward publication in July that year, preceding by a few months a collection of the honored short fiction. A few months later, in an arrangement Anteus had with the University of Pittsburgh Press, Hunnicutt’s short fiction appeared as In the Music Library.
One day, back when Suite For Calliope was still in galleys, I received a printout of a starred review it got in Kirkus. The date was May 4th, and this was the review, written I learned later by Kirkus’s fiction editor at the time, Ann Larson:
An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw–and more than richly reward–readers of almost every inclination. Ada Cunningham, of Richmount, Indiana. is the partly crippled daughter of gifted and highly eccentric parents: a journalist mother who declares Ada to be a prodigy, raises her as such (with flamboyant Élan), then dies suddenly when her daughter is eight years old; and a father who is a musical genius, who came from poverty and was a transient violinist and artful dodger as a child, who gives Ada music lessons from the time she’s three, and who is committed to an asylum before she is 16. Life with these parents–as described by the brave, unflinching, quick, forgiving, and heartwrenchingly observant Ada–would be matter enough for many a novel, but this one soars on toward farther ends that keep the reader wide-eyed and enthralled. There’s a penetrating mystery at the heart of it all, and, before its solution: an aunt who comes into the picture with malevolent aims (she may even want to murder Ada), a burned house, legal proceedings–as result of all of which Ada, accused of being both a witch and a madwoman, flees Richmount and takes to the road (as her father did before her), supporting herself by her wits and by her gifted piano playing (in brothels and bars), until at last she finds sanctuary and refuge in the winter quarters of a circus troupe–with setting, color, and cast of characters worthy of yet another novel–where she becomes (and remains) calliope player, composer, and loved member of this wondrous new “”family.”” A summary leaves out far too much: the sturdy grace of Ada’s never-self-pitying voice; the continual feast of homely detail, and detail of music, musicians, and musical instruments, as weft as of the circus and its people; and the breathtaking symbolic depth of the whole, which, touched by the hand of this gifted writer, serves to place Ada’s birth, her flight, and her high artist’s quest among very august novelistic company indeed. A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.
As I learned when I called to tell Ellen the good news that her novel had received a star from the always tough Kirkus, and read the review to her (this was probably before regular use of fax machines.), I learned it was also her birthday. We had quite a celebration on the phone. (May 4th has been a meaningful date in my life on a few occasions, recollections about which I’ve collected in this post.)
When published by Walker, Suite for Calliope sold out its hardcover printing, Dell acquired the paperback rights, and it had a number of laudatory newspaper reviews. Ellen did readings in Wisconsin, near her home—Wisconsin also being the home of the notable circus museum in the town called Baraboo. Years later, when I was working at Kodansha America, and doing a few books in Buddhism, I happened to be reading the Buddhist journal, Tricycle. I came upon an interview with retired New York Knick player and NBA head coach Phil Jackson who praised Suite for Calliope as a meditative novel of ideas that he was currently recommending to friends. All in all, it was a great experience to have with the first novel I ever worked on, made all the better by Drue Heinz and Dan Halpern’s generosity toward the author. We all met in Pittsburgh in the early Spring of 1987, when Ellen received the award for her short stories. To me, it is truly fitting that Dan will receive the later iteration of the Maxwell Perkins Prize. I look forward to congratulating him in person.
To broaden the connections to my professional life even further, and take them all the way back to my roots in bookselling, when I ran Undercover Books, my bookstores in Cleveland, one of the first successful literary books we read and sold was A. Scott Berg’s biography, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius, more recently a popular movie with Colin Firth as the Scribner’s Editor-in-Chief, and Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe.
* As Editor-in-Chief of Scribner in the 1920s-40s, Perkins edited and published novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, among many acclaimed authors.
I’m looking forward to being part of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Publishing Conference on Sunday June 7. I will be evaluating the work of about a dozen writers during the workshop. It should be fun to encounter all this new work and talk about writing and publishing with all the participants. The conference will be held near Lake Placid, NY. If you know any writers who live in that region of upstate NY, please let them know about the event. Thanks to Michael Coffey and Nathalie Costa for the invitation. Click here for more details and see the screenshot below. 
Fascinating Q&A on C-Span BookTV w/narrative science writer Karen Masterson, author of The Malaria Project: The US Government’s Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure, which chronicles the efforts of the US military which had for long been worried about the disease’s potential to infect American troops serving in far-flung locales. There was a move to find a cure for the mosquito-borne disease. Interesting to me, the book, which looks to be fairly serious science, is published by NAL. They brought out it in 2014, apparently first in hardcover. By my reckoning, NAL is a house long known more for mass-market paperback fiction than narrative nonfiction in hardcover. [It looks like they’ve now brought it out now in trade paperback.] Good for NAL, a nice piece of publishing. More on Masterson and her book via this link. You can view the video via this link on BookTV’s website.
One thing Masterson said amazed me. The effectiveness of bed nets—which have been a useful tool in combating malaria, preventing mosquitoes from biting people while they sleep—is being eroded because mosquitoes, hungry for what scientists call their “blood meal,” are adapting their behavior and learning to bite people earlier in the day when they are still out and about. In watching her talk about this global affliction that still sickens and weakens millions worldwide every year—and kills a considerable percentage of those stricken—I was reminded of a book that I began discussing in 2006 with Paul R. Epstein—a doctor and scientist, and at the time, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. Epstein was a trailblazer in studying the effects of climate change on human health. I first heard his distinctive New York accent when he was a guest that year on an episode of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. You can still hear it, via this link. Listening to their conversation in a rental car, in a classic ‘driveway moment,’ I learned that due to the planet’s warming temperatures, mosquitoes that transmit malaria have over the past several decades begun doing so at more northern latitudes and higher elevations than they have ever been known to do before. Epstein also discussed the finding that the tick-borne illness dengue fever is also occurring at latitudes and elevations where it was before not seen. Epstein discussed how these diseases are infecting a much greater number of people worldwide due to the warming of our planet.
These are only a couple of the scientific discoveries chronicled in Epstein’s book, Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It, co-written with Dan Ferber, which ultimately came out in 2011. I actually commissioned it in 2007, shortly after I became Editorial Director of Union Square Press at Sterling Publishing, a job that ended two years later when Sterling, a division of Barnes & Noble, shuttered the imprint, a milestone I’ve also written about on this blog. When I left the company, my old bosses quickly canceled Dr. Epstein’s book, although I had nearly completed editing the manuscript. Fortunately, that decision, though very shortsighted, while preventing the book from being published as soon as it might have, it was later picked up by the University of California Press, to be published alongside other important environmental titles. This is a link to the book on U Cal’s website. Sadly, Dr. Epstein, died in November 2011, at age 67, of cancer. Here’s a Washington Post obit on him. Though we fell out of touch after Union Square Press closed, I recall we did speak a couple more times, and he sent me a finished copy of the book, which he inscribed to me with a very generous message, “April 25, 2011 To Phil Turner—The motivating force for this book. Warm wishes, Paul,” pictured below. I didn’t know he was ill, and was stunned by news of his death.
Before Dr. Epstein became a teacher and researcher at Harvard, he had worked as a doctor in places like Mozambique and Angola, devoting himself to the study of tropical diseases and improving public health in developing countries. It was a privilege to meet and work with him. I was really sorry he wasn’t able to make personal appearances in front of audiences, on TV, and on radio, like I first heard him. As I listened to Karen Masterson on C-Span tonight, I found myself wondering if she knows about Paul’s research on the growing incidence of malaria and other illnesses worldwide due to climate change, and if she has perhaps read Dr. Epstein’s book. I see she teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins, so perhaps I’ll have a chance to send her this post and find out. [I did correspond with Ms Masterson and she was interested to learn about Dr Epstein and his book.]
