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| Sonny Mehta | |
On Monday, the book industry was shaken by the death of one of the most beloved and illustrious publishers and editors in the business, Sonny Mehta, who was the editor-in-chief of Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, only the third person to head the Knopf imprint in its storied 104 years. He was 77 and had been in charge of Knopf since 1987.
While many may not be familiar with his name, even the most occasional reader is likely to have read books that Sonny Mehta published or edited. His special gift was applying his exacting standards in editorial, production, design, marketing, and publicity to everything from high literature to books that sold many millions of copies. During his tenure, Knopf published works by six Nobel Prizes winners--Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertész, V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison--as well as books by Michael Ondaatje, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez. At the same time, Mehta published the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E.L. James (under the Doubleday imprint), the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson and works by Michael Crichton, including Jurassic Park.
In 2018, when he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement from the Center for Fiction, Mehta gave an indication of why he had tastes that resonated with millions of readers around the world. Accepting the award, he 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."