Effective today, Linda Matthews is retiring as acting director of Chicago Review Press and Independent Publishers Group. She was the fourth employee to join the press, when she started in 1975 as an editor. She later became publisher and director and in recent years focused in part on HR matters.
Curt Matthews, IPG's CEO and Matthews's husband, said in part in a company e-mail: "Linda was a truly gifted editor, the sort of editor who could transform a page of sloppy prose into something worth reading by making perhaps only three precise changes. Over her career she has edited hundreds of books."
She also has written several books: The Balancing Act: A Career and a Baby and Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family. In retirement, she plans to write another, with the tentative title of Voices of the Loyal South, focused on the claims courts that considered financial compensation for people who had lived in Confederate territory during the Civil War, had suffered damage by Union troops and could show that they had never approved of secession.
Matthews commented: "This company has been one of the big engagements of my life.... It has been a very fine thing, being part of CRP, Inc." She said she looks forward to free time, new projects and outings with grandchildren.
Exactly a year ago, another longtime IPG executive, Mark Suchomel, abruptly left the company. He had been president for 15 years, and had joined Chicago Review Press in 1986. He founded and is now head of Legato Publishers Group, which is an affiliate of Perseus's Publishers Group West.