Children's nonfiction author James Cross Giblin, "whose books ranged from topics like cutlery and why we use it, windows and why we have them, and walls and why we need them to clear-eyed biographies," died April 10, the New York Times reported. He was 82. Giblin also was a legendary editor, beginning at Criterion Books in the late 1950s, and in the 1960s moving to Seabury Press, where he founded and became the publisher of the children's imprint Clarion Books, which was later acquired by what is now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Giblin's Chimney Sweeps won the National Book Award. His many other books include How We Invented Knives, Forks, Spoons & Chopsticks, & the Table Manners to Go with Them; The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler; Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth & John Wilkes Booth; The Rise & Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy; and When Plague Strikes: The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS.
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John Ferrone, an editor "who shepherded Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple into print, encouraged Anaïs Nin to publish her erotic fiction, and served as James Beard's dining and cooking companion and literary executor," died April 10, the New York Times reported. He was 91.
Ferrone spent more than 35 years in publishing in a variety of editorial roles, beginning at Dell before moving to Harcourt, Brace & World (later Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), where he remained until his retirement in 1990. The Times noted that he "acquired several out-of-print books by Virginia Woolf for publication by a Harcourt paperback imprint and was the American editor of the much-admired Virginia Woolf: A Biography, originally published in England, by her nephew Quentin Bell." He also edited The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, which won the National Book Award for paperback fiction in 1983.
