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| Susan Moldow | |
Susan Moldow, president of the Scribner Publishing Group and publisher of Touchstone, is retiring at the end of the year, Simon & Schuster president and CEO Carolyn Reidy announced in an e-mail to S&S staff yesterday. She wrote, in part, that after Moldow informed her of her decision, "while I could only honor her desire with the deepest gratitude and some regret, since then I have had occasion to happily recall the innumerable highlights of a long career in which she has been an inimitable presence within our company and our industry, with accomplishments that have had considerable impact here and on our culture."
She recounted that Moldow entered the publishing world in 1966 as a summer intern at Workman Publishing, and the following year, after her graduation from Smith College, she joined Doubleday, where she worked until 1971. After a period in San Francisco and Boston, she returned to New York and joined Pocket Books, part of S&S, and worked at Washington Square Press before joining Avon Books from 1976 to 1981.
She then held senior editorial management positions at Dell Publishing, Penguin Books, Doubleday again, and HarperCollins. She returned to S&S in 1994, shortly after the Macmillan acquisition. "Her first order of business was to rationalize and reorganize a collection of three disparate adult imprints--Charles Scribner's Sons, Macmillan and Atheneum--and forge them together as one: Scribner, a single powerful brand that at once acknowledged and cherished the distinguished history and tradition of those diverse imprints, while also signaling a new and contemporary focus that would revitalize and move Scribner forward." In 2012, she became president of the larger Scribner Publishing Group, taking on overall responsibility for both Scribner and Touchstone, and since 2013 she has also been Touchstone's publisher.
Among authors she has published are Barbara, Laura and George H.W. Bush, Anthony Doerr, Angela Duckworth, Janet Evanovich, Philippa Gregory, S.C. Gwynne, J.A. Jance, Charles Johnson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, Phil Knight, Rachel Kushner, John le Carré, Frank McCourt, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Reynolds Price, Annie Proulx, Kathy Reichs, Geneen Roth, Lisa See, Andrew Solomon, Colm Tóibín, Jeannette Walls, John Edgar Wideman and Reese Witherspoon.
Reidy added: "To talk with Susan, whether one-on-one or in a meeting when she is giving one of her trademark, carefully composed and enthusiastically delivered presentations, is always an adventure. No matter the subject, or the book involved, she is always ready with an arch remark or self-deprecating quip, demonstrating her encyclopedic knowledge of the publishing marketplace and her love for what we do. And let's not forget that Susan, who never used a computer, played a major role in launching the digital revolution as the publisher of Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, the first-ever major e-book success. While she was a demon e-mailer with her classic-model Blackberry, which she insisted on using well beyond its date of obsolescence, and has never met a piece of paper she didn't annotate and keep in the world's most curious filing system, she also led Simon & Schuster in finding ever-new, cutting-edge digital marketing techniques to highlight Stephen King's publications."