Sonny Mehta, the literary savant who guided the reading hours of millions of people and the fortunes of venerable publisher Alfred A. Knopf for 32 years at a time of changing tastes, aggressive merchandising and demands for profits, died Monday at his home in New York City. He was 77.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, a Knopf spokesman said.
In an age of blockbuster bestsellers by presidents and prime ministers, of sometimes surreal and shocking literary breakthroughs and of cutthroat competition in a shrinking industry, Mehta was an almost ideal editor and publishing executive: a voracious reader and instinctive decision-maker who could spot great books and, coming from a paperback world, had no qualms about aggressively marketing them.
On his watch, first as Knopf’s president and editor-in-chief, and since 2005 as chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mehta delivered literary quality and runaway sales, backed by clever promotion — he once invited 250 booksellers to a Los Angeles Dodgers game to launch a baseball book — that drew reviewers and booksellers to almost anything stamped with Knopf’s colophon: the leaping Borzoi wolfhound.
He published the work of nine Nobel literature laureates, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” (1989), and of winners of Pulitzer and Booker prizes and National Book Awards; memoirs by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and Pope John Paul II; and new translations of Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and Albert Camus.
Mehta also published popular works by Toni Morrison, John Updike, Anne Rice, John LeCarré, P.D. James and Gabriel García Márquez; Geoffrey Ward’s “Civil War” companion to Ken Burns’ PBS series; Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park,” Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo trilogy and many important French, German, Italian, Spanish, African and Asian writers.
For Knopf’s classic imprint — now more than a century after its birth in 1915 — Mehta was only the third editor-in-chief, following founder Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Robert A. Gottlieb, who joined Knopf in 1968, built it into America’s largest trade-book publisher and, on the cusp of his departure to edit The New Yorker, hand-picked Mehta in 1987 as his successor.
Ajai Singh Mehta, known as Sonny, was the son of one of independent India’s first diplomats. As a boy he had lived with his father on postings in Europe and the United States, and was educated at private schools in India, Switzerland and Britain and at Cambridge University.
He began his career as a paperback publisher in Britain, commissioning Germaine Greer’s feminist treatise “The Female Eunuch,” and works by Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. But he was hardly anyone’s idea of an eminence grise when he was plucked from relative obscurity as publisher of Pan Books, Britain’s paperback king, to run America’s most storied hardcover imprint.
Settling into Knopf’s cluttered Park Avenue offices with the carefree aplomb of a court jester, the black-bearded boss seemed amusedly disinterested in literary power and the genteel backstabbing politics of the publishing world. He wore black sweaters and black jeans, drank black-label Scotch in his office without ever appearing drunk, and for years worked in a cloud of his own cigarette smoke.
He was not easy to know. Some colleagues called him reserved and moody, aloof in a way that gave him an enigmatic magnetism. But others said he could also be charming and gregarious, especially at the frequent book parties he threw at his nearby apartment. In later years, he attended events all over Manhattan and became known for a more extravagant man-about-town nightlife.
A Bold Approach
But in his first year on the job, he was all work. He signed up 32 books, including biographies, novels and titles about Broadway, Hawaii and India. He ordered much larger first printings than his predecessor had, often doubling them, an aggressiveness seemingly borne of confidence that he would be able to sell them as easily as he had mass-marketed paperbacks.
“Yes, there is something attractive about taking risks,” he told The New York Times. “I’m more marketing- and sales-oriented than others, and the notion of selling books continues to interest me. Just because we’re Knopf doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sell books as well as any other publisher in the land. I still want us to publish the best books in every area. I want us to remain the classiest publisher in town.”
In 1989, with the arrival of Alberto Vitale as the hard-charging chief executive of Knopf’s parent, Random House, Mehta found a powerful new ally. They both had strong backgrounds in competitive paperback sales and promotion, and Vitale told The Times that Mehta was “without question the most brilliant publisher in the country; he is phenomenal; he has everything.”
In Random House’s Balkanized corporate world, there were dozens of imprints, and their publishers had been allowed — even encouraged — by Vitale to compete with one another with bids for the same books. “I was a troublemaker, a motivator, an instigator,” Vitale told The Times in 2001. “I did with my publishers what I did with my children; treated them evenhandedly.”
Whatever it did for the Random House bottom line, the in-house competition often raised bitter feuds among publishers in the family of fiefs. But it also brought opportunities for Mehta. An early turning point in his career came in 1989 when an exasperated veteran running the Vintage paperback line in another division resigned.
Mehta took over Vintage, adding it to Knopf. He hired its first editorial and marketing staff, redesigned its covers and reintroduced paperback reprints to booksellers as if they were new books. He raised Vintage prices, betting that buyers would pay more for serious paperbacks in handsome editions. Sales and profits rose. Vintage became the most successful brand in paperback publishing.
As Knopf flourished, Mehta expanded further. He added the intellectually influential Pantheon division after its publisher left in a dispute with Vitale, and bought the Everyman’s Library classics line to compete head-to-head with Random House’s Modern Library line, calling it a “coincidence” and adding: “Occasionally we do step on each other’s toes.”
After Bertelsmann acquired Random House from the Newhouse family in 1998, Mehta again expanded Knopf, this time at the expense of a new sister company, Doubleday, by adding its Anchor line of high-quality paperbacks to his stable. In a major Random House reorganization later he acquired the Doubleday Group itself.
By then, Vitale was gone. But he had put in place an innovation that heralded success for years to come, insisting that every contract for a book include digital rights. E-books were not highly profitable at the start, but with the creation of Amazon’s Kindle and other e-reading devices, they became saviors of publishing. Bookstores, too, were changing. Small independents were vanishing, and even big chain bookstores were struggling to survive in the digital age.
Winning Bets
Mehta often paid huge sums for books by world celebrities — $9 million for Pope John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (1994); a world-record advance of $15 million for Bill Clinton’s memoir, “My Life” (2004); and $9 million for Tony Blair’s “A Journey: My Political Life” (2010). There were no profit guarantees for such outlays, but in most cases his choices were solid, and the investments paid off handsomely.
Even doubtful calls sometimes turned profits. After Simon & Schuster rejected Bret Easton Ellis’ disturbing novel, “American Psycho,” the first-person tale of a serial killer who tortures and dismembers women and children, Mehta published an edited Vintage paperback edition in 1991. Despite protests by women’s groups, it was an overnight bestseller. But the storm blew over, and years later the story was picked up for a dark comic film, a musical and other adaptations.
In another risky venture, Mehta in 2001 paid a $4.2 million advance to Stephen L. Carter, a black Yale law professor, for “The Emperor of Ocean Park.” It was the most ever paid for a first novel. A murder mystery, it told the story of a black professor who investigates the death of his father, a conservative judge, and explored themes of black identity, politics and the law.
After a bidding war for the book, Knopf and another Random House imprint ended up with equal bids. But Carter chose Knopf because, he said, three years earlier Mehta was “kind enough to read a couple of chapters and tell me whether it was something that I should keep working on.” Marketed as mainstream fiction, the book signaled a major shift for African American literature. It won critical praise and several awards, and spent 11 weeks on The Times bestseller lists.
By 2015, Knopf’s centennial, the Knopf Doubleday Group was publishing 550 titles a year and contributing a major share of Penguin Random House’s $3.5 billion in revenues. In 2015, Publisher’s Weekly named Mehta its “Person of the Year.”
“On a good day, I am still convinced I have the best job in the world,” he told Vanity Fair after reading a new Graham Swift novella. “I opened it and didn’t know what to expect, and I read it in one sitting right here in the office, utterly mesmerized. Sometimes you find something new and you just say, Wow!”
A Diplomat’s Son
Ajai Singh Mehta was born in New Delhi on Nov. 9, 1942, to Amrik and Satinder (Duggal) Singh. The father of Ajai and his sister, Amrita, who was four years younger, was one of the first four diplomats for independent India’s first government under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the family lived with him on his early postings in Prague and New York. Ajai acquired the nickname Sonny from a U.S. ambassador who was a neighbor during a posting in Nepal, and it stuck.
At 9, the boy was enrolled at the Lawrence School in Sanawar, India, a private boarding academy in the foothills of the Himalayas in northwest India. At 16, he transferred to the International School of Geneva for two years and then to the Sevenoaks School in Kent, England, where he graduated in 1961, and won a scholarship to Cambridge University.
At Cambridge from 1962 to 1965, he earned the equivalent of master’s degrees in both history and English literature in 3 1/2 years. He also worked for Granta, the literary magazine.
In 1965, Mehta married Gita Patnaik, a documentary maker and writer whose fiction and nonfiction works have been bestsellers in Europe, the United States and India. The couple had one son, Aditya Singh Mehta. In addition to his wife and son, Mehta is survived by a granddaughter, Leela Mehta. Mehta’s sister died many years ago.
Mehta began his publishing career in London at Rupert Hart-Davis in 1965 but a year later moved to Granada Publishing, where he co-founded the Paladin imprint and commissioned Greer’s “The Female Eunuch,” which was published by a sister group, MacGibbon & Kee Ltd., and became a bestselling manifesto of the women’s movement.
In 1972, he joined Pan Books, publishing writers like Jackie Collins and Douglas Adams, who went on to become household names, and he founded the storied Picador imprint, publishing Booker Prize winners McEwan, Rushdie, Swift, Edmund White and Julian Barnes — so many that The Times of London called his tenure “the Picador Generation.”
Determined to introduce Britons to successful American writers, he acquired works by Michael Herr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Robert Stone and others from Knopf. Visiting New York, he got to know Gottlieb, whose verdict settled the succession: “Sonny has an absolute passion for quality in books and at the same time is a brilliant commercial publisher.”
Besides Ishiguro, Mehta published Nobel laureates Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, Imre Kertesz, V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and works by the winners of 29 Pulitzer Prizes and nine National Book Awards. He also published graphic novels, including a volume of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” (1991), on the recollections of a Holocaust survivor, and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” (2003-05), on her childhood in the Iranian Revolution.
Mehta, who had homes in London and New Delhi as well as New York, was never tempted to write a book himself.
In 2018, Mehta received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement from the Center for Fiction.
“Reading has been a constant in my life,” he said in accepting the Perkins Award. “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.”
Robert D. McFadden c.2019 The New York Times Company
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