Publishing News
General News
October 1-15, 2004 Edition GENERAL NEWS Low Named Publisher
of Lee & Low, Spanish
Language Publisher
NEW YORK, NY/10/08/2004Lee & Low has named Jason Low as publisher, succeeding cofounder Philip Lee, who is retiring. Low is the son of the cofounder and president Thomas Low. Louise May, formerly executive editor, will fill Lee’s role as editor-in-chief.
Lee & Low was founded in 1994, and specializes in Spanish language books for children to help their transition to English. Lee & Low publishes about 3 or 4 titles per year and has a backlist of 20 or more titles, both hardcover and paperback. Jason Low has been with the company since 1997.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 35.3 million Latinos in America, a 58 per cent increase from 12.9 million a decade ago making Hispanics the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group. One-third of the Latino population is under eighteen.
Spanish language translation apparently is a complicated procedure, requiring a year or more for a single book to be translated from, English to Spanish and vise versa.
Frankfurt Fair
Ends With Slight
Attendance Increase
FRANKFURT, GERMANY/10/11/2004The Frankfurt Book Fair ended this past weekend on a quiet note, with attendance up a slight 3 percent compared to last year, according to Publishers Weekly.
Attendance on Wednesday was 43,985, and on Thursday, 54,628, PW said. However, the numbers likely included students and other nonprofessional attendees, and some industry observers said American publishers were under-represented.
Few big deals were reported at the Fair this year, but among the biggest was one sealed by Public Affairs and the non-partisan Century Foundation to co-publish Defeating the Jihadists. The book is written by several national security experts with Richard Clarke as the lead author. Public Affairs’s Peter Osnos made the deal with Century. Richard Clarke has also become a bestselling fiction writer. His latest book will be released by Putnam.
In other deal news from the Fair, Simon & Schuster’s Doug Stewart reportedly bought a novel by Rebecca Lee called The City Is a Rising Tide. Several other offers were in the works, though not closed by the Fair’s end.
