PEOPLE NEWS HEADLINES
December 14 – December 21, 2006 Edition
Philip Turner Joins Sterling to Head Union Square Press-New Nonfiction Imprint
New York, NY/12/7/2006—Sterling announces today that Philip Turner-currently Vice President, Avalon Publishing Group- will be joining Sterling to direct Union Square Press, an imprint devoted exclusively to narrative nonfiction.
At Avalon, Turner was Editor in Chief of Carroll & Graf Publishers, Philip Turner Books, and Thunder’s Mouth Press. I am very pleased to join Charlie Nurnberg and Sterling, one of the best operated publishing houses in New York. They publish brilliantly in many areas, including illustrated books, craft books, children’s, and photography, states Turner. This is a new direction for Sterling, and one that Im confident will be a great complement to the superb publishing theyre already doing. Union Square Press titles will be imperative books, books that matter in peoples lives. I look forward to leading this exciting enterprise, a new home for review-driven, award-worthy books.
As Charles Nurnberg, CEO and Publisher at Sterling says, I greatly admire Philips books and his exceptional ability to select compelling subjects and open up new areas of interest to readers. He edits quality books so that they appeal to a very wide audience. We look forward to this unique and exciting imprint, and to books that will entice, enthrall and energize the book-buying public.
Beginning in fall 2007, Union Square Press will publish about forty books a year in a variety of areas, including adventure, biography, culture, current and international affairs, the environment, history, politics, social issues, and sports. Turner and Nurnberg will also create a Union Square Press paperback program focusing on revivals of important out-of-print books, reprints in trade paperback of both its own and other publishers titles, and quality paperback originals. Turner will also create within Union Square Press a branded line of books featuring truthtellers, whistleblowers, and muckrakers, a signature of his tenure with Avalon.
Turner began his career in 1978 as a co-founder with his family of Under Cover Books, an independent retail bookselling chain in Cleveland, Ohio. My editorial judgment is still informed by the thousands of decisions I made in the seven years I spent buying new titles for our three-store indie chain. As an editor for the past twenty, if I cant picture a real-live customer for a book Im considering, I still just decline it. I edit manuscripts with the author perched on one shoulder and the reader on the other, mediating between both and striving to ensure that each is understood by the other.
Since leaving retail in 1986, Turner has held a number of senior editorial positions, including Executive Editor at Times Books, Random House, and Editor in Chief of Kodansha America. During his seven-years with Avalon he has acquired and published such national bestsellers as The Woman Who Wouldnt Talk by Susan MacDougal, The Politics of Truth by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and Shake Hands With the Devil by Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, and the just-published blockbuster, On The Brink by Tyler Drumheller, the highest-ranking CIA official yet to write a book on the Iraq war.
Turner will join Sterling on January 15, 2007.
Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., is one of the worlds leading publishers of nonfiction titles with more than 5,000 books in print. Among its bestselling titles are Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, The Big Book of Knitting, Chapman Piloting & Seamanship, the Poetry for Young People series, and The Cosmo Kama Sutra.
