Editor Larry Ashmead died 3 September 2010 of pneumonia. Born Lawrence Peel Ashmead in Rochester, New York, on 4 July 1932, he edited numerous best-sellers, including Susan Isaacs, Tony Hillerman, Isaac Asimov, and Quentin Crisp. In his nearly fifty-year career, he worked for Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and Lippincott, which merged with Harper & Row, and later became HarperCollins. He retired from HarperCollins in 2003.
Ashmead studied geology at the University of Rochester, spent two years in the Army, and then completed his doctorate in geology at Yale. According to his New York Times obituary, he “was expected to work for the oil company that had financed his studies but walked away from the deal. Instead, he got a job as an editorial assistant at Doubleday, where his boss gave him a manuscript by Asimov. Ashmead leaned on his scientific background to find error upon error. Asimov showed the young man he was wrong virtually every time, but said he had never had anyone pay such close attention to a manuscript. He asked Ashmead to be his editor.”
According to the Times, his feet were set on the path to editing as a 9-year-old boy when he “visited his local library in Rochester to hear a mystery writer read from her book. But what particularly thrilled him was to learn that the author had a day job as an editor sitting in a Manhattan skyscraper reading manuscripts.”
Commenting on his death, Isaacs, the author of best-sellers such as Compromising Positions, said she owed part of her success to Ashmead’s editing. “Besides finding what was wrong [in a manuscript], he also knew what wasn’t there.”
After retiring, Ashmead wrote Bertha Venation: And Hundreds of Other Funny Names of Real People (published by HarperCollins in 2007).
Edited 6 October 2010 to add: Memorial service for Larry Ashmead announced