DISCOVERING THE NEXT GOOD BOOK

Larry Ashmead '54 can tell the story of a first inkling of his future career with the precision of someone who has spent the past 40 years separating good stories from bad.

Now a vice president and executive editor at publishing giant HarperCollins, Ashmead was a 9-year-old grade-schooler in the Rochester suburb of Brighton when local mystery writer Amber Dean was invited to give a talk at the school library.

"It was one of those library talks that all the nerds went to," Ashmead says.

Dean told the group of youngsters that her job consisted of writing stories and sending them to an editor in New York who sat in a skyscraper and read mysteries all day.

"I thought, 'What a neat job!' That's what I want to do when I grow up,'" Ashmead says. "'I want to sit in a skyscraper and read mysteries all day.'"

Ashmead has been reading mysteries--as well as science fiction, nonfiction, and all kinds of literature in between--almost from the time he graduated from the University. He has the New York office in the skyscraper, and he has a host of aspiring and well-established writers sending him their work.

For 15 years he was the chosen editor of Isaac Asimov, overseeing the publication of 44 books by the science fiction legend. He's also been editor for Nan Talese and Patricia Highsmith.

His current authors include Sister Wendy Beckett, Susan Isaacs, Tony Hillerman, and Simon Winchester.

(And, in addition to the office in the skyscraper, Ashmead also has a farmhouse in Tuscany that he has had restored and that serves as a twice-a-year home away from New York.

He donated a week's stay at the rustic farmhouse for the Sesquicentennial auction this fall.

"It's a lovely place," he says. "I try not to be there too often because I would fall in love with it.")

Ashmead's own story took a slight diversion during his college days. During his four years at Rochester, he piled up the expected collegiate credentials of a top editor at one of the nation's largest publishing houses: He had a job at Rush Rhees Library, he wrote for the Campus Times, and he was a member of Quilting Club, the crew that wrote and produced its own musical comedies.

But he majored in geology, and he went on to earn a doctorate in the less-than-prosaic field from Yale University.

"I always liked geology--and I still do--but I didn't really like geologists," Ashmead says. "They were so obsessed with one thing, and I wasn't really like that."

But in the Cold War-tinged 1950s, there was plenty of government scholarship money for students interested in science, he says. And he figured geologists could get jobs in exotic locales around the globe.

Instead of globetrotting, Ashmead headed to New York, where he took a job at Doubleday as an assistant editor for science books. It was there that Asimov selected Ashmead as his editor after reading one of the younger man's critiques of his work.

Ashmead briefly joined Simon and Schuster in the late 1970s before jumping to J. B. Lippincott. The small publisher was part of Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins.

As vice president and executive editor, Ashmead focuses on conceiving and acquiring projects, and seeing them through to publication.

There is, he admits, little time for reading, much less editing, books. (A team of colleagues does most of that work.)

But despite the long hours and the commercial pressures, Ashmead speaks volumes about his love of publishing.

"It's been everything that I imagined, a truly wonderful profession," he says. "I can honestly say that in my nearly 40 years, there are only three or four people I don't like or don't speak to in the entire business."

"If you really love books, it's a great industry."

Although he's troubled by the conglomeratization of publishing--when he started there were roughly 25 well-known family-owned chains; now there are five major players--Ashmead says readers have benefited from some of the changes.

For example, books are much more accessible to larger segments of the population than 30 or 40 years ago, he notes.

And he doubts that electronic publishing on the Internet will displace hard-backed copies any time soon. Few writers could pull off last summer's experiment by horror master Stephen King, who "self-published" a novella on his own Web site, Ashmead says.

The most immediate market for online publishing will likely be in reference books, not trade books, he says.

"Books are still books and will be for some time," he declares.

He, too, plans to stay on for "some time," noting that he has "too many good books that I want to see published."

One of those is from Winchester, whose 1998 book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and The Madman, became a surprise bestseller.

Ashmead is working this fall with Winchester, who also is a trained geologist, on a book about the first geologic map ever made of England.

"It's funny that I come back to geology, isn't it?" Ashmead says.

And whether the new book becomes a bestseller or not, Ashmead has no doubt that lightning could strike again any time.

"That's what makes it all wonderful," he says. "It's awfully nice when a good book sells to an awful lot of people."

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