A voracious reader and an instinctive decision maker, Mr. Mehta could spot great books and, coming from a paperback world, had no qualms about pushing them.
Sonny Mehta in 2001, when he was president and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. He had an eye for quality but also knew how to deliver sales through savvy marketing.
Sonny Mehta in 2001, when he was president and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. He had an eye for quality but also knew how to deliver sales through savvy marketing.
Sonny Mehta, the literary savant who guided the reading hours of millions of people and the fortunes of the venerable publisher Alfred A. Knopf for 32 years at a time of changing tastes, aggressive merchandising and demands for profits, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, a Knopf spokesman said.
In an age of blockbuster best sellers by presidents and prime ministers, of sometimes surreal and shocking literary breakthroughs, and of cutthroat competition in a shrinking industry, Mr. 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 2009 as chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mr. 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 sellers 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 Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and Albert Camus.
Mr. Mehta also published popular books by Toni Morrison, John Updike, Anne Rice, John le Carré, P.D. James and Gabriel García Márquez; Geoffrey Ward’s companion to Ken Burns’s PBS series “The Civil War”; Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”; Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo trilogy; and the work of many important French, German, Italian, Spanish, African and Asian writers.
For Knopf’s classic imprint — now more than a century old — Mr. Mehta was only the third editor in chief, following the founder Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Robert A. Gottlieb, who joined Knopf in 1968 and, on the cusp of his departure to edit The New Yorker, handpicked Mr. Mehta in 1987 as his successor.
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