Former book editor Larry Ashmead died aged 78 on Friday. During his 43-year career in publishing, he edited more than 40 books by Isaac Asimov. According to AFP, he also rescued Simon Winchester’s account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman from the “garbage bin” after everyone else had turned it down. He also published a book of his own in 2007, Bertha Venation And Hundreds of Other Funny Names of Real People, which included names like Ida Slaptor. He died in a Hudson, NY hospital after a brief illness. [AFP]
